His dad wanted him to be a boxer, but with Kool & The Gang he ended up a funk /soul icon who has cause for celebration
At 16, I was already really into my band. Kool & The Gang started, with a different name, in Jersey City, New Jersey when I was 14. We were called the Jazziacs at the time, and this was 1964. So it’s been 60 years this year. My brother was into John Coltrane; George Brown, my drummer, was into ‘Philly’ Joe Jones; Dennis Thomas, another original member, was into Cannonball Adderley; Ricky Westfield was into Herbie Hancock. We used to rehearse in a church hall with a little stage room. People like Pharoah Sanders and McCoy Tyner would come over for Sunday jams.
I had three things going on – I could be a mechanic or a boxer, but I became Kool in Kool & The Gang. My father had wanted me to be a boxer. He had me in the ring when I was only nine and we would do three rounds. And my grandfather wanted me to be a mechanic – when I was two years old, he used to have me under the car with him getting all greasy. When I was still in Youngstown, Ohio, I even built my own motorbike by taking a lawnmower motor and putting it on a bicycle frame. But once I got to Jersey City, everything changed.
My father was a boxer and he was like a rolling stone in the sense that he wasn’t home a lot. He and my mother had a few problems. At that time, we lived in a home where we didn’t have a lot. So my mother’s sister said, “Girl, I gotta get you out of here.” She came with her station wagon and her husband and everything we owned went in the back of it. If they hadn’t brought us to New York, there would never have been Kool & The Gang. There were six of us, so they split us up – some of us lived with one of my mother’s sisters, some with another sister and my mum found a job and a house for us in Jersey City. So I was a country boy, we were almost like The Beverly Hillbillies, but God blessed us and here we are.
The neighbourhood in Jersey City we were staying in was a little tough.
There was a guy who called himself Cool. I liked that so I took the name Kool as my middle name. But I had to learn how to defend myself, because my father was a boxer and there were guys who wanted to challenge me. It was called neighbourhood survival.
There were always musicians around. My father used to live in the same building as Thelonious Monk near the Lincoln Center in New York. He asked Thelonious Monk to be my godfather. And Miles Davis used to come over to the gym when my father was boxing. He wante
