Since 2005 Plastic Crimewave (aka Steve Krakow) has used the Secret History of Chicago Music to shine a light on worthy artists with Chicago ties who’ve been forgotten, underrated, or never noticed in the first place.
I’d like to think the narrative has changed on Chicago and disco since the infamous Disco Demolition Night at Comiskey Park in 1979. White rock fans blowing up disco records was never a good look, in no small part because the genre was so heavily Black, Brown, and queer. I’ll allow that some of the kids at Comiskey might’ve known nothing about disco except that they thought it sucked, but that’s their loss. Just like rock ’n’ roll, disco was dance music that grew organically out of R&B. It spurred innovation in production techniques and instruments (synthesizers really came into their own in disco), and its influence is still heard widely today. Songwriter, singer, multi-instrumentalist, and producer Peter Brown was as essential as anyone to disco and what made it unique, with a string of hits in the late 70s and early 80s, and his tale reads like a history of popular music in miniature.
Brown has very rarely granted interviews since leaving the biz in the late 80s, and in fact I’ve only been able to find one that’s of any substance—a lengthy, undated Q&A with the website Disco-Disco.com. It’s the source for every direct quote in this story.
Brown was born in Blue Island on July 11, 1953, and raised in Palos Heights. His mother gave him music lessons, and his father (an electronic engineer) encouraged Brown’s technical inclinations by bringing home tape machines and an early stereo turntable. Having learned a variety of instruments, he tried to put together a band with friends, but as a kid he didn’t consider music a professional path.
“I loved recording,” he said, “and would spend hours overdubbing myself playing one instrument after another onto a primitive two-track tape recorder my father supplied. In the end I would have an entire orchestra of myself playing drums, organ, a variety of small rhythm instruments and maybe some accordion—anything that I could get my hands on.”
As a teenager, Brown listened to the likes of Earth, Wind & Fire and Chicago, and as he got increasingly serious about music, he learned the drums and would eventually master timbales, congas, and all sorts of other beat-making instruments. But he still thought he’d probably pursue the graphic arts as a vocation, and he attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago for a spell in the early 70s.
“At the time there wasn’t much of a school,” he said. “The ‘classrooms’ were the dark, dank rooms located beneath the museum, furnished with discarded, tattered furniture that looked as if it had been picked up on a street corner somewhere.” Brown focused on classes in painting, sculpture, film, and art history, but he found the entire experience discouraging.
Brown had never entirely abandoned his private music making, though, and at about this time he met producer Cory Wade through mutual friends. Wade hailed from nearby Indianapolis and worked for TK Records, a label based in Hialeah, Florida. Inspired by Wade’s interest in his home recordings, Brown began sharing increasingly polished demos—including a tape with three basically finished tracks. Wade played the song “Do You Wanna Get Funky With Me” for TK president Henry Stone, and the story of Brown’s biggest hit began.
Stone wanted to release the demo as it was. Brown had recorded it in his bedroom on a four-track, playing everything but the saxophone solo (added by his friend Mike Smith and run through a synthesizer). “I couldn’t imagine releasing a song recorded in my bedroom and begged Henry Stone to let me bring the demo to Florida to improve and add to the tracks on a professional 24-track recorder,” Brown told Disco-Disco. “He relented and I was able to clean up the tracks.” The finished single used additional guitar, background vocals, and percussion.
When “Do You Wanna Get Funky With Me” was released in 1977, it quickly became the first million-selling 12-inch single. (Twelve-inch 45s were new at the time, but they’d soon become the most popular format for extended dance tracks.) It reached number 18 on the Billboard Hot 100 and reached the top ten on the R&B and disco charts; it was also a hit, albeit a more modest one, in Australia and the UK. (In 2005, hedonistic local industrial pranksters My Life With the Thrill Kill Kult covered the song on the album Gay, Black and Married.)
Brown immediately signed to TK Records imprint Drive, which sought to capitalize on the single’s success by setting him a six-month deadline for a completed album. As the LP took shape, Brown contributed vocals, drums, and synths (he favored keyboards from ARP Instruments, and briefly served as a spokesperson for the company). Wade encouraged him to act as his own producer, and to fill out the arrangements Brown recruited Robert Rans as his lead keyboard player and cowriter, plus guitarists Steve Gordon and Tom Dziallo, background vocalist Pat Hurley, vocal trio Wildflower, and R&B diva Betty Wright of “Clean Up Woman” fame (who sang on the propulsive cut “Dance With Me”).
The resulting album, 1977’s A Fantasy Love Affair, of course included “Do You Wanna Get Funky With Me,” with its title nice and big on the cover. The album art generated a mild scandal with a detailed silhouette of what looked like a nude model, but the “model” was in fact a cardboard cutout Brown had made.
In early 1978, “Dance With Me” would become Brown’s next single, and it was another huge success on the Billboard charts—as well as in Canada, the UK, Australia, and New Zealand, where it reached its highest position of number three. Featuring the lush string arrangements of Bert Dovo, the grooving dance number still slaps hard by today’s standards. Whosampled.com says “Dance With Me” has been sampled more than 20 times, appearing in tunes by the likes of the Chemical Brothers, LL Cool J & Busta Rhymes, and Def Jef. It also appeared on 90s film soundtracks such as Summer of Sam and Donnie Brasco.
