He Sang Kool & the Gang’s Biggest Hits. Now He’s Ready for a Hall of Fame Celebration

E
veryone in the band knew there was a problem, even if they didn’t know exactly how to fix it.

It was 1978, and nearly a decade into their recording career, Kool & the Gang — the once-dominant jazz and funk group whose biggest hits propelled clubs all over the world — were at a low point. Their last two albums had been duds, swallowed whole and spit out by the disco revolution that ostensibly should have held up the horn-driven New Jersey band as gods. “We’d tried our hand at our version of disco,” drummer George “Funky” Brown wrote in his 2023 memoir. “It didn’t work.”

Reviews at the time were unsparingly harsh. “Kool and the Gang have gone bland,” the Detroit Free Press wrote in one typical piece on 1978’s Everybody’s Dancin’. “They’ve joined the disco lemmings … The edge has gone.”

Robert “Kool” Bell, the band’s bassist and co-founder, remembers music impresario Dick Griffey offering an idea so simple, it sounds ludicrously obvious in retrospect. “He said, ‘I think you need a lead singer,’” Bell tells Rolling Stone.

Up until that point, Kool & the Gang had relied on group vocals to back up their commanding horn arrangements. They’d never had a frontman. “We didn’t particularly care that much for vocalists, man,” Larry Gittens, who played trumpet and flugelhorn for the band in the mid-1970s and the late 1980s, says. “As long as those horn parts were right and the songs were funky and Kool was pumping out the bass, we were good.”

The formula had worked for years. Coming together in Jersey City’s Lincoln High School in 1964 as the Jazziacs, they played local dances and coffeehouses before expanding into New York gigs and changing their name to Kool & the Flames and, finally, Kool & the Gang. Their 1969 debut LP fused jazz, soul, and funk into an unexpected hit, and by the mid-1970s, songs like “Funky Stuff,” “Hollywood Swinging,” “Jungle Boogie,” and “Spirit of the Boogie” made them one of the most popular groups in the country.

But that was then. As the group began to look for a new sound, a struggling but talented 25-year-old local singer with a smooth falsetto, impressive range, understated charisma, and movie-star looks was the first to audition for them. “My brother [co-founder Ronald Bell] said, ‘You sound like a young Nat King Cole,’” Bell says. “When we first heard him, we said, ‘This is who we want.’ We didn’t audition anybody else after that.”

Now 71, James “JT” Taylor isn’t a household name, but hundreds of millions of people across generations have been enamored by his voice. As the lead singer for Kool & the Gang from 1979 to 1988, he helped usher the group into a more pop- and rock-oriented sound, leading to the most commercially successful era in their 60-year (and counting) history. His credits read like a funk-pop greatest hits set: “Too Hot,” “Ladies’ Night,” “Get Down on It,” “Joanna,” “Fresh,” “Misled,” “Cherish,” and the group’s signature song, “Celebration” — all voiced by a former teacher whose biggest claim to fame prior was a stint in a Jersey cover band called Fillet of Soul. On Saturday night, he’ll enter the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame alongside the Bell brothers and co-founders Dennis Thomas, Brown, Claydes Smith, Richard Westfield, and Robert Mickens.

“JT’s voice sounds like it’s singing and talking to you, like Sinatra,” says keyboardist Adam Ippolito, who played with Taylor on 1979’s Ladies’ Night (the group’s first album to go platinum) and 1980’s Celebration! “He gave them a personality and a human connection that they had previously lacked. It was very personal and lifted them to another level.”

“Over the years, I’ve heard many singers sing the songs that he made popular,” adds Jim Bonnefond, who produced or engineered many albums for the group in the Taylor years. “But never coming close to the warmth and character of James’ voice.”

It can be easy to forget how monumental Kool and the Gang’s run was in the 1980s, the era of Bruce Springsteen, Michael Jackson, Madonna, and Prince. All seven albums they released from Ladies’ Night to 1986’s Forever went gold or platinum. Their chart dominance includes 20 albums on the Billboard 200, 48 entries on what is now the Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs chart (nine of which went Number One), and 32 entries on the Hot 100, including 12 Top Ten hits.

