This of course set a good foundation for making a band concept.

We always had a great friendship and deep admiration for one another. I bonded with them as a kid engineer early on. They always had a sense of workability and openness - you could record with these guys on 12 different tunes and no two recordings would sound the same. These guys were on fire! They had this Funk Brothers thing going on, and I am very happy to have worked with these two very wonderful guys. Jerome and Robert were the mainstay session cats at TK Records. There would not be a KC and the Sunshine Band without Jerome and Robert. The keyboard player or writer would sometimes be 20, 30 years older than the guys playing the rhythm stuff. Jerome and myself and Robert, we were all really young cats in our teens. He was about 38, and I was only about 16. It would either be me on bass, or Ron Bodgon, who was a much older guy. But for the most part it was Jerome Smith on guitar, Robert Johnson on drums, and they would also change out the bass player or the keyboard player for a different flavor. They would just interchange the lead singer and/or the writers. There was a young rhythm section that was recording, for the most part, all of the R&B records out of TK Records. But back then, the arrangements would be rehearsed and played over and over and over and over again until the arrangement was smooth enough to turn on the tape recorder, and then of course we'd go about trying to get that magic take to build upon. Of course, tracks are made differently today – everybody does everything inside the computer. Songfacts: So you guys were writing and recording just the tracks, and then a vocalist would put their tracks on later?įinch: Yeah, sometimes a writer would have an idea for a song, and he would direct us, and we would be the session musicians. It could be Gwen McCrae, it could be Benny Latimore, it could be Timmy Thomas. There would be Willie Clarke or Clarence Reid as writers, or there would be whoever else had an idea. yeah, who knows who the tunes went for? Because no one ever said. Songfacts: Did you guys ever record anybody we've heard of?įinch: Let's see, Betty Wright, George McCrae, Bobby Caldwell. The way business worked back then, if you had a handful of artists and everybody sold just a little bit, it was the same thing as making a hit record, because it all adds up. Henry was just trying to make some local chart action happen. There were a lot of R&B records coming out, like Benny Latimore and Betty Wright. There was this 8-track studio upstairs on 1-inch tape, and people would go back there and just start recording away, and then whenever something was worthy of coming out, Henry would have it pressed, because there were local pressing plants all over south Florida back then. So, it was like, Wow, wouldn't it be a great idea to mix this information center from the front part of the building, and then in the back of the building there was this little funky R&B recording studio where people would go back there and record. You know, when you're young you're really clairvoyant and you can see all kinds of stuff. You couldn't buy it directly from the record company, you had to get it from the distributor.Īs a kid I was paying attention to everything. Sometimes records from manufacturers would come in from Louisiana, Memphis, or Nashville, go to his distributor, then go back up the United States. Whenever there was a buzz in the record industry, Henry would know about it, because his distributor was very, very hot, and he used to service all of the record stores around the southeast region of the United States. They would handle all the labels, and they definitely captured what was going on at any given moment. It was actually called Tone Distributors, which was a huge block-long warehouse and a very powerful one-stop independent record distributor.

Rick Finch: Well, it wasn't called TK Records until we had a #1 record with George McCrae (' Rock Your Baby'). Carl Wiser (Songfacts): Tell me about TK Records.

Bassist richard finch prison