Hamilton Bohannon: the return of a disco legend

“I’m from Georgia, and that’s where we like to get down,” exhorts Hamilton Bohannon. “And I want everybody to get up to get down.” And who could refuse? It’s a rare pleasure to find Bohannon, now aged 72, behind a drum kit. Rare because this was his first show anywhere since 1983 and 40 years since his last show in New York.

But Bohannon, a former Motown touring bandleader who began playing with a 13-year-old Stevie Wonder (who talked the musician into leaving a high school teaching job) is justifiably described as father of the four-on-the-floor disco beat – not to mention dance music in all its subgenres – and appears delighted to be back on stool, guiding his eclectic eight-piece band through hits that touched Talking Heads and Tom Tom Club, Chic, Johnny Marr and beyond. Last year Justin Timberlake joined the long line of Bohannon samplers that includes Jay-Z and Snoop Dogg, when he lifted the strings from a ballad, I Wonder Why, to make Strawberry Bubblegum on 20/20.

The ever-nattily dressed drummer, tonight sporting a Darth Vader T-shirt and pink cowboy shirt and alligator boots, arrived with no shortage of funky firepower. Among them: Carolyn Crawford, the Motown star, who sang with him since 1973; bassist Fernando Sanders; Womack clan cousin Treaty Womack of Brainstorm; trumpeter Rayse Biggs; two guitarists, one chopping out the funk, the other rock riffs and blues in the style of pre-Motown bandmate Jimi Hendrix; and a gospel-leaning lapsteel player, Nikki D Brown from Toledo, Ohio, whom Bohannon found on YouTube. On stage, Bohannon calls calls her “one of a kind”.

Together, they drove through Foot Stompin’ Music, Bohannon’s Beat, Lets Start the Dance and the extraordinary South African Man, with its 9-4 beat and spooky Farfisa floating in and out of the mix. Aside from a couple of covers, Bohannon keeps it 4-4 – it’s Bohannon’s Beat after all.

“I’m gonna’ kick four on the floor and set up rhythm patterns all around me, send them to the guitars and keep the beat on the floor. I use one chord. I don’t use no bridge but I might go to seven, eight, nine, 10 breakdowns in one song,” he tells me after the set. “It’s like driving on the highway: you have to keep straight in your lane or you’re gonna crash. That’s why I keep the bass drum front and centre to keep the guitars from crashing into each other. Everybody gotta stay in their lane.”

As leader of Bohannon & the Motown Sound at the 20 Grand and Royal Peacock in Detroit, Bohannon played live with all Motown’s headliners, while recording duties were assigned to the Funk Brothers. But when Berry Gordy relocated the label to Los Angeles in 1972, Bohannon stayed behind to start his own, self-contained group. “I knew where I wanted to take it. I wanted to do something different. I wanted to do something that would break through. If I sounded like everyone else I would never have got anywhere.”

So how did he come up with it? “What does your heart do?” he asks rhetorically, pumping his chest with his fist. “Boom Boom Boom.”

It’s much closer to funk than disco, but his tracks slip easily into blues and gospel. With this much heavy groove, who needs variety? “It’s one beat and that’s the beauty of it,” notes the artist (and former Will Oldham dummer) Spencer Sweeney in the audience.

“He stayed with what was true and the rest of the world caught up,” reasons Sanders, who like Crawford, first played with the maestro in 1973.

Bohannon released several albums on Brunswick, often with a dance side and a ballad side – Stop & Go, South African Man, Insides Out, Bohannon, Dance Your Ass Off and Gittin’ Off – and several more on Phase II that kept the beat and the showbiz going well into the 80s. Then he returned home to Newnan, Georgia, and dropped out of sight.

With a second show in Washington the following night, Bohannon promises to be out on the road more often. Fun for us if he is. “I’ve been gettin’ calls to come up here,” he says. “But I ain’t 25 like you.”

Which raises the question, what has he been doing for the last, oh, three decades? “I’ve been playing, but not on a whole set of drums. I’ve been recording all the time. I got music now they’re gonna’ have to catch up with me all over again. I’m goin’ again. I’m goin’ to the moon …”