The story of Kool & the Gang

Boxers, jazz and paint cans

The story begins in Youngstown, Ohio, where Robert Bell was born on the eighth of October 1950 and his brother Ronald a year later. Their father, Bobby Bell, was a boxer and a Golden Gloves champion. He and his brother Tommy went to New York to train, and they lived in the same apartment building as the jazz pianist Thelonious Monk. Monk became Robert's godfather. Miles Davis used to drop by the gym because he fancied himself a boxer, and he wanted to spar with Bobby. Bobby said no. As Robert later told it, his father warned Miles that one wrong punch could split his lip and end his trumpet career.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Music started with whatever the boys could find. Too poor for drums, the Bell brothers banged on old paint cans, and they learned that the amount of paint left inside changed the note. Robert later said that as a small boy he mostly wanted to be a mechanic, because his grandfather kept him busy under cars. At home their father played jazz records, and Ronald remembered sitting in front of the new stereo listening to Miles Davis and Dave Brubeck when he was only five or six. In 1960 the family moved east to Jersey City, New Jersey, to be near their mother's relatives while their father travelled to fight.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Jersey City was a rougher place than Youngstown. Robert said the country boys had to toughen up to avoid getting beaten on the street, and he drifted toward the local gangs, where everybody carried a nickname. There was already a guy called Cool with a C, so Robert became Kool with a K. In 1964 the brothers teamed up with friends from Lincoln High School: Dennis Thomas on alto saxophone, Robert Spike Mickens on trumpet, Ricky Westfield on keyboards and George Brown on drums, plus the guitarist Charles Smith. Brown had learned by tapping on things with butter knives, and after one three dollar lesson his family could not afford any more. Thomas was just thirteen.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

They called themselves the Jazziacs, and they meant it. Their heroes were John Coltrane, Cannonball Adderley and Freddie Hubbard, with a dose of Latin jazz from Mongo Santamaria. On Sundays they went over to Greenwich Village to play the hootenanny night at the Cafe Wha, where they were paid in turkey sandwiches and potato chips. Getting from there to the Village Gate felt like making it big. Along the way they played alongside jazz players like McCoy Tyner, Pharoah Sanders and Leon Thomas. Ronald later admitted they were stubborn purists. He said it was hard to get them to play rhythm and blues at all.[1] [2] [3] [4]

From Soul Town to the first records

Jazz did not pay, so the band took work as the house group for Soul Town, a small Jersey City outfit trying to copy Motown. Backing local singers meant learning the Temptations, the Miracles, the Supremes and James Brown note for note, and that R and B training slowly bled into their jazz. The name kept changing too. They were the Jazz Birds, the Soul Town Band and the New Dimensions. By the BBC's account, as the Jazz Birds they even won the famous amateur night at the Apollo Theater in Harlem. Then, at a club called the Blue Note, an emcee kept shouting that Kool was on bass, and he began billing them as Kool and the Flames.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The new name did not last. Their first manager, the producer and songwriter Gene Redd, pointed out that James Brown's band was called the Famous Flames, and nobody wanted trouble with the Godfather of Soul. Stuck for an alternative, they settled on Kool and the Gang because it sounded rough and street. Redd signed them to De-Lite, the new independent label he was working with, and on the third of July 1969 they released their debut album, Kool and the Gang. It was all instrumental and only just over half an hour long. Redd named one track Sea of Tranquility, because the moon landing was in the air that summer.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

The first single, also called Kool and the Gang, reached number nineteen on the soul chart. When the band first heard it on the radio, some listeners assumed it was a Puerto Rican group, because of all the bongos and horns. Watching an act called Willie and the Mighty Magnificents convinced them they could not just stand still and play, so they worked up a stage show. Their label also asked for vocals. With no real singer in the group, they simply chanted together, and Robert admitted they sounded ragged at first. The live album Live at the Sex Machine reached number six on the R and B album chart in 1971 and stayed there for thirty three weeks.[1] [2] [3] [4]

