Firmament Record
This month’s totem of power for the worthy – Chicago future-funk faster than a speeding bullet.
Captain Sky The Adventures Of Captain Sky AVI, 1978
AT SPIRITED US indie AVI Records, Liberace wasn’t the only cape-wearing artiste promoting a larger-than-life fantasy in 1978. Daryl Cameron, a singer, writer, producer and arranger from southside Chicago, had also joined the LA-based label’s roster. He had, he said, “entered the phone booth of his mind,” and emerged in comic book costume to become his crime-fighting alter-ego Captain Sky.
“There weren’t enough black superheroes back then,” the 64-year-old tells MOJO today. “So Captain Sky came to the rescue!”
Born in 1957, Cameron’s first loves were Batman and James Brown. He first saw the latter perform live at Chicago’s Soldier Field football stadium when he was 13. “I was sat right at the front and I couldn’t believe my eyes and ears,” he says rhapsodically. “Here was the roots of funk, everything grew from it, George Clinton, Bootsy Collins, the Ohio Players, I mean everything.”
The same year he got his first guitar and learnt by playing along to the R&B sounds he heard on radio station WVON, before honing his craft in a series of soul outfits – “the Bionic
Band, Southside Movement… we never recorded but we were popular in the city, at the clubs and block parties.”
In early 1978 he hooked up with Eddie Thomas, Curtis Mayfield’s former partner at Curtom. “[Daryl] had his own very distinct ideas about what he wanted to do as a solo artist,” Thomas said in 2020. “He was very community minded. He wanted to put Chicago on the funk map.”
“I told him about my Captain Sky concept, how he was a musical hero that people could look up to and be proud of,” says Cameron. “‘Captain’ because he stands for authority – whatever I came up with had to have a power and punch to it – and ‘Sky’, because of the unlimited possibilities out there. He said, ‘I think you’ve got a hit son.’”
The five songs that make up his debut, The Adventures Of…, were written in his bedroom and sketched out from the basslines upwards. Rehearsals, he says, were “focused. I was dedicated. I wanted everything worked out before going into the studio. Finding the right musicians was key to getting it done right. They were phenomenal players, they knew exactly what they needed to do and they put all their personality into the music.”
Thomas, meanwhile, signed Cameron to AVI and, with his parents footing the $5,000 studio bill, Cameron holed up in former American Breed singer Gar y Loizzo’s Pumpkin Recording Studios. Cameron remembers it being made at home in the intimate, small space, which was essentially Loizzo’s garage. They recorded piecemeal over eight weeks, as his group pledged allegiance to the funk aesthetic with technically precise but appealingly loose extended jams. The centrepieces, Super Sporm and Wonder Worm, were both super-energised pieces executed with maximum joie de vivre. The former is an explosive 13-minute-plus blast of intergalactic groove, sweet and sticky bass, bubbling synth and cheeky innuendo: it grew, says Cameron, from two colliding dance moves popular in the clubs: “half the Spank, half the Worm – hence, the Sporm!”
Meanwhile, Wonder Worm is a pulsating space odyssey with rubberised vocals which starred a wriggling invertebrate with extraterrestrial powers. Cameron, dressed up in white jumpsuit and tasselled cape and wielding a circular silver shield, performed it on US TV music show Soul Train in 1979. “You knew you’d made it when [host] Don Cornelius invited you to perform,” he says. “It was a cosmic experience.”
The album cover for The Adventures
Of… is suitably cosmic too, featuring an illustration devised by Cameron of Captain Sky flying above the Chicago skyline on a gold record. The Adventures… never made gold status, but to Cameron’s satisfaction, it did reach Number 30 in the US black music chart. “That meant my message of love and empowerment was getting out there on to the street,” he says. His futuristic Afro-funk groove also had a considerable impact on early hip-hop, earning him a shout-out on the Sugar Hill Gang’s landmark Rapper’s Delight: his sounds would later be sampled by Afrika Bambaataa, Public Enemy, Boogie Down Productions and more.
1979’s Pop Goes The Captain added horns, strings and percussion to the mix, though further output after 1980’s Concerned Party
#1 was halted through drug misuse. “That whole ’70s snowstorm caught up with me,” says Cameron.
But Captain Sky would soar again. Cameron later got clean and began working as a recovery support specialist at a Chicago hospital. He also set up his own not-for-profit mentoring and leadership programme for at-risk African-American men. Now he’s preparing a series of remastered reissues to accompany 2020’s comeback,
The Whole 9. “I see it as giving back,” he says. “I’m still touched by how many people I connected with and inspired, and I want to make people feel good about themselves. Captain Sky gave me that power. I’m passing it on.”
Thanks to Aaron Cohen
“There weren’t enough black superheroes back then.” DARYL ‘CAPTAIN SKY’ CAMERON