Besides recording the band’s albums, the horn men of ToP have been called upon to grace the recordings of dozens of other artists, ranging from Eric Clapton to Little Feat, Bonnie Raitt, John Lee Hooker, Santana, Linda Ronstadt, and many more. When most folks think of Tower of Power, it’s those horns-among them longtime trumpeters Greg Adams and Mic Gillette (who died in 2016) and saxophonist Lenny Pickett-they have in mind. Regardless of who’s come and gone through the years-and ToP has hosted a number of fine vocalists as well as instrumentalists-the core of the band has always been its five-piece horn section. All of the band’s signature tunes-“What Is Hip?,” “You’re Still a Young Man,” “So Very Hard to Go,” “You Ought to Be Having Fun,” and 18 others-are given definitive live treatments by the ensemble, numbering more than a dozen players for the occasion.
The highlights, which included guest appearances from several alumni-Tower of Power has encompassed more than 60 individuals during its half-century-have now been released as a two-CD/one-DVD set, appropriately titled 50 Years of Funk & Soul-Live at the Fox Theater (Artistry).
NEW TOWER OF POWER ALBUM FULL
It all came full circle for ToP in June 2018, when the then-current lineup celebrated the outfit’s 50th anniversary over the course of two nights at Oakland’s historic Fox Theater. “Our album designer said, ‘You guys need to claim Oakland.’ So we named that first album East Bay Grease and we’ve been promoting Oakland, California, ever since, throughout the world.” “It was pointed out to us early in our career that we were not a San Francisco band,” says Tower of Power tenor saxophonist and bandleader Emilio Castillo, one of the two co-founders still performing with the group, along with baritone saxophonist Stephen “Doc” Kupka. And second, Tower of Power didn’t play psychedelic rock-from the start, they were all about soul and funk. For one thing, they were from Oakland although located directly across the bay from San Francisco, it might as well have been a suburb of Chattanooga as far as the rock audience was concerned. But one new band, Tower of Power, found themselves on the outside looking in.
Local rock bands like Jefferson Airplane, the Grateful Dead, Sly and the Family Stone, Santana, and Big Brother & the Holding Company (with Janis Joplin) were already famous or about to be. I n the late 1960s, the San Francisco sound was all the rage.
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