In 1978 Brown put together a live band whose membership topped out at more than ten players, including Dziallo (on bass), the members of Wildflower, and guitarist Joe Guzzo. In Brown’s interview with Disco-Disco.com, Guzzo described the experience. “We started the tour in a small Illinois town called Quincy, and then through the southern states down through Texas to Florida, then north playing gigs up the coast to the upper east coast,” he recalled. “We played everything from small intimate clubs to discos like New York’s Xenon, as well as big venues like Madison Square Garden. We headlined as well as opened for other acts like Parliament, Funkadelic, the O’Jays and others.”
As Brown’s fame grew, he appeared on TV shows such as The Mike Douglas Show and American Bandstand. He also filmed a segment with 60 Minutes where he demonstrated how a track is assembled in the studio. Brown’s second album for TK, 1979’s Stargazer, yielded the party-starting single “Crank It Up (Funk Town).”
TK Records was doing some major unit shifting, but it still collapsed in a haze of legal disputes and declared bankruptcy in 1981. (It was acquired by the Roulette label and became Sunnyview.) Brown bounced back, though, and released his third album, 1983’s Back to the Front, via RCA Victor. Brown recorded the LP at Sound Labs in Hollywood (on his previous label, he’d used Florida studios), working with executive producer Bob Gaudio, famous as a founding member of harmony group the Four Seasons. “Baby Gets High,” also released as an advance single in 1982, was the biggest hit from Back to the Front—it made appearances on the Billboard pop, R&B, and dance charts.
Brown’s fourth album, Snap, came out in 1984 on CBS, and for decades it would be his last. He cut it at Pumpkin Studios in Oak Lawn, run by Gary Loizzo (formerly of the band the American Breed), who’d already produced big bands such as REO Speedwagon and Styx.
Though Brown’s output as a recording artist was on pause, his career as a songwriter was about to take a surprising turn thanks to star DJ and producer John “Jellybean” Benitez, who’d worked on the hit single remix of the Snap track “They Only Come Out at Night.”
“After the remix session, John, Madonna, Freddy DeMann, Madonna’s and my manager at the time, and I went out to dinner together and then went to a Michael Jackson concert,” Brown said. “The evening ended at Michael’s post concert party in his hotel suite at the Helmsley Palace.” DeMann ran a management business with Ron Weisner, and they asked Brown to come up with a song for Madonna.
Brown was still working with keyboardist Robert Rans, who’d become his main lyric-writing partner, and they tackled the project together. After a week of false starts, the chorus for “Material Girl” popped into Brown’s head while he was driving, and the rest is history. That global smash is so closely tied to Madonna’s rise to stardom that its title might as well be her nickname.
Brown and longtime collaborator Pat Hurley also cowrote “Maybe It Was Magic,” which Brown has called his favorite among all the songs he’s had a hand in. They intended it for Peter Cetera, but he didn’t think it was quite right for him. At the time Cetera was producing an English-language solo record for Agnetha Fältskog from ABBA, and he asked if he could give the song to her. It appeared on the 1987 release I Stand Alone, which became a huge hit in Sweden and also charted in the States.
Brown retired from the music business in the late 80s, eventually moving into design and architecture. He’d started a family and wanted to be at home, not in the studio or on the road. He’d also developed a bad case of tinnitus. “I had to preserve my hearing and sanity by retiring to a quieter lifestyle,” he said.
At the time of the Disco-Disco interview—which seems to have been before 2018, since it doesn’t mention the album Brown released that year—he still lived in the Chicago area. He’d retained his music-publishing business and his membership in the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences, but he said he had no plans to make a comeback.
“I’ve gotten used to the private life and enjoy it very much,” he explained. “My real love was never for the spotlight, but for the music and the creation of it. The best music I’ve ever written, in my opinion, are pieces I’ve done for my own personal pleasure, since I’ve been out of the limelight. Orchestral pieces and some popular music that no one but my family and friends are likely to ever hear.”
Brown wasn’t entirely done making music for other ears, though. His 2018 album Boom, his first release in more than 30 years, came as a surprise even to many of his fans—but it was a very pleasant one. Its 11 tracks explore smooth R&B, throbbing electronica, and plenty of the groovy territory in between. Brown wrote, performed, arranged, recorded, and mixed the album on an iMac using a single microphone.
“I never thought of myself as a disco artist and never really tried to write dance songs,” Brown said. When he made “Do You Wanna Get Funky With Me,” he hadn’t yet been inside a disco club. The sound was so popular, though, that musicians felt they had to climb aboard to get by. “Every artist from the Rolling Stones to Ethel Merman put out a disco song or album,” Brown recalled. “People tend to forget that.”
In other words, an artist making disco remains an artist—even if you’re biased against the genre, surely you can acknowledge that genius shines through, no matter the setting. And Peter Brown has earned that distinction many times over.
The radio version of the Secret History of Chicago Music airs on Outside the Loop on WGN Radio 720 AM, Saturdays at 5 AM with host Mike Stephen. Past shows are archived here.