One early song came out of a night in jail. As the Bell brothers told Rolling Stone, the band was rehearsing in a daycare center before a show in Hackensack when police walked in and found drugs hidden in a couch. The brothers insisted it had been planted to set them up. An officer asked which of them was going to take the weight, and three of them spent the night locked up and missed the gig. They turned the line into a song, Who's Gonna Take the Weight, with a spoken introduction by Dennis Thomas. After two live albums they split amicably with Redd and produced Music Is the Message themselves in 1972, the same year the Bell brothers converted to Islam.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

Jungle Boogie and the funk years

By 1973 the label was losing patience. Manu Dibango's Soul Makossa was a huge record, and De-Lite wanted Kool and the Gang to cover it, or at least work with the man who produced it. The band refused. Instead they booked a rehearsal room in SoHo, went in around eight in the morning, and by midnight, as Robert remembers it, they had Funky Stuff, Jungle Boogie and Hollywood Swinging. Ronald said the rising keyboard line of Jungle Boogie came to him as a pyramid shape on the piano. The song was first called Jungle Jam. The gravelly spoken vocal and the Tarzan yell at the end came from their roadie, Don Boyce, who told them he had an idea for the track.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

The album was Wild and Peaceful, with one wild side and one peaceful side, and it was their breakthrough. Funky Stuff became their first pop top forty hit. Jungle Boogie went to number four on the Billboard Hot 100, and Hollywood Swinging reached number six while giving them their first number one on the soul chart in June 1974. Both sold a million copies and the album went gold. It also brought them their first big white audience. On Hollywood Swinging the lead voice belongs to keyboard player Ricky West, and Nile Rodgers later said that Chic's hit Good Times was partly inspired by it.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Flush with success, the band turned inward. Light of Worlds, from 1974, was their most spiritual record. Counting their compilations, they thought of it as their ninth LP, so they picked nine songs to stand for the nine planets. Out of it came Summer Madness, which began life as part of a longer piece by Spike Mickens and Elton Taylor. Ronald cut the final section loose, started it on piano, and at five in the morning, alone in the studio, he detuned a brand new ARP 2600 synthesizer and let it glide upward through the octaves. The engineer Harvey Goldberg told him it was amazing. In 1976 it turned up in a scene of the film Rocky.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

In October 1974 they appeared on Soul Train. The 1975 album Spirit of the Boogie added trumpeter Larry Gittens from the Stylistics, and its title track made the top forty. It also contained Jungle Jazz, an instrumental built on the same rhythm as Jungle Boogie. The drum pattern near its start became one of the most borrowed beats in dance music, turning up in more than fifty songs, including Pump Up the Volume by MARRS. The band also recorded tracks for the Last Poets on the spoken word project Hustlers Convention, and Robert notes that some people call that the first hip hop.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Lost in the disco years

By the middle of 1976 the hits dried up. Disco was taking over, and a loose, greasy funk band with no lead singer did not fit. They tried to adapt. The albums Open Sesame, The Force and Everybody's Dancin' brought in female singers and string sections, and keyboard player Ricky West left in 1976 to form his own band. Robert later said they got too fancy and too clever and lost the basic Kool and the Gang sound. A Detroit newspaper ran a review under a headline saying the band had gone bland. Drummer George Brown summed it up more bluntly. They had tried their version of disco, he said, and it did not work.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

There was one strange bright spot. Ronald built the track Open Sesame around a Middle Eastern scale and a melody he half remembered from The Nutcracker, which he had heard in fourth grade. He kept the band in the studio for twelve hours of head arrangements without once stepping into the control room. The label then placed it on the soundtrack of Saturday Night Fever, telling the band they would not earn much from it but it would be great for their career. That album became one of the biggest sellers of all time and won the Grammy for Album of the Year, with Kool and the Gang among the credited artists. Their own disco records still flopped.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Ronald later called those years the band's one real low point. Bookings fell, and the band worked only on and off. But they were thinking. The anti disco backlash was building in America, and the Bells could see that most of the big soul bands had a star up front. Earth, Wind and Fire had Maurice White and Philip Bailey. The Commodores had Lionel Richie. Kool and the Gang had always sung together as a gang, with the horns doing the real singing. Meanwhile their younger brother Kevin, later known as Amir Bayyan, was leading a protege group called the Kay Gees, whose records would be sampled decades later by Dr. Dre and Kanye West.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