The group has remained a cultural touchstone since then, with their music still regularly appearing in movies, sporting events, and video games. As their popularity waned in the late 1980s, the advent of hip-hop brought countless crate-diggers to comb through the band’s catalog, making them one of the most sampled groups of all time. They’ve sold 70 million albums worldwide and in the past five years alone, they’ve amassed 1.1 billion collective streams, according to data service Luminate.

The Rock Hall induction is bittersweet. Three founding members – Brown, Dennis “Dee Tee” Thomas, and Ronald Bell – have all died in the past three years. “We the last of those members,” Robert Bell says. “The only ones left are me from the Seventies and Eighties and JT from the Eighties. That’s it.”

Notwithstanding an appearance together at the 2018 Songwriters Hall of Fame, Bell and Taylor lead mostly separate lives. Bell still regularly tours with the current lineup of Kool & the Gang, who recently opened for Springsteen at New Jersey’s Sea.Hear.Now festival; last year, he and the band released People Just Wanna Have Fun, their 26th album. Taylor flies more under the radar, having stopped performing aside from the occasional gig to belt out the Eighties classics, and living a quieter life 20 minutes from where he grew up in Hackensack.

Born in Laurens, South Carolina, a small town 70 miles northwest of the state capital, Taylor showed his interest in music early. “As a kid, my mind was always like, ‘What’s that sound I heard?’ I would hear the crickets and hear beats,’” Taylor says when he visits the Rolling Stone office for a rare interview earlier this year. “I used to get in trouble playing drums on my school desk.”

He moved to Hackensack at age seven and joined his first band, the Electro Five, at 12. The band was good enough to earn a shot at the Apollo Theater’s vaunted Amateur Night when Taylor was 13. “You try to act cool because there’s girls there,” he says. They came in third, covering the Intruders’ soul hit “Cowboys to Girls.” He obsessed over James Brown, Sly and the Family Stone, R&B, and Motown as a teenager, but also absorbed heavier acts like Led Zeppelin and Jimi Hendrix.

In his early twenties, Taylor moonlighted as a local bar singer, doing funk, rock, and soul covers and getting paid in drinks while keeping his day job as a preschool and elementary school teacher. The kids knew his real dreams. “When I take the sunglasses off, it was like, ‘Are you tired today? Did you do a show last night? OK, we won’t be bad today,’” Taylor recalls, laughing. “They knew I was stressed out.”

Taylor went on to sing in a string of local groups with names like Street Dancer and Full Force throughout the Seventies. (And yes, more than once, crowds would flock expecting to see the other James Taylor.) But none of them could pay the bills, with Taylor still living at his mother’s house, “barely eating” and struggling to find a way to make music his career.

Bandmates from this time recall his drive to succeed. “When we would practice — no matter what song it was — he performed like he was in front of an audience every time,” says Gene Bono, who performed with Taylor in the band Fillet of Soul in the mid-1970s, when the singer was barely out of his teens. “That still sticks with me to this day.” 

Taylor had covered some Kool & the Gang songs in his early years, and at one point, Fillet of Soul got to open for the band. He tried to meet them, but says security wouldn’t let him backstage.

In 1978, he got his chance. When he entered House of Music, the West Orange studio where Kool & the Gang recorded, Taylor thought of classic frontmen at the time: Lionel Richie with the Commodores, Philip Bailey and Maurice White with Earth, Wind & Fire, Michael Jackson with the Jacksons. He expected the group to continue their jazz and funk explorations, but quickly realized they were looking for something else. Around the same time, the group enlisted famed producer Eumir Deodato, who had won a Grammy for his jazz-funk odyssey “Also Sprach Zarathustra (2001)“ and worked with Earth, Wind & Fire two years prior, to help craft their new pop and rock sound.

“Their records weren’t really selling that much, and it was time for a change,” Taylor recalls. “They needed something that I don’t think they knew that they needed.… [Ronald Bell] put me in a room and said, ‘Let me hear you sing something,’ and I just did my falsetto thing.”

