Miami - The Party Freaks (2019)

Songwriter Willie Clarke, more noted for his songwriting with Clarence Reid, created this self-contained band around vocalist Robert Moore; the other players were Freddie Scott (drums), Warren Thompson (guitar), Andrew Curran (guitar), Bobby Williams (organ), Willie Jackson (bass), George Perry (bass), and Clarke (percussions). Personnel changes occurred, Tony Z (Zamagni), for one instance, comped with them in the late '70s before leaving for something more musically challenging.

Amid cutting three albums, Miami served as the house band for TK Records' family of labels and played on sessions for Little Beaver, George McCrae, Gwen McCrae, and Betty Wright, among others. Their first album, The Party Freaks, came out in 1974 and featured catchy jams like "Party Freaks" and "I Can See Through You"; a second LP, Notorious (1976), spawned their popular "Kill That Roach" (a reflex-phrase in tropical cities like Miami where roaches grow big as butterflies and even fly on occasions). TK's owner, Henry Stone, fattened Miami's recording budget for the second album, enabling the employment of strings, horns, and a new member: Jesus Gonzales.

A final album, Miami, hooked around an update of Otis Redding's "I've Been Loving You Too Long," dropped in 1978, but it didn't go and Miami splintered. TK Records was an arm of Stone's empire that included the South's biggest record distributor -- if you wanted your record distributed below the Mason-Dixon Line and east of the Mississippi River you dealt with Stone; however, bankruptcy proceedings caused TK Records to be dissolved in 1980; it re-emerged under another name but the glory days were over. Polygram U.K. released a CD of Miami's finest tracks, entitled Hey Y'all We're Miami the Party Freaks. ~ Andrew Hamilton