J.T. Taylor, Deodato and Celebration

The turn came on tour with the Jacksons. The promoter Dick Griffey, who ran Solar Records, watched Kool and the Gang night after night and told them they were great but they needed a lead singer. Through one of the tour managers and the owner of the studio where they were recording, they found James Taylor, known as J.T., a former schoolteacher and nightclub singer from Hackensack, born in South Carolina. At his audition they had him sing jazz, and they told him his voice reminded them of Nat King Cole. He was the first singer they auditioned and the only one. Taylor later recalled that some members, and the female singers he replaced, did not welcome him.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

The second change was a producer. The band's first choice, Stevie Wonder, was too busy. They turned instead to Eumir Deodato, the Brazilian arranger who had a surprise hit in 1973 with a funk version of Also Sprach Zarathustra. Deodato stripped back the horns and pushed the hooks. The music for their next album was mostly written before Taylor arrived, and the lyrics were built around his voice. Robert had been going out to Studio 54 and other Manhattan clubs, and noticed they all had ladies' nights. When he told Ronald the title, Ronald loved it at once. Ladies' Night came out in September 1979 and went platinum, with the title track and Too Hot both reaching the pop top ten.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7]

Celebration grew straight out of Ladies' Night. A line near the end of that song invited everyone to celebrate, and Ronald decided it was a whole new song. He finished the track after the band won two American Music Awards in one night, and the others remember shaping it on the tour bus heading home. Robert says the famous whoop in the chorus was meant as a cowboy's yee haw. Released in October 1980, Celebration topped the R and B and dance charts by the end of the year. In January 1981, when Iran freed fifty two American hostages, news broadcasts played it to mark their return. On the seventh of February it reached number one on the Billboard Hot 100.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

It held the top spot for two weeks before Dolly Parton's Nine to Five took over, and it was their only pop number one. It also reached number seven in Britain. Broadcasters used it for the 1980 World Series, the 1981 Super Bowl and the 1981 NBA Finals, and Walter Mondale used it for his 1984 presidential campaign. It became a fixture at weddings, graduations and ballparks. In 2016 it entered the Grammy Hall of Fame, and in 2021 the Library of Congress chose it for the National Recording Registry. Ronald said he had no idea it would be a hit.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The formula kept working. Something Special, in 1981, was their third platinum album in a row. It carried Take My Heart, a number one R and B hit written by Charles Smith, and Get Down on It. That one began when a friend urged Ronald to listen to Bob Marley. He started playing a reggae style melody at rehearsal, Taylor began singing over it, and the song took shape. It became their biggest British hit yet, at number three. That same year the band persuaded Marvin Gaye out of his self imposed exile in Belgium to play with them in London. The fourth Deodato album, As One, in 1982, struggled to go gold, and the band decided the partnership had run its course.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8]

Joanna, Emergency and the eighties peak

Producing themselves with the engineer Jim Bonnefond, they made In the Heart in 1983. Its big single was Joanna, a gentle love song. Variety reported that the character was based on Charles Smith's mother. The video cast Joanna as the owner of a roadside diner and was filmed at the Colonial Diner in Lyndhurst, New Jersey. Some of Robert's friends told him it was too pop to be Kool and the Gang. It reached number two in America, stuck behind Culture Club's Karma Chameleon, and number two in Britain. Broadcast Music Incorporated later named it the most played pop song of 1984.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

