by Roni Sarig
Go-go arose in the late ‘70s out of Washington, D.C.’s African-American neighborhoods. Just as DJs in the Bronx started to isolate and repeat the best section of funk records in order to create more inspiring dance music, go-go bands like Chuck Brown & the Soul Searchers did away with all but the hyper-rhythmic funk “breakdowns” in their live sets. By getting rid of the song and retaining the nonstop, full-on dance beat, go-go became the preferred music at parties in the capital area throughout the ‘80s, with groups like the Junkyard Band, Rare Essence, and E.U. (who gave go-go its biggest mainstream hit with 1988’s “Da Butt”). With its heavy audience interaction in the form of shout-outs and call-and-response chants, go-go was by design a live, community-oriented music. For that reason, the music never translated fully on record and therefore never reached a national audience. The complex polyrhythms of bands like Trouble Funk, though, have lived on through their inspiration on others.
Around the same time, 250 miles north in New York City, a small record store in the Village was becoming an outpost for the post-punk sounds coming out of England. Run by Ed Bahlman, 99 Records specialized in imports that fused punk with dub reggae, spacey funk, and other experimental sounds. Bahlman decided to turn 99 into a record label in order to release the music of no-wave composer Glenn Branca, but soon he steered toward bands that were offering a hip, New York version of post-punk’s funk and dub fusion. Though Liquid Liquid came out of the downtown Manhattan art scene (punks who found the groove) and ESG were teenage sisters from the Bronx (disco kids who fell in with the new wave), together their releases molded a unified “minimalist funk” sound for 99 Records.
Thurston Moore, Sonic Youth:
99 Records became this hangout for us. All these imports would come in and they’d play them. It became our own little slice of England. Then they put out bands like Liquid Liquid and ESG and 99 turned into this completely heavy, hip thing for us. I think there was this whole group of people like the Beastie Boys and the Luscious Jackson girls who were kind of a half-generation younger than us, teenagers who grew up [with that stuff] in New York.
Go-go and 99 Records formed two distinct strands of a funk avant-garde in the early ‘80s. Though they were little recognized at the time – and continue to be largely overlooked today – the contributions of these scenes can be heard in everything from dance pop to hip-hop to techno to post-rock.
TROUBLE FUNK
Johnny Temple, Girls against Boys:
Trouble Funk taught many of us D.C. kids the true meaning of the word “groove.” Trouble’s nonstop rhythms, best captured live, were mesmerizing and drew even the stiffest among us onto the dance floor. In American hardcore, D.C. was one of the first [punk] scenes to see the introduction of swing into the otherwise straight and rigid music. First in Soul Side (which included three GvsB members) and now in GvsB, we have always plumbed the depths of our low ends, searching for hidden grooves. Trouble Funk showed many of us that music could be just as sexual as it was aggressive... It was Trouble Funk that told us not to fear the groove; instead, ride it and sink way down low into it.
While Trouble Funk was not the first go-go band, or even the most commercially successful, it was certainly among the best. In accentuating the most appealing aspects of go-go pioneers, Trouble Funk stripped down the music to its groove essentials and virtually defined the genre for generations to come. What’s more, in its willingness to intermingle and connect with other music worlds – including D.C.’s hardcore punk scene and New York’s hip-hop scene – Trouble Funk served as the premier ambassadors of go-go. So while the go-go scene never got far beyond the capital area, Trouble Funk enabled the music’s rich polyrhythms to cross into both rock and electronic dance music, and leave a significant imprint on modern music.
DJ Spooky (Paul Miller):
Trouble Funk was absolutely brilliant with their multi-percussion shit. It’s going to take the drum ‘n’ bass kids years to match that kind of complexity. All the layering and the call-and-response thing, the way they interact with the crowd, is brilliant. My drum ‘n’ bass is more like go-go in a way, with multiple layers, and a fusion of West African stuff with sci-fi imagery.
