What Go-Goes Around ...

The Funk Genre That Brought D.C. to Its Feet 20 Years Ago Is Back With a Joyous Refrain: The Party's Not Over

The crowd gets down at the Rare Essence GoGo show. (Rebecca D'Angelo - For The Washington Post)

The chant starts with one or two folks, just as it always has. "Wind me up, Funk!"

Almost immediately, more people join in -- "Wind me up, Funk!" -- and in less than a minute, it sounds like every person crammed into the Reeves Center's Club U is urging James Funk to turn up the party. Hundreds of arms are outstretched; their waving hands seem to be swatting the go-go beats.

"Wind me up, Funk!"

As the Rare Essence band turns out a fusillade of percussion, James Funk bobs in front of the mike and surveys the crowd. "A lot of old-school [expletives] here tonight," he says. Then he launches into another singsong chant: "If you feelin' old-school, get your hands up! Get your hands up!"

Tonight, Rare Essence is led by two of its former frontmen -- James "Funk" Thomas and Little Benny Harley. They work their way through the band's vintage hits, and each familiar chant is greeted by cheers. Waggling bodies ride layers of percussion: drums, of course, but also rototoms, congas and even a cowbell.

These are songs from the early to mid-'80s, which was the golden era of go-go, the District's homegrown funk music style. Before rap really took hold, D.C. was go-go city. It was a time before the crack epidemic and drug-related turf wars provoked so much street violence that going to a go-go concert meant risking your life. Before younger bands came up and replaced the classic large-band go-go sound with a stripped-down, rap-influenced style.

Now, many veterans of the go-go scene are reviving that golden era, and their fans are, too.

Rare Essence, one of the most important bands on the local go-go circuit, has been performing for 25 years. The band plays three regular weekly shows, but Saturday nights are different. On "Old School" Saturdays, alumni like James Funk and Little Benny front the band and the horn section is expanded. Saturday nights at Club U, at 14th and U streets NW, the audience is old enough to remember when classics like "Go-Go Mickey" and "RE Herman" first came out. These shows have been so popular that the band's new album is a oldies collection titled "Doin It Old School Style: Live at Club U."

Rare Essence is not the only go-go band revisiting history these days. Chuck Brown, the man who invented the genre, will soon release a live album that features several go-go classics performed by old-school artists. Gregory "Sugar Bear" Elliott, former leader of Experience Unlimited (EU), is also back on the scene. And more than a dozen veteran bandleaders and instrumentalists turn out each Monday for Little Benny's regular "Go-Go Allstars" night at Classics in Camp Springs.

Last year Little Benny released an album titled "Live at the Cafe (Back in the Day)," and since then he's been the hardest-working man in go-go. He's performing seven nights a week, and on this particular Saturday, he's on a tight schedule.

At 1:15 a.m., Benny slips off the stage and out the door, on his way to a downtown hotel, where he's performing at a party for boxer William Joppy. Then he's off to the Tunnel in Northeast, where he'll play a set with Chuck Brown. By 3 a.m., Benny returns to Club U and is back onstage, stripped down to a sweaty undershirt.

"Are you tired yet?" he asks the audience.

"Hell, no!"

He asks again and again, and the answer is always the same. The people here are not tired of go-go just yet.

In an era dominated by whatever pap MTV happens to be favoring on a given week, a time of prefabricated kiddy pop and mercenary radio programming, you might expect regional music scenes to succumb. But more than 25 years after a charismatic ex-boxer and ex-con named Chuck Brown invented a nonstop party groove he dubbed "go-go," D.C.'s unique funk genre continues to thrive. In the late '70s and most of the '80s, Chuck Brown & the Soul Searchers, Rare Essence, Trouble Funk and Experience Unlimited took turns presiding over a vibrant live music scene that included well over a dozen lesser-known bands. The most popular groups performed five or six nights a week; on some nights, they might play several shows: one in Northwest, one in Southeast and one in Prince George's County. During the '90s, second-generation groups like the Junkyard Band, the Northeast Groovers, the Huck-a-Bucks, Pure Elegance and the Backyard Band revitalized the genre and made the music theirs.