In June 1984 the band took a break from recording to play a sold out show at Wembley Stadium organised by Elton John. That November they happened to be visiting the London offices of Phonogram, the label they shared with the Boomtown Rats, on the day Bob Geldof arrived to pitch a charity single for the Ethiopian famine. Robert Bell, J.T. Taylor and Dennis Thomas ended up taking part in Do They Know It's Christmas, and the band's own history later called them the only American group on the record. The album they were making, Emergency, became their biggest seller, with more than two million copies sold in the United States.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Emergency gave them four American top twenty hits: the title track, Fresh, Misled and Cherish. Misled leaned into rock guitar, and Ronald said it was mostly about a girl who led him astray. Fresh came with a video that retold Cinderella and topped the R and B chart in May 1985, before Whitney Houston knocked it off. Cherish was a soft ballad that reached number two on the Hot 100 and spent six weeks at number one on the adult contemporary chart, the biggest song of the year on that chart. It became a fixture at weddings. By 1986 Kool and the Gang had scored fourteen American top forty hits since 1980, more than Michael Jackson.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

The seventeenth album, Forever, in 1986, gave them two more top ten hits in Victory and Stone Love. By then the founding trumpeter Spike Mickens had retired because of poor health. For the 1987 tour of fifty American cities, the band rehearsed with a choreographer at Prince's Paisley Park studio. Robert and Taylor set up a scheme giving free tickets to schoolchildren with perfect attendance, and the band dropped its advertising deal with Schlitz beer because it no longer fitted a family image. Sadly, Ricky West, the original keyboard player and the voice of Hollywood Swinging, had died in 1985, nine years after leaving the band.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Life after J.T.

After that tour, J.T. Taylor left to go solo, and the news broke in February 1988. Robert later said Taylor had some issues with the band's management and wanted to try something new, at a time when Lionel Richie and Michael Jackson had done well on their own. Dennis Thomas said the whole group had talked about splitting into smaller projects. Taylor scored quickly with All I Want Is Forever, a duet with Regina Belle, and The Promised Land, heard in Ghostbusters Two. Kool and the Gang replaced him with three singers, Skip Martin, Odeen Mays and Gary Brown. The big hits, however, stopped coming.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The next few years were hard. Sweat, in 1989, was made without Taylor, Ronald Bell or Spike Mickens, and one critic called it probably the worst album of their career. Ronald came back for Unite in 1992, but it too failed commercially, and a reviewer said the band sounded like older men trying to be young and hip. In December 1998 tragedy struck Dennis Thomas's family. His daughter Michelle Thomas, the actress known from The Cosby Show and as Steve Urkel's girlfriend Myra on Family Matters, died of a rare abdominal cancer in New York at the age of thirty.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Taylor returned in 1995, on the understanding that he could keep his solo career too. The album State of Affairs came out in 1996, with every song written by Taylor and Ronald Bell, but it sold poorly, and by 1999 Taylor wanted to go it alone again. After he left the second time, Robert decided to go back to how they started, as a band of musicians who could all sing rather than one frontman and a backing group. Singer and guitarist Shawn McQuiller, who had first come in after Taylor's earlier exit, took many of the lead vocals, and keyboard player Curtis Williams returned.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The most sampled groove in town

While the band struggled on record, hip hop kept their music alive. Producers found the early grooves irresistible. Eric B. and Rakim used Give It Up, and when Ronald first heard it he thought it sounded just like himself playing. Public Enemy drew on three Kool and the Gang songs for Fear of a Black Planet, and Ronald said that album won him over completely. In 1991 DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince built Summertime around the rising synthesizer of Summer Madness. Madonna used Jungle Boogie on Erotica, and the Luniz used its horns for I Got 5 on It. George Brown liked to say he had become the most sampled drummer in history.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

In 1994 Quentin Tarantino put Jungle Boogie into Pulp Fiction, and the soundtrack went on to sell two million copies in America. A whole new generation discovered that the Celebration band had a tougher past. Ronald said seeing it in the film made him think their old music must be really good if it was still around. A few years later Sean Combs approached Robert at the Apollo, promised to make him a hit, and sampled Hollywood Swinging for Mase's Feel So Good, which reached number five in 1997. Chris Rock later used Hollywood Swinging at the Oscars, in both 2005 and 2016.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

