A question shouted across a Pittsburgh club during a band break turned into a US No. 1 single. Wild Cherry singer and guitarist Rob Parissi wrote “Play That Funky Music” in roughly five minutes, scribbling on a drink order pad after a patron asked his hard rock group whether they were going to play some funky music.
The story is doing the rounds again this week on Reddit’s r/todayilearned, and it holds up against the documented history of the song and the band.
A rock band losing gigs to disco
Wild Cherry formed in Steubenville, Ohio, in 1970, led by Parissi, who grew up in the steel town of Mingo Junction. The name came off a box of cough drops. For years the group played straight rock across the Ohio Valley, the West Virginia panhandle and Pittsburgh.
By the mid-1970s that was a problem. Disco was filling dance floors, and club promoters wanted acts that kept people moving. Parissi pushed his bandmates to add dance numbers to their sets; they pushed back, wary of being labeled a disco band.
The shout at the 2001 Club
The turning point came at the 2001 Club on Pittsburgh’s North Side, where the crowd was mostly Black. During a break, a patron put the question to drummer Ron Beitle. The song’s documented history renders it as “Are you going to play some funky music, white boys?” The band’s history gives a slightly different wording, “Are you white boys gonna play some funky music?”, as Beitle recalled it later while the group hunted for song ideas. The viral version circulating online, “play some funky music, white boy,” compresses both.
Either way, Parissi heard a hook. He grabbed a pen borrowed from the bartender and an order pad, and the lyric he wrote is about exactly the bind he was in: a rock band trying to survive the disco era.
From B-side to No. 1
Parissi originally meant the track to be the flip side of a cover of the Commodores’ “I Feel Sanctified.” Studio engineer Ken Hamann brought the band to Sweet City Records, a Cleveland label distributed by Epic, and the label heard the hit and flipped the plan. The single became Sweet City’s very first release in April 1976.
The recording featured Parissi on lead vocals, Bryan Bassett on guitar, Allen Wentz on bass and Beitle on drums, with session players supplying the horn riff that runs through the verses.
How fast it climbed
- April 1976: single released on Sweet City.
- September 18, 1976: No. 1 on the US Hot 100, and No. 1 on the soul singles chart too.
- Year-end 1976: No. 5 on the US year-end Hot 100.
- 2018: ranked No. 93 on an all-time list of Hot 100 songs.
Counting from April to mid-September, that is roughly five months from a scribbled order pad to the top of the American pop chart. Abroad, it reached No. 2 in Canada, No. 4 in the Netherlands and New Zealand, and No. 7 in the UK.
The record was certified platinum in the US and eventually sold 2.5 million copies there alone. The band won an American Music Award for top R&B single and two Grammy nominations.
One hit, then a long afterlife
It was also Wild Cherry’s only US Top 40 hit, which puts the band firmly on lists of 1970s one-hit wonders. Badiyaa looked at how that label sticks in our piece on Roxy Music’s “Love Is the Drug” and its US one-hit-wonder status. Follow-up singles such as the soundalike “Baby Don’t You Know” stalled at No. 43, and the group broke up in late 1979.
The song kept earning. Vanilla Ice released his own take in 1990 without crediting Parissi, who was later awarded $500,000 in a copyright case (a figure that still lacks a cited source in the public record). That version still reached No. 4 in the US.
For more 1970s session stories, see our profile of Jim Ed Norman, who arranged the strings on the Eagles’ “Hotel California”. Parissi, meanwhile, got a street: on August 11, 2013, Mingo Junction renamed its longest road Rob Parissi Boulevard.
Further reading
Image: Catboy69, CC0 via Wikimedia Commons
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