Lately, something even more remarkable has taken place. People who came up listening to go-go, then outgrew the music and stayed home for years, have started coming back out. And musicians who slowed down for a while, local stars like James Funk, Sugar Bear and Little Benny, are performing more than they have in years. For the first time in his 25-year career, Little Benny, 37, has been able to quit his day job. The tireless Chuck Brown, who will turn 67 in August, is as big a draw as ever.

"Old-school go-go is hot," says Kato Hammond, a former musician who runs the "go-go resource" Web site www.tmottgogo.com. "That older crowd, the ones who were saying, 'I'm too old for go-gos,' are coming out to shows again. I'm lovin' it."

Their bands are playing their hits -- go-go oldies, if you will, songs that have been around long enough to evoke nostalgia. And while part of the appeal is the classic go-go sound eschewed by the younger bands, the revival may also result from the considerable charisma of the bandleaders.

"The performers that are doing this -- Chuck Brown, James Funk, Little Benny, Sugar Bear -- they're ageless," says Tom Goldfogle, co-owner of the local distribution company Liaison Records. "Those people are ingrained in the hearts and sounds of this city, and the music is so intertwined with the city and the culture. These artists have the ability to . . . come back on the scene and be as strong as they ever were."

Three months after its release, Rare Essence's "Doin It Old School Style" looks as if it will be the band's biggest seller ever, says guitarist and vocalist Andre "Whiteboy" Johnson. Chuck Brown's upcoming "Your Game . . . Live at the 9:30 Club" features Johnson, James Funk, Little Benny, drummer "Go-Go Mickey" Freeman and keyboardist Mark "Godfather" Lawson (all affiliated with Rare Essence at one point or another) along with Big Tony Fisher and Robert "Dyke" Reed from the once-influential Trouble Funk. The Washington Convention Center recently hosted a "Hall of Fame All-Star Celebration" featuring many of these performers, and other multi-band old-school festivals will likely take place this summer.

For the fans, old-school represents a trip back in time, even if they're only in their mid-twenties. Onstage, the artists reminisce about way-back-when go-go venues like the Masonic Temple, the Panorama Room and the Washington Coliseum. "We'll talk to them about the old places where we used to play, where we used to party at," says Chuck Brown. "They'll remember how old they was then and all that. It brings back memories. They see old faces, old friends, old enemies that are not enemies anymore. It's a together thing, sort of like if you went to a reunion.

"All my gigs are old-school gigs, 25 and up through 65," says Brown with one of his trademark guffaws. "And I'm the oldest of anybody in the whole joint!"

Back when they were teenagers, Stacy Taylor and Crystal Rucker used to catch Rare Essence all-ages shows around the city. They stopped going for several years, but now they're Saturday night regulars. "It's a party," says Taylor, 27, a customer service representative. "You can be in the worst mood, but you come in here and they bring you up."

"They just have so much love for us," says Rucker, also 27. "They hear your name one time, and they'll never forget it. They'll be onstage and they're like 'What's up, Crystal?' "

Dan Powell, 28, is a D.C. government worker who grew up on Rare Essence. "No one under 23 will understand this," he explains during a band break. "It puts you in a zone. You feelin' it. Your mind, your body, your soul. The music envelops you."

Old-school go-go, which celebrates such time-honored values as the importance of getting your groove on, also provides a respite from the meanness and crassness that characterize so much contemporary pop music, particularly hip-hop. "With old-school, you remember very good times, times that was peaceful, when you could go to a party and have a good time and come home," says James Funk. "You didn't have to listen to all that 'I'm gonna slap your mom' stuff, the calling females bad names and talkin' about who's the biggest honcho in town. Back then, the music was about partyin', about making people feel good."