Trouble Funk was together as early as 1978, but it wasn’t until the following year, when the group started sharing bills with original D.C. go-go band Chuck Brown & the Soul Searchers, that it found its sound. Trouble Funk’s leaders, keyboardist Robert Reed and bassist Tony Fisher, were so impressed by the Soul Searchers’ ability to distill the essence of funk – the James Brown-style instrumental breakdowns that all but discarded the song in favor of the dance grooves – they decided to adopt a similar approach. Soon the group had formulated what would become the standard go-go band lineup, which included the slap bass and bright horns of most funk bands, but diminished the role of guitar, added electro-funk synthesizers (often more than one), and most of all, focused all its attention on the beat.
Trouble Funk’s three percussionists built multilayered rhythms using congas, timbales, toms, and a variety of other drums and noisemakers, not the least of which was a steadily clanking cowbell. Instead of having a singer leading the group, Trouble Funk, like other go-go bands arising around D.C. in the late ‘70s, opted for something closer to a lead “talker.” Like early hip-hop DJs, the vocalists directed the group and audience members through party chants, call-and-response games, and shout-outs to nearby towns and neighborhoods (well-known examples include: “We gonna drop the bomb on the Southeast crew!” and “Fee fi fo fum, tell me where did you come from?”). By the time the group released its debut record, 1979’s In Times of Trouble, go-go was beginning to catch on as a distinct style and Trouble Funk were among the scene’s leaders.
Jenny Toomey, Tsunami / Licorice:
One of the things I loved about Trouble Funk is they never leave the audience alone. They’re always baiting the audience, making fun of them, getting them to dance, breaking them in half, pitting audience members against each other, and really involving the audience in the show. That’s something we do with less success. I spend a lot of time baiting the audience when Tsunami plays, definitely, because I really feel like it should be an exchange.
Three years later, go-go had grown into a major attraction at parties and dances in the mid-Atlantic. Though bands remained almost entirely centered in D.C., word of the music extended up into New York, where the local rap scene was exploding on a national level. Sensing that go-go might be the “next big thing,” prominent early hip-hop label Sugar Hill (who’d introduced artists such as Sugarhill Gang and Grandmaster Flash) signed Trouble Funk and released its breakthrough album, Drop the Bomb. With its loose, live-in-the-studio atmosphere, the record was among the first go-go releases to successfully translate onto vinyl the party vibe so crucial to the music. But more than that, Drop the Bomb connected Trouble Funk and go-go with the world of rap music and a far wider audience.
Wyclef, solo / the Fugees:
Trouble Funk was hot, the mixture vibe of go-go: the funk, the rock, the combination. Our stuff incorporates all of that. Like if you listen to the end of “Anything Can Happen” [from The Carnival], we’re using go-go beats.
More connections between hip-hop and go-go began to raise the music’s profile even further. Rick Rubin, an early go-go fan who ran the New York-based Def Jam label, sampled Trouble Funk in songs by the Beastie Boys and, most notably, LL Cool J’s “Rock the Bells” (in the ‘90s, Rubin and Henry Rollins’s Infinite Zero label would reissue two Trouble Funk collections). The group also recorded with early rapper Kurtis Blow, and later with the controversial rap group 2 Live Crew. And hoping to do for go-go what the film Wild Style had done for hip-hop, a film called Good to Go attempted to inspire wider interest in groups like Trouble Funk.
Meanwhile back in Washington, Trouble Funk was building other musical bridges. Though D.C. in the early ‘80s could boast of active music scenes in both go-go and hardcore punk, the two worlds rarely coincided in the largely segregated city. That
changed, however, on September 23, 1983, when “The D.C. Funk-Punk Spectacular” brought together Trouble Funk with local hardcore heroes Minor Threat and visiting Texas punks the Big Boys. The show offered the mostly white punk kids a taste of Trouble Funk’s nonstop rhythmic assault, and had an enormous impact on the previously funk-deficient hardcore scene.
