There must be something in the water in Dayton, Ohio. Lakeside, Ohio Players, Slave, Shirley Murdock, Zapp, and Van Hunt represent just a handful of the acts to unravel the musical DNA of this small Midwestern metropolis on the world stage. Their contributions to the worlds of funk, hip-hop, and R&B extend far beyond the city’s 155,671 residents.
From this particular geographical genome grew Platypus, a band known to the dwellers of Dayton as the purveyors of funk-infused progressive rock and perhaps the first black band ever to inhabit the orbit of Yes and Genesis. To the staff at Motown during the late-’70s, they were something a little different: their close relationship with producer Hal Davis facilitated their participation in records by Michael Jackson, Thelma Houston, Diana Ross, and The 5th Dimension. To present-day DJ’s and crate-diggers, they remain the force behind “Dancing in the Moonlight”, an infectious disco romp that lit up dancefloors for a spell in 1979. To most everyone else, they are something of a question mark, a curious footnote in the discography of Casablanca Records, which released their only two albums, Platypus (1979) and Cherry (1980).
However, the Platypus story began well before those two albums, dating all the way back to 1972 when the band packed up from Dayton and moved to Los Angeles. They immersed themselves in the scene and were quickly noticed by fellow artists and industry tastemakers. Everyone from Rick Wakeman to Roberta Flack recognized the band’s exceptional musicianship and booking agents far across the globe in Japan and Australia invited Platypus to play for extended jaunts. Record executives from Motown and Atlantic were impressed by what they heard but were also challenged by the band’s forward-thinking fusion of musical influences. Even when the band conceded to commercial strictures they still retained a distinct style that was honed from performing together for the better part of a decade. It’s little wonder that Casablanca, which signed and promoted every kind of act imaginable, was ultimately the label that took an interest in Platypus.
Once the act entered into a major label contract, two irreparable events dissolved what Platypus had taken years to create. The tragic death of lead guitarist Larry Hines brought their momentum to a halt while the sale of Casablanca to PolyGram generated drastic personnel changes at the label. Under a new regime, Casablanca dismantled its roster and internal fissures between band members ended the nearly decade-long career of Platypus.
The principle members of Platypus – Lloyd Jones, Kerry Rutledge, Curtis Sanford, and Arthur “Hakim” Stokes – have not played together since 1980, yet all four musicians are still recording, producing, and performing with other entities. 30 years after their debut, Platypus shared their memories of how they came together, toured the world, and made innovative music during one of the most creatively fertile decades in popular music. (Note: additional portions of the interviews with the members of Platypus will appear in PopMatters’ forthcoming retrospective celebrating the 35th anniversary of Casablanca Records.)
Tell me how Platypus formed.
Arthur “Hakim” Stokes: We started in Dayton, Ohio. The group was called The Four Corners and it was originally four singers: Dana Meyers, Floyd Weatherspoon, myself, and Jerome Johnson.
Kerry Rutledge: I was in a group called The Bad Bunch. What happened is The Bad Bunch did a gig in Cincinnati and on the way back, the lead singer fell asleep and ended up crashing the van. He ended up passing in two days and the other singer was crippled and one guy lost the use of his legs. My cousin walked away unscathed.
Curtis Sanford: I was in the band with Kerry. In the meantime, The Four Corners weren’t really touring or playing that much so some of their members came to fill in for the guys that we lost. When The Four Corners decided to start back up, one of their members quit, and they took Kerry along with them. It just so happened that their drummer was leaving too. Kerry mentioned that I was available, so then I became part of that band that backed up The Four Corners.
Stokes: The three-piece backup band was Larry Hines, Lloyd Jones, and Curtis Sanford.
Lloyd Jones: It just kind of evolved. We dropped the “The” and we were just “Four Corners”. Little by little it turned more into a self-contained unit, rather than a singing group and back-up band.
Why did you move from Dayton out to Los Angeles?
Stokes: Hal Davis, who has passed on, was from Cincinnati. He was also the Jackson Five’s producer. We had written a song called “What Goes Around Comes Around”. Hal had come to Dayton through a mutual friend, Levinsky Allen. He heard it, liked it, and ended up recording it for Michael Jackson on the Ben (1972) album.
Rutledge: It was good timing for the group to use that vehicle of being on the album with Michael to get into Motown. It was on my 19th birthday that we arrived in California. So on my 19th birthday, I was in Berry Gordy’s Sunset Studio with Hal Davis and Four Corners.