The band leaned into the new audience. Gangland, in 2001, had rappers performing over the band's remade songs. In 2004 The Hits Reloaded paired their classics with pop acts. Atomic Kitten's Ladies' Night reached number eight in Britain, one place higher than the original, and the group even named their album after it. Jamiroquai, Lisa Stansfield and Liberty X also took part. Then came another loss. Charles Smith, the guitarist whose jazzy octave runs shaped Summer Madness and who wrote Joanna and Take My Heart, stopped touring in January 2006 and died after a long illness on the twentieth of June, at fifty seven. The Bells' youngest brother, Amir Bayyan, took his place.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

Festival fields and a star on Hollywood Boulevard

Kool and the Gang became one of the hardest working legacy acts anywhere. Still Kool, in 2007, went platinum in France. In November 2010, founding trumpeter Spike Mickens died in a nursing home in Far Rockaway, New York, at fifty nine. In 2011 the band played Glastonbury to a huge field of rock fans. David Lee Roth was watching, and when Van Halen reunited he asked for Kool and the Gang as the opening act. Roth told Robert that Van Halen's crowd was about sixty percent women, and Kool and the Gang had Ladies' Night. They opened nearly every show of the 2012 North American tour.[1] [2] [3] [4]

There was more sadness in 2015. Trombonist Clifford Adams, who had played with the band since 1977, died of liver cancer at sixty two. He had no health insurance, and friends had held fundraisers hoping to pay for a transplant. That October, fifty years after they started, the band received its star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, and it also entered the New Jersey Hall of Fame. In 2016 Jersey City renamed a street Kool and the Gang Way. In 2018 the Bell brothers, George Brown and J.T. Taylor were inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame, the award Ronald said he would save first from a burning house.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

That same year brought private grief to Robert. His wife Deborah, whom he had met as a teenager and married in 1971, died in November 2018 after a long illness. The band kept moving. In 2019 they celebrated fifty years since their first record with a world tour, and in Philadelphia they received the Marian Anderson Award. At that concert Nile Rodgers, whose cousin was Spike Mickens, played Good Times and Hollywood Swinging side by side and admitted his hit was Hollywood Swinging in disguise. Robert was supposed to give a speech, but instead picked up a bass and played Celebration with everyone on stage.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Farewells and the Hall of Fame

On the ninth of September 2020, Ronald Bell, known as Khalis Bayyan, died suddenly at his home in the United States Virgin Islands, with his wife Tia by his side. He was sixty eight. No cause was announced. He had written or co written almost every hit, and Robert called him the glue. Less than a year later, on the seventh of August 2021, Dennis Thomas died peacefully in his sleep in New Jersey at seventy. He had played on every Kool and the Gang recording since 1969, and his last show was on the Fourth of July at the Hollywood Bowl. Weeks later the band released Perfect Union, songs Ronald had finished before he died.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9]

George Brown faced his own battles. In 2023 he published a memoir, Too Hot, Kool and the Gang and Me, in which he wrote about depression and addiction to prescription pills. He said that whatever was going on, when it was time to go on stage, everything else went to the side. That summer the band released People Just Wanna Have Fun, written by Brown and Robert Bell, and in August Brown retired. On the sixteenth of November 2023 he died of lung cancer in Los Angeles, at seventy four. Asked to describe their music, he always gave the same answer. It was the sound of happiness.[1] [2] [3]

In October 2024, thirty years after they first became eligible, Kool and the Gang were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland by Chuck D of Public Enemy, who called it a long overdue celebration. With the Roots backing them and Questlove on drums, Robert Bell and J.T. Taylor shared a stage for a rare reunion, running through Hollywood Swinging, Get Down on It, Ladies' Night and Jungle Boogie before Celebration and a shower of confetti. Taylor asked the crowd to raise their phone lights as he read out the names of ten members who had made the band. Robert, the last founding member still standing, put it simply. Only he remained from the seventies, and Taylor from the eighties.[1] [2] [3]

