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Bob Boyer
Look What You’ve Done for Me / We Got the Power - 7"
Hit - 1972
Michael Panontin
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Bobby Boyer may be the farthest thing from a household name these days, and this obscure single is probably of interest to soul completists only. But he was once one-half of a pioneering rap duo known as, with slight variations, Bobby & Demo. Together with his fellow Detroit-area transplant Demo Cates, the pair released a string of 12-inch singles at the tail end of 1980 that are among the first rap records ever to come out of this country.
Boyer was actually born in Windsor. But while he was in the third grade, his family shifted across the border to Detroit, settling in the city's north end. There, the precocious young Boyer started taking trumpet lessons and by age eight was singing in a group with his older brother. By the time he reached junior high, he had formed a quartet that was performing at talent shows, birthday parties and backyard summer gatherings.
He enrolled at the massive Northern High School on Woodward Avenue, a school whose list of musical alumni included the likes of jazz pianist Tommy Flanagan, singers Smokey Robinson and Aretha Franklin, and the Dramatics' co-founder Ron Banks. While there, Boyer expanded his group, known as the Original Pryme, to a seven-piece with an additional five-member backing chorus.
His friend Cates, meanwhile, was busy playing sax with the Fabulous Counts, a.k.a. the Counts, who issued a few funk LPs in their time, including the blistering 1971 set, What's Up Front That - Counts, which was partly recorded in Toronto. Cates fell in love with the city and decided to move there.
As did Boyer.
He was just 17 years old when he arrived in Toronto, but Boyer managed to find work right away. He played the usual bar circuit, but it wasn't long before the young singer scored a part in the much-publicized CBC-TV production The Black Hallelujah - "It's soul and jazz and rock and gospel; it's a happening and it will explode in color," gushed the Ottawa Citizen. It was broadcast on April 9th (Good Friday) 1971 and, thanks to CBC's budget and professionalism back then, featured music and lyrics by Russ Little and Norman Symonds.
Boyer then found himself in Art Snider's Sound Canada studio recording a couple of tracks for a new label that Snider was launching. Snider must have been beaming with confidence to name the imprint Hit Records. The fact that his first three artists were complete unknowns didn't stop him from releasing the singles simultaneously and then taking out a full-page ad in RPM magazine to promote them.
Boyer's version of Al Green's 'Look What You Done for Me' was the third of those three records and came out in May '72, just a couple of months after Green's. It veers little from the silky original, with Boyer falling short of Green's mellifluous vocal, though not by much. Collectors, however, seem to be more interested in what's on the back side. Boyer's 'We Got the Power' is funky and topical. He seems to have taken a page out of the Gil Scott-Heron songbook, with lyrics that begin with "It's a pretty bad situation / 'cuz the world today is in desperation". The song is set atop a bed of piano, horns and backing vocals from the Tiaras, and while not without the occasional misfire, it is a potent single that certainly deserves a spin or two.
An ad for 'We Got the Power' at the time noted that he was "presently working on an album of his own, most of the songs being compositions written by Bob at the age of seventeen". What happened to that album is anyone's guess. And save for that brief foray into hip hop and the occasional credit, including a co-write on David Bendeth's 1979 jazz-funk classic 'Feel the Real', Boyer's career unfortunately never quite seemed to find its groove.
('We Got the Power' is still relatively cheap, with decent copies selling for under a hundred USDs these days.
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