Daryl Cameron believes the time is right for his cape.
Musically, The Whole 9 connects to The Adventures of Captain Sky and the two albums that followed. Cameron’s overarching mood is as resolutely positive now as it was then. Classic funk guitars, scratchy yet precise, engage with bass and keyboard vamps while horns sneak in brief solos. Cameron, who’s about to turn 63, still prefers live instruments over samples, and he shuns Auto-Tune in favor of his natural voice. While he’s always written or cowritten the majority of his repertoire, he’s now introducing reimagined versions of other artists’ material and expanding into different idioms: his new tunes include a blues song (“So So Good”).
“Music is universal, man, it has no color,” Cameron says. “It doesn’t have a gender, really. Some of it does: You can listen to some stuff, and it’s kind of soft. And some other stuff is hard. But even as men, we have some female tendencies. It’s always a mixture.”
“All the DJ had to do was play the record one time to know which breakdown was which,” Cameron says. “The first groove could be a heavy percussion break; the next may be a bass break, or just the drums and percussion. So that record was one of the first to ever do this.”
- Captain Sky performs “Wonder Worm” on Soul Train in January 1979.
“Costume designer Dexter Griffin was phenomenal,” Cameron said. “I would tell him exactly what I wanted in the costume, and we never met. He had all of my specs, all of my measurements. I’d say, ‘I need something with purple,’ and he’d say, ‘How about purple and silver? Make the boots come up to the thighs.’ A few days later, he’d just make it and send it to me via FedEx.”
