Robert “Kool” Bell knows a thing or two about writing hits. After all, his band, Kool & the Gang, spawned tracks like Ladies' Night and Celebration, sold over 70 million albums worldwide, and has been sampled en masse. Not bad for a bassist who started out by learning how to play one song (Coming Home, Baby) on one string.
And, speaking of greatest hits, one of the Gang's best-known tracks, Get Down on It was inspired by an unlikely source – Bob Marley.
“With Get Down on It, a friend of ours talked to my brother and said, ‘Listen, have you ever listened to Bob Marley?’” Bell tells Bass Player in a new interview.
Article continues below“My brother said, ‘Well, no…’ And our friend said, ‘Well, you should listen to a little bit of Bob Marley…’
“So, we’re in the studio, and my brother came up with this idea, which was not quite reggae, but had a reggae feel to it. That song became Get Down on It.
“But at the time, we said, ‘What are we gonna call it?’ We ended up calling it Get Down on It, and again, we had no idea it was gonna become so big. It’s still a big record for us.”
Upon release, the song hit the top 10 on the Billboard Pop and R&B charts and clinched the number three spot on the UK charts, becoming their highest-charting UK hit at the time.
Kool & the Gang’s success, grooves and genre-blending repertoire meant that their records were – and still are – ripe for sampling, a fact that doesn’t go unnoticed by Bell (“Just ask Will Smith [who sampled Kool & The Gang]. He got a platinum record and went on to become a movie star,” he quips).
“We felt very good about it when they first started sampling us. But we had to put somebody on a ‘sample patrol’ to catch who was playing what,” Bell adds. “Eventually, they said that when you sample a record, the record company will charge you for the sample. After that, we became – actually, we are – the most sampled group in hip-hop.”
Bass Player’s interview with Robert “Kool” Bell will be published in the coming weeks.
