TOP 40 DEBUT: February 2, 1980
PEAK POSITION: #8 (March 22, 1980)
Creating fictitious musical acts for television used to be strictly a white man’s game. This oddly successful trend kicked off in 1965, when producers Bob Rafelson and Bert Schneider conceived the Monkees as a small-screen response to Beatlemania; more than fifty years on, they’re still the gold standard for fake bands of every color, with six Top 3 singles in less than two years, retroactive critical praise, and decades of revivals and reunion tours. In 1970, the Partridge Family made a similar jump from sitcom invention to pop stardom with the #1 single “I Think I Love You.” A year earlier, an actual cartoon did the same thing. (The Archies’ “Sugar Sugar” hit #1 in September ’69. It’s a 10.) Meanwhile, network shows with predominantly African-American casts barely existed before 1974; just seeing the Jackson Five—a living, breathing R&B group, albeit in animated form—star in their own Saturday morning series felt like a major accomplishment. Even with a “black” sitcom like What’s Happening, the musical acts remained very much real and very much Caucasian.
And then came Soul Train, AKA the cooler, hipper, funkier version of American Bandstand. It was a music program made by African-Americans, for African-Americans, featuring only African-Americans. In the early Seventies, that was absolutely groundbreaking. Soul Train aired its first episode on August 17, 1970, on local Chicago station WCIU-TV, with initial guests Jerry Butler, the Chi-Lites, and the Emotions. The show went national in 1971; weekly episodes would air in syndication for the next thirty-five years.
Especially during its first decade, Soul Train carried incredible cultural cachet within the black community: popular enough to spin off its own record label, and popular enough to manufacture its own musical group. Shalamar weren’t exactly the Soul Train Monkees, but they certainly wouldn’t have existed without the show itself. And just like their whiter television brethren, Shalamar soon transcended their artificial origins to have actual, real-world hits. In early 1980, “The Second Time Around” topped both the R&B and dance charts—and peaked at #8 on the Hot 100—on its way to becoming Billboard’s 44th biggest song of the entire year. Not bad for a trio comprised of two television dancers and a cover-band vocalist.
Shalamar had a Top 40 single even before the group actually existed. Soul Train host Don Cornelius—a cooler, hipper version of the already-plenty-cool-and-hip Dick Clark—used the early success of his program to launch a label, Soul Train Records, in 1975 with the show’s talent coordinator, Dick Griffey. Their first signing was an R&B vocal quintet rechristened the Soul Train Gang. The Gang’s first single was “Soul Train ‘75.” (Decades before social media, Cornelius and Griffey absolutely understood the power of branding.) But constant promotion on the program wasn’t enough to make the single, or its parent album—an absolute branding masterpiece titled Don Cornelius Presents The Soul Train Gang—successful. The pair tried again with “Uptown Festival,” a ten-song Motown medley set to a disco beat and recorded by a team of session musicians. Griffey credited the single to a nonexistent artist, using a name modified from a particular brand of French perfume: Shalimar.
In the summer of ‘77, a radio edit of the nearly nine-minute “Uptown Festival” hit #25 on the pop charts and #2 on Billboard’s “Disco Action Top 40.” (It’s a 5.) Cornelius and Griffey, realizing the value of creating a real-life group to capitalize on the song’s success, began looking in-house to assemble Shalamar’s roster. Jody Watley and Jeffrey Daniel were two of Soul Train’s most popular dancers; Gary Mumford, another cast member, had contributed a few vocals to “Uptown Festival” and became lead singer by default. The newly-formed trio took over as the public face of Shalamar, towering like gods on the painting that adorns the cover of Uptown Festival. All the music on the inside was the work of hired players.
Within months, Mumford left, Griffey bought out Cornelius’ stake in the label, and Soul Train Records became SOLAR Records. Shalamar brought in vocalist Gerald Brown, formerly with the Soul Train Gang, and kept going. 1978’s Disco Gardens sold less than its predecessor and contained no big singles, but in every other respect it marks a clear improvement over the trio’s faceless debut. That shift is best exemplified by “Take That To The Bank,” a Top 20 U.K. hit and an early example of what would become the classic “SOLAR sound”: late-period disco mixed with embryonic electro-funk, spearhead by the label’s in-house producer, Leon Sylvers III. SOLAR would have an outsized influence on the sound of American R&B in the new decade, thanks to artists like the Whispers, Midnight Star, Klymaxx, and The Deele (who will all eventually appear on this site). But the company’s crown jewel was always Shalamar, and it would be Shalamar’s fifth single that gave SOLAR its first commercial breakthrough.
“The Second Time Around” built on the template established by Disco Gardens, with one crucial upgrade: Howard Hewett took over for Gerald Brown, becoming the trio’s third lead singer in as many years. Daniel and Watley already knew the Akron, Ohio native from his time playing covers at the L.A. night club Maverick’s Flat, a popular hangout spot for the Soul Train crew. Hewett had actually been approached to join Shalamar earlier, in 1977, after Mumford quit; he passed due to overseas touring commitments. Eighteen months later, Daniel offered Hewett the job a second time. His acceptance solidified the “classic” Shalamar lineup that would remain in place for the next four years and five albums.