From teenage jazz purists to funk pioneers, disco survivors and pop hitmakers, Kool and the Gang reinvented themselves roughly once a decade. They have sold more than seventy million albums worldwide, with two Grammys, seven American Music Awards and nine number one R and B singles. Their grooves have been sampled well over a thousand times, by artists from Jay Z and the Beastie Boys to A Tribe Called Quest. As of 2024, the latest reports we have, Robert Kool Bell was still leading the band on the road. As he likes to say, people always have something they want to celebrate.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

The people around Kool & the Gang

Robert Kool Bell and Ronald Khalis Bell. The brothers founded the band as teenagers in 1964 and led it together for fifty six years. Robert was the bassist, the face and the businessman, the one who hung out at Studio 54 and came back with titles. Ronald was the self taught composer and arranger who wrote most of the music. They converted to Islam together in 1972. Robert called Ronald the glue of the band, and after his death in 2020 released the songs Ronald had left behind.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Kool and the Gang and James J.T. Taylor. Taylor was the only singer they auditioned, and his warm voice carried every big hit from Ladies' Night to Stone Love. The relationship was never simple. He recalled resistance when he arrived, he left over management issues around 1988, returned in 1995, and left again in 1999 wanting his own career. In 2024 he and Robert Bell shared the Rock Hall stage, a rare reunion that Rolling Stone called exhilarating.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Kool and the Gang and Eumir Deodato. The Brazilian arranger produced four albums from 1979 to 1982, starting with Ladies' Night, and helped turn a struggling funk band into a pop hit machine by streamlining the songs around hooks and J.T. Taylor's voice. He was their second choice after Stevie Wonder. When As One struggled to go gold, the band ended the partnership and produced themselves. Deodato later arranged for Bjork, and his granddaughter is Hailey Bieber.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Kool and the Gang and Gene Redd. Redd was their first manager and producer. He heard them in 1968, signed them to De-Lite, produced and arranged their instrumental debut, and gave them the title Sea of Tranquility. It was Redd who warned them off the name Kool and the Flames because of James Brown's band. After two live albums they parted amicably and began producing themselves.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Kool and the Gang and Dick Griffey. The Los Angeles promoter and founder of Solar Records toured with the band while they opened for the Jacksons. He told them bluntly that they had a great show but were missing a lead singer. The band took the advice, found J.T. Taylor, and entered their most successful decade. The founders credited Griffey with the idea for the rest of their careers.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Bobby Bell and Thelonious Monk and Miles Davis. The Bell brothers' father was a boxer who trained in New York and lived in the same building as Thelonious Monk, who became Robert's godfather. Miles Davis wanted to box and would drop by the gym, hoping to spar with Bobby, who refused for the sake of Miles's lip. That jazz world shaped his sons, who started out as the Jazziacs.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Dennis Thomas and Michelle Thomas. Dennis Thomas, the band's alto saxophonist and master of ceremonies, was the father of the actress Michelle Thomas, who played Justine on The Cosby Show and Myra on Family Matters. Her publicist was Ronald Bell's daughter. Michelle died of a rare cancer in 1998 at thirty, and Dennis outlived her by twenty two years.[1] [2] [3]

Spike Mickens and Nile Rodgers. Chic's Nile Rodgers is a cousin of Kool and the Gang's founding trumpeter Robert Spike Mickens. Rodgers has said that Chic's Good Times was partly inspired by Hollywood Swinging, and at the 2019 Marian Anderson Award concert he played the two songs back to back to prove it. Robert Bell also recorded a song with Rodgers and Chic around 2010.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Kool and the Gang and Chuck D and Public Enemy. Public Enemy sampled three Kool and the Gang songs on Fear of a Black Planet, and Ronald Bell said that record made him a hip hop convert, because he could practically hear George Brown playing inside the beats. Years later, in 2024, Chuck D inducted the band into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.[1] [2] [3]

