Doctor's Cat - Feel The Drive

ART 1016
I miss hearing this song on the radio.  Feel the Drive was all over Chicago when it came out and this record was the first import I ever bought. To me, in 1983, this music really sounded like the future.  Finding out that the song was from Italy only made sense to me at the time.  Americans for the most part weren’t making music like this and wouldn’t be for a few more years at least.  Italian (and Dutch) imports really set the stage for the development of House music in Chicago.

Imports like these were the some of the first examples of all-electronic music that I had ever heard.  American dance music at this time had synths and electronic drums but they still tended to include guitar and bass (Arthur Baker and Afrika Bambatta were execptions).  Italo didn’t use synthesizers to emulate real instruments; it used them on their own terms for their own reasons.   It’s interesting to note that, at least in Chicago, Italian and Dutch imports were at their height of popularity around 1983-1985.  Once local producers started making music like this, demand for European labels fell off (except for labels like Rams Horn that pressed re-releases of older American Disco).

Feel the Drive is pretty typical of the Italo songs that got heavy rotation in Chicago.  Hypnotic bassline, conga driven drums, and female vocals singing pretty much nonsense lyrics.  In a lot of cases the instrumental versions of these tracks got more play but not in this case.  Feel the Drive’s vocal version got equal airtime.  About a year or so later, Doctor’s Cat scored another Chicago hit with Watch Out.  I have no idea if these songs or the group Doctor’s Cat were big elsewhere.  The only Americans I’ve met who know the group are from Chicago.  Same goes for a lot of the big Italo hits of the time.  I’ve often wondered how it was that some tracks became such huge hits in this city.  Did a couple of DJ’s have a good connection to Italian labels like il disc 8 and Memory Records?  Was it driven more by the buyers from the big retail players (Importes, Etc., Rose Records)?  I was too young to know but I did know that this music was the shit.

Track List

Side A
Feel The Drive (Vocal)

Side B
Feel The Drive (Instrumental)

Side A&B