POP MUSIC REVIEWS : KC & Co.: Just the Way We Like It

A little bit of soul, like a little information, can be a dangerous thing--as evidenced by seminal disco bands like KC & the Sunshine Band, which took a modicum of black music, mixed it up with innocuous bubble gum and came up with a strangely infectious drivel.

The Miami group’s very name is usually the pretext for a joke when invoked today, but a streak of No. 1 hits on the pop and R&B; charts in the mid-’70s testifies to a legacy of boogie and booty that seemed like a good idea at the time.

After a long absence, KC & the Sunshine Band returned like heroes Sunday to 1970, an all-’70s Hollywood dance club where 25- to 30-ish groovesters relive an era of hedonism, bad clothes and great black music.

In the context of this shrine to the Me Decade, singer H.W. Casey--still in great shape at 39, as his shirtless moments attest--was greeted with the kind of rabid reception that might be accorded a personal appearance by Judy Garland at a female impersonators’ convention.

This couldn’t have been much different from a Sunshine Band set of the ‘70s, so the revisionist view isn’t much different: Casey isn’t much of a singer, and his showmanship won’t turn James Brown green, but he deserves respect as a hard, sincere worker and co-architect of a sound.

On what we’ve traded away, dance-music wise: Give us today’s new jack swing in a contest with KC’s stiff, relentless rhythm any time. But the four-man horn section here sounded pretty terrific, and no one had to stop shaking booty to wonder whether tapes and sequencers were doing all the band’s work, which is just the way (uh-huh, uh-huh) we like it.