LA, July 16: Harry Wayne Casey has been shaking his booty across America for three decades, and this summer he plans to kick that booty into high gear once again.
Of course, most people know H.W. Casey as "KC," as in KC & The Sunshine Band, the 1970s disco act that still tours the country and is part of "Get Up 'N Dance!," a new tour starting in August and also featuring the Village People, Thelma Houston and Anita Ward.
"Technically it's definitely very different than when I toured 30 years ago," Casey told Reuters in a recent interview. "The best part really is once I'm up on the stage."
Casey, 52, got his start in the music business as a teenager in Florida. But by the mid-1980s, the dance icon had left the business following a serious car accident that took him out of the spotlight for nearly a year around the time that the disco craze faded.
For a time, Casey and fellow disco idols like the Village People fell prey to the bitter backlash against the genre that erupted in the early 1980s, manifesting itself in "Disco Sucks" bumper stickers and a mass disco album demolition day at a baseball stadium that turned into a riot.
At one time, Casey struggled with substance abuse.
But by the early 1990s, a growing appetite for anything retro, particularly from the 1970s, breathed new life into his material, eventually bringing him back to the stage and inspiring him to seek rehabilitation.
Additionally, a lot of 1970's disco music and riffs are being sampled into popular hip-hop music and have found their way into popular commercials.
Casey's stage act these days, which includes original percussionist Fermin Goytisolo, has been featured at events like professional football's Super Bowl and will visit cites such as Baltimore, Philadelphia, Boston and Toronto as part of the summer tour.
"We do the hits. We do them pretty much the way they were originally recorded," he said.
Among those are dance numbers like "(Shake Shake Shake) Shake Your Booty," "I'm Your Boogie Man," and "That's the Way (I Like It)."
But while the songs may remain the same, the outfits, like the garish jumpers with bell-bottomed pants, do not.
"I wouldn't fit into them anyway!" he laughed. "It's reality -- that's me at 22 and this is me at 52."
But despite the rigors of touring and the slump in the music industry in recent years, Casey said another retirement was not imminent.
"I might go out at 60 -- you never know," he said.
Bureau Report
