George Mccrae Rock You Baby

Hometown Interview | George McCrae

By Scott Benarde

“That’s it right there,” says singer George McCrae, who unwittingly helped launch disco 25 years ago. The West Palm Beach native is downtown pointing to the building where he and singer Gwen McCrae, then his wife, got their first big break–years before his dance anthem Rock Your Baby catapulted to the top of the charts. Today, the place is a hip-hop club called Chino’s. But in 1968 the building at 114 Narcissus St. was a striptease club called the Kandy Bar– the first white club to hire the duo. The McCrae’s joined the white house band, Apollo Myth, and performed two nightly sets of Motown and R&B hits six nights a week for $500 a week. It was “classy,” McCrae remembers, a room where all the top strip acts tantalized. “They teased, not like now where everything is taken off,” he says. The patrons were polite upper-and middle-class Palm Beachers whose idea of a wild time was dancing–” the police chief on down–beneath the psychedelic lights in the black-walled club.

The sunset Lounge in West Palm and Ebony in Riviera Beach were the hip black clubs back then. Sam Cooke, Sarah Vaughan, Count Basie and Duke Ellington had played there over the years. McCrae and his wife had played the Ebony earlier in 1968, opening for teenage Miami diva Betty Wright. But playing a white club in Palm Beach County, especially one frequented by members of the Kennedy family and other fun-seeking bluebloods from across the Intracostal, was almost unheard of for black entertainers.

McCrae earned extra pay sweeping out the club during the day. He laughs at that now. “I didn’t mind doing it,” he says, “because I’d find a lot of loose money cleaning up, $10 and $20 bills.” He also can laugh at the stardom that almost sank him so long ago. He didn’t handle his fame and money and girls very well. But instead of crashing and burning in a drug-and alcohol-addled haze, when George McCrae well, he simply picked himself up and walked away. Humility, common sense and a wise grandmother’s words saved him– and ultimately steered him back to what he lived for, music. George McCrae, who had worked for years for this, was getting nervous. Sure, he wanted a hit, but not a smash, not an era -defining classic, just a modest hit that would allow him to play small clubs until he grew old.

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