Sanford: The guys who were co-writers were scheduled to receive the royalty check for “What Goes Around Comes Around” so we decided that we could use that money to supplement us while we’re there. Those guys graciously offered to donate a good portion of that money to help us pay expenses, hotel bills, and food. We didn’t know what we were going to be in for. None of us had ever been out there.
Jones: We didn’t know anybody in Los Angeles except our friends in Lakeside, because they were also from our hometown and they got there maybe a year or two before.
Stokes: We met a young lady called Sandy Newman. I can’t remember who was with me but somebody else from the group. We were at a shop on Hollywood Boulevard and being the person that I am — friendly and just talks to people — Sandy Newman and I started talking. At that time, she was the manager for the Bar-Kays, Robert King, and Lenny Williams, who was the lead vocalist with Tower of Power. We talked and we exchanged numbers and everything. She ended up managing Platypus. When she managed us, she had another woman named Beverly Smolen, who became her co-manager.
How did Four Corners become “Platypus”?
Sanford: We were just kind of pow-wowing. In the beginning, we were a four-man singing group with a back-up band but we were always kind of one unit. One of the bands that we kind of patterned ourselves after in the early days was Three Dog Night because they had three singers and they had a back-up band but they were all under one name. We were trying to come up with names and coming up with names, to me, is one of the hardest things. We just got to the point where we were just saying anything. We just got so fed up with it. We just said, “The next name we come up with, we’re going to keep it whether we hate it or not”.
Stokes: I believe Beverly Smolen was the one who came up with the name “Platypus”. It had such a nice ring to it that we were okay with it. There were a lot of other names in the hat but we went with Platypus. A platypus is a mixture of a few different animals. It has webbed feet like a duck, its body is kind of like a beaver, and it has a duckbill. The interesting thing about that is our music was a mixture of different sounds. It went on to represent what our music was.
Jones: We thought it was apropos. We actually were interested in the rock and roll side of the business but, being black kids, we grew up hearing a lot of jazz and R&B in all of our respective homes and around our friends. A lot of us were interested in progressive rock.
So Platypus was really a poetic way to encapsulate what your band was about.
Sanford: Coincidentally, as soon as we came up with the name Platypus, in less than a year, we were in Sydney, Australia.
Which is native to the animal! How did you get the gig in Australia?
Sanford: Sandy had connections overseas with club owners. He was looking for a band at the time. She sent info on us and he accepted us.
Rutledge: We performed there for about two or three months. We actually got a chance to meet Joe Cocker. He came to see us. Rick Wakeman came to see us. We played the song “Roundabout”. He basically told us point blank that we were the first group he’d ever seen play it absolutely correctly. When Chris Squire and Jon Anderson recorded the ending to “Roundabout”, Rick said that they had to slow the machine down to get it to sound that high. We just did it naturally.
What a compliment!
Sanford: Oh, it was a bigcompliment. Our heads kind of swelled. When he told us that, we were just on cloud nine. We were the most serious Yes-heads. Everybody was into Yes. My first time hearing them, it just blew me away. We were eager to hear something different than the norm. John McLaughlin and the Mahavisnu Orchestra was a big influence on the musicians in the band. They were all instrumental, not much vocals. Genesis was one of our big influences. When people heard us, we were a cross between Yes and Earth, Wind & Fire meets Stevie Wonder meets Genesis meets Mahavishu Orchestra meets Rufus and Chaka Khan. We played and loved all kinds of music. Yes just really intrigued us because they were just so wide open. It seemed like whatever came in their head, they played well.
Rutledge: That’s the kind of music that we were about, man. We weren’t Con Funk Shun.
Jones: We didn’t want to be like everybody else. We wanted to create something new. When Living Colour came along, we were kind of like, “Man you know what? That should have been us”, because we were an edgy band like that but when we got signed, we thought that we had to start playing the game. We struggled to actually play what they wanted us to play. I know I wasn’t a good soul player. I never really played that kind of stuff. My interests were always more towards the rock kind of stuff.
I actually heard some tracks that sounded like they were recorded years before you signed with Casablanca. The Yes influence really comes across.
Stokes: We were working with a guy named Frank Byron Clark. He was the main engineer/producer that (later) worked with Total Experience Records. Total Experience Records ended up recording Yarbrough & Peoples and the Gap Band.
Jones: He wanted to record what the group really was, not a commercial version of it. Some of the stuff that we recorded early on, I was listening to the other week. I’d like to do some of these over because I could really do them justice now. Some of the ideas, to me, are better than the musicianship at the time. The ideas were really solid I thought. I’d love to get a shot at doing it over again. Some of those songs I just really love.
