incredible bongo band
apache (breakdown)
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Highly influenced by the work of Paul Buff, Art Laboe and Preston Epps, The Incredible Bongo Band was a faux group (essentially just a studio project), formed by Pride record executive Michael Viner to create theme music for the film "The Thing With Two Heads". Following the success of the project, Viner then used MGM studio downtime to record funk-influenced covers of hits, using pick-up musicians. Although the "group" never existed as a true band, a team of individuals was assembled for a publicity photo. The group's best known work is probably their percussion-centric cover of "Apache", originally a worldwide hit in 1960 by The Shadows. It was later sampled heavily by hip hop artists (and, over a decade later, drum 'n' bass artists) to become one of the most popular sampled percussion breaks of all time. The Art Laboe and Preston Epps instrumental "Bongo Rock" was also covered by Viner's pick-up outfit as "Bongo Rock '73" (a minor US chart hit), along with a cover of "Let There Be Drums", much influenced by the "surf-style" treatments of Paul Buff's drum-oriented works.
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The Incredible Bongo Band, also known as Michael Viner's Incredible Bongo Band, was a project started by Michael Viner, a record artist manager and executive at MGM Records. The band's output consisted of instrumental music in the funk genre, characterised by the prominence of bongo drums and also conga drums. Although the band released two albums, 1973's Bongo Rock and 1974's Return of the Incredible Bongo Band, the band is best known for its cover of "Apache", a song originally made popular by The Shadows. This record languished in relative obscurity until the late 1970s, when it was adopted by early hip-hop artists, including pioneering DJs Kool Herc and Grandmaster Flash, for the uncommonly long percussion break in the middle of the song. Subsequently, many of the Incredible Bongo Band's other releases were sampled by hip-hop producers, and the "Apache" break remains a staple of many producers in drum and bass. The song received popular attention again in 2001 when it was featured in an ad for an Acura SUV. Recently, music critic Will Hermes did an article on Apache and the Incredible Bongo Band for the New York Times. The song "Let There Be Drums," which was made famous by Sandy Nelson and also performed by The Ventures, was used as the theme song for the long running television show "Atlantic Grand Prix Wrestling" during the 1980's.
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