Chartsweep 1984: The Pointer Sisters - Automatic
by Minimal
After nearly ten years together, it seemed like the Pointer Sisters were about to die out with the '70s. Starting with Anita, Bonnie, and June Pointer in 1969, then adding big sister Ruth in 1972, the R&B quartet had an almost textbook origin. The daughters of a reverend, weaned on gospel and church choirs, and sequestered from both the sinful blues and—that ol' son of a bitch—rock and roll. Of course, that only lasted until they played the best trick in the book—spend the night at your friend's place and take advantage of their cooler (or more oblivious) parents. American Bandstand and Ed Sullivan took care of the rest.
The sisters showed themselves to be shapeshifters, moving between blues, soul, and funk (all under the R&B umbrella), all underwritten by their bread and butter mix of swing jazz and crystalline pop harmonies. Their self-titled debut is instructive in this regard, as the group's early albums followed this informal formula. Lead and/or close with lengthy, raunchy rips of funk and blues, and stuff the middle with a combo of mid-tempo vocal jazz, boogie-woogie blues, and medleys straight out of a jazz revue. You could move from sultry club crooning, to a shuffling swagger, to frantic double-time scatting, sometimes all within a single song. One of their greatest moments of versatility featured the sisters figuratively donning ten gallon hats in 1974's "Fairytale", complete with a blue sky steel guitar and cantering bass, mashed up with an orchestral sweep and the quartet's thick wall of harmonies. They would be rewarded with a sort of country and western triple crown: the first appearance by an African-American group at the Grand Ole Opry, a grammy for the best country vocal performance by a duo or group (also the first ever to be awarded to an all-female group), and a washed-up Elvis covering their song in all his late era, hysterical glory.
Six singles in the Billboard Hot 100, a number one on the R&B charts, consistently charting albums—and yet, the group nearly ran aground in 1977. Following 1975's Steppin', June would leave the group after a nervous breakdown caused by ongoing drug and alcohol issues. Their next effort was so delayed that a full year would pass after the recording sessions before it was released with a wet-thud. Put out almost as an afterthought late in the year, 1977's Having a Party lost whatever momentum the sisters had built. June's contributions weren't quite missed, but only because all jazz and blues influences were completely thrown out. It seemed that with the success of Steppin', which had leaned more heavily into funk and Hayes-esque soul with excellent results, the decision was made to go whole hog in that direction. Having a Party is the first time the sisters present a collection of fully contemporary music, and while everything is as prim and polished as any of their other releases, it comes across as an album of deep cuts at best, something for the R&B heads to pull out when a certain mood strikes.
This record shouldn't be the kind of affair to sink a career. However, for a group that previously churned out three albums in as many years, disappearing for a full year only to return with a record indistinguishable from the great mass of late seventies R&B was never going to bring legitimate commercial success. The delayed release also cost the sisters a chance to get in early on that other '70s phenomenon burning up the charts; by the time Having a Party limped out, disco was in full effect—the release of Saturday Night Fever was only a month later. Handcuffed during the album cycle, the group sat out while other R&B artists mined the mirrored ball for gold. Perhaps smelling blood in the water, Bonnie would leave as the calendar turned for her own solo career. Down two members in three years, mismanaged into a potential dead-end by their label, and with their own families looming large for the remaining two (Ruth would give birth to her second daughter at the beginning of 1978) both sisters agreed to take a step back from music.
Ruth and Anita's last ditch attempt at relevance involved one of the most useful tools on pop's shelf: reinvention. While their music began drifting away from the jazz age in Steppin', the sisters still maintained their throwback image with clothes ripped straight from the racks of thrift stores. The dresses and wide brimmed hats from the '40s (on full display for their first album's cover) may have been a real novelty among the tie-dye, denim, and leather, by 1977 it was straight up confusing without the musical output to match. As the music went, so followed the fashion; vintage was out, contemporary was in. Also out was their old label, Blue Thumb Records, which folded in 1979 with Having a Party among its last releases. Enter producer Richard Perry, a man responsible for projects as varied as Captain Beefheart's Safe as Milk and Ringo Starr's solo debut. Looking to start his own pet label to foster talent on the side, Ruth and Anita managed to be the first to negotiate a deal. A new image, a new label—the final ingredient would ironically be something old and familiar. Working on their next release under Perry, June was invited into the studio to lay down vocals for their cover of Sly Stone's "Everybody is a Star'', only to be persuaded to return to the group full time. With the sisters, it remained a family affair.
