'Do we put them under dance? Do we put them under R&B? Do we put them under pop?'" They never know where to put us in the record stores. "I wasn't really happy with the tag at the time. "Our music was R&B, and it was our sound that became the disco sound," Casey told Wirt. "That made it danceable and people love to dance." Every song on their 1974 debut album, Do It Good, shared the same happy beat. So if you were having a party you could throw it on and listen to the up-tempo the entire time," Casey told Jason Macneil of the Toronto Sun. With their hit getting serious radio play, the band knew it was time to make a full album. But there was a hunger for dance friendly R&B music with a pop beat. The bubble-gum, feel-good pop rock of David Cassidy clashed with the heavy sounds of Led Zeppelin, without much happening in between on the Top 40. One of the reasons the song took off so quickly was that it wasn't like anything else on the radio at the time. The up-tempo simple beat of "Get Down Tonight" helped introduce disco music to the world. Though their live shows had up to 12 band members on stage hammering out beat-heavy tunes for Miami's dance crowds, KC and the Sunshine Band actually had only four official members: the two founders, plus guitarist Jerome Smith and drummer Robert Johnson. They got the break they were looking for when they released their fourth single, "Get Down Tonight." Casey told Bledsoe, "It broke everywhere -Boom! But I knew the night we finished it that it was a hit." By this time the band had built a solid reputation on stage as the perfect band to dance to. But KC and the Sunshine Band were still stuck as a studio band -performing occasionally to hone their skills, and recording singles, while hoping one would take off. The group's first single, "Blow Your Whistle," began to show some signs of life in the South, and their next two singles, "Blow Your Funky Horn" and "Queen of Clubs," found a European audience. When the band thought they had a good song on their hands they released it. He told Wayne Bledsoe of Tennessee's Knoxville News-Sentinel, "You'd buy an album and half of it would be slow and sad, and I'd think 'What a drag.'" The energetic Cuban and Bahamian-inspired music scene in Miami helped the duo put together a band of talented and hungry musicians who loved to be onstage and project an enthusiastic dance sound. Casey grew up listening to soul and R&B music, but was always disappointed by the albums as a whole. "I loved the Motown sound, the Stax sound, all that old Atlantic stuff," Casey told John Wirt of the Baton Rouge, Louisiana, Advocate. The style they developed was a dance-friendly pop beat with a big sound. During rehearsals Casey's stage presence was formidable, and the two knew they had something. They soon decided to start up a band of their own called KC and the Sunshine Band. Casey displayed an enthusiasm for music and performing that caught Finch's eye, and the two quickly hit it off. Harry Wayne "KC" Casey and Richard Finch met in 1972 while working for TK Records in Miami, Florida. They captured the momentum and went on to produce their first hit single, "Shake, Shake, Shake Your Booty," which was among the songs that first launched the disco era. But a song they wrote for George McRae called "Rock Your Baby" found wide acceptance and gave the band another shot at fame. Their debut as KC and the Sunshine Band was a flop, with a single titled "Blow Your Whistle" doing almost nothing in the music scene, even on the local charts. Starting out in the music business, Richard Finch and Harry Wayne Casey (otherwise known as "KC") couldn't know they would become staples of the huge 1970s disco craze.
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