Stokes: One of the songs that we did during that time was a song called “Appreciate Your Love”. That song was written by Dana, Floyd, and myself but we ended up recording that song on our second album, Cherry. Dana was the original lead vocalist on it but I ended up singing it once we did it as Casablanca. Floyd actually left after a year and went back to Dayton. Dana went on to be a songwriter with Solar Records and wrote for The Whispers and Shalamar. He left the group too, which broke it down to five.
During this time, were you still intending to sign with Motown?
Rutledge: Yes, that was the intention but for a lot of different reasons, that never did work out for the group. Some of us were able to be involved with big hit records. I was involved with “Love Hangover” with Diana Ross. I did some background vocals and played some percussion on that one. We did a TV theme album with Motown.
Stokes: We did a lot of background vocal work with Hal Davis, playing around L.A. and what have you. He would call me in to do things. I am an Aquarius like he was. I grew up being called “Sonny”. That’s a family nickname that came from my aunt but the interesting thing about it is Hal Davis’ name growing up was also Sonny. Whenever he would need the extra vocals, I would bring in Kerry or Dana. If he only needed the one voice, he would call me.
Rutledge: Hal Davis actually asked me to come and to help him with a song that we had put together. He asked me to come to the studio by myself. I got to the studio and he says to me, “Look man, remember this song? You remember all the harmonies don’t you Kerry?” I said yeah, because that was my thing — I could sing all the harmonies. I was gifted. I never took a day of music or any of that. He explained to me, “Listen, this is what I want you to do, Kerry. I want you to go in here and take control of this session. What you’re going to do is teach these guys all the harmonies to this song. Don’t let them intimidate you. Make sure they do it exactly how you want them to do it. They’re some friends of mine and you should know who they are so come and let me introduce you”. That group was The 5th Dimension.
Wow! It’s interesting that though you were not signed to the label, you were still active with Motown. Even without an album, the band was doing a lot of gigs.
Rutledge: Yes. We did the Whiskey A Go-Go and all the hot spots back then. That was in ’74. We toured Vancouver. Actually, we went up for one weekend at this one place called Oil Can Harry’s. The guy loved us so he said, “We want you guys to stay an extra week to open up the show for this group that just got a hot record up here on Mushroom Records”. That next weekend, we opened the show for Heart.
Ha! I know you also played Maverick’s Flat quite a bit in Los Angeles.
Jones: That was a special place. For some reason, it was just a mecca for musicians. It was right on Crenshaw in the middle of everything that was going on. It was a trendy spot for young blacks who just wanted to dance. A lot of the people who danced on Soul Train came to this club and danced. It had kind of a homey atmosphere because all around the outside of the dance floor, they had pillows on the floor so people could actually sit on the floor and watch the band. It was a very interesting spot. I think the opening scene of Foxy Brown (1974) was shot in Maverick’s Flats. There’s a bulls-eye on the door and someone comes walking through that door. I have a picture or two that was taken right there. The picture of Larry on that back of the first album cover was taken there. A lot of people came there: Jim Brown, Mick Jagger, Chaka Khan. The list goes on and on. When they first came to town, The Gap Band auditioned at that club. We met Billy Preston there. We ended up going on the road with him.
From I understand, a fateful trip to Osaka kind of turned the band’s fortune around. How did you get there?
Sanford: There’s a friend of ours who lived out in Los Angeles, William Stevenson, who’s passed away. I knew him from when I was six or seven years old. He lived next door to my cousin. He put Kerry and I up in his apartment. He happened to know a guy who was a booking agent for bands in Japan. I think that’s how it came about. At the time I was up in Canada with the girl who ended up being my first wife. Kerry called me and said we got a gig in Japan so hop on a bus and get back down to Los Angeles.
Rutledge: We stayed in Osaka for about three months. All those tours back then were extended stays. We ended up playing in Osaka at a place called The Bottom Line nightclub, a really nice place. Now this is something for the books: We were playing at Maverick’s Flat in Los Angeles and this guy came out and he said, “I ain’t never seen nothing like you guys. I wish I had time to do this and do that”, things you hear all the time. We did the gig that weekend and went to Osaka the next week. We were coming out of the nightclub in Osaka about three days after we saw this man. We walked down the steps and into the streets of Osaka and walked right into him. He says, “Hey man, I’m going to bring my sister-in-law over here to see y’all. My brother is married to Roberta Flack”.
