Q&A: Cameo's Larry Blackmon reflects on his nearly 50-year career ahead of Columbus show

If you find yourself Downtown Saturday, you may catch an earful of grooves from some of the finest funk bands in history.

Cameo, The S.O.S. Band and Zapp will perform at 614 Funk Fest at the Columbus Commons, 160 S. High St., beginning at 4 p.m. Tickets, which start at $50, are available at 614funkfest.eventbrite.com.

Produced by Fame Productions, the event benefits the 22nd Foundation, which introduces low-opportunity youth to a healthy lifestyle through tennis and other sports.

Headliner Cameo will celebrate its 50th anniversary next year. Most known for its 1980s hits "Word Up!" and "Candy," the Grammy-nominated band has produced a robust repertoire of diverse styles and experimentation. Founder and frontman Larry Blackmon spoke to the Dispatch about the group's long career in a recent interview.

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Question: Sometimes, when I'm listening to records from artists that I grew up with, there's this sadness that hits me, because even if the artist is still out there and doing their thing, I know there are songs I'll never get to hear live. While you obviously have to play the hits in your sets, do you ever miss playing the songs that people may have let slip off their minds?

Larry Blackmon: Not at all, because the challenge is you have but so much time onstage, and you try to do a list that's comprehensive, so that you try to accommodate the expectations of your audience. It makes it hard when you've been together as long as we have, and have done so many songs, so I don't think it's possible to do every song everyone in the audience would want to hear, because our audience varies in age and commitment.

Q. Are you ever tempted to throw ‘Post Mortem’ in the set list, though?

Blackmon: Never. Listen, I love ‘Post Mortem.’ These songs are like children, you know what I mean? I've learned my lesson by asking that question … ‘what song would you like to hear?’ And I tell you, there is no way to do every song. … We understand better than most groups—or we'd like to think so—that we are accommodating the majority of (our) audience.

Q. Prior to the ‘80s, Black musicians, particularly funk musicians, had to be world-class players across genres to create that gumbo that is funk. To be a good funk band back in like ‘77 or ‘80, you had to be hip to a lot of musical styles to compose and perform some of that music. Where was all this learning happening, and how were these cats able to throw down on so many styles?

Blackmon: Well, for us, it's not as hard because we are a funk band, (but) I would find it very hard for an act having different styles to accommodate everyone. We tried not to do a calypso song. … If we were to break into a reggae song, we wouldn't do it more than, at the most, two minutes, because we know that very few people came to hear just that. And you have to take that into consideration when you're putting together the repertoire.

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Q. Cameo in the ‘70s, was very soulful and funky, and as soon as the ‘80s hit, the music got a little more aggressive. Cameo always seemed to carry just a little bit of menace, like a little something dark around the edges, these spooky chords, these harsh sound effects—lots of references to being mentally ill.

Blackmon: That's because we were mentally ill (laughs). That’s easy.

Q. Like, ‘I'll Be With You’ and ‘I Want You,’—they have these lovely sentiments, but there are like these heavy, dark funk things going on. And so, by the time you get to ‘Alligator Woman,’ the music took on this hard weirdness, but it didn't lose its funk under the experimentation. Is that an intentional effect?

Blackmon: No, it's progression. It's evolution. It's the natural things that happen with a band when you've been together as long as we have. We don't say, ‘Let's make this dark’ or whatever. But if we like the feeling that it evokes, we'll stay with it. And what makes us who we are is what we do. And that has never been difficult for us when it comes to live music. We loved stretching and taking things to where we felt it needed to go.

Q. I have to ask about slow jams, of course. Cameo has enough to fill a compilation by itself, which it did. And your ballads always seem to ground the album. Was there a logic there? Did every album have to have a ballad no matter what was going on?

Blackmon: We wanted to do songs that were impactful, and we take pride in you listening to a song (and) the first 90 seconds of that song puts you in the mood of what you were going to get for the rest of the song. We had to do songs that played on the radio, and we did not want a person to have to sit there and listen for two minutes before they got to know what they liked about the song. … You walk through the door of a place that you're visiting because you're curious. And you look around and you get the feel of the place and you say, ‘Oh, I like this,’ and you stay there, or you turn around and leave. So, when it comes to the songs, we wanted our audience to know that what they spent their hard-earned money on, they got. We wanted to make an impression, and one that lasted, one that made sense.

Q. So, it's 2023. It's been 49 years of Cameo.

Blackmon: How about that? We didn't sit around and look at our calendars and say, ‘Man, we've been together 49 years.’ Life moves you. And having done this for more than half of the time we've been alive, it becomes something that always moved us. And that's why we're still here. That’s the glue that holds us together, the fact we've been together for so long and in different configurations. And it's been a hell of a journey.

And it's fun going different places musically. And then you hear or you are moved by a particular genre of music, and you feel you have a right to express that in your way. If Cameo was doing this, or if Cameo was doing that, how would that feel? How would it flow?

Q. Outside of doing live shows, what does the work of Cameo look like going into its 50th year? Are you good on doing full albums at this point? Is it just like a singles game these days? Do you even feel like putting out new Cameo music?

Blackmon: How could you not feel like putting out music if that's what you do and you do that for a living? I'm sure there might have been people that maybe felt that way, and they're doing whatever they're doing now as a result. But for me, it's always been (that) you’re motivated by the fact that people enjoyed certain things and the experiment, and what you can express in your way that will continue to interest people. … Like ‘Alligator Woman.’ I had no idea it would be something that so many people enjoyed during that time. And our cover of Elvis Presley’s ‘Can't Help Falling in Love.’ We enjoyed the fact that our audience enjoyed that.

Q. So, I came down on 'Flirt' as my favorite song after much indecision, because it's just doing so many things at the same time. It's got the most ear candy. There's not a second when something isn't jumping into the fray. Guitars, keyboard, stabs, offbeat scales, percussive vocals, a bass with hiccups, all of that. So, on an album that already features the song 'Alligator Woman,' which is itself a trip, how did 'Flirt' happen?

Blackmon: That song came together on its own. When you're rehearsing, that kind of song becomes what it becomes by the individuals. There's always a structure. And once you establish that structure, then you work with it, and then people experiment. And that's how that song happened.

Q. It sounds like a song that happened in a jam.

Blackmon: Yes. You experiment with the crescendos and the decrescendos. And as the instruments evolved, you could do certain things with instruments that you didn't have access to prior. It becomes interesting. And then you sit back and say, 'Yeah, that worked.'

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This article originally appeared on The Columbus Dispatch: Cameo's Larry Blackmon to play 614 Funk Fest in Columbus