When Go-Go Got Going

Go-go dates to the mid-'70s, when Chuck Brown, a bandleader who performed what D.C. folks called cabaret shows, decided his audiences shouldn't sit down between numbers -- he wanted a continuous party groove. So he devised percussion breakdowns that linked songs together. Brown went through three drummers before he found the right beat, and soon his band was playing the beats during the songs as well.

The first go-go hit, Chuck Brown & the Soul Searchers' "Bustin' Loose," was a national hit in 1979. It predates the classic go-go sound, but the elements were in place: the percolating percussion patterns, the call-and-response chants, the rump-shaking party mood and the bandleader's engaging personality.

From the mid-'70s to the early '80s, other local bands helped forge go-go's sound. Trouble Funk and Experience Unlimited intensified the percussion. Rare Essence perfected the art of an extended party jam that didn't stop until it was time to go home.

In the mid-'80s, Island Records chief Chris Blackwell, who had turned reggae's Bob Marley into an international superstar, signed several of the bands and announced that he would take go-go global. But his plans quickly fizzled. Island and other labels that signed go-go acts didn't understand how to record, produce or market them. The labels tried to refine the very rawness and street urgency that had made the music so appealing to Washington fans. Some bands paid a price: Trouble Funk, which aggressively pursued national stardom, would never fully recover its credibility with the D.C. audience.

Still, the go-go bands played on for local crowds, whose enthusiasm for the music seemed boundless. In 1988 Experience Unlimited caught a well-deserved break. After film director Spike Lee saw EU play a party here, he used the band in "School Daze." The song "Da Butt," which was featured in the film, spurred a national dance craze and shot to No. 1 on the R&B singles chart. Ultimately, though, EU's stardom proved fleeting, and after a couple of poorly executed major-label albums, the group disbanded and Sugar Bear took a day job, teaching special education at Alexandria's T.C. Williams High School. ("It's so funny," he says now. "I try to teach a class, and kids are goin' 'Ow! Doin' da butt!' And all their moms want autographs.")

The music also survived something far more debilitating than clueless record executives. The crack epidemic hit Washington hard in the late '80s, and go-go shows became a magnet for trouble, in part because they attracted rival neighborhood crews quick to settle disagreements with gunfire. In 1987 a gunman sprayed bullets into a crowd leaving a go-go at the Masonic Temple on U Street NW, and 11 people were shot. After several other well-publicized shootings, some resulting in fatalities, many clubs closed their doors to go-go promoters. The media and city politicians found an easy scapegoat in go-go. Some went so far as to suggest that the music's tribal beats riled up young people, that it made them uncontrollable and violent.

As the violence eventually subsided, the shows became safer but many of the old-school musicians stayed home -- and so did much of their audience. Chuck Brown continued to play, attracting older fans, while Rare Essence competed with innovative next-generation groups for the younger audience.

How, precisely, did go-go's old-school revival come about? Depends whom you ask. Chuck Brown may have helped it along in recent years by bringing James Funk and Little Benny to join him on his marathon live sets. The departure last year of several Rare Essence members who favored a more contemporary sound seems to have led that band to revisit its past. And while old-school go-go has received little airplay in recent years, people never stopped listening to it. "A lot of people were still riding around in their cars and crankin' old-school go-go," Little Benny points out. "That's how it stayed alive and how some people was gettin' hip to it."

Sugar Bear played a key role in the revival. After EU had toured as much as it could off the success of "Da Butt," Sugar Bear says, he "wasn't even trying to come out to play the live scene no more." But in the spring of '97, his old EU drummer, William "JuJu" House, asked him to fill in for an absent bass player in a local '70s revival act called Maiesha & the Hiphuggers. When people in the audience saw him, recalls Sugar Bear, "they gave me love and 'wind me up, Bear,' and all that. So I did all the old songs for them, and they went crazy.