Stokes: Richard “Dickie” Bosley was brother to the guy that was married to Roberta. He was acting as Roberta’s road manager or something similar.
Rutledge: The next night, sure as shit, Roberta Flack comes to the show, her and James Mtume. We lit it up for her.
Stokes: She fell in love with Platypus.
Sanford: We met her and talked. She said she really loved the band, loved the concept, and whenever we got back to the states to give her a call. She kept her word because as soon as we got back, we did that.
Stokes: We came back to Los Angles in late-August or early-September ’76. We re-located back to Dayton because Roberta wanted to bring us to New York to do some recordings. She sent Kerry over to get some money from Quincy Jones. We used that money to get back to Dayton.
Sanford: It was like we were her babies and she was kind of overseeing us. She was quite busy as an artist herself but she also kept tabs on whoever was handling our business and whoever was watching over our project.
Stokes: From Dayton, we worked on some music and then Roberta brought us into New York. We went to the Hit Factory. We recorded “Dance If You Can” there and we might have worked on “Dancing in the Moonlight”. I got a track somewhere with that original music on it.
Rutledge: Then things kind of got weird. I had just talked to James Mtume on a Monday and he was at Roberta’s house rehearsing with her and Donny Hathaway. By Wednesday, I wake up to, “Donny Hathaway’s just dove out of the window”. I’m like, “Oh, what the hell?” I called Roberta’s house. Mtume answered the phone. I’m like, “Man, what in the fuck is going on?” He said, “It’s real bad, man. She’s really not taking this at all”. It was real tough for a minute.
I can’t even imagine what that was like.
Sanford: She was broken up and it kind of took her out of the loop for awhile but we still kept pounding it out. She was like, “I can’t be as visual with you guys right now but you can always give them my number and have them call me”. Amazingly enough, when we finally got our record deal, it was Roberta’s name that carried a lot of weight.
So what actually led to your signing with Casablanca?
Stokes: We went back to Dayton after the New York trip. My brother Otis was lead vocalist with Lakeside and I kind of hung out with them because they were back in this area doing some recording. A guy named Rich Goldman had a studio in Cincinnati called Fifth Floor. I ended up working out a deal with him for us to come in.
Sanford: We went in there under the pretense that we were cutting a demo. Our keyboard player quit. I had to play all the keyboards on there. We didn’t think it was really the actual album, which it ended up being.
Stokes: We re-recorded “Dance if You Can” and “Dancing in the Moonlight”, “Street Babies”, and, I want to say, “Love the Way You Funk”. Rich Goldman was getting ready to go to Los Angeles to try to work some deals with some other acts that had been recording at Fifth Floor. He liked what he was hearing from us and wanted to take our music with him.
Rutledge: He had ties with Casablanca and he got us the deal.
Stokes: We ended up going out to Los Angeles to finish the album. What’s interesting about that is we spent all of those years in Los Angeles chasing record labels and we come home to get signed with a Los Angeles label!
Sanford: After we got the deal, we went back in with what we had and just kind of shaped things up. We got real strings from the Cincinnati Philharmonic so we cleaned it up a little bit but the actual tracks were the demo tracks. We were just really ecstatic when we found out that somebody was interested enough to sign us. We always had these guys that were interested in signing us but they wanted to change it and make the music more danceable or say, “Can you sound more like Earth, Wind & Fire or Stevie Wonder?” We were like, “There’s got to be somebody out there that will accept our music and what it is”. We had recorded lots of stuff that we thought was our concept of music. Because of the influence with Yes, we were playing stuff with really odd time signatures and stuff like that, which wasn’t danceable. We were kind of having a hard time. We had a lot of positive feedback from record companies but the negative part of it was, “We don’t know where to put you. We don’t know how to market you guys. You sound like a white group. We don’t know whether to put your pictures on there”.
Yet it sounds like your music progressed from more rock-based stuff to something a little more danceable, like “Dancing in the Moonlight”.
Stokes: That song was written by me and Larry Hines. We were in New York City since Roberta Flack had brought us to New York to do some recordings. Larry had music to that and we were rooming together. The words and melody were written by me and Larry in the hotel room.
Sanford: Larry said, “I put some pretty good thought and feel into it but basically I’m really thumbing my nose at the music industry because of how everybody is so disco-oriented”. Disco wiped out a lot of bands and killed any kind of prog-rock, avant garde music that people would listen to. Larry was just kind of making a joke of what he thought a corny disco song would sound like but when we went to record it, we had a serious attitude of let’s make it really good. Let’s not go in the studio and make a joke out of it. Let’s just take this song and really play it. That’s the approach we took. We were serious about it.
