with Burgess and some other local teens. As backup, they used a funk band from the projects called the Soul Severes, whose recording “I Got It” was reissued by Kay-Dee Records. “So we had an organization at this point, where you had three vocalists, young, like, seventeen years old,” says Adams. “The band was between seventeen and nineteen years old, and there were, like, seven guys in the band. It was one big family.” The group began touring, performing alongside acts like Kool and the Gang, who would also sometimes play backup for the group. Adams recorded Black Ivory at his own expense and went to Perception Records to see if they would sign the group. While in the lobby at Perception, he overheard that the label needed an arranger for a Welch’s Grape commercial. “When I heard the words ‘arranger, television commercial,’ I thought, ‘I can do that,’ ” says Adams. “I had never done strings at that time, but I said, ‘I can do that; I’m an arranger.’ That’s a really gutsy move when you’re nineteen years old.” After a crash course in arranging strings, he pulled off a successful session. Adams’s jingle got Perception more advertising work and landed him a job at the label. Through Adams, Black Ivory got a deal, and they continued to work together, recording two albums on Perception’s subsidiary, Today Records. Adams wrote, arranged, and produced music for a slew of other artists at Perception, including J. J. Barnes, Debbie Taylor, and Astrud Gilberto. But after a dispute over Black Ivory’s contract, Adams left the label in 1974. In spite of his new position as vice president of A&R, Adams sided with the artists who had brought him to Perception in the first place. He was out of work and in search of a new creative outlet for his music. Adams had already experimented with synthesizers, using them at first to replace the French horns on Black Ivory records. Then, influenced by Stevie Wonder, he used the instrument more and more. By the time he began working independently, Adams had decided the Minimoog synthesizer would be his main musical tool. “I could express what I wanted to express through the Minimoog,” he says. In the summer of ’75, Adams wanted to record a dance record that reflected the changing sounds of the day. “Music was going through this transformation, it was heading towards disco, but it hadn’t really gotten there yet,” he says. “Disco, at that point, was an extension of R&B; it wasn’t the garbage that it became later.” Adams remembers vividly the first time he heard disco in a club. “The first record I experienced was ‘Love to Love You Baby’ by Donna Summers,” says Adams of the night when, at twenty-four, his girlfriend took him to a gay disco. “That night opened my ears and body to disco on an emotional level. It was shortly after that I started the Cloud One and Bumble Bee [Unlimited] and Universal Robot stuff. It really helped me to focus on the importance of emotion to the dance experience.”
With Sparks bandmate John Cooksey keeping a hustle- style two-step on drums, Adams began laying down riffs and improvising with the Minimoog in the studio. “Once I had decided on the concept of Cloud One and ‘Atmosphere Strut,’ it seemed logical to go out on a limb,” he says of his synthesizer explorations on the now classic cut. “I was trying to get the most out of the instrument. I was experimenting.” He brought a group of friends into the studio, that included Sylvia Striplin, to sing the chorus, “We’re gonna fly, fly away,” and to add crowd elements to parts of the song. The project was a form of release for Adams. “‘Atmosphere Strut’ was my opportunity to be my other self,” he says. A few months later, in the fall of ’75, Adams was introduced to Peter Brown, who was starting an independent disco and funk label called P&P Records, the other “P” for his wife Patricia Brown. Brown heard “Atmosphere Strut” and asked Adams to release it as one of the label’s first singles. “Peter says to me, ‘I have all the connections you don’t have, I’m very tight with all the programmers up and down the East Coast, I do record promotion for people, and I can press x amount of records,’” remembers Adams. “I wasn’t in great financial shape, because I hadn’t worked in a year, and, out of frustration, I said sure. So he put out ‘Atmosphere Strut.’ ” Frankie Crocker, a radio personality and DJ broke the record in New York. “Frankie Crocker, God bless his soul, was one of those great music people with vision. He was the first person to play a lot of hit records,” says Adams. Club DJs were soon spinning the single throughout the Northeast, and Brown suggested Adams do a Cloud One album. Adams repeated the process that had originally created “Atmosphere Strut,” this time using a new drummer, Richie Taninbaum, and a group of background singers. Over a weekend, they recorded five more songs for a Cloud One LP that would be titled for its hit single. Adams knew he had found a home at P&P, a place where he could do his thing and ideas flowed freely. “I recognized from that point on, after ‘Atmosphere Strut,’ that P&P would always be, like, my personal playground,” he said. “P&P Records became sort of the catch basin for talented people who had concepts that they wanted to try. We never told anybody on P&P what they could or couldn’t do, what they should or shouldn’t do. It was like, ‘Go for it, if you want to bang pots and pans together, that’s your sound.’ ” After Cloud One, Adams established a slew of musical identities to showcase his synthesizer virtuoso. The first was the Universal Robot Band, launched by the soulful party track “Dance and Shake Your Tambourine.” Adams’s next project would add a new buzz to his repertoire of strange personas. “I’m listening to Alvin and the Chipmunks, and I don’t know where the concept of the bumblebees came from, but I guess I was looking once again for a way to have a voice without
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