The time spent with Planet Records resulted in the group's best commercial performance to date. Backed by a willingness to dive deeper into rock, disco, and the multi-faceted dance music birthed by disco's cratering, they would score three top five hits in the span of four years. By 1982, every single the Pointer Sisters released found its way into the charts. When Break Out dropped in late 1983, the sisters were decidedly grossed out by the name (Ruth recalls the trio being reminded of a rash). Regardless, it was as succinct a description of what followed in 1984 as you could muster, and it began on the back of "Automatic".
In a sense, "Automatic'' is a perfect fusion of two different decades of club culture; a combination of the liquid grooves of funk and disco with the eighties technological suite. Chicken-scratch guitars meet disco's standard four-on-the-floor beat programmed via drum machine. The bass line's minimal funk carries that unmistakable Minimoog "wub" and instead of a full orchestral suite, the chorus pops with delirious synths that could have come straight from The Human League. When the bridge rumbles around, those same synths warp themselves into a playful kind of psychedelic funk. Lyrically, the song takes on a very eighties pretension, with love turning the narrator into a robot on the fritz. Ruth's contralto delivery is what really elevates this song, turning a simple passion play into an androgenous affair that mirrored the fashionable ambiguity in the clubs. Her verses are end stopped by a twinkling synth melody that imparts a beautiful sense of wonder and curiosity. Naturally, the Pointer Sisters' signature close harmonies blow the chorus wide open, ending with the trio moaning the track's title, circuitry melting down with desire. I dare you to not crack a smile when that deep voice responds to the sisters' call, like George Clinton himself is yucking it up over that sexy, stuttery guitar.
Although it was the second single released from Break Out, it's not entirely clear that Perry and the sisters originally intended on releasing "Automatic" at all. For an album that was bursting with slick, post-disco grooves, bolstered by synths and emulators alike, Perry chose "I Need You" as the lead single to simply gain traction on R&B radio. A mid-tempo ballad with traces of '70s soul and funk, the track's more easily identifiable with the late evening, at home parent jams of adult contemporary than anything you'd hear on a night out in the city. Yes, it did end up higher on the R&B charts than any of their singles since 1981, but it was a surprisingly conservative move for such a high energy album (even more so in light of what they released in 1984). The next single due up was the memorable "Jump (For My Love)", a song actually characteristic of the album, but interest was bubbling elsewhere. Through and through a song for the dancefloor, people were legitimately responding to "Automatic". If you went out clubbing in the winter of '83/'84, I guarantee that you heard this song—an album cut, no less!—at some point during the night.
It doesn't take genius to see when you've got success cooking right in front of you. "Automatic" was released in short order in mid January and all parties were rewarded handsomely: the song was glued to the Billboard Hot 100 for twenty weeks, peaking within the top five in the US and UK. The Pointer Sisters had solid gold hits in the past, but this was different. The sisters were having a moment. The next three singles released in 1984, "Jump (For My Love)", "I'm So Excited", and "Neutron Dance'' dominated commercially in the same way, with the latter even riding piggyback on those other cultural juggernauts, Eddie Murphy and Beverly Hills Cop.
These three songs were full blown pop hits, perhaps performing even better commerically than "Automatic". But therein lies the key difference. These are expertly performed pop songs. "Automatic" is a multi-genre monster, rooted as much in the body-shaking seventies as it was in the fresh sounds of the eighties. Somehow, this mash-up makes the song more definitive of the time and place, more integral to our collective remembrance of that era. I can only imagine how many millenials, like myself, were introduced to this song because of a video game looking to curate that exact essence. Grand Theft Auto: Vice City attempted to recreate the most eighties experience you could imagine: a Miami-lookalike city set in 1986, awash with drugs and neon, and complete with a soundtrack tailored with period-perfect tunes. It's no wonder that the most popular in-game nightclub would feature this tune playing while NPCs blissfully dance over and over again, stuck on automatic. This was a period that, if only for a year, the Pointer Sisters ruled.