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SF: I don’t.

Rick: It was a pretty big world message type song. Timmy Thomas is a really wonderful guy, he’s a schoolteacher. That was his biggest record. But anyway, his organ was left up in the studio, and “Rock Your Baby” became born unto this crazy drum machine that was inside of this Lowry organ that he left there. We wanted to have some steadiness about our demos, KC and I. KC would get on the piano or the Fender Rhodes and start playing away, and we would just jam. And the only way we could record was by taking the tape that was thrown away. I would gather it back up and spin it back onto a reel. Sometimes there would be two or three different types of tape, so the sound would change in the middle of the recording.

I used to use that as a tempo map, and I would play along with the drum machine. In the beginning it would hide my errors, but it would also teach me to be a better drummer, because I was paying attention to it that closely. Then we would build on that. We had a 1” 8-track machine and I had a cheap Japanese bass. We were just recording and recording and recording. And one night, this one track came out like better than anything else. It was like God was in the building or something - we had been blessed. It was like the hunger and desire was so incredibly overwhelming that some magical moment happened in there. We knew to build on that track.

There were a bunch of records coming out at that point. Hues Corporation had a song called “Rock The Boat,” and Harry and I were also paying attention to the chart actions at clubs, because club records, according to Henry’s direction, were doing better than just regular R&B Records. Back then you could sneak into a club and they didn’t check your ID, so Harry and I would once in a while go sneak into the local clubs. There was one on Southwest 8th Street in Miami, Florida, that played dance music. We’d go in there for about an hour or two until it got to be way too late for us to be there. And we’d pay attention to what brought the people to the dance floor, and what made them sit down. So we started gearing ourselves to writing more in that direction. “Rock Your Baby” was inspired by the gathering of all that information.

SF: So it wasn’t just you and KC putting this together, it was the guys from the band?

Rick: Originally, “Rock Your Baby,” the only two musicians were KC and I, and then we paid Jerome Smith $15 to put a guitar on it. In fact, everything on the first George McCrae album was just KC and I, except we'd bring in a guest guitarist here and there. We didn’t have any budget, so we had to come up with the money ourselves.

SF: That’s very resourceful. You guys had this whole track together, how did you come up with the lyrics?

Rick: It took a while. The track was laying around for a pretty good bit before we came up with any of the words. But we weren’t in a rush to make the wrong thing happen. We also discovered that through time you make good decisions. Because I saw the people who were in a hurry to get in and get out of there. You know, doing it on tape is one thing, but jeez, can you imagine the guys who put stuff together in an hour on Pro Tools? If you don’t build time into a recording, how is it gonna last? Back in the days of tape you were forced to put time into a recording with all of the elements that you had to deal with, like rewinding the tape, putting the tape on the machine, turning on the microphones, getting the settings. The equipment was very crude, but it sounded great. We had great microphones. Back then great microphones were cheap. We had a Neumann 47, a Neumann 67, and we had RCA ribbon mikes, all kinds of crazy stuff.

But I have an interesting story to tell you about the bass drum sound on “Rock Your Baby.” It was actually a transistor radio speaker. One day the microphone was broken for the kick drum. Being the electronics gadget dude that I was, I figured maybe the diaphragm was broken inside the microphone. I couldn’t figure out why it wouldn’t work, but it didn’t. So I took that microphone apart, and I used the transformer inside and connected it to a regular speaker from a little tiny pocket radio. I put the speaker in the bass drum, and that’s what I used as a mic for the kick on the “Rock Your Baby.” (laughs) It came out really good.

SF: You played that drum?

Rick: Yeah, it was pretty interesting.

SF: It sounds like this song set the stage for the songwriting partnership of Richard Finch and Harry Wayne Casey. Were you guys writing the lyrics together, throwing ideas off each other…

Rick: I would be more directing the arrangements of the music and coming up with the titles. And then Harry would write the lyrics. Harry was a pretty good lyric writer. But coming up with the titles and coming up with the musical arrangements, that would be me, because I had been doing that already when I met Harry.

SF: And that’s how you guys wrote for most of your partnership?

Rick: Oh yeah. When we started seeing the success from “Rock Your Baby,” we got this frenzy of recording, we got this great feeling of we need to go record more stuff. We would get Jerome and Robert, and KC would come up with a basic idea on the piano or something like that, and I would be the arranger/producer/bass player/engineer guy, who would help set the tempos and make sure it sounded hot, that the arrangement was with it, and that it moved. I picked up on that from back in the day with being a cover band for country and western stuff, because all of that old country stuff has smoothness. All the Patsy Cline, Webb Pierce, Buck Owens, all that old stuff was written really slippery and it had a soulful country feel about it. All the old country stuff had more soul to it - this new stuff is too mathematically correct, and doesn’t really have too much life to it.

SF: That’s really interesting how you’re drawing a parallel from old Buck Owens to KC and the Sunshine Band’s hits.

Rick: Yeah, because if you listen really carefully to KC and the Sunshine Band, you’ll hear the influences of country, Caribbean, R&B, and I don’t know what else. (laughs) KC’s dad was very Irish and his mom was very Italian. So I’m sure he had both of those influences, including church. He had an early love for gospel tunes and Motown as well.

I would always pay attention to the chart action that was going on. For example, “Get Down Tonight” was inspired by a record by Gilbert O’Sullivan called “Bad Dog, Baby” - (singing) “Well, I told you once before, and I won’t tell you no more to get down, and get down, and get down. You’re a bad dog, baby, but I still want you around.” He wrote that song about his dog. That record was really hot back then. And I was like, Okay, this guy has a great idea. He’s talking about “get down.” But I didn’t find out until later on he was talking about his dog. And I was like, Well, that’s really square. How hip is that? So we just kept taking it to the next level. We started being like a helicopter to the situation and paying attention to what everyone else was doing, and then trying to come up with something better and more hip. “Get Down” is too inconclusive. It has to say “get down – something else.” So we figured out to call it “Get Down Tonight.” And that was the first big one for KC and the Sunshine Band.

SF: You mention that you love being behind the curtain, but this sounds like it got taken to an extreme, because by naming the band KC and the Sunshine Band, that implied that KC was the leader of the band, and it was just a bunch of other guys behind him.

Rick: It used to be KC and the Sunshine Junkanoo Band, because when I first started working with KC he had this idea to involve these steel drums and all this stuff from the Caribbean, which was a lot to do back then, especially in a small 8-track studio. But how the Sunshine part came up is that people around KC used to call me “Sunshine” because I was all happy and bubbly and I always smiled wherever I went. Sherry Smith and Dutch Shaefer came up with the name. Dutch was a radio station DJ-went-promotions guy at TK Records hired by Henry. And then so was Sherry. They all worked at this radio station in San Francisco called KFRC. I guess they wanted to move to Miami, and they got hired by Henry to do promotions and publicity and stuff like that. But it was funny, because Dutch and Sherry used to call me Sunshine all the time, and it wound up being KC and the Sunshine Band. Also we were from the Sunshine State.

SF: And were you okay with that?

Rick: Yeah, of course. You can’t take anything too seriously; you just have fun with it.

SF: But how do you feel about KC becoming the face of KC and the Sunshine Band?

Rick: I never wanted to be an out front guy. I always knew my place. As a matter of fact, I didn’t expect that this was gonna go on the road. I quickly converted to that, of course, because I was just as excited as everyone else. But we were like, Oh my God, what are we gonna do now? We have to hurry up and put something together. And you can see how crazy it used to be in the beginning if you go back and look at some of the footage on “Queen of Clubs” that was recorded by the BBC.