Shortly afterward, Richard Finch, the Sunshine Band bassist who’d co-written and co-produced all the group’s hits with Casey, split bitterly from the group. The members of the band weren’t getting along by the time they recorded the 1979 album Do You Wanna Go Party. It’s also the last song that the classic version of the band would ever make. “Please Don’t Go,” the first #1 hit of the ’80s, happens to be the first ballad that the Sunshine Band ever recorded. It took a ballad to temporarily bring them back. In 1978, the year disco hit its commercial peak, the Sunshine Band only managed a couple of singles that scraped the lower rungs of the top 40. (“Keep It Comin’ Love” is a 5.) For nearly three years after that, the Sunshine Band got nowhere near the top 10. The Sunshine Band followed up the 1977 #1 “ I’m Your Boogie Man” with the relatively limp “ Keep It Comin’ Love,” which peaked at #2 later that same year. You don’t carve out a lasting pop career by knocking out subtlety-free bulldozers for years in a row. Their songs were fun, but they were also subtlety-free bulldozers. The Sunshine Band’s sound was maddeningly simple and repetitive. For a hot minute - until the Bee Gees came along and kicked them into the sun - KC & The Sunshine Band were the biggest band in disco. After that, the Sunshine Band themselves did everything they could to capitalize on the sound of the gay-club underground, scoring four quick-succession #1 hits from 1975 to 1977. Bandleaders Henry Wayne Casey and Richard Finch wrote and produced George McCrae’s 1974 smash “ Rock Your Baby,” which I consider to be the first fully intentional disco #1. There’s no one party that can claim responsibility for the disco boom, but KC & The Sunshine Band were, at the very least, early adapters. That’s especially true of the decade’s first #1 single: One of the defining chart-pop groups of the ’70s pulling off a short-lived last-ditch post-disco reinvention. In most respects, especially on the pop charts, the first few years of the ’80s are pretty much ’70s hangover. The popular-imagination version of the ’80s - the day-glo, the architecturally molded hairdos, the cocaine yacht parties - was already starting to take shape in the waning days of the ’70s, but that whole ’80s aesthetic didn’t take over for years. The ’80s didn’t really begin on January 1, 1980. In The Number Ones, I’m reviewing every single #1 single in the history of the Billboard Hot 100, starting with the chart’s beginning, in 1958, and working my way up into the present.
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