“He wasn’t a singer that riffed all over the place. We weren’t looking for that,” Ronald Bell told Red Bull in 2015. “We were so focused on making a record that was going to work and get us back on top … The record company wanted another hit from us. We had to make music that sounded like nursery rhymes; melodic mantras, chants, and hooks that people would remember.”

Some members resisted the idea of a permanent lead singer. But with a new frontman and new producer in tow, the horns that once dominated the melody became accents for Taylor’s voice. “It was just the magic of that moment with that style of songs,” Taylor says. “When they wiped away the horns, it made the song open. Deodato used to say, ‘You should be able to put your arm through the track.’”

Vocals came quickly once the group worked out their songs, with Taylor, who co-wrote many of the band’s biggest hits at the time, often nailing the final vocals in one or two takes, according to Bonnefond. Alongside his singing, Taylor also brought a new sense of style and flash to the group, helping to develop the band’s MTV-era videos and acting as the de facto choreographer and wardrobe stylist who made them fashion icons of their day. (Exhibit A: A jaw-dropping early 1980s performance of “Get Down on It” starring keytar solos, gold-trimmed jumpsuits, ass-shaking, and a mid-song backflip.)

The band’s new lineup took off almost immediately, with first singles “Too Hot” and “Ladies’ Night” becoming massive sellers and bringing them back to national consciousness. Still, the diehard fans didn’t know what to think. “No one knew it — it was new,” says Taylor. “People would say, ‘Well, that can’t be Kool & the Gang, man. They messed the sound up.’ Until it goes platinum.”

From 1979 to 1984, with Taylor front and center, the band churned out one smash album after the other, including 1981’s Something Special, 1982’s As One, and 1986’s Forever. “Kool & the Gang is a tale of two cities,” Gittens says. “We really delivered on the funk, and then JT came in and helped the band cross over with his vocals and stage presence. There was just so much appeal.”

“By the second album [with Taylor], everybody showed up in limos,” adds Ippolito.

“He brought the Eighties,” adds Bell. “It was a perfect union.”

Perhaps no song represents “bringing the Eighties” more than 1980’s “Celebration.” “The very first time my mother heard it, she said, ‘You’re gonna sing that for the rest of your life,’” Taylor says. “Mom is really never wrong, right?”

The song became ubiquitous — a staple of countless weddings, bar and bat mitzvahs, and literally any place where there’s a party going on right here. It’s been played at the Super Bowl and World Series. Astronauts woke up to it on the International Space Shuttle. And it was the first song that greeted American hostages returning from Iran in 1981. In 2021, the Library of Congress added the song to its National Recording Registry. This summer, 44 years after its release, both the Democratic and Republican National Conventions played the track for their respective nominees.

“Its success validated my true spiritual emotion, and my greatest thing is to see the smiles and appreciation from the people,” Taylor says. “It’s so many different emotional levels of that song. Even to this day, they put the song in a [birthday] card. People are sending me my own song!”

When Forever came out in 1986, neither Taylor nor the rest of the group knew it would be the last album he made with the band in his initial run as its frontman (though he’d briefly return for one album a decade later). The group had been touring, recording, and doing promo virtually nonstop for years, and the grind was exhausting. Tempers and egos flared more frequently, with Taylor’s position up front as a focal point. “The worst part of success is the wedge that fame could put between two artists,” Taylor says. “When it came down to writing songs, we were able to come together. But it got to a point where it was like, ‘JT thinks he’s Kool and the Gang’ — which was insane. It started eating away at the fabric of the group.”

Brown, who generally spoke highly of Taylor in his 2023 memoir, nonetheless offered a pointed observation about this period: “He’d come down with what we called L.S.S., a common band disease: Lead Singer Syndrome.”

