70s classic hit turns 50: Meet the man behind it!

Rob Parissi, the front man for 1970s rock outfit turned R&B band Wild Cherry, remains eternally grateful for the events that changed his life and thrust his song into immortality.

"Play That Funky Music" turns 50 years old this year.

For anyone who could turn on a radio in those days, place a stylus on a 45” single, or (best of all), get to the local disco, this song is forever etched on their psyche, like an oil stain on their favourite bell-bottoms!

Parissi spoke to Kelowna10 about how this 'white boy' created the iconic classic.

Watch the video, and keep reading below for more.

Huge hit

“I’m grateful,” Parissi says with an almost disbelieving chuckle in an interview over Zoom. “That’s the only thing I can say all the time. I’m grateful.”

The song’s hook speaks to the need for a bunch of white boys to get with the times and ride the rising momentum of the nascent disco era.

“A lot of songs happen, and then they’re gone. Some, they happen and they stay,” Parissi asserts with the credibility of over half a century in the business behind him.

Play That Funky Music certainly has longevity. Released in 1976, it hit No. 1 on the US Billboard Hot 100 and it also mounted the summit of the Billboard Hot Soul Singles chart.

Fifty years on it still gets regular airplay everywhere, including on great radio stations like OV1039 That 70s Station, in Kelowna.

The song’s words are about as literal as you could get for an artist and his band who were in danger of going extinct at a far too early age.

The 5-minute write to avoid oblivion

If it wasn’t for his quick creative thinking combined with the threat of going out of business as a band, the world may never have seen the wooly haired, hairy-chested, gold medallion-wearing Parissi power-vocalizing those famous words. Just check out the YouTube videos for a reminder!

Parissi recalls the band would play on off nights at a disco club at a time when rock and roll was no longer hitting enough of the right notes with patrons.

“People wanted to dance to deejays; rock clubs were closing down,” he explains. “Black people would come to us and tease us and say, ‘When are you white boys going to play some funky music?’”

So, Parissi pulled the band members aside for a serious chat. If they could not incorporate R&B and disco into their set, their chances of getting future gigs looked as dim as a mirror ball in mud.

“The drummer spoke up and he said, ‘well, like those people keep saying, play that funky music white boys.’”

The die was cast. Parissi walked out of the meeting and picked up a drinks order pad from the table.

The note started with those now famed storytelling words: Hey, once I was a boogie singer/ Playing in a rock 'n' roll band

“I wrote the first two verses. I didn’t have time to write anything else because we had to be back on stage,” he remembers. “We did the last set, got in the car, and I wrote the last verse on the way home. It took me a total of five or ten minutes to write that thing.”

Fatherly doubts

But that hook - one of the most recognizable and loved lines in disco history - still needed approval from a close source: Parissi’s dad, who thought the reference to “white boy” wasn’t a good idea.

“My dad, he was my best friend in my whole life, and when he heard the recording, he said, ‘you can’t do that, you’ve got to take that out!’”

Parissi stuck to his guns, insisting that nixing those two words would kill his creation.

He took the tape to every record label office he could get into but couldn’t secure any commitment until a fortuitous connection via an Ohio tour promoter got it in the ear of the powerful CBS records. They picked it up and it went stratospheric.

Parissi says until the day he died his dad would tell everyone how he’d initially dismissed the “white boy” lyric. “But no one was happier than my dad to be wrong!”

Something else simmering?

Parissi has been happily retired since 2017, but is there perhaps a late career twist for this 75-year-old singer, songwriter and producer who always had rock n roll as part of his DNA?

He recently recorded a song that was always popular with the live audiences in the decades long after the Wild Cherry days: Life’s a Bitch (Then You Die).

Check it out here.

“I recorded it with some buddies and it’s another one of those songs that when it gets to the hook everyone shouts: ‘Life’s a Bitch ...Then You Die,’ he says with a huge smile.

“I don’t know if I’m going to do something with it,” he ponders, perhaps only partly in jest. Maybe he should be knocking on some more doors, although it’s Universal, Sony, or Warner these days. Maybe if it’s released on vinyl? It could be packaged with a commemorative gold medallion...and a lyric sheet on a nightclub order pad?

Maybe not.

“I’m just hanging out now. I’m happy and just very glad things turned out the way they did,” Parissi says, with the modest contentment of knowing one of his many songs really made it big.

“I’m absorbing it all, and appreciating it all, and I’m just happy that I was correct about that,” he laughs, noting without that “white boy” lyric, the song would indeed likely have died.

Legacy

Play That Funky Music continues to recruit new listeners. Parissi says TV shows like American Idol and America’s Got Talent have got in touch over the years to arrange licensing agreements with him.

“There are always kids singing that song. It seems if you can sing that song [on the TV shows] then you move up.”

Parissi is delighted with the career he’s had, maturing his powerful but controlled vocal range, first with Wild Cherry, then in a touring band with Bobby Caldwell. His work has also included co-producing an album with Gary Bonds and Bruce Springsteen in the early 80s.

Like so many others, he says he learned about short musical story telling from Beatles legends John Lennon and Paul McCartney. And from the age of five, he remembers being captivated with the Little Richard records his older sister would bring home.

“I always knew that R&B, black music, if it wasn’t for black people, rock n roll would stink pretty much. So, when I started to play music, I carried that with me.”

He certainly had it on his mind and in his sights in that nightclub 50 years ago.

“If I knew how big that song was going to be, I would have stayed up that night and written 4,000 more songs because I was on a roll. I knew where it was, which way it was going, and it took me five minutes. I should have just kept writing more songs.”

Millions of fans, old and new, are delighted he penned this one.  Not bad for the rock n roll white guy.