Friday Flashback: Mighty Real
Or, How a Detroit Lions running back turned me on to one of the greatest disco singles of all time
Greetings, Jagged Time Lapsers!
I’m absolutely swamped with work deadlines this week, and a new JTL piece that I’ve been cooking up needs a little more time in the oven. So in honor of Pride Month, I thought I’d go ahead and re-run (with a few minor tweaks) something I originally wrote back in March 2023 about a true LGTBQ icon who released some of the greatest disco singles of all time: Sylvester!
There’s a pizza joint near my new pad that serves up an excellent NYC-style slice at a decent price, has a somewhat primitive mural of a generic Italian hillside on their dining room wall, and whose proprietors are a couple of older Italian-American guys who spend much of their time breaking each others’ balls in a really entertaining fashion. In other words, I’d already be pretty much sold on the place right there… but then they went and completely locked down my customer loyalty by blasting 1970s soul, funk and disco jams on a regular basis.
Yesterday, I was greeted after I walked in by the glorious trilogy of Chic’s “Everybody Dance,” Sylvester’s “You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real) and Amii Stewart’s stomping cover of Eddie Floyd’s “Knock On Wood”. Disco classics all, but hearing that Sylvester track for the first time in way too long truly knocked me on my ass. It’s the perfect disco anthem — sexy, uplifting, giddily propulsive, studded with shiny synth squiggles, and topped with a chorus that soars so high it practically pierces the Earth’s atmosphere.
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“Mighty Real” wasn’t actually the first Sylvester song I ever heard — that honor went to “Dance (Disco Heat),” which I’m pretty sure was introduced to me via one of Rerun’s dance segments on What’s Happening!!, though I’ve never been able to find a YouTube clip to corroborate that memory. I loved that particular song so much that I asked for (and got) the 45 for Christmas in 1978, which would put it among the first 20 singles I ever owned.
I didn’t find out about “Mighty Real” via radio airplay, either — at least, not as a stand-alone song. I first heard it in late 1978, when the song was serving as the bed music for an oft-played radio ad for Mel Farr Ford, an auto dealership in the Detroit suburb of Oak Park which was owned by former Lions great Mel Farr.
“Mel Farr Ford, at 10 Mile and Greenfield,” the VoiceOver boldly intoned. “Minutes from anywhere!” “Anywhere?” asked another voice. “ANYWHERE!!!” came the stentorian answer, as the chorus of “Mighty Real” went into full hyperdrive in the background. I didn’t know enough at the time to recognize that melodic snippet as the work of Sylvester, but I heard the commercial so often in the November and December of ‘78 that it’s still hard for me to hear “Mighty Real” now without feeling the overwhelming urge to blurt out “ANYWHERE!!!”
(Fun fact: Mel Farr, along with Lions teammate Lem Barney, can be heard providing the “Hey, Man!” streetcorner jive on Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On”. Farr was a big music fan who was also pretty hands-on with the production of his dealership’s TV and radio ads, so I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that he was the one who chose “Mighty Real” for the radio spot. Thanks, Mel!)
It wasn’t until after moving from Ann Arbor to Los Angeles at the end of ‘78 that I began hearing “Mighty Real” without, as they say, commercial interruption. The song was all over the radio in Southern California, especially KRLA, where it was a regular feature of “Art Laboe’s Disco Dance Party,” the oldies-oriented station’s five-nights-a-week attempt to cash in on the rampant disco craze.
The song never fails to take me back to the late winter and early spring of 1979, which was pretty much the peak of my original disco fandom; the release of Van Halen II and Cheap Trick at Budokan that spring would pull me back towards rock-oriented waters, and my burgeoning interest in new wave and FM-oriented rock —plus the realization that disco had already reached its cultural over-saturation —would cause me to pretty much stop buying disco records by the end of the year. But in early ‘79, nothing else on the radio sounded as good to me as “You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real)”.
