Bad Bobby Glover

I teach with that guy.

Admittedly, not closely as he and I are in different departments and don't share a lot of the same students, but he's a teacher at good ol' PHS.

I remember when, during Bobby's first year with us, the school newspaper did a pretty standard "get to know the new teacher" feature and showed a picture of Bobby with his current band Funk Allegience (who are sorely lacking any web presence) and mentioned that he had a gold record as a recording artist. I'll admit that my initial response to the gold record comment was to throw the flag (it's a brown flag, and it's got the same name as a card game, in case you were wondering) and just assume that the new guy was selling himself up a little bit for the kids.

But I did my research first, and found Bad Bobby Glover, an album released in 1984 and produced by Roger Troutman.

Roger Troutman?

That name sounded familiar - born in Hamilton, OH; member of Parliment - so I did a little digging and found that Bobby Glover was a member of Zapp and later a back-up singer for Dayton. Depending on the source I read, Bobby either was a founding member of Zapp or joined pretty early, but either way, he appeared on their first album which made it to #2 on the Billboard Top 100.

Bobby continued with Zapp for a few more albums, and I'll admit that I don't know whether he continued with them until the muder-suicide of Roger and Larry Troutman. I really should sit down and talk with Bobby about all of this sometime this coming school year.

What I do know is that his solo album gets pretty good reviews wherever I can find mention of it on the web - here, here with 40-60 second samples, here - and that it's available for purchase at a number of rare vinyl sellers including Gemm and even unofficially on cd if you're willing to pay $65 for the cd/lp combo.

You can also go the YouTube route and check out (in audio only, sadly) "It's My Turn", "What Kind of Lady", "Your Spell", and "So Mean" from his album.

In searching for those, I also came across a few Zapp videos that make me wonder whether Bobby is in any of them, as well. Possible things to check for later - live in Cincy, in DC #1, in DC #2, in DC #3, in DC #4. But that's for another day.

I did also find one site that offers the full album in downloadable form. I just have to figure out how to uncompress the rar-formatted packet. From there, I, like Bad Bobby Glover, will be golden.

I like the turn of phrase in that last paragraph well enough that I'm not going to get rid of it, but I used a trial version of WinRar 3.71 to open up the packet and, while there's a little problem with inconsistent volume from track to track, the tracks all appear to be complete and clearly transferred to digital medium. Thanks to whoever this blogger is.