Prince is widely acknowledged as the father of the Minneapolis Sound but that doesn't mean he has a patent on the sound or, more importantly, the funk. While the superstar has, along with producers Jimmy Jam & Terry Lewis' Flyte Tyme Productions, scored the most chart success, he's got plenty of rivals in the talent stakes. Andre Cymone, Dez Dickerson, Jesse Johnson, But as is always the case in Minneapolis, out of the old comes the new, and one of the newest purveyors of funk to emerge from the land of 10 000 lakes is Greazy Meal. Featuring a line-up that consists of Dave Anania (drums), Jim Anton (bass), Ken Chastain (percussion, guitar), Julius 'Juice' Collins (vocals), John 'Strawberrius' Fields (guitar, vocoder), Brian Gallagher (sax, in establishing the much lauded 'Minneapolis Sound'. During a business trip to the USA, I managed to hook up with Greazy Meal, and former New Power Generation, keyboardist Tommy Barbarella, who dropped in at a mutual friend's place for a bit of a chat. 'I was still playing with Prince, it was like two years ago now', begins Tommy when down the gig. I was like, "absolutely! I'm there".' 'I even went home and wrote songs after hearing them because I was inspired. Because their cover choices, they were a cover band at the time, were just stuff I'd never heard. I'd never heard anyone do "Asia" by Steely Dan, and that's some complicated shit ... "Hey Love", old Stevie come out, nobody did, we just locked ourselves in the studio for a week and cut everything. And then we got serious.' The record in question is "Visualize World Greaze". Totally funded, recorded and promoted by the group themselves the album has become a consistent seller. Sounding funky, fresh and full of the feel good music samples or anything like that because my gig with Prince, that's what it became, I wasn't playing keyboards anymore, I was just playing samples. I just wanted to play again, so I played all organic things ... y'know Wurli, Clav, Hammond, Fender Rhodes ... ' 'There's actually a hidden track on there too', he reveals when discussing the album. It's a 'O' track, you have to rewind track 1 to get like, "No, I'm gonna try and make this Greazy Meal thing happen". So y'know I turned him down.' It was hard [working with Prince] but for me, I have the kind of personality that can handle it. I'm very easy going and can adapt to a lot of situations ... basically I put up with a lot of shit, to a certain point. It was stressful, very stressful, and I was stretch to our stylistic muscles to show that we can do everything. Apart from the Greazy Meal project, Tommy has also worked on another album for a Japanese record company. 'It's a project called "MPLS" and it's basically me Levi (Seacer), Sonny (Thompson) and Tony Mosely, the rapper. a very international audience, so we're figuring whether we go for the band sound and give them what they're used to us playing or do we go more urban and try and get some hits. We're kinda straddling the fence at the moment.' With so much talent, and an already established fan base, one could be forgiven for thinking that the band are not too far are getting decent record deals, like Groove Collective and Liquid Soul. 'We do gigs with Liquid Soul and other groups like that when we go to Chicago sometimes. We do gigs with them and we listen to them and we think, "we don't sound anything like this, they're a bunch of bald guys playing horns and there's no hook and there's no chorus."
	Ricky Peterson and many others are all up there with him but very few, with the exception of jazz man Peterson, are still churning out the hits. These days only St Paul Peterson (who is starting to make his mark as song writer) and a pasted together version of The Time (who seem to be continually on tour), remain active performers and the Twin Cities' music scene fails to attract as much interest as it did a decade ago. flute), Spicy T (raps) and Tommy Barbarella (keyboards), the group has been a popular weekly attraction at the Cabooze bar in Minneapolis where it regularly attracted crowds of around 1000 people. Interestingly, group member 'Strawberrius' Fields is the nephew of one Steve Greenberg, the man behind Lipps Inc., the group that brought us the monster hit Funkytown, and someone who, in this writer's opinion at least, was a major influence on Prince and played a major part questioned on the origins of Greazy Meal. 'Y'know Greazy Meal started and I went down to hear them. They played on Sunday nights, which was like our day off from the plantation out there, and I went down to hear them and I was like, "wow, this is the coolest band I've ever heard, I wish I was in this band". They had this keyboard player who was really good, y'know getting gigs with Isaac Hayes or something, and he left and they called to see if I wanted to come Wonder ... every song was feel good music. Old Stevie Wonder, Earth Wind & Fire, just happy stuff ... almost corny but there was this laid back vibe that was just so cool. It was just like that for quite a while. I'd just show up and play, I'd never even rehearse. Then one day it was like, "let's do a record, you got any tunes?" We just kinda threw our ideas on the table, went in and cut 'em and after a while we realised, "we got something good here". I didn't know how it was gonna that drew Tommy to the group in the first place, "Visualize World Greaze" has been a constant on my CD player since I received it back in May. Particularly strong is Tommy's own wistful "Old Soul Cafe" (a hit waiting to happen), the rocky funk of "Unfaithful", the quirky shuffle of "Money" and the tender, hypnotic retro soul of "Away Delilah". 'It's a totally live recording, there's loops on some of the tunes that we played to but with this group I didn't want to play any to it. It's a cover of "Funkytown" which we did for this movie we featured in, a documentary on Minneapolis.' So when Did Tommy's stint as 'sex symbol' and keyboard player with the New Power Generation come to an end? 'It wasn't too long ago, right about the same time we cut the record. It was just a matter of timing, that ended and Greazy Meal started to go through the roof. He asked me to come back last fall and it was unhappy a lot of the time but now I miss it sometimes. There's lots of good memories.' Greazy Meal have also released their second project, a ten track remix album entitled "Digitalize World Greaze". 'We don't really expect this one to sell as much as the other one', says Tommy matter-of- factly. 'It's mainly just another promotional tool to show people what we can do, that we're capable of doing an entire remix record ourselves. And it's also just a kinda It's been really hard 'cause Rosie's not involved, Michael (Bland) is not involved, we've got another drummer playing some tunes, so what we've been doing is featuring a couple of other vocalists. It was like "well what do we do, do like the Sweetback record where we feature different vocalists and there's no real frontperson or do we try to or do we try to make it more like a band and have a frontperson?" It's hard because we have a built-in audience with the NPG fans, away from that elusive deal with a major label, but that's not really the case. 'Y'know a lot of people like us, but record people don't I guess,' he says with a laugh. 'The feedback we've been getting is, "well, we wouldn't know how to market you." Y'know they hear a saxophone and they hear an instrumental on there and suddenly "oh they're an acid jazz band" ... we get stuck with that, like Jamiroquai. And then they lump us with the acid jazz groups who Then we go up there and rock and have songs, so I don't know. It's funny ... people hear a saxophone and it's jazz. 'People in the industry here are just scared now. There's no bandwagon for them to jump on right now -- grunge is over, alternative is dead and no one knows what the next big thing is, so everyone's scared.'   Check out our Wrecka Stow for the sounds of Greazy Meal...