Rodney Brown, Pioneering ‘Funky Broadway’ Drummer, Dead at 78

Rodney Brown, drummer on 1967’s “Funky Broadway,” a Dyke & the Blazers classic and one of the first hit songs to use a variation on the word “funk” in its title, died May 17 of unknown causes in an unknown location. The lifelong Phoenix resident, who’d been the last surviving member of the band’s original lineup, was 78.

Brown’s distinctive skipped-beat syncopation on “Funky Broadway,” a track covered by many artists, most notably Wilson Pickett with a Billboard Hot 100 No. 8 hit later that year, turned out to be influential. Clyde Stubblefield employed a similar technique on James Brown’s “Funky Drummer,” released in 1970, which became a widely sampled breakbeat on numerous hip-hop classics.

“‘Funky Broadway’ started the funk beat that was heard around the world,” says Lucius Parr, a veteran Phoenix guitarist whose ’70s band, the Soul Keepers, featured Brown on drums. “‘Funky Broadway’ had a break where they gave Rodney this drumbeat solo — ‘wiggle your waist, baby, shake, shake, shake,’ all that stuff. It was just Dyke and the drummer.”

The original “Funky Broadway” single, split into two pieces, with “Part 1” on the A-side of the single and “Part 2” on the B-side, peaked at No. 65 on the Hot 100 in August 1967, as well as No. 17 on the R&B chart (now the Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs chart). The band’s independent label, Artco, struggled to break the song on the radio because programmers responded, “You can’t say ‘funk’ on the radio,” according to John P. Dixon, an Arizona music historian who helped found the Arizona Music and Entertainment Hall of Fame. DJs at white stations, at the time, associated the word with Black culture and avoided it: “It was just one of those words, they felt, as a rock ‘n’ roll radio station, they would have a hard time,” Dixon says. “People would get turned off by it.”

(Jazz tracks had used the word several times before “Funky Broadway,” including Horace Silver’s “Opus de Funk” in 1953, but these songs were never chart hits. Also, country singer and comedian Ray Stevens, who is white, had a No. 91 Hot 100 hit in 1966 with “Freddie Feelgood (And His Funky Little Five Piece Band).”)

Pickett’s version had the effect of desegregating the word, but tragically, the Blazers were never able to fully capitalize on the song’s success: Frontman Arlester “Dyke” Christian was shot to death in Phoenix in 1971. 

Influenced by James Brown and the Temptations, Rodney Brown first picked up drums after he was playing basketball in a park and happened to see a band playing nearby. His mother bought him a drum kit. Dyke & the Blazers’ saxophonist, Bernard Williams, invited him into the band, and his first gig with them was at a local Elks Club. “When we made the record, they gave me a drum solo,” Brown said in a 2004 interview for the Arizona Music and Entertainment Hall of Fame. “I’d only been playing six months when we made ‘Funky Broadway.’” 

After performing before large crowds on a 1967 tour — including a run at New York’s Apollo Theatre, where James Brown was in attendance, according to interviews with band members — the original lineup broke up. Christian convened a new version of the Blazers, which at one point included James Gadson, a prolific session drummer who appeared on songs by the Jackson 5, Paul McCartney, Herbie Hancock, Bill Withers and many others.

This Blazers iteration, including musicians who would go on to play with the Watts 103rd Street Rhythm Band and Earth, Wind & Fire, hit No. 4 on the R&B chart with “Let a Woman Be a Woman – Let a Man Be a Man” and No. 7 with “We Got More Soul,” both in 1969.

Rodney Brown played in bands sporadically after his Dyke & the Blazers experience. At the time of his death, he was working in real estate. “Funk started right here in the desert,” he said in 2004, “and we were part of the group that started it.”