As a teenager, Suzy Chase got her R&B from the wrong side of the tracks. Now she’s spinning that music Saturday nights in a low-lit Broadway bar.
Each Saturday, Suzy fills the Trophy Bar with old school R&B, fortissimo on the bass. In the DJ corner, under a collection of random trophies, she spins the jams back from the days before R&B singles had hip-hop breaks, when the beats were bashed out the old fashioned way, by hand.
Suzy’s rapid firing cutting of the songs is only interrupted, in the front lounge anyway, when a new patron wanders in from the street, filling the front bar with the sound of a J, M or Z train rattling overhead.
Suzy’s specialty is 80’s funk and R&B, a rough transition time for both genres. When the young people think funk these days, they’re probably thinking of the 70s variety beamed down from the Mothership. This period doesn’t hold a lot of sway over her, though. “How much George Clinton can you hear?” she asks, rhetorically.
Decimated by disco, most all the 70s stalwarts of the hard groove–G. Clinton’s various P-Funk assemblages, James Brown, Ohio Players–remained barely standing into the next decade, tattered solders of Uncle Jam’s Army. And by the early 1980s, disco itself was overexposed, so was shedding its sequined costumes and hiding ‘neath the skirts of R&B and funk. For good measure, both genres also appropriated some new wave synthesized squiggles and fills.
And this is what you hear, listening to Suzy’s DJ set. She bring you back to the Reagan era, except with one awesome sleight of hand. Chances are pretty good that you actually haven’t heard any of the songs, or even most of the artists, she plays. If she does play some Donna Summer or Chic or Michael Jackson, it is usually some deep cut.
“I’m just always digging. Every day. On YouTube, at the record store. Digging digging digging,” she says.
For instance, last night, she rolled out this tight little jam:
Gets a groove on, yes? Ever hear of Quinella? Neither have we and, apart from a few thousand radio listeners around NYC in 1980, neither have many other people in this world.
Too bad. But pop music is awash in tuneful songs that could have been major hits but just missed the big time — due to bad promotion, lousy timing, or a hook ever so slightly askew. But track down all these forgotten songs and string them together and you’ll get a hit parade from some slightly alternate universe.
That’s the musical world that resides in Suzy’s head.
Other gems she played that night included “Backstrokin’” by The Fatback Band, “So In Tune With You” by Kellee Patterson, “Searching to Find the One” By Unlimited Touch, “Soho Phaze” by Elixia.
Dare we go on? “Can You Feel It” by the Funk Fusion Band, “Lets Get It Together” by El Coco, “Rock the Beat” by Jamaica Girls, “Soul Train’s A’Comin’” by O’Bryan, “C’mon Stop” by Black Gold, “Fake” by Karen Silver, and “There’s No Stopping Us” by Ollie & Jerry.
Suzy grew up in Kansas City, and while adoring the pop songs of the day — think Styx and the REO Speedwagon– she also listened to quite a bit of KPRS, Kansas City’s longest running black music station, also one of the oldest black family owned music stations in the U.S. (yes, us white folks really did call it “black music” back then).
“I was listening to Zapp and Roger, DeBarge and the Dazz Band. So I had to go way over, to the wrong side of the tracks to the record store every week, in my white CRX,” She recalls, laughing at the image. Her parents were fans of jazz. One-time Miles Davis sideman Herbie Hancock was big in the Chase household, so the R&B and funk of the day seemed like a natural continuation of the music.
“What first grabbed me was ‘All This Love‘ by DeBarge. It was just so heartfelt and funky. It just hit me,” she says. Duran Duran’s “The Reflex” just couldn’t cut it, in comparison.
She has since moved this music from those records into MP3 form, as much of it, by the way, has yet to make it to iTunes.
She started out in radio in Kansas City. Her dreams brought her to New York, and delivered her to work at Interscope and, after that, then Jive. At Jive, she met her idol El DeBarge, who, after a short meeting in a studio, wrote a note saying that he enjoyed their meeting. She still blushes at that.
More recently she started what came to be perhaps the world’s most popular Podcast dedicated to old school soul and R&B, The Groove Radio. And when she asked the owners of the Trophy Bar what kind of music they wanted her to play, they told her whatever she wanted. The rest is Trophy Bar history.
If want to buy her a beer during her set, get a Stella. And if you ask whether Prince or Michael Jackson is better to dance to, she’ll choose Michael. She loves her some Prince, but “Little Red Corvette” is just no match for “P.Y.T.”
“Prince is a real musician. He can play the guitar. But Michael Jackson just had it,” she explains.
