KOOL & THE GANG’S "CELEBRATION"

CLASSIC TRACKS

KOOL & THE GANG’S “CELEBRATION”

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“Deodato was definitely brought in to make Kool & The Gang sound a bit more pop,” says Bonnefond, who is still an engineer and producer, but is also now the head supervisor of SAE’s (School of Audio Engineering) audio recording program in Nashville. “If you listen to some of their earlier songs—‘Jungle Boogie,’ ‘Hollywood Swinging,’ ‘Open Sesame’—it’s quite different from ‘Ladies Night,’ which was the first hit we had with them, ‘Too Hot’ and ‘Celebration.’ On the stuff we did, there were less horns and a lot more dance kind of grooves. At the time, they were being influenced by a lot of different people, including Prince and Michael Jackson, as well as still having their earlier influences.”

Part of the Ladies Night album had been cut at MediaSound in New York City, but, by the end of that project, House of Music had become the group’s favored studio. For Kool & The Gang, it was an ideal place to work—close to their Northern New Jersey homes but in a relaxed and decidedly non-urban setting. “The studio’s calling card was that it was in the vicinity of New York, but on seven beautiful acres with a swimming pool and basketball court, and surrounded by trees,” Bonnefond says. “It was very cool.”

Celebrate, the 1980 album that contained “Celebration,” was recorded in the facility’s “B” studio, “which was actually pretty small,” Bonnefond remembers, “maybe 15 by 30. It was not a huge space, so we squashed in and baffled off drums and hung packing blankets, and basically did whatever we could to fit everybody and still get separation.”

It helped that the way the band recorded in this era was that they would cut a skeletal basic track consisting of just bass, drums, guitars, keys and a guide vocal, so the full band, with horn players, was rarely ever in the studio at the same time. “Also, we didn’t have any iso booths,” Bonnefond says. “It was one small studio and then we would use the hallway, which was really the sound lock between the studio and the control room, for vocals. Believe it or not, that worked pretty well.”

In 1980, the studio featured MCI 24 tracks and MCI 500 Series consoles, which Bonnefond still speaks highly of: “At the time, there were a lot of Neve snobs who were down on the MCI boards, but I really liked them, especially for mixing.” The studio also used Studer A80 2-tracks, dbx 210 modules and 316 racks for noise reduction, plus, Bonnefond says, “the normal assortment of 1176 compressors, LA-4s, some dbx 165s, an AMS delay and reverb, some Eventide stuff, and EMT plates and an EMT 250.”

According to Bonnefond, “A lot of the songs we recorded with Kool & The Gang were written in the studio. Often, they’d come in with a groove or a few changes and we’d work on those, and then we’d take pieces of the 24-track, and, depending on what was needed, I’d edit them together and we’d come up with songs that way. There were different ways that the songs evolved, but I’d say less than 50 percent of the material on a given album was written and finished ahead of time. George Brown, who was the drummer for a long time, would write songs that were pretty much complete—like ‘Ladies Night’ and ‘Too Hot.’” In the case of “Celebration,” which was written by Ronald Bell and the group, Bonnefond believes there was a demo with the main hook and the structure of the song in place, “but I think a lot of the lyrics were written after the fact. But for that particular album, that was one of the more shaped-up songs.”

The way the group worked, “first we’d set up the room for the band to play, and we’d go into basic track mode for a few weeks,” Bonnefond says. “We used to like a pretty dead drum sound, so we’d pack the kick drum with blankets and a sandbag to keep the blanket in place, and most of the time the front head would be off and sort of tunneled with a blanket. At the time, the kick drum was everything—if you listen to some of those mixes, you’ll understand that. We really worked to get a good kick drum sound, and we worked hard to isolate it from the rest of the kit. The snare was also pretty dead; sometimes I’d use my wallet or a piece of felt to mute the top head so it didn’t ring too much.” It’s Bonnefond’s recollection that he used an AKG D-12 on the kick drum and a Sennheiser 421 on the snare. Strangely enough, George Brown rarely played toms in the studio—a concession to the importance of the kick, snare and cymbals/hat in the music the group was making then.

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