Song of the Day 7/6: The Floaters, “Float On”
This out-of-left-field hit was one of the songs of the summer in 1977, mostly because of its slow-jam groove, not its silly lyrical conceit. I can’t be sure, but this song could have inspired Tim Meadows’ SNL sketches as Leon Phelps, the Ladies’ Man. It hit No. 2 on the Hot 100 and spent six weeks at No. 1 on the soul singles chart. It also hit No. 1 in England.
A little background for the kidz: At the time, personal ads had emerged from the grubby back pages of alternative publications and gone mainstream, as astrology had done in the ’60s. The former trend saw its popular-music apotheosis in “Escape,” the piña colada song, but this is the only one that combined the two. Each verse is structured like a brief personal ad: name, star sign, and what he’s looking for in a woman — one he can take “to love land.” The song cannot be parodied because it already sounds like one but hey, that groove! Pretty good dance steps, too.
The song appears as an 11+ minute opening track on the Floaters’ debut LP, and a single version was edited down from it. It lops off the first five minutes of the album track, a portion that amounts to an instrumental version with backing vocals (in an earlier time it would have been the B-side), and inexplicably also trims the second half of each singer’s verse, which saves all of about 12 seconds. This TV performance cuts the instrumental intro, but employs the full verses.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HZklwTGZutc
The Floaters emerged from an earlier group, the Detroit Emeralds, that had a couple of hits earlier in the ’70s. The song came to group member James Mitchell, who doesn’t get a verse, in a dream; like Keith Richards with “Satisfaction,” he jumped out of bed and recorded it. Here’s the long version.
The band broke up in 1980 and members went their separate ways. The most successful was Charles Clark, who went on to a long career in gospel music. Larry Cunningham, who loved a woman who loved everything and everybody, was a fixture on the Detroit soul scene and was widely mourned there when he died in 2019.
In the early ’90s Cadbury used the song and claymation to publicize its creme eggs in Great Britain with this advert.
