Video: Chicago Record Label Rediscovers An '80s Disco Band
By Mae Rice in Arts & Entertainment on Feb 22, 2016 9:24PM
Universal Togetherness Band from Simon Brubaker on Vimeo.
For just a few years in the late '70s and early '80s, a little-known disco group romped through Chicago's South Side, getting disco-era nightclub goers dancing to their unusual music.
In the short film above, local filmmaker Simon Brubaker chronicles the rediscovery of the group, Universal Togetherness Band, and their lost disco album, recently released by Chicago label The Numero Group.
That release, which the label calls “permutations of soul, jazz-fusion, new wave, and disco,” began when Numero’s Jon Kirby first heard the band on The Chicago Party, a disco-era TV show filmed in a South Side nightclub.
The show had a format akin to Saturday Night Live, and the band’s vintage performances caught Kirby’s eye thanks to the “stompin’ bass drum,” as Kirby puts it in the film (as well as, probably, members’ willingness to wear head-to-toe red).
Kirby Googled the head of the band, Andre Gibson, and found him living just outside Chicago in Dolton, IL. The film takes the viewer inside Gibson’s home, which has bright yellow walls, framed photos of his daughters hung everywhere—and a closet packed with Universal Togetherness Band outfits.
“My mom made all of this stuff,” he exclaims, holding up a pearlescent vest with “UTB” embroidered on it.
His home is an absolute vault of Universal Togetherness memorabilia, from sheet music to photos. “In my heart, I felt like this was going to be be something that was valuable,” he says in the film.
It’s worth a watch, especially for the moment where Gibson says: “If my daughters, who are 19, can enjoy what I did when I was 19? That speaks for itself.”
You can also buy the album on vinyl, CD, MP3, and FLAC formats, all through Numero. It’s made up of songs the band tracked in Chicago at Columbia College between 1979 and 1982. Apparently, they recorded a lot of material, almost unheard of given that era’s recording technology—and this is the best of it.