Stokes: I’ve always felt that “Dancing in the Moonlight” was a disco smash.
Yes, it absolutely needs and deserves to be rediscovered. That was my introduction to the band and I can’t listen to it enough! Now,Platypus was released in 1979. Though five of you recorded the album, there are only four of you on the cover.
Rutledge: The tragedy of Platypus is right here: When we were living in California, Larry started getting these headaches and we would take him to the doctor and they’d send him back home. They couldn’t figure it out so we took him to USC.
Jones: The doctor had a little meeting with all of us. I remember it very, very well. I remember him saying what was going on. I remember when he said it, I was looking around the room at the other guys and I think maybe after the doctor left I said, “Did you guys understand what he said? That this is terminal?” It was like they didn’t get it because nobody commented on it at all. It was a blow. He was diagnosed with terminal leukemia.
Rutledge: We had already signed the deal with Casablanca. He flew from LA back to Cincinnati to put down his last vocal and his last solo. He went back to California and he died. They brought him back to Dayton and we buried him.
Stokes: The date that Larry ended up passing was the date the contract went into effect after officially being signed. I was just glad that he was able to do that because he had done a lot to get to that point. He finished the album as well. He’s singing and playing on it. It was a bittersweet type of victory for us because we had all been through a lot together.
Jones: That was a terrible time. Larry never got to hear the album. We actually had an album and there it would be with our pictures. This was our dream. That was what we were working for.
It’s great that he’s part of that album since you had spent so many years getting to that place.
Stokes: One of my favorite songs of Larry on there, because he’s playing and singing, is “Running From Love”. He’s playing lead guitar and he really left his signature. Periodically I’ll listen to some of the tracks and he really played his behind off on that particular song.
Rutledge: “Running From Love” is special to me. That’s the one that Larry flew back into town and sung that song and played that guitar solo. That’s him singing the hook – “There ain’t no running…”
Sanford: Lloyd and I wrote “Running From Love”. “Don’t Go Away”, which was a ballad, had some really nice guitar work by Larry. He was sick at the time but he came in and cut all his tracks in one day. He really laid that out. “Dance If You Can”, we did that with Mtume and D-Train. When we cut the actual Platypus album, we just re-did it. I had to do all the keyboards. It was really close to the New York version but the New York version had Reggie Lucas (who played guitar on Madonna’s first album) on the demo of that song and then we did the job of duplicating what they did in the studio. I like “Dance If You Can” too.
Rutledge: “Street Babies” was my inception. I was at the point creatively where I was like, we’re doing all this progressive music and that’s cool but I just happened to know that we needed to get into something a little more danceable, a little more straightforward instead of augmenting different time signatures and those things.
What would I have seen if I went to a Platypus concert at that time. What were your shows like?
Sanford: We were dressed in bright, shiny gold and silver, knee-high platform boots, and flowing cape-type stuff with really bright colors that everybody wore back in the ’70s. People that would hear the band outside the club would not know the band was all black members. They would think it was all white members in the band. There was kind of a funk undertone, which made everybody curious. We had really different instruments. In the early days, we only had what we could afford basically, but we always aspired to have different stuff. Before it was all over, Lloyd moved towards bass pedals with the Rickenbacker bass like Chris Squire would have. Larry, before he passed away, he had the double-neck Rickenbacker guitar. I had the giant drum set with a gong and all kinds of extra percussion. Everybody had a monster set up. That’s what everybody did back then. There were a few people that would look at this equipment and say, “I wonder what this band is going to sound like”.
Stokes: Our shows were high energy. The Japanese coined our music quite well. They called it “between rock and soul”. That’s really what it was.
Jones: We didn’t do steps or anything like that. We were more like a band instead of a singing group in those days. We got away from all of that because we weren’t comfortable with that. We were like a black rock and roll group.
Stokes: We were one of the first black groups to approach being onstage like a white act would approach being onstage. The type of music that Prince played, we were doing that as a band.
You really were ahead of your time.
Jones: It was hard being in that spot. Some people looked at us like, “What is this all about?” Either you totally got it or you totally didn’t. There was really no grey area or in-between.
What do you recall about the promotion surrounding the first album?
