Stylistics bring beloved hits back to Blaisdell Concert Hall

It’s been 50 years since Airrion Love founded The Stylistics with Herb Murrell and three other like-minded friends, and despite all the passing years, he still enjoys the things that come with being a successful entertainer — including some things you might expect to get tiring, such as rehearsals, traveling, holidays away from home and family, and doing interviews year after year after year.

“Traveling is part of the job; interviews aren’t half as bad as traveling, but I’m not tired of either,” Love said in a recent phone call from Japan, between concerts. Love, one of the quartet’s mid-range vocalists, is also the designated spokesman of the group for interviews; Murrell does a lot of the emcee work on stage,

The Stylistics were in Japan after six weeks of shows in the U.K. and a few days’ layover at home in Philadelphia on the way to Asia. They’ll be playing a one-nighter in the Blaisdell Concert Hall on Sunday and a New Year’s Eve show in California before they go home.

Love is looking forward to reaching home sometime on New Year’s Day to enjoy a few days off, and then starting up the engines all over again for the group’s 51st year in the music business.

“This year is our 50th anniversary,” he noted. “It’s hard to realize how long it’s been, but 50 years later we’re still here, and I’m seeing the audiences getting younger and younger.

“I don’t know if our (original) fan base is dying off,” he joked. “We still have the old die-hard fans, but I’m starting to see the younger people at our shows now.”

The Stylistics underwent its first personnel change in seven years when Harold Eban Brown resigned early this year, ending almost 18 years as the group’s falsetto lead vocalist to pursue a solo career. In his place Honolulu will see Barrington “Bo” Henderson, a music industry veteran whose credits include nine years as a member of the 1980s funk band Lakeside, a year with the Detroit-based soul group The Dramatics, and five years with The Temptations.

“We’ve been a friend of Bo for years, and when the opening (in The Stylistics) came up, he approached us with an interest to be in the group,” Love said. “Bo brings some professionalism to the group, being that he has a long track record with The Temptations and other groups. He brings another aspect to us, and I think that’s another reason things are fresh again. It’s The Stylistics, but with a fresh approach.”

The change also means that Jason Sharp, who joined the group in 2011, is no longer the “new guy,” though at 50 he is now the youngest of The Stylistics.

“Jason now is the youngest, but he’s an old spirit,” Love said. (He and Murrell are 69; Henderson is 62.) “We’re talking about it yesterday in the dressing room. We (all) just seem to have so much in common, so much to talk about, because we all have shared a lot of time in the business.”

THE STYLISTICS’ smooth harmonies and falsetto vocals have made them island favorites ever since “You Are Everything,” the first of their five RIAA-certified gold singles, was a hit on local radio in 1971. The song reached No. 9 on the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart and was followed by four more gold singles: “Betcha By Golly, Wow,” “I’m Stone in Love With You,” “Break Up to Make Up” and the enduring love song, “You Make Me Feel Brand New.”

Other Hawaii favorites included “Stop, Look, Listen,” “Let’s Put It All Together,” and The Stylistics’ 1973 novelty song, “Rockin’ Roll Baby.”

Hawaii can also look forward to hearing “Ebony Eyes,” a song on the group’s first album that their record label never released as a single but which became uniquely popular here. It became so popular that a Hawaii-resident group, the Kasuals, recorded their version of it in 1982 and won a Hoku Award. “Ebony Eyes” isn’t well-known enough elsewhere to be on the standard set list, but The Stylistics always do it when they’re in Hawaii.

The Stylistics came together in 1968 when three members of one young Philadelphia vocal group decided to start working with two members of another group. Love, Russell Thompkins Jr., and James Smith were former members of the Monarch; Herb Murrell and James Dunn came from the Percussions. They were performing in clubs around Philadelphia when a local entrepreneur asked if they’d like to make a record. They did, and recorded “You’re A Big Girl Now.”

“You’re a Big Girl Now” only reached No. 73 on the Hot 100, but it was a Top 10 hit on Billboard’s R&B Singles chart, and national label Avco Embassy signed the group to a real contract. The label brought in record industry veteran Thom Bell to produce them; Bell and his songwriting partner Linda Creed wrote almost all the hits that followed through the mid-1970s.

Dunn and Smith retired in 1980. Thompkins left in 2000. Love is looking forward to 2019 — year 51 for The Stylistics.

“We should be going into the studio next year,” he said. “Bo is a great writer also and he has some material that we have been listening to and rehearsing with, so we should have some new product out in 2019.”

Looking back to his early days — he kept his day job working in a Philadelphia bank until 1971, when The Stylistics were booked at the famed Apollo Theater in New York — Love says he’d do a few things differently if he knew then what he knows now.

For one, he have invested in Apple in 1980, when the company went public. “To buy it right there at the beginning would have been a great move,” Love said, laughing.

“If I could do something else over I would study music — maybe vocal training, maybe composition. I didn’t come from the church, I just enjoyed singing as a child and then in school choirs. If I could give my younger self some advice, I’d say, ‘Get more music education.’

“Today, 50 years later, I’m still learning.”