The Robinson Caruso Organization is an 11-piece R&B and Soul band, playing original music inspired by artists signed to Atlantic, Stax/Volt, Motown, Hi, and Brunswick Records (among others) in the 1960s and 197os.
Robinson Caruso was born at the age of eighteen in 1963. The illegitimate child of Wilson Pickett and an albino gazelle, Robinson was abandoned soon after birth onstage at the Apollo Theatre wearing only crimson silk boxer shorts and platinum knuckledusters. Relying only on instinct, Caruso delivered an off-the-cuff performance of “The Oogum-Boogum Song” and won over the notoriously hostile crowd.
Berry Gordy adopted the young singer and had him cryogenically frozen and buried at the bottom of the Swanee River with the command that he be thawed only in the event that “soul music teeters on the brink of death.” In 1997, he was discovered by a family of kayakers who mistook him for a hypothermia-stricken camper. The outdoorsy family clothed him in Patagonia fleece and enrolled him in a private school in Cape Girardeau, Missouri.
Robinson’s soul power was obfuscated and nearly obliterated until the fateful day that the weak airwaves of Columbia, Missouri’s KCOU radio station cosmically reached the radio of his adopted parents’ Range Rover with a recording of Aretha Franklin’s “Ain’t No Way.” The old heat returned instantly, and Caruso threw himself from the vehicle, tucked and rolled safely to the shelter of the nearest spotlight and brandished a microphone as if from nowhere to urge an unsuspecting audience to give it up and turn it loose. Finally, Robinson Caruso is prepared to bring millenial soul to a generation for whom music has ceased to create community. Prepare to party up.
The Robinson Caruso Organization is a collective of musicians including:
James Rone
Gary Miller
“Baby Jake” Torkelson
Marcus Bohn
Jordan Carlson
Andrew Crowley
Fred Beukema
Brendan Jones
Ben Bussey
Sheena Janson
James Grigsby
Zachary Scot Johnson