Stokes: Nothing other than the billboard stuff. We did a $10,000 picture-taking session for the first album with Claude Mougin. He had done sessions with Rod Stewart.
Sanford: We didn’t do a lot but we did a showcase down in Cincinnati. Jheryl Busby from Casablanca flew in. When the record company does stuff like that, they contact everybody they can. It was like hundreds of people. We had a record signing and interviews and stuff like that.
Jones: It seems like we did all of that legwork ourselves. I saw very little support from the label itself.
Rutledge: The record company was already going down the tubes so they weren’t really trying to promote anything. They were just signing groups and writing them off the books. Then there were some management issues where we had opportunities to do certain things, we had a chance to go out on the road and promote the album with the Bar-Kays and do 42 dates and it never happened. I’m like, “What the hell’s wrong with this picture?”
Stokes: Once Bruce Bird went into the presidency at Casablanca, we knew that PolyGram had bought Casablanca. It was common knowledge that some changes were being made. I thought, at the time, it worked for us because if Bruce went from Executive Vice President to President, and he was the one that signed us, that should have worked for us but there were some things that happened where there were some bad decisions that were made and some things happened that Bruce wasn’t happy with.
Given that kind of climate, what was the mindset going into the second album, Cherry?
Stokes: The mindset was we had to find a replacement for Larry. We got a gentleman named Jerry Johnstone. Jerry was a fantastic guitar player. He was a young guy at the time. Jerry might have been 19 or 21, somewhere in there, but he was absolutely fabulous on the guitar. He was probably the best replacement for Larry.
Jones: Larry was one of his idols anyway. You hear something that’s reminiscent of the first album on the guitar front.
Rutledge: Regardless, it would never be the same.
How, then, did you decide on the musical direction for the album?
Sanford: We were deciding to change our direction more towards who we really were. That’s when the politics started coming in. Casablanca signed us as record producers, not just artists. The producer controls the budget and controls the project. We had signed a single record deal with an option for four more. It was $2.2 million over five years. Back in ’79, that’s really good money. The first one was supposed to be a $75,000 budget. The second one was supposed to be $125,000 budget and so on. The record company wanted us to go more towards dance music so they asked if we would be interested in using an outside producer. We were like, “Not really, we want to do our own stuff”. They said, “Well we want to send a guy with some songs and just let you guys take a listen…”
Stokes: …so Art Stewart was brought in. Art Stewart had a couple of songs he did for Marvin Gaye on Motown. I had worked with Art over the years through working with Hal Davis. Art was sometimes the engineer for the sessions that I was doing. Art had produced “Got to Give It Up” for Marvin Gaye.
Sanford: He’s a friend of Marvin’s and Marvin said, “I’m going to give you this tune, you go remix it and we’ll put it out”. That’s how he got his reputation. He brought in like six or eight songs that didn’t even fit the band. They were good songs but they just didn’t fit us. He had three by this guy Gary Taylor, who was kind of a more jazz pianist who played really smooth. It was okay music but it wasn’t us. We haggled back and forth and then we contacted the record company. The bottom line was this, “You’re struggling, the label’s struggling. We need some names, some reputations. You guys are producers but we want to get an outside producer who’s got a name that sold big so we can put his name on there and associate him with you guys”. We agreed to it because we could see that it was going to be that or nothing. Art Stewart had all of these big name session guys, which is good for name-dropping, but he was paying them triple scale. They’d come in early in the day and sit there. He really kind of ate up the budget in a sense. He had three session guys from Los Angeles playing so Jerry ended up just doing the guitar solos. All the chords and all that stuff was done by session guys, which kind of upset Jerry because he just entered our band and he was thinking he could get his name out there.
You didn’t even get your photo on the album cover. There’s a woman on the cover.
Stokes: We had absolutely nothing to do with the second album cover. I never met the woman. That was done by the company. Somebody thought it might have been a good idea to play off of the Ohio Players because they always had women on all of their covers.
Are there any songs you still enjoy hearing from that second album?
Stokes: There’s the title track that was written by Jerry Johnstone. I want to say him and Kerry wrote it. I like that track. There was a tune called “Giving You All My Love” and that was one of the tunes that Art Stewart brought to the album. Kerry is singing the lead on that. That’s one of my favorites. I still enjoying hearing that. “Appreciate Your Love”, I’m singing the lead on that, that’s one of my favorites. Probably the last one would be “You and Me”, which follows “Appreciate Your Love”. Me and Kerry are doing the lead on that.
