Sister Sledge : He's the Greatest Dancer
If 1978 belonged to Bruce Springsteen ( Darkness, Patti Smith's "Because the Night", The Pointer Sisters' "Fire", some of Southside Johnny's Hearts of Stone), 1979 belonged to Chic ( "I Want Your Love", Risque, three Sister Sledge hits, "Rapper's Delight" and Sheila + B. Devotion's "Spacer").
On January 22, 1979 Sister Sledge released We Are Family, the third album for the then virtually unknown quartet of Philadelphia siblings. They got a whole lot of help from their RCA label mates. All of the songs were written by Chic masterminds Bernard Edwards and Nile Rodgers who once said "pound for pound, I think We Are Family is our best album hands down." That's despite the fact many of the songs were written before the Chic team ever met Sister Sledge.
The title track, sung in one take by 19 year old Kathy Sledge, is one of the most memorable songs of the 1970's, and can still liven up any wedding reception. The Pittsburgh Pirates made "We Are Family" their theme songs on the way to a 1979 World Series victory. The song topped the US R+B chart and peaked at #2 in the US pop chart.
The first single from the album was "He's the Greatest Dancer", my favorite on the album and one that might have charted higher than US #9 had Atlantic Records not released "We Are Family" right on its heels. Edwards and Rodgers wrote the song for their own band, but gave Sister Sledge the song. The production values are top notch, featuring some classic Rodgers guitar lines.
The disco disc features identical versions (at 8:06 and 6:04) of the two side-openers--the title track, a magnificent, soul-shouting sisterhood anthem that could set straight cheerleaders and militant lesbians dancing side by side, and "He's the Greatest Dancer," a seductive tribute to a fellow who gets to doff his designer clothes in the presence of countless panting women. (I wonder if I would have been so amused by the boy from New York City in 1965 if I'd known that in 1979 he'd be taken seriously.) All that's missing from the album is "Lost in Music," that one-in-a-hundred I-love-you-know-what song that illuminates its subject. Plus a couple of useless slow ones and some chic riffs. So the d.d. would be your buy--if you could buy it.
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