It was normally time to go to bed, but the Pimps of Joytime were just getting started. I dragged my tired body out of the camp chair at July’s FloydFest and shuffled through the campground toward the infectious beat of a Latin rhythm.
No one was yawning near the stage. In fact, after a nearly three-hour set, the band returned for a 30-minute encore after four in the morning. But they weren’t done. “If you have a drum, a conga, anything to bang on, come get down in front of the stage,” beckoned lead singer Brian J before joining the crowd for a free-form percussion jam in the field. Then, just as the first light started to peek over the mountains, the band got back on stage. A few hundred people were going to be very tired all day long.
“That was so special,” recalls Brian J, the band’s founder. “The promoter was like, ‘Listen, if you guys can play a long time that’d be great.’ That’s a license to really relax and have creative freedom to express ourselves.”
The Pimps can’t be pigeonholed into a genre — it’s all soulful, but one song might segue from an Afrobeat groove to an electronic club beat with sitar. It’s all pretty damn funky, and it’s impossible to hear it and sit still.
Brian J is joined by fellow Pimps Chauncey Yearwood on congas and vocalist/percussionist/sampler Mayteana Morales. The mysteriously named Clark Dark holds down the pocket on bass, and the drummer is a constantly fluctuating enigma (they’ve had 16 in five years).
Brian J began the Pimps as a solo project in 2004 by building a studio in his Brooklyn house. “I started with no direction in mind and no concept,” he explains. “It started to be this funky good time, and I went with that.”
The band name sprung from an offhand comment by a friend. “It just seemed right,” says Brian J. “It’s audacious, a bold choice of words. And it sounds funky.”
It wasn’t until 2007’s High Steppin’ was in the works that Brian J put together the live band. Everyone appears on their forthcoming disc, Janxta Funk, to be released in 2011. That record, and their relentless performances, may be enough to make Pimps of Joytime a household name. Love Best of Charleston? Help the Charleston City Paper keep Best of Charleston going every year with a donation. Or sign up to become a member of the Charleston City Paper club.