Jones: Cherry was a bit more polished than the first album. We grew as musicians. You can tell the musicianship is a lot better on the second album. We weren’t the producer but we actually did a lot of co-production. We knew about being in the control room and we had learned to understand about how that goes. That’s an ongoing process. When you love something like that, you grasp at it and catch onto it really quickly. I liked “Ice Cream Delight”. That was one of my songs. It had a walking bass in it, almost kind of a jazzy interlude in the middle of a dance tune. That one I’d record over because it was a little bit too fast. If we did things too fast, we’d kind of lose the groove of it.
Sanford: A lot of the songs on there were danceable but they were a little sophisticated. Art brought six songs and one of them was like a flat-out B.B. King-type blues song, which was just so not us. There was a real clash on that album. There were songs that were us trying to be us, us trying to please the record company, and then some that Art brought. We knew what we wanted to sound like and we were constantly bickering with the producer: “That’s too R&B for us. We don’t sound like an R&B band. We’re a progressive rock band”. We were sounding more like an R&B blues band that my dad probably played in. That kind of us beat down.
Cherry was the last album you recorded. What happened to your deal with Casablanca?
Sanford: They decided to drop us because Cherry sold less than the first one. With no promotion, it didn’t sell like it should have. Gigs fizzled out. We were calling and asking for support and stuff like that. It just wasn’t happening. We were sitting idle for a long time. We were back in Dayton. Everybody was still working on songs and trying to get the project going but it was falling apart. We had equipment and we had rehearsal space and we had a band and a crew but no gigs. The record company was like, “The record’s not selling so no promoters are calling us”.
What contributed to the band members going their separate ways?
Stokes: I guess people not being able to see eye to eye on things, which happens with a lot of groups, and certain people wanting to do things their way and other people not agreeing with them. That’s probably the best explanation.
Jones: I used to always call it the battle for power that was going on between Arthur and Kerry. They battled out for leadership of the band. Anytime we would get together to have a meeting, it would always end in argument between those two. Curtis would always fall asleep and I’d just be sitting there going, “Oh God, not again”. It was the same old thing every time. Whenever a meeting was called, Curtis and I dreaded it. He’d fall asleep and I’d be bored to tears. The argument would always ensue. We just decided to call it a day because we just couldn’t come together on ideas of what we wanted to do as far as moving forward with the band.
Sanford: We could holler and scream at each other but never a fistfight. Never. We never had that problem. We would bitch each other out and it would be done. The thing about Larry is he was such a peacekeeper. There were two factions in the band. There was the band — Lloyd, Larry, and me — and then the singers, which was Kerry and Arthur. Usually when the two sides argued, Larry would always come up with a good solution. After he passed, we didn’t have that peacekeeper. It could get really hairy, still no fistfights, but we couldn’t come together on things.
Rutledge: I wanted to go in another direction. After we did the Cherry album, music had changed again and my attitude was, Look what we need to do is try to come up with something even funkier. We took about a 30-day period to just write something to come up with something and I never will forget this: when we all got back together, I had some ideas. Me and the new guitar player put some ideas together in his basement on a four-track cassette. At that point, nobody had any ideas but they didn’t like my ideas so I chose to leave the band. I guess I’m the guy that disbanded.
Sanford: It wasn’t like we had a meeting to say we were going to disband. Everybody just naturally fell apart. I started playing with some local bands, just to make money. Kerry was still working songs and he was recording here and there. Arthur was lining up some business stuff and he was calling record companies.
Rutledge: We just ended up not being able to get a deal anymore. I moved on. Me and Jerry went down to Counter Part Studio in Cincinnati and cut a demo. I got three calls in one day. I got a call from a label in New York. I got a call from somebody in California and ended up with Ken Cayre of Salsoul. I started “Jakky Boy and the Bad Bunch”, which we did on Salsoul/RCA. That did its thing and then we ended up in ’85 releasing another album on Atlantic under the same brand. Now, I’m working with Zye Music, which is my business in Atlanta. I got a couple of subsidiaries, one is called GetItVille Entertainment. I got a studio here. We got a rap group called All-Black that we’re developing right now. It features Buck Johnson and Andre Da Giant. We’re also looking into doing soundtracks with Goliath Promotions.
Sanford: I played in a lot of bands. I put bands together, trying to get record deals. I had this one band that was amazing. It was a local band. Guys from the Prince/Time camp came to check us out and they actually loved the band. They were going to try to bring some of the guys from The Time. They were trying to get Jam & Lewis to see the band but the band split up before that could happen. I tried a few other projects and I went to Canada. I played with other bands. I ended up joining Heatwave. I wasn’t in the band. I was their sound man. I went in the front of the house and mixed for them. I did that for about a year. I came off that. Currently, I’m playing drums with The Deal, which is the band L.A. Reid and Babyface were in.