King Coffey, Butthole Surfers:
The punk rockers would gather at my house and we would literally spraypaint the walls and get drunk on pink champale while listening to Trouble Funk. I’d say Trouble Funk were really influential, in the whole sense of rhythms and funk. With the Big Boys, who were huge locally in Austin, and Minor Threat, there was a whole crossover. Trouble Funk exposed a lot of suburban white kids to go-go music and funk in general. The whole sense of rhythm and heavy percussion, it was one of the reasons the Buttholes were excited to have two drummers in the band, just to have those extra polyrhythms.
But while Trouble Funk and other go-go bands have occasionally flirted with mainstream crossover, a large scale go-go explosion never came. Mostly, this had to do with the music’s appeal in primarily a live format, and its inability to translate into hit records. With 1987’s Trouble over Here / Trouble over There, Trouble Funk attempted to move in a more radio-oriented direction, toward R&B and song-based funk. When it was a dismal failure, the group stopped recording altogether. As a live band, though, Trouble Funk has continued to tour the U.S. and Europe, where the group’s rousing shows have converted and inspired new fans. Particularly well loved in England, Trouble Funk are cited as an influence on the rhythmically complex electronic dance music known as jungle, or drum ‘n’ bass. While go-go remains a popular sound in and around D.C., younger styles like jungle are applying Trouble Funk’s beats to new technology and introducing it to new worlds.
DISCOGRAPHY
In Times of Trouble (D.E.T.T., 1979; 1983); the rare debut album was reissued as a half live double album.
Drop the Bomb (Sugar Hill, 1982); the group’s breakthrough, significant for its success in capturing a live sound in the studio, as well as for its release by a rap label.
Saturday Night Live from Washington, D.C. (Island, 1985); a terrific live album that effortlessly captures the spirit and energy of go-go.
Trouble Over Here / Trouble Over There (Island 1987); a largely unsuccessful attempt to expand the group’s sound into more song-oriented R&B.
Live (Infinite Zero, 1996); an obscure, independently released live album from 1981, reissued and nationally available for the first time 15 years later.
Early Singles (Infinite Zero, 1997); a compilation from the group’s beginnings.
ESG
Kate Schellenbach, Luscious Jackson:
ESG’s first EP; I swear, has been sampled more than any other record. These sisters from the Bronx that looked like kids created this catchy funk, so intuitively and to the capacity of their skills. I remember going to their shows, sweating and dancing, singing and clapping. They were like some friend of the family’s band playing at a prom. When Jill [Cuniff, of Luscious Jackson] was putting together the band, she asked me, “Would you be interested in playing in an ESG cover band?” And I said, ‘Yeah, that sounds really cool.” For us it was the same thing: a heavy bassline, a simple, funky drumbeat, and simple guitar lines. When we first started writing music for Luscious Jackson, ESG was a really big influence as far as approaching the music.
ESG took a do-it-yourself approach to dance music, which by the late ‘70s had become incredibly slick and prefabricated. In doing so, they captured the attention of artsy downtown New Yorkers who wanted music that was as real and exciting as punk, but that could also move them on the dance floor. With a pure and natural musical vision, and an ability to stretch stylistic boundaries, ESG offered a New York analogue to the adventurous female post-punk being made in England by groups like the Silts and Raincoats. Because their simple and repetitive dance grooves made perfect raw material for hip-hop DJs and rappers, ESG has long been a favorite source of samples for everyone from Big Daddy Kane to Wu-Tang Clan. And at the same time, their honest, unadorned funk tunes inspired a young and eclectic early ‘80s New York music scene that would produce acts like the Beastie Boys, Moby, and Luscious Jackson.
Moby:
ESG have been sampled in millions of hip-hop and house records, and they have a couple songs that are such classics that pretty much any disco in New York could play them and everyone would scream and blow whistles.