Kool and the Gang and David Lee Roth and Van Halen. Roth saw Kool and the Gang at Glastonbury in 2011 and insisted on them as the opening act for Van Halen's 2012 reunion tour. His reasoning was that Van Halen's fans were mostly women and the band had Ladies' Night. The pairing of a funk band with a hard rock crowd worked, and they opened nearly every North American show.[1] [2] [3]

Robert, Ronald and Amir Bell. The Bells' youngest brother Kevin, later Amir Bayyan, played guitar with Kool and the Gang on tour and in the studio in the late seventies and led their protege group the Kay Gees, whose records were later sampled by Dr. Dre and Kanye West. When Charles Smith died in 2006, Amir took over the guitar chair in his brothers' band.[1] [2] [3]

Rare facts about Kool & the Gang

• Thelonious Monk was Robert Kool Bell's godfather. The Bells' father, a boxer named Bobby Bell, lived in the same New York apartment building as Monk. Robert says he never actually met Monk, though he did get to know Miles Davis later.[1] [2] [3]
• Miles Davis wanted to spar with the Bell brothers' father, a champion boxer. Bobby Bell turned him down, joking that if he hit Miles wrong and split his lip, the trumpeter might not have a career.[1] [2]
• The Bell brothers first made music by beating on old paint cans. They could not afford drums, and discovered that the amount of paint left in each can changed its pitch, like a set of bongos.[1] [2] [3]
• Robert spelled Kool with a K because another boy in the neighbourhood was already called Cool. Moving to Jersey City at ten, he joined in the street culture where everybody had a nickname. The other Cool used a C, so Robert switched letters.[1] [2]
• As teenagers they played Sunday nights at the Cafe Wha in Greenwich Village for a turkey sandwich and chips. Robert says they were not playing for money at all. Graduating from there to the Village Gate felt like playing Wembley.[1]
• George Brown's first drum lesson cost three dollars, and his family could not afford another. He had practised on things with butter knives. The teacher, who had played with the Shirelles, told him he was a natural, and he taught himself the rest by studying Buddy Rich.[1]
• Dennis Thomas carried the band's earnings in a paper bag stuffed inside the bell of his saxophone. In the early days he was the group's budget hawk, as well as its wardrobe stylist and master of ceremonies.[1] [2]
• Their debut single made some radio listeners think they were a Puerto Rican band. The mix of horns and bongos confused people. Robert told the Guardian that some thought they were a Spanish band.[1] [2]
• The track Sea of Tranquility on their 1969 debut was named with the moon landing in mind. Producer Gene Redd came up with the title because the moon walk was happening while they recorded the album.[1] [2]
• The voice on Jungle Boogie, Tarzan yell included, belongs to the band's roadie, Don Boyce. The band felt the track was missing something. Boyce said he had an idea, went into the studio and delivered the growling spoken vocal. He later sang on Spirit of the Boogie and Open Sesame.[1] [2]
• Jungle Boogie was originally called Jungle Jam. Ronald Bell said the title did not work, so he went home, tried out other phrases, and settled on Jungle Boogie.[1]
• Light of Worlds has nine songs to represent the nine planets. The band counted it as their ninth LP, including compilations, and picked one song per planet, as the solar system was counted in 1974.[1]
• Summer Madness grew out of a longer song by Spike Mickens and Elton Taylor called You Don't Have to Change. Ronald Bell cut off the final section, began it with piano, and added the famous synthesizer glide. The title was simply one Spike had always wanted to use.[1]
• The soaring synthesizer on Summer Madness was recorded alone at five in the morning. Ronald Bell detuned a brand new ARP 2600 and let it glide up through several octaves. As of 2018, more than 145 recordings had sampled the song.[1] [2]
• Summer Madness plays in Rocky, but it is not on the Rocky soundtrack album. The instrumental is heard in a scene of the 1976 film, and was later used in a Nike commercial with LeBron James.[1] [2] [3]
