Tower of Power

With a career spanning almost five decades, Tower of Power from Oakland, California are one of America's most enduring soul bands with one of the busiest touring schedules in the business. Surprisingly, given the band's longevity, their commercial success as a big-league soul band occurred for a brief two-year period in the 1970s when they benefited from the vocal talents of singer Lenny Williams. Williams joined the band in 1972 replacing Rick Stevens (who subsequently spent 36 years in prison for three murders committed after he left the band), and features on their two most acclaimed albums 'Tower of Power' and 'Back to Oakland'. Williams also sang on the majority of the band's most successful singles, namely 'So Very Hard to Go', 'This Time It's Real', 'What Is Hip' and 'Time Will Tell'. With the departure of Williams, Tower of Power's appeal began to wane, disco was beginning to get a stranglehold on the charts and hardcore soul bands were becoming out of vogue. Columbia, the band's record company, coerced the band into recording some quasi-disco tracks but it was an unsuccessful experiment and the band never repeated the the success of the Williams era. The band continued to record sporadically but exist nowadays primarily as live performance artists.

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