"Word got out that Bear is playing old-school stuff with Maiesha, and the crowd started swelling. We went from one night a week at Bailey's in Silver Spring to doing three nights a week at different clubs, then we were playing seven nights and nine shows a week. The band was doing the '70s and '80s music, and the last hour was strictly go-go. I did all my old stuff: 'Shake It Like a White Girl,' 'Da Butt' . . . all my go-go chants. It just blew up."

Maiesha isn't performing now -- she's recuperating from an illness -- but the Hiphuggers are still together. "Now to this day, everybody is doing what I did," says Bear. "I feel really good that I opened up doors and brought live entertainment back for the bands of Washington, D.C."

The go-go scene has always been competitive. Bands keep a careful ear perked in the direction of other groups. Once the Hiphuggers got hot, other bands noticed.

But Rare Essence's Andre Johnson says he had been considering regular old-school shows for years. "I run into a lot of people who used to come and see us in '85 and '86 and '87, but they won't come out now because what we're doing now was geared more toward a younger audience. They kept saying, 'Why don't you do an old-school night?' So we had the people's request."

Rare Essence started its old-school Saturdays at Club U about a year ago. Before that the band, whose members seem to observe a revolving-door policy, staged occasional reunion shows that nearly always sold out.

"Fans have been yellin' for it for years," says Kato Hammond, whose Web site has chronicled the return of the old school. "They wanted to hear old Essence -- Rare Essence has made such an impact on go-go, it's wild -- but it was falling on deaf ears. After Maiesha & the Hiphuggers got hot, bands finally realized -- gong! -- that this is what people wanted to hear."

Younger bands are still drawing audiences, but their sound is different. They grew up listening to hip-hop, which explains their relatively spare, heavily percussive and less melodic style. The older bands emulate the big funk bands of the '70s, including horn sections and, in some cases, the synchronized steps. "Old school was like you were going to a show," says Little Benny. "Bands were entertaining somebody, dancin' and steppin'. Back in the day, Rare Essence had steps. That was a whole show."

"This is no put-down to the younger bands, because I do admire Backyard and Junkyard," says Funk. "They're great entertainers . . . and they've helped keep the go-go scene alive. It's just that there is a yearning for the legends."

One More Time

Go-go's old-school revival may be flourishing, but Hammond has some apprehensions. "I'm lovin' it, but I'm seeing where it's going," he says. "I do worry -- reason being that now that the bands see that the style is what people tend to want, I just hope they create new material using the same old-school standards. I hope they don't get lazy about it."

And the band members have concerns of their own. Even though they're drawing grown-up (and presumably responsible) audiences, finding venues can still be problematic. How is it, asks Bear, that since MCI Center was completed in 1997, not a single go-go band has played there? "Outside promoters come in and do rap shows up in here, but not one go-go act is on the bill," he says. "I really think that's bad. That's a violation. This is the go-go capital of the world."

On Friday nights at Classics in Camp Springs, Chuck Brown leads the full house through as many of his local hits as he can squeeze into four hours. His band features a few new faces, including his daughter K.K., but most of these musicians are veterans who've been knocking around for years. As usual, this is a night of "special dedications" -- going out to the old Triples Nightclub crew, to the folks who used to party up at the Masonic Temple, to "everyone who's 25 and over."

Antonio Thomas, 31, stands with his back against the wall, nodding to the chunky percussion. He says he's been coming to go-gos every week since he was 16. "I could never get sick of it," he says. "I'm from D.C. Do you think a pastor in church would ever get sick of gospel music?"

Old-school stars can take comfort in the durable loyalty of fans like Thomas. Names like Sugar Bear, Little Benny and James Funk may barely register with the rest of the world, but at home once again, these artists can find affirmation every night of the week.

"I don't know of any other scene in the country or in the world that has been around for such a long period of time," says Rare Essence's Andre Johnson. "We've seen most rap artists come and go. We're still here."