Mark III

One of the strangest, most fascinating deep funk albums of the '70s was titled Marvin Whoremonger and credited to a band called Mark III. Conceptualized by a Las Vegas hustler, the album was built around single-take sessions recorded by guitarist Richard Thompson, bass guitarist Clifford Johnson, and drummer Michael Thompson (all of whom were high-school students at the time), as well as vocalist Marvin Neros. Producer Cholly Williams took these recordings to Hollywood and augmented them with horns, synthesizers, and percussion played by anonymous session musicians. The wildly hedonistic songs are all themed around sex, drugs, and partying, and they're heavy, sloppy, and exuberant. The album was privately released as a double LP on a label called BlackLite Records in 1976, and while Williams promised all of the musicians that they would be superstars, the album languished in obscurity. Over the next several decades, record collectors discovered the album, and the few copies that surfaced sold for hundreds of dollars. In 2016, Now-Again Records reissued the album for the first time.
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