Flashback Funk Fest, featuring Morris Day and the Time, coming to Tuscaloosa

Morris Day and the Time, Zapp Band, Con Funk Shun and Atlantic Starr will play the Tuscaloosa Amphitheater as part of a package tour called Flashback Funk Fest at 6 p.m. May 28.

Day and band last played Tuscaloosa in 2018, as part of group show called Funkaloosa, with George Clinton & Parliament-Funkadelic. Day announced in September that he'd be retiring after this 2023 tour.

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The first Time album featured Prince Rogers Nelson playing all the instruments, alongside old high-school friend Morris Day singing lead. As teenagers, they'd played together in the band Grand Central.

Conflicts, jealousies and outright fights between the old friends, especially on the 1982 "Controversy" tour, in which the Time opened for Prince, helped inspire the plot behind breakthrough 1984 film "Purple Rain."

In it, Morris Day and The Time played themselves, as one of the three house bands in a Minneapolis nightclub, with Prince and The Revolution, and Dez Dickerson and the Modernaires. Though Prince, his band and compositions took the bulk of the film's runtime, Morris Day and the Time scored radio hits and broader MTV presence off prominent placement, performing "Jungle Love" and "The Bird," songs co-written by Day, the Time's lead guitarist Jesse Johnson, and Prince, using pseudonym Jamie Starr.

The group had coalesced around another Minneapolis funk/R&B band, Flyte Tyme, adding Johnson on guitar, Day as lead singer, and Jerome Benton, brother of the band's bass player Terry Lewis, as Day's onstage comic foil, backup singer and dancer. During various breakups and between music projects, Day and Benton have acted, composed and performed for film and TV, while former members Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis became one of the most prominent and successful songwriting-producing duos of the last 30 years, writing 41 top 10 U.S. hits for artists including Janet Jackson, Luther Vandross, Lionel Richie and numerous others.

After the success of "Purple Rain," Day went solo, as did Johnson, and the Time fractured. Original Time members reunited first in 1990 for Prince's film "Graffiti Bridge," which helped score their biggest hit, "Jerk Out." They soon broke up again, reunited briefly in 1995, and came back together for a series of shows and recordings starting in 2008, changing the band's name to rhe Original 7ven, following legal disputes as to ownership of name rhe Time.

They have occasionally returned as the original unit to play Prince tributes and other occasions, but the current touring lineup features Day and drummer/percussionist Jellybean Johnson, joined by a pair of musicians who added to the 1995 reunion, and three others who joined the Time in the 21st century.

Like their friend and former co-creator, along with inspirations such as Sly and the Family Stone, James Brown and Parliament-Funkadelic, Morris Day and The Time blends rock, soul, dance and funk in those and other hits such as “Cool,” "Gigolos Get Lonely Too," “The Walk,” “777-9311" and “Get It Up."

Zapp Band's another funk-rock band born in the midwest, created in Dayton, Ohio in 1977. Working with Clinton and Bootsy Collins of P-Funk in earliest days, the four Troutman brothers, Roger, Larry, Lester and Terry explored electro funk, making heavy use of the