If you’re the headliner, you don’t want your support act to upstage you, but you do want them to set the tone - and the mood - for what’s to come. So you can understand why Kool & the Gang bassist Robert “Kool” Bell was slightly taken aback when, back in 2011, David Lee Roth asked them to open for Van Halen.
Speaking to The Sunday Times, Bell said that the invitation came after Kool & the Gang’s Glastonbury performance in 2011. “They had Coldplay and U2 and all the big rock groups there,” he says. “So we came on and did our thing and David Lee Roth saw it and said, ‘I want Kool & the Gang to be my support act.’”
Hmmm - are you sure about that, David? Yes, Kool & the Gang have some top-drawer bangers, but their back catalogue marries taut ‘70s funk (the likes of Jungle Boogie, Hollywood Swinging and Funky Stuff), disco floor-fillers and the odd schmaltzy ballad - not exactly what you’d expect the typical Van Halen would want to hear.
This being the case, it’s no surprise that one of Roth’s ‘associates’ had their doubts. “You’ve been smoking wack - Kool & the Gang?’” Bell claims that they said to Roth, but the singer was adamant. “David said, ‘Yeah, Kool & the Gang. I just saw them rock the rockers.’”
And so it came to pass that, in 2012, the two bands went out on the road together. Not only that, but the tour was a success, and Roth would later tell Bell why he always thought that it would work out.
His theory was that both bands had large female audiences, and songs that they would like. “[Roth] said, ‘We have the song Jump and you came up with Celebration - let’s go out and have a party,’” Bell recalls. “We ended up doing 48 shows, throughout America and also up in Canada.”
Elsewhere in the interview, Bell discusses the issue of sampling. Specifically, Will Smith’s use of elements of 1974 Kool & The Gang track Summer Madness in his 1991 song Summertime (credited to J Jazzy Jeff & the Fresh Prince). “He really didn’t change the track that much, he just rapped over the top of it,” he says.
Kool & the Gang are, famously, one of the most sampled acts of all time. Bell doesn’t seem to have a problem with this, so long as he and his colleagues are appropriately compensated.
“At one time they wouldn’t pay - we had to get people on the sample patrol,” he says, before crediting Joe Biden for passing legislation during his presidency that helps with that.
“Now we’re getting paid,” he confirms.
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