• The drum beat from Jungle Jazz, a 1975 album track, appears in more than fifty other songs. It turns up in MARRS's Pump Up the Volume and Jade's Don't Walk Away, and even ships as a sample with the FL Studio software.[1] [2]
• Open Sesame borrows from The Nutcracker, which Ronald Bell had heard in fourth grade. He built it from twelve hours of head arrangements. The band got little money for its place on Saturday Night Fever.[1]
• In 1979 Robert Bell offered his brother two song titles, Ladies' Night and Hanging Out. Robert pitched both titles to Ronald. Ladies' Night thrilled him and Hanging Out did not, so it became the B side.[1]
• At his audition, the band made J.T. Taylor sing jazz and said he sounded like Nat King Cole. He was the first singer they auditioned and the only one. Before joining he had been a schoolteacher and nightclub singer.[1] [2] [3] [4]
• Stevie Wonder was the band's first choice of producer in 1979. He was too busy, so they hired the Brazilian arranger Eumir Deodato instead, who produced their next four albums.[1]
• The whoop in the chorus of Celebration was meant to sound like a cowboy's yee haw. Robert Bell traced it back to Country Junky, a 1972 track in which the band tried to mix funk with country music.[1]
• Dolly Parton's Nine to Five ended Celebration's run at number one. Celebration reached the top of the Billboard Hot 100 on the seventh of February 1981 and held it for two weeks.[1]
• Walter Mondale used Celebration for his 1984 presidential campaign. Stereogum noted drily that in the end he did not have much to celebrate.[1]
• The Joanna video was filmed at the Colonial Diner in Lyndhurst, New Jersey. In it Joanna runs a roadside diner and serves the band, with flashbacks to her past as a dancer at Harlem's Cotton Club.[1]
• Joanna was the most played pop song in America in 1984, according to BMI. It peaked at number two, stuck behind Culture Club's Karma Chameleon, even though some of Robert's friends told him it was too pop.[1] [2] [3]
• In 1981 Kool and the Gang coaxed Marvin Gaye out of his exile in Belgium to play with them in London. George Brown called Gaye his idol and said the night was incredible.[1]
• They sang on Band Aid largely by accident. They shared a label with the Boomtown Rats and happened to be in Phonogram's London office the day Bob Geldof came to pitch the charity single.[1] [2]
• For their 1987 tour, the band rehearsed at Prince's Paisley Park studio. They also handed out free tickets to children with perfect school attendance, and dropped a Schlitz beer advertising deal to suit their family image.[1]
• By 1986 Kool and the Gang had more American top forty hits of the eighties than Michael Jackson. They had fourteen top forty singles between 1980 and 1986.[1]
• Hollywood Swinging was the soundtrack for Chris Rock's Oscar segments in both 2005 and 2016. In the bits, Rock asked Black moviegoers whether they had seen any of the Best Picture nominees.[1]
• Sean Combs pitched his sample of Hollywood Swinging to Robert Bell in person at the Apollo Theater. Combs promised to make him a big record. It became Mase's 1997 hit Feel So Good, which reached number five.[1] [2]
• Atomic Kitten's 2003 remake of Ladies' Night charted higher in Britain than the original. It reached number eight, one place above the 1979 version, and the group named their album after it.[1] [2]
• There is a Kool and the Gang champagne. After a sold out French concert, a promoter proposed it. Robert Bell visited the Champagne region and helped create Le Kool.[1]
• Get Down on It became the band's most streamed song on Spotify. It sits ahead of Celebration, according to the BBC. The song began as a reggae style jam after Ronald was urged to listen to Bob Marley.[1] [2] [3]
• In 2022 the band played Celebration to christen a cruise ship named Carnival Celebration. The concert was part of the naming ceremony in November 2022 for the new ship.[1] [2]
• Kool and the Gang waited thirty years for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. They became eligible in 1994 and were finally inducted in October 2024 by Chuck D.[1] [2]

Disputed stories

These stories are told often but the accounts don't agree. Here are the versions and who says what.