The Scroggins sisters grew up in a South Bronx apartment that was filled with the jazz and blues music of their white father, a struggling musician, and black mother, a former singer. By their early teens, their mother had become increasingly concerned about keeping the girls off the neighborhood streets, which had become a dangerous place for teens. To keep them occupied, she bought her daughters instruments and encouraged them to play. Sixteen-year-old Renee Scroggins took to the guitar, while younger sisters Deborah and Valerie began playing bass and drums, respectively. They learned quickly, and around 1976, the sisters formed a family group named after their birth-stones (emerald, sapphire) and favorite color (gold), which they abbreviated as ESG.
Though the Scroggins sisters were fans of everything from classical music to Queen, ESG was most closely impacted by the funk and early disco music they heard in the neighborhood; it was these sounds the girls tried to recreate in their own songs. But given their limited skills and small group format, what came out was something very different. The music had the essential elements of dance music – the funky beats and basslines, with disco-styled vocals – but it moved with the simplicity and amateurism of a garage rock band. When ESG developed far enough to play live, they began appearing in various talent shows around the Bronx. Their combination of naive charm and memorable hooks was immediately appealing.
David Pajo, Tortoise / Slint:
ESG were a huge influence, because their songs are so simple. They were one of those bands that when you see them you get really inspired to make your own music. What they do looks like anybody can do. I love when I get that feeling.
Among those who happened to catch an early ESG talent show performance was Ed Bahlman, proprietor of 99 Records in Greenwich Village. Impressed by the teenagers, Bahlman began getting the group gigs in downtown Manhattan clubs like Hurrah’s and the Mudd Club. From the start, they felt little connection with the club-hopping, coke-sniffing SoHo art scene of the early ‘80s. The Scroggins sisters kept their distance – even to the extent of bringing their own food and drink to clubs. Richard McGuire, who as a member of Liquid Liquid often shared bills with ESG, says, “I always felt that they didn’t understand what the hell they were doing in this scene. Everyone would love them, but they were very kind of closed to themselves. We did shows with them, and I remember their mother would come down with them and make sandwiches. It was a real family outing.”
Still, ESG’s stripped-down approach to groove-based music fit right in with the post-punk dance sounds at the time, and the three teenage sisters, plus a friend on percussion, became a downtown hit. In 1981, ESG met and performed for Tony Wilson, the head of well-known British indie label Factory Records. Impressed, Wilson introduced the band to producer Martin Hannett, who had planned to record Joy Division before the group’s singer Ian Curtis committed suicide. With Joy Division falling apart, Hannett brought ESG into the studio instead. The result became ESG’s debut U.K. single, Moody / UFO, which was bolstered to six songs for their first American EP on 99 records.
Tim Gane, Stereolab:
I bought this 12” because I liked the sleeve, and it was one of those records where you’re just laughing because it’s so good. I think it was the most focused record ever. You break down the parts and it was so simple, everything is unbelievably sparse, yet it was completely realized. There’s no waste on it at all.
In no time, both the single and a follow-up 12-inch remix of Moody became club favorites in New York and London. The tracks were not so much songs
as linear funk grooves, with echo-heavy dub percussion, a steady throbbing bass, and Renee’s simple, repetitive vocal line (on Moody). After a second EP on 99 Records, ESG released their first album, 1983’s Come Away with ESG. In addition to Renee, Valerie, and Deborah, the record featured a fourth sister, Marie, who joined the group on percussion. The band soon expanded even further to include the sisters’ neighborhood friends, bassist Leroy Glover and guitarist David Miles, and all of the sisters shifted to percussion and began sharing vocals.
At the peak of ESG’s popularity they were on the front lines of dance and punk music’s intermingling, and found themselves opening for acts like Joe Jackson and the Clash. By 1984, though, as 99 Records became embroiled in legal battles unrelated to the band, ESG fell into their own disputes with Bahlman. For ESG’s second album, Renee formed her own label, Emerald Saphire & Gold Records. Though they earned a club hit with the song Standing in Line, internal problems soon split the sisters and ESG became largely inactive.
