I Lose Sleep Over You

 Private Eye was a bay area funk group in the '80s produced by Berkeley native Claytoven Richardson. The group released one LP and a few singles on Fantasy in 1983. "I Lose Sleep Over You" is their hardest funk track and has been on my turntable a lot lately. The talented Richardson had a hand in numerous '80s funk records including the boogie laced Bill Summers LPs Call It What You Want and Seventeen, as well as one of the best Bay Area 80s funk LPs No Better Love by Chas.

 There is a later (and much easier to find) version of "I Lose Sleep Over You" by Street Fare from '87 that is still great, no doubt due to the same producer's touch. 

Private Eye - I Lose Sleep Over You

So Wrong

 California finally got a break in the weather, it was a long hard winter folks, but B.E wants it's friends in the Mid West the East Coast and in Europe to know that we toughed it out and are doing ok, thank you for all your well wishes and thoughts over the past month and a half.

 In celebration I'm putting up some coked out Cali boogie wave, a smash on San Jose radio in the summer of 1983, the instrumental side of So Wrong, the 12" single from Doobie Brother's guitarist Patrick Simmon's first solo album.

Patrick Simmons - So Wrong (Instrumental)

Set Fire To Me

 I remember playing this proto deep house dub side at a club in Montreal a few years ago. I dropped the track early in the set, trying to feel the crowd, when a local party goer pushed his way up to the DJ booth and tried to get my attention, my vanity led me to assume he wished to find the name of this 1986 dollar bin classic, but instead it turned out that he wanted to share some friendly advice that went something along the lines that perhaps DJ'ing wasn't the best choice of career for me and maybe I should consider doing something else. It was clear to him that I wasn't very good and it could only have been a case of miscommunication or mistaken identity that had brought me to be playing dubby garage records at his techno nightclub.  He had a sincere expression on his face, as though he were just trying to save me some wasted years and as such I took his freely given wisdom to heart. 

 Every time I hear something by New York salsa trombonist Willie Colon, which is now and again, I think back to those scathing remarks made to me and how perhaps one man's comment undermined my confidence and prevented me from quitting my video game industry job to follow my true passion and become a full time boogie record cataloging blogspot page editor. I could have been burning CD-r's with looped up edits of this or that, travelling a little bit, seeing America. 

Willie Colón ‎– Set Fire To Me (Inferno Dub)