"Cocaine's a hell of a drug," went the now sadly immortal phrase, and damn if Rick didn't prove it in this 1980 Soul Train clip in which he fidgets and boasts and behaves as a total ass. D: "You have a lot of energy." R: "Oh, it's that vitamin E I took." Come on! Trying to clown Don Cornelius?I was thinking about cocaine-laced funk this week when I was introduced to the nightmarish world of a guy named Ricky Simms who recorded with friends under the moniker Wicked Witch. The I Love Music discussion board has a thread on him, through which I got to hear the WW album Chaos 1978-86. And I hope I never hear it again. Listening to tracks like "Fancy Dancer" and "X Rated" put me in a disjointed haze, their basslines growling as if coming up from hell itself, their ideas going off in jagged directions and abrupt disconnections, hollow and desperately empty. No wonder they call it the Devil's dandruff.
But I won't subject you to that. You needn't have my nightmares. Instead I'll give you some more-benign '80s funk: "Crazay," by a Jesse Johnson whose sobriety I cannot guess at and a Sly Stone who in all likelihood has no memory of ever having performed this song. Johnson had left the Time two years prior with a good sense of period funk formula, but Sly brought little lyrical coherence and the refrain was a washout, so "Crazay" deservedly made it only to #53 on the Hot 100 in 1986.
PS: This is my 200th entry here. I will have a cupcake.
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