#Mother's Finest #funk rock #hard rock #R&B #funk metal #soul #1970s
Lemmy named his band Bastard before he decided on Motörhead. Lars Ulrich thought Thunderfuck was the way to go, before taking the name of his friend’s fanzine titled Metallica. And as Joyce ‘Baby Jean’ Kennedy recalls, the greatest of all funk rock bands once considered calling themselves The Motherfuckers. “We wanted to say that,” she says, laughing, “but we couldn’t have gotten away with it. So we just took the ‘MF’ and became Mother’s Finest.”
With a multi-racial line-up and a sound described as ‘Sly And The Family Stone-meets-Led Zeppelin’ – a combustible mix of soul power and hard-rock muscle – Mother’s Finest emerged in the early 70s as a band on a mission. As Kennedy puts it: “We wanted to make music that anybody could enjoy. We wanted to entertain and to be provocative, to give people food for thought. It was soulful, spiritual rock’n’roll, sexy and heavy with guitar. We were encompassing all of those things.”
There were multi-racial groups and black rock stars before them – Sly And The Family Stone and Jimi Hendrix being the most significant. But “our band was predominately black”, Kennedy says. In the definitive Mother’s Finest line-up, fronted by Kennedy and her husband Glenn ‘Doc’ Murdock, and featuring Jerry ‘Wyzard’ Seay on bass and Mike Keck on keyboards, the white members were drummer Barry ‘B.B. Queen’ Borden and guitarist Gary Moore, whose nickname ‘Moses Mo’, would distinguish him from the Irish guitar hero. It was with this line-up that the band made their reputation as a fearsome live act, and reached a creative peak between ’76 and ’77 with two albums produced by Tom Werman, who was then working with Ted Nugent and Cheap Trick.
But for Mother’s Finest the big breakthrough never came. Which, Kennedy says, was a mystery to Werman. “Tom always wondered why this was one band he produced where it never happened on a huge level.” She says that from the band’s perspective, with a mixture of pride and fatalism: “We had all the things that would make it work, but for some reason the spheres didn’t see it that way.” As she looks back on the glory days of a band she still leads, alongside Doc and Moses Mo – a band whose influence has carried over the decades in the music of Prince, Living Colour, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Lenny Kravitz, Dan Reed Network and more – she accepts that what made Mother’s Finest unique was also what made them a hard sell in what was a less enlightened era. “The band was multi-racial, and that was rare,” she says. “Especially doing rock music with two people of colour out front. It was a beautiful thing. But back then nobody really knew how to make it work within the bureaucracy of the music industry. I just think that this band was a little bit before its time.” From: https://www.loudersound.com/features/mothers-finest-we-were-paving-the-way-for-things-to-happen-in-music-but-we-didnt-know-it
Mother's Finest is a funk rock band founded in Atlanta, Georgia by the singer couple Joyce Kennedy and Glenn Murdock in the early seventies. Mother's Finest was one of the "first real rock bands with both black and white members". Their music was a blend of funky rhythm, heavy guitars and expressive rock singing. Their debut album Mother's Finest from 1976 today is a rare collector's piece and contains the ironic song "Niggizz Can't Sang Rock & Roll" (they were criticized for it by an important reverend and had to suspend it from their live concerts). In 1978 they were guests on the German broadcast "Rockpalast" and with one concert (recently reedited in Europe as the DVD Mother's Finest - At Rockpalast) they gathered cult status in Europe which lasts until today. In the late seventies they produced more soul-oriented albums and at the beginning of the eighties some heavy rock on the album “Iron Age”. In the nineties they were back with "Black radio won't play this record", a funk metal album, and their last CD was "Meta-funk'n-physical" from 2004 which is more hip hop and electronic beats oriented. From: https://www.last.fm/music/Mother%27s+Finest/+wiki
