Kleeer was an American New York City–based
funk
Funk is a music genre that originated in African-American communities in the mid-1960s when musicians created a rhythmic, danceable new form of music through a mixture of various music genres that were popular among African-Americans in the ...
,
disco
Disco is a music genre, genre of dance music and a subculture that emerged in the late 1960s from the United States' urban nightclub, nightlife, particularly in African Americans, African-American, Italian-Americans, Italian-American, LGBTQ ...
and
post-disco
Post-disco is a term and genre to describe an aftermath in popular music history circa 1979–1986, imprecisely beginning with the backlash against disco music in the United States, leading to civil unrest and a riot in Chicago known as the Dis ...
band, which was formed in 1972 under the name The Jam Band, as a backup group to different disco bands and vocalists.
Members
* Woodrow "Woody" Cunningham (lead vocalist and drummer, died 2010)
* Paul Crutchfield (percussionist and keyboardist)
* Richard Lee (guitarist)
* Norman Durham (bassist, died 2011)
Career
After a switch to the name Pipeline in 1975, the group also decided to switch to making
hard rock
Hard rock or heavy rock is a heavier subgenre of rock music typified by aggressive vocals and Distortion (music), distorted electric guitars. Hard rock began in the mid-1960s with the Garage rock, garage, Psychedelic rock, psychedelic and blues ...
instead of disco. Record labels competed to sign them but, when they finally ended up at
, their single "Gypsie Rider" did not fare well commercially.
In 1976, they got the opportunity to become
The Universal Robot Band along with underground disco producers
Patrick Adams and
Greg Carmichael. This project was more successful than their former projects. They made the single "
Barely Breaking Even" alongside singer
Leroy Burgess, and they also recorded an album. The group toured as The Universal Robot Band until 1978. After 1978, the band decided to make all their music themselves under the new name of Kleeer.
Between 1979 and 1985 the group released seven albums and had several
hits
Hits or H.I.T.S. may refer to:
Arts, entertainment, and media Music
* '' H.I.T.S.'', 1991 album by New Kids on the Block
* ''...Hits'' (Phil Collins album), 1998
* ''Hits'' (compilation series), 1984–2006; 2014, a British compilation album s ...
in the US
''Billboard'' Hot 100 and in
R&B charts
A chart (sometimes known as a graph) is a graphical representation for data visualization, in which "the data is represented by symbols, such as bars in a bar chart, lines in a line chart, or slices in a pie chart". A chart can represent t ...
. The most mentionable are "Keep Your Body Workin'", "Tonight's the Night", "Winners", "Intimate Connection", and "Get Tough". The sound was now more focused on 1980s style funk, and
electronic instruments, like
vocoder
A vocoder (, a portmanteau of ''vo''ice and en''coder'') is a category of speech coding that analyzes and synthesizes the human voice signal for audio data compression, multiplexing, voice encryption or voice transformation.
The vocoder wa ...
s and synthesizers.
lead singer
Mic Murphy was a road manager for the band before the start of his record career.
After the 1985's album ''Seeekret'', the band disappeared for unknown reasons. Most of the musicians continued working with other projects. In the 1990s, however, the group re-formed as Kleeer at some occasions.
Discography
Studio albums
Singles
References
External links
Kleer biography and discographyat
Discogs
Discogs ( ; short for " discographies") is a database of information about audio recordings, including commercial releases, promotional releases, and bootleg or off-label releases. Database contents are user-generated, and described in ''T ...
.
Six Million Steps – Woody Cunningham/Kleeer Special radio show from November 2010*
*
{{Authority control
American dance music groups
American funk musical groups
American soul musical groups
American boogie musicians