For reasons never really made clear, the first faculty advisor at my undergraduate radio station (good ol' Dr. Propel) had a signed, promotional picture (the usual black-and-white 8x10 glossy) of Troy "Big Shot" Peoples - the self-proclaimed Son of Funkenstein - hanging prominently in his office. By "hanging" I mean it was stuck to the wall with yellowish tape and by "prominently" I mean it was a oddly shaped wall near the corner of the building so there wasn't much room for anything else there anyway. The picture was a full-length shot of Troy standing next to his keyboard and dressed like he was trick-or-treating as George Clinton. It was autographed, thanking Propel for giving his disc a spin, a four-track single of his song I Dropped Da Bomb on You featuring the same song in various tempos subtitled "Slow Bomb," "Funk Bomb," and "Disco Bomb."
But was his CD ever played on our station? I don't know. I can't imagine what format it would have fit under - funk? R&B? While the song is a jam, I never remember seeing it in the control room. But that's the funny thing about this: we found the CD everywhere.
It started when the new faculty advisor arrived. A fairly easy-going guy named Martin Manning, he kept "Big Shot" on the wall and had a copy of the CD single in his office. Then we found another copy hidden away in the music library. Then we found another in the television station's equipment closet. Then another copy appeared in the faculty advisor's office. But was this one of the already discovered copies or a different disc altogether? Who knows - but it matched the CD later found in one of the radio production room. Then we thought we got rid of most copies by giving them away during the purging of the music library. Not so fast - someone found another copy and I think by then we knew either 1) it was a cursed disc, doomed to forever haunt the radio station; or 2) "Big Shot" had sent our station at least two-dozen copies of his CD. By this time someone was fed up with the whole thing and when the next disc surfaced – which you know it did - it was immediately broken in two. Ouch!
Even with that harsh punishment I still managed to graduate with a copy of the disc, which I have to this day. The disc notes the song is from the "soon to be released" album Da New Testament of Funk but I was never able to successfully find anything about an album by this name, especially from the early-mid 1990s. Notes with the CD single mention Calvin Yarbrough and Alisa Peoples produced the song, names best remembered for their 1981 smash hit Don't Stop the Music. I'm guessing music ran in the Peoples family.
Still, I have to wonder whatever happened to "Big Shot"?
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I Dropped the Bomb on You
(Troy "Big Shot" Peoples)
Troy "Big Shot" Peoples
From the CD single I Dropped the Bomb on You
1994
[Lyrics unknown]