Stokes: Once the group broke up, I pursued working with myself and my sister. My sister was Diane Stokes and I’ve been known as Arthur “Hakim” Stokes for years. I ended up recording with Curb Records and I did a project with my sister, Hakim with Lady Diana. We did a few things with them and then when that went south, I did jingles and played with area groups and that type of thing. I was blessed a couple of years ago to start working with Spectra Entertainment, a production company out of Dayton that books over 100 festivals, fairs, corporate, casinos, college, and theater dates a year. I’m also a member of Touch, which is a Motown tribute act and my production company is called MoSound Music.
Jones: I went on the road for awhile and started playing with a rock and roll band. They found me through the musicians’ union. They were coming through town and their bass player was quitting or fired or whatever the deal was. They were doing the Holiday Inn circuit. I toured with them for about eight months or so working every week on the road. That got me going pretty good. I bought some good equipment and came back to Dayton and shortly after that, about ’86, I got married and started my own band. That band lasted about ten years. It was called Two Below. They were very successful. We worked every week. We did a lot of NBA functions and NFL stuff for the Indiana Pacers and the Indianapolis Colts. We were doing really good. Everybody in town wanted to be in my band because I was able to keep the core of the band together for about ten years. We worked every week. It was a really good run. I actually wanted to try to get back into the recording thing with that act but some drugs reared their ugly head and pretty much ripped the band apart. It got to a point where my lead singer would be forgetting the words. It was starting to give the band a bad name. That was ultimately the reason why I decided to let it go and move out to Las Vegas because I had made some really good contacts. I’m a person who believes in never burning bridges. You never know where that person might be able to help you out with something else later on down the line. I had a bad taste in my mouth after ten years of doing one band and doing everything yourself. I did 90% of the bookings, made sure the band had somewhere to rehearse with equipment. Everything. It wears you down after awhile. I just wanted to get a break from it but I love music so much I’m at that point where I’m ready to do it again now.
What is your proudest moment in Platypus?
Rutledge: There were a lot of them. I guess the first time we ever performed in 30,000-seat arena and it was full and everybody knew the songs. You start doing your shit and everybody’s singing your songs in the crowd. That’s the proudest moment. The first time that ever happened.
Stokes: The proudest moment is probably putting out our very first album. That was a milestone. It was such a long journey to get to that point and for us to actually accomplish it and then to hear music on the radio.
Sanford: Personally, for me, it was when we recorded the first album. We got a call from the guy that was our keyboard player and he quit. We were in the studio and we were waiting on him. We were stuck. The keyboard player knew all the songs and we’d have to teach another one all these songs. We didn’t know how long that would take but I knew the songs. I could throw chords together and I went in and recorded it. When a lot of people hear the record, and it has a list of what instruments I play, they’re looking at me like, “Wow man you did all of that?” I’m like yeah but you would not believe it. It took awhile to do. We did it and the end result was an album. For me personally, that was one of my proudest moments.
Jones: Just the actual completing of the albums and them being out on the market. That was an accomplishment in itself. I was always proud of the band, internally, because we always knew what we could do. Even to this day, I’m proud of those albums. The more people that can be familiar with them, the better. I always saw it as really valid music that can stand the test of time. Some of those songs are really good stuff. Who knows? It might kick it off again in the direction it should have been going in to begin with. You never know. Somebody might be interested them, and might want to re-record them. The door is always open.
How do you think it would sound, 30 years later, if you guys came back together? Would you be able to pick up from where you left off?
Stokes: I think we could. It’s just a matter of doing it. We probably would have to brush up on a couple of things but once we got started I think we could.
Jones: I don’t know what the venue would be but maybe just to get together to re-record some stuff. Being in that band, I really learned a lot about vocals and it helped me to this day. I’m always the guy arranging the vocals for whatever act I’m working with. I’m not even the singer but I know about vocals and I know how they’re supposed to sound and what you’re supposed to be doing from being with those guys. Their vocals were incredible. For awhile there were some…as with any family, you always have this bickering that goes on. There was a little bit of that going on for a while, which was one of the things that created a little distance. At this point, I honestly think all of that is gone. I think it would really be a cool thing to reunite. That would be some fun right there.