Concert Review: KC & the Sunshine Band Live at the Atlantic City Ocean Casino and Resort!

KC Gifts His Fans with the Performance of a Lifetime

Let the  Sun shine: KC & the Sunshine Band live at the Atlantic City Ocean Casino and Resort.

A Concert Review by Phil Rot*

The word “dazzling” is thrown around a lot lately, but it’s the only word I could use to describe what concertgoers were treated to last night at the Atlantic City Ocean Casino and Resort. My mother and I had been waiting for years to see KC & the Sunshine Band live, and I can safely say that the wait was well worth it. From “Get Down Tonight” to “(Shake Shake Shake) Shake Your Booty,” Harry Wayne Kacey kept posteriers of all ages shaking til the early mornin’.

To give you a little background, KC & the Sunshine Band, the second album by the Disco Funk pioneers of the same name, was the soundtrack to my childhood. Although I was born too late to experience the magic of KC’s music in its heyday, my mother was not. She caught every KC show in town and was invited backstage by the band on multiple occasions. It was during these backstage affairs that my mother experienced the most insane, debauched and eroticly charged moments of her life. There was even a joke in the family that I was a “KC baby,” but mother swore she’d only ever slept with “some of” the horn section.

Needless to say, my mother’s experiences seemed to have “rubbed off” on me. While my friends rocked out to the sounds of Stone Temple Pilots and Nirvanna, I was pulling into the student parking lot with “I’m Your Boogie Man” blaring from the tape deck of my Town Car. If disco was dead, I had yet to get the memo.

Flash forward to May 2024: I’m driving down the AC Expressway, and there on the billboard I pass every day to work: “KC & the Sunshine Band Live at Ocean Casino!” The first thing I did after pulling into the county Assessor Office parking lot was get on my phone and order two VIP tickets to the band’s November performance. Thankfully, as if the disco gods had deemed it so, there were still plenty of tickets available.

On a blustery November night, Mother and I, warm and cozy in the Ocean Casino Grand Ballroom, were both enjoying cocktails, chatting it up with another mother-son duo of “Sunshiners” (a term used in the KC fandom to denote true fans of the band). Though the strong, fruity drinks helped calm our enlivened nervous systems, we were all still shake, shake, shaking in our platform boots, waiting for the Sunshine Band to hit the stage. 

And then, the lights dimmed—a lone trumpet’s coronation played as the rest of the horn section slowly materialized beneath the cool, blue stage lights. As the trumpet’s siren song swelled, my heart raced, waiting for the thump of the kick to transport our booties to Disco Land. 

As the cymbals splashed, I heard my mother scream, and soon the entire audience was set alight by the shimmer of the ten-foot disco ball descending from the ceiling. After a rousing funk improvisation from the rhythm section, the crowd’s applause became deafening as the frontman of the hour, Harry Wayne Casey, took the stage…

Seeing the original Funky White Boy greet the crowd in a shimmering reflective disco suit and center-parted hair, my mother nearly lost it (honestly, I did too, albeit in a less sexual way). He appeared a tad wider than he did in ‘75, but still, at seventy-three years old, the man simply radiated sexual electricity, and every woman in the audience, no matter how advanced in age, was picking up what KC was laying down. 

As the band continued to tease “That’s the Way (I Like It),” KC treated the audience to a five-minute rant on the “Industry Jews” who’d been keeping him from releasing his latest record, a double disc funk concept album based on the life and legacy of Henry Ford. The fans cheered as KC extolled the virtues of staying “true to your convictions” and “toppling the Zionist-occupied record industry.”  

While an undeniably eye-opening speech, the fans were ecstatic when the “do do do’s” finally kicked in, and KC assumed his duties at his trusty Yamaha DX keyboard.  For the next ninety minutes, we were lost in the music. Every so often, between an elbow pull or electric slide, I would turn to see my mother enraptured by the music. Even at sixty-five, her movements were like that of a spry college girl, overcome by the erotic piping of the Satyrs. 

Lost in rhythm, Mother’s hips gyrated in a manner I could only compare to that of a sultan’s concubine, fully aware of the consequences she could face were her master not properly titalated. At several moments, I imagined what it must have been like on the night that I was conceived, did Mother dance for Father in such a way that night? The cycle of life is undoubtably a wonderous dance. 

I can’t tell you how many booties my booty came into contact with that night, but by the end of it, the crowd was more than ready for a gentle comedown. In the middle of a heart-stopping rendition of “Please Don’t Go,” KC took a minute to thank everyone for coming and urged audience members to read “The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion” to better understand what he and his band were up against. While not a big nonfiction reader, I managed to snag a couple of copies of the book at the merch table before leaving. It’s honestly a little dry, but some passages feel pretty topical during these troubling times.

All in all, it was a dazzling night that my mother and I will never forget. We must have smelled like a couple of sweaty, over sexed teenagers on the car ride back, but it was totally worth it. So, if KC & the Sunshine Band happen to come to your town, this is one “E ticket” you do not want to miss!

Thank you for reading this amazing article by Phil Rot. Like, subscribe and share to be automatically entered into a million dollar raffle! Will you be the lucky winner?