It all came to a head in 1987 during a Christmas run at Caesars Atlantic City. As Taylor tells it, he was physically burnt out from all the time on the road. Walking onstage with a bad voice, he began to sing “Cherish,” the band’s tender ballad from 1984’s Emergency. “I closed my eyes and opened them and I couldn’t see,“ Taylor says. “It was just red. I froze.” Taylor went offstage and returned a few times, but the unknown medical issue worsened. Backstage, he says, “I remember the road manager saying, ‘Eff him, we don’t need him no more.’ … Only one guy [from the band] came back to see how I was doing. I knew then that it was done.”

Taylor quit the group soon after, kickstarting myriad lawsuits with the band and their label over publishing and royalties. (“We settled in court on what would go to him and what would go to us,” Bell says. Terms were never publicly disclosed.) 

“I wish the band the best, but part of the break-up was very distasteful,” Taylor told Classic Pop magazine in 2014. “They claim I was never really part of the group, and I don’t know why they’d say that. But I’ve tried to move on. They do their thing and I do mine.”

While Bell and Taylor are reticent to talk details today – this is the group, after all, that wrote “Celebration,” and both seem squarely focused on the Hall of Fame – the pair say there was never any personal animosity between them. “I was never salty about it,” Bell says. “He wanted to do his own thing. I didn’t have a problem with that if that’s what you wanna do, but there’s a way that we could have done it.” His tone is more nonchalant than angry, spoken from the perspective of a 74-year-old man who seems to have long put any negative feelings in the rear view.

In 1989, Kool & the Gang released Sweat, their first album without Taylor in more than a decade. That same year, Taylor put out his solo debut, Master of the Game, a sultry amalgam of New Jack Swing, romantic ballads, and Eighties pop featuring the hit “All I Want Is Forever,” a duet with R&B singer Regina Belle written by Diane Warren.

“You know it’s him from one note,” Warren tells Rolling Stone. “JT made it sound like a classic. He and Regina were two perfect voices coming together on the perfect song for both of them.”

“I was extremely nervous for this studio session,” Belle adds in an email to Rolling Stone. “After all, this was THEE JT James Taylor that ‘melodized’ (I made that word up ‘cause it fits) crazy hits! His vocals on everything is butter.”

Taylor recorded four well-received solo albums that dipped further into smooth R&B, though none matched the cultural impact of his work with Kool & the Gang. Barry Eastmond, who produced and co-wrote four songs off Taylor’s 1991 album Feel the Need, praises Taylor’s “easygoing voice and perfect combination of R&B and pop.” But he notes the double-edged sword of being a former member of a globally successful group.

“Kool & the Gang overshadowed anything else he was allowed to do as a solo artist,” says Eastmond, who is now an adjunct professor at NYU’s Department of Music. “When you have such iconic records, everybody knows you for that, and sometimes you get put in a box and aren’t allowed to move forward. Mick Jagger away from the Rolling Stones is not going to be as successful as Mick Jagger with the Stones. Some people can’t let go of that.”

For Taylor, the Hall of Fame induction will be both a validation of a life steeped in music and a tribute to those who put him on his path. “It’s emotional for me. I think about my mom,” Taylor says, his voice cracking with emotion as his eyes well up. “I think about her sacrifices. A young mother who was widowed in her forties. This is her award. I think about my grandparents and my sisters who sang with me when it was raining and we couldn’t go out. I think about Electro Five, Street Dancer, Fillet of Soul, and, of course, Kool & the Gang. it’s humbling. It’s exciting. It makes me proud.”

Almost 60 years after joining his first group, Taylor says he still “sometimes has to force myself to go to sleep.” He’s been off the stage for several years to focus on music and other creative projects and has taken to acting, starring in short films helmed by his son Xavier. Now, he hopes to both release new music and return to performing.

Towards the end of our hour-long conversation, Taylor remembers the letters he’s received from fans eager to tell him how certain Kool & the Gang songs affected their life — a marriage soundtracked to “Celebration,” the grieving of a lost parent made easier because of “Cherish.” “Those are the gratifying things that I still get,” he says. “People say, ‘When are you going to retire?’ I never will. It’s a part of my blood.”