Title aside, “The Second Time Around” contains no references, buried or otherwise, to Hewett’s prolonged courtship process with the rest of the group. (Although that would have been deliciously meta.) Sylvers wrote the song along with William Shelby, who’d just joined the SOLAR-created Dynasty, and you can tell he's aiming for maximum accessibility—with nondescript lyrics to match. The narrator’s “mistakes” get glossed over in a handful of lines; the main focus becomes “true love,” specifically the kind that can “still be found/ The second time around.” Basic romantic reunion stuff, albeit with an unsettling undercurrent: Parse the lyrics carefully, and it sure sounds like this poor woman’s relationship woes all stem from the same guy now telling her she “can’t keep running away from love.” (Maybe keep running from this one, girl.)
Hewett, who plays the part of our questionable narrator, effectively kicked off a three-decade recording career with “The Second Time Around.” He would go on to voice every major Shalamar hit before his departure in 1985; a string of later solo albums yielded Top 10 R&B singles well into the Nineties. As a vocalist, Hewett always seemed confident but slightly anonymous, with a silky smooth tenor not unlike the silky smooth tenors of so many other Eighties soul men. If Shalamar had a distinctive sound, it didn’t come from Hewett’s voice. It came from pairing that voice with the less-trained pipes of Shalamar’s most famous ex-member.
Despite her eventual solo mega-stardom, Jody Watley never got top billing in her first group, nor did she share the lead on any other Top 40 Shalamar single besides this one. (In fairness, she’s all over their lesser-known R&B hits.) Like Daniel, she was hired for her dancing, rather than her singing, as Cornelius bluntly explained in a 1987 feature with the Los Angeles Times: “My partner said, ‘Jody Watley can’t sing.’ I said, ‘It doesn’t matter, only the look matters.’” But she’s the crucial component that makes “Second Time” work, the grit to offset Hewett’s natural sweetness. He might take the lead, but it’s her “backing” vocals that stand out, their back-and-forth during the breakdown (“Not like the first time/ Not like the first time/ Talking ‘bout the second time”) raising his game as much as hers. Hewett was a talented, gifted singer; Watley had personality to burn. That combination caused sparks.
“The Second Time Around” wound up being SOLAR’s first million-selling single, and ultimately the label’s biggest hit ever. It’s not difficult to see why: This is discofied pop at its buoyant best, fizzy and funky in a way that epitomizes the whole of its parent album’s title, Big Fun. Every element of the track feels lighter than air, from the bouncy bass part (played by Sylvers himself) to that slyly syncopated muted guitar. Piano chords ring like church bells. Elegant string lines add bits of color. A dirty sawtoothed synth slices through the bridge, only to disappear just as quickly. On the superior 12” version (see below), a nicely funky horn section even enters the mix, bubbling and bursting inside the choruses.
And of course, there’s the song’s distinctive flourish: a laughing Syndrum, punctuating the groove over and over like a toy laser gun. That silly sound enters, and exits, and re-enters again, seemingly at random, the aural equivalent of a five-year old let loose inside a recording studio. As a production trick, it's deeply, deeply goofy—but also, kinda genius. And it sums up the effervescent kick of the song perfectly. If listening to “Second Time” doesn’t put a stupid grin on your face, you might be immune to joy.
For whatever reason, Shalamar had a tricky time following up the massive success of “The Second Time Around” in the U.S. Successive singles from Big Fun missed the Hot 100 altogether, setting a pattern for the next few years where the trio would score medium-sized hits on the R&B charts without really crossing over to pop radio. But in England, it was a different story. Shalamar’s 1982 album Friends went platinum and spun off four Top 20 singles, buoyed by a legendary Top of the Pops appearance where Jeffrey Daniel, the group’s primary dancer, used “A Night To Remember” to put on a clinic in the art of “body popping.” The biggest cheers came for a move never before seen on British (or American) television: the “backslide.”
On the other side of the pond, a fan from Daniel’s Soul Train days was paying attention. He attended a Shalamar show back in the States, approached Jeffrey afterwards, and arranged for lessons. Nine months later, he unveiled his own version of the backslide on the Motown 25 television special. By the time Shalamar finally got back to the American Top 40, in August 1983, Michael Jackson—and his newly rebranded “moonwalk”—had taken over the world.
GRADE: 8/10
I WANT MY MTV: There’s a part of me that absolutely loves the quaint, uncomplicated simplicity of these early R&B promos. Some might wonder why Shalamar blew their entire video budget on sequined jumpsuits. I consider it money well spent.
12”ERS: The 12" version of “Second Time” (sometimes called the “Disco Mix,” depending on the country) doesn’t merely extend the shorter radio cut. It also adds—and subtracts—various elements along the way, making for two very different listening experiences. As I mentioned above, those additional horns make this long cut the superior one, but you honestly can’t go wrong with either version.