I had no idea at the time that the man born Sylvester James Jr. was gay, or that he’d made his initial show biz splash as a member of The Cockettes, the celebrated avant-garde San Francisco drag troupe. In fact, I don’t remember reading any media coverage of him at all in 1979; it wasn’t until about 1984, when I saw an interview with Sylvester in the British music paper Melody Maker — a feature no doubt inspired by the recent UK success of the heavily Sylvester-influenced Bronski Beat — that the penny really dropped for me.
Not that Sylvester’s sexual identity would have made any difference to my 12- and 13-year old self (I was a big Village People fan back then, and I damn well knew what their deal was), but it was only later on that I began to understand just what a powerful icon Sylvester must have been for the late-‘70s queer community, and what a true badass he was in general. John Waters has described Sylvester as “Billie Holiday and Diana Ross on LSD,” but he was actually even deeper — and more mind-blowing— than that festive description would imply.
Dig, for instance, the 1973 albums Sylvester and The Hot Band and Bazaar, Sylvester’s two rock- and blues-oriented albums with The Hot Band. White rockers like David Bowie, Marc Bolan and Lou Reed could (and did) bolster their fortunes in those days by openly flirting with androgyny and bisexuality; but while Bowie (whom Sylvester and The Hot Band opened up for in San Francisco in 1972) gave Sylvester some props at the time, the post-Woodstock world was not at all ready for a rock band fronted by a towering, flamboyantly gay Black man with serious gospel pipes. Which is too damn bad, because both of those records are really cool, and contain such jaw-dropping gems as this Blaxploitation funk reworking of the “My Country ‘Tis of Thee”.
Back in the mid-seventies, my elementary school friends and I thought we were being rebellious as all hell by changing the line “sweet land of liberty” to “sweet land of Nixon’s pee” when we sang this song in music class, unaware that Sylvester had already Aretha-ized Samuel Francis Smith’s patriotic lyrics into a fierce anthem of defiance that worked on subversive and empowering levels we couldn’t have even imagined. Let it ring, indeed...
When The Hot Band broke up, Sylvester made a few unsuccessful attempts to rebuild his act along similar musical and visual lines. But when his manager Brent Thomson suggested he downplay his androgynous image in favor of a more masculine look — a suggestion soon followed by the addition to his act of singers Martha Wash and Izora Rhodes (a.k.a. Two Tons of Fun, who would later find success of their own as The Weather Girls) and a move towards more soul- and dance-oriented material — everything clicked. Sylvester and “The Tons” were soon the toast of SF’s Castro district, becoming a must-see act at several of the area’s hottest gay clubs, and Sylvester landed a solo deal with Fantasy Records following a stint at the more mainstream-oriented Palms nightclub on Polk Street.
Motown legend Harvey Fuqua was the one who signed Sylvester to Fantasy; he also produced or co-produced all of Sylvester’s subsequent albums for the label. But it was Sylvester’s musical partnership with electronic dance music pioneer Patrick Cowley that really took his career to the next level. Cowley’s synths and sequencers are all over 1978’s Step II, an album which made it to #28 on the Billboard 200 thanks to the radio and dance floor successes of “Dance (Disco Heat)” and “You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real)”.
Fuqua and Cowley would eventually clash over Sylvester’s musical direction — and Cowley would score an influential dance hit of his own in 1981 with “Menergy” — but for me, their work together with Sylvester remains right up there with Chic’s first three LPs and the Giorgio Moroder/Donna Summer collaborations as prime examples of just how stratospherically brilliant and life-affirming classic 1970s disco could be. Due to AIDS, neither Cowley or Sylvester made out of the 1980s alive, which was as much of a tragedy for music as their deaths surely were for those who knew and loved them.
While it would have probably been to Sylvester’s commercial advantage to maintain a masculine persona once his songs began ascending the pop charts, he was someone who clearly enjoyed and embraced fluidity, both in his music and in his own image. As this incredible video for “You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real)” makes clear, Sylvester looked fantastic as an elegant gentleman — but there was also no way in hell that he was going to relegate his feminine side to the closet.
Rest in Power, Sylvester — you unquestionably kept it mighty real.
An underrated icon. You can hear Sylvester's sound/influence in 1000s of dance records.
I danced a lot to Sylvester!