"You Dropped A Bomb On Me" by THE GAP BAND

The Wilson Brothers took Greenwood, Archer and Pine Streets (and Tulsa's dark history) all over the world. [Summer of '82 pt. 4]

I won't forget what you done to me

Greenwood, Archer, and Pine — Charlie, Robert, and Ronnie Wilson were teenagers when they named their band after those streets in the heart of the historic Greenwood neighborhood in Tulsa, OK. Greenwood Avenue was important because it’s one of the few Tulsa streets that did not run through its Black neighborhood to the other side of town. In the early 20th century, the avenue was lined with doctors’ and lawyers’ offices, the center of a thriving community whose economic vitality earned the name the Black Wall Street. The Tulsa race massacre of 1921 burned it to the ground. 

Greenwood Ave. did not cross into white neighborhoods, but the Wilsons did. Leon Russell’s The Church studio was a couple miles away from the actual church where the Wilsons’ Pentecostal minister father preached and their mother, the church organist, hosted gospel concerts. Russell was a major figure in the Tulsa sound, a regional gumbo of blues, rockabilly and Louisiana swamp rock, before striking out to Los Angeles, where he earned a spot among the cadre of ace session musicians known as The Wrecking Crew¹. Back in Tulsa after a run as the lead guitarist, pianist, and musical director for Joe Cocker’s 1970 Mad Dogs and Englishmen tour,² he bought properties around Tulsa, including the old church that would become his recording studio. He signed The Gap Band, as they came to be known after a promoter’s abbreviation for the Greenwood, Archer and Pine Band³ made it onto a show poster, to his Shelter Records and hired the versatile Wilsons to back him on his 1974 country-jazz album, Stop All That Jazz. 

“You Dropped A Bomb On Me” comes from Gap Band IV, which is actually the fifth in their series of self-titled albums. The Wilsons released albums called The Gap Band both for Russell’s Shelter Records (1977) and another for Total Experience Records (1979) after they moved west to work with Los Angeles producer Lonnie Simmons. The label shared a name with the popular club Simmons owned in L.A.’s Crenshaw District, and along with songwriting help, Simmons gave the Wilsons a perspective on what would rock a dancefloor. Which is how a band that had aspired to the sophistication of Earth, Wind and Fire came to embrace throbbing keyboard bass and gimmicky sound effects. 

There are two basslines on “You Dropped A Bomb On Me,” Robert Wilson’s bass guitar groove of the sort that earned him the nickname Godfather of the Bass, and the pulse of brother Ronnie’s Mini Moog. Both of these owe to Parliament-Funkadelic. Bootsy Collins is a cousin to the Wilsons, and while Robert doesn’t play with Bootsy’s ineffable flash⁴, he had the same arsenal of voicings and thumb slaps. For Robert, the bass was all about setting the mood. He could make it sing as on the intro to “Shake” or keep it deep in the pocket, driving a song on his back without breaking a sweat.  

That keyboard bass, however, comes straight from Bernie Worrell, who famously daisy-chained Mini-Moogs for the bassline on Parliament’s 1978 R&B chart-topper “Flashlight.” The floor-shaking sub-bass sound spread quickly through funk into synth pop and beyond. Robert’s bassline gives this song its R&B swing; that pitch-bent, distorted low end brings the electro funk that got people hyped in the clubs. 

Charlie Wilson said, “We go down to the clubs like it was homework and watch out for what the kids are getting off on. It might be a run of notes or a sense of breakdown in the rhythm that makes ’em holler. We want that kind of excitement.” 

Sound effects in music reached an apotheosis in the ‘80s, both in the theatricality of Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” and the cutting pioneered by hip-hop DJs (with a sprinkling of William S. Burroughs tape cut-ups from the avant garde). But like the price of watery cocktails, sound effects make the most sense in a club, giving instant recognition to a song. A mixer had already added the sound of a revving engine and screeching tires to “Burn Rubber” on Gap Band III and from there it kind of became their thing — a crowing rooster begins “Early In the Morning;”⁵ “Party Train” begins with the chugging of a steam engine. That whistling bomb-drop sound effect on “Dropped A Bomb On Me” is the most effective, though, cutting through the low fuzz of the Mini Moog bass line and any ambient noise and clatter in a club to announce a banger of a track. 

You were my thrills, you were my pills

You dropped a bomb on me

You turn me out, you turn me on

You turned me loose then you turned me wrong

The nuclear threat of the Cold War was a darkly ironic party trope in the ‘80s — Prince’s “1999” and Trouble Funk’s “Drop The Bomb” were also each released in 1982 — and the idea of “the bomb” evolved into meaning “great” in the new millennium. While it’s clear that the lyrics in “You Dropped A Bomb On Me” refer to emotional devastation (a sexy one at that, given Charlie’s husky tenor), it feels like an odd choice for a band with explicit connections to the site of the 1921 Tulsa race massacre, which included an aerial bombardment from crop duster planes. Charlie Wilson, for one, was happy for that confusion; drawing attention to a massacre missing from high school history textbooks was always a goal since he and his brothers started a band together.  

"We knew we were going to go all over the world — at least I did," Charlie told ABC News, explaining that the band would "have to talk about that, and where the name came from" to many interviewers who had never heard of the race massacre that killed hundreds of people and burned 1,250 homes in an effort to erase years of Black success. That their music never directly spoke to this foundational element of the Gap Band was also intentional. Charlie knew a witness to the massacre, Lucille Figures, who made him to promise to not share any of the details she told him of America’s deadliest act of domestic terrorism until after she died. The Wilsons’ mission would be covert one. 

“She told me a lot of things. But she made me promise, ‘Don't ever speak about what I told you until I'm gone’,” Wilson said in an ABC interview on the 100th anniversary of the attack. “She watched people die and getting shot. So, she was to never speak about it. They kept it quiet, so they would be protected in some way.” 

Lucille Figures, one of the last known survivors of the Tulsa race massacre, died in 2013 at 104. 

10 Song Playlist

Technically it’s just nine songs, since one of them is the “You Dropped A Bomb On Me” 12” remix.

Thank You

Thanks for coming along on this jaunt through the summer of 1982. I have one more in the works, but there are any others from that fertile year on your mind, please let me know.

1. Some of the songs on which Russell performs: "Surf City" by Jan & Dean, "Mr. Tambourine Man" by The Byrds, "Help Me, Rhonda" by The Beach Boys, "When Somebody Loves You" by Frank Sinatra, "Da Doo Ron Ron" by The Crystals, and "Danke Shoen" by Wayne Newton.

Russell is also in the house band for the T.A.M.I. Show, a two-day concert filmed for theatrical distribution. It’s worth seeing the intensity of James Brown’s performance after learning that he would not be headlining and the shaken look on Mick Jagger’s face when the Stones followed him. (Jagger says he wasn’t ready crap himself because of course he does.)

2. That’s Russell, looking like a cartoon wizard, on piano in the video linked above.

3. Hence the initial spelling of The GAP Band for a while.

4. “Gash, Gash, Gash,” one of the songs on every album where they’d let Robert do whatever he wanted, is their P-Funkiest song, complete with the Sir Nose D Voidoffunk-style vocal.

5. This is my favorite Gap Band song because it’s a good modern soul song done up in the electro funk of the era. Thanks for asking.