Robbed hit of the week 3/11/19 - Zapp & Roger's "Slow and Easy" ...
from the album All The Greatest Hits (1993)
Billboard Hot 100 peak: #43
This week's "robbed hit" belongs to R&B singer/songwriter/producer Roger (Troutman) and his funk band "Zapp", who were credited together on this post-breakup album. Zapp had been having hits throughout the 1980s, hitting #1 for two weeks with "Dance Floorr" in 1982; meanwhile only their first single, "More Bounce To The Ounce", made the pop Hot 100 in America at #86. Roger had also carried on a solo career, since 1981's remake of "I Heard It Through The Grapevine" hit #1 R&B for two weeks. His 1987 single "I Want To Be Your Man" became his biggest success, reaching #3 on the American pop chart and taking a single week at #1 on the R&B list in Billboard magazine. In 1993, All The Greatest Hits was released, featuring singles from both Zapp & Roger (and credited as so). Two new tracks were added, with the nine-song "Mega Medley" released as a single. It climbed to #54 on the pop chart and #30 R&B. The second offering was an original, "Slow and Easy", and proved to be the even more successful of the pair, helped a lot by singer Shirley Murdock ("As We Lay"), who guested on the track she wrote with Roger and Larry Troutman...
While "Slow and Easy" made it to #18 on Billboard's R&B chart, the single stalled right under the pop top-40 at #43. It would be the group's final hit. Three years later, Roger was featured on 2Pac's #1 pop hit "California Love", while that same year his guest spot on Johnny Gill's "It's Your Body" scored him a top-20 R&B hit that almost reached the pop top-40 at #43. At the end of that year, a second compilation from Zapp landed a final minor R&B with a cover of Stevie Wonder's "Living For The City" (#57 R&B, "bubbled under" the pop Hot 100 at #120). Roger was last seen on the chart as a featured artist on Nastyboy Klick's "Down For Yours" (#58 R&B, #69 Pop). In 1999, Roger was killed in a murder-suicide done by his brother Larry, ending his and Zapp's career.
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Here's Zapp and Shirley Murdock performing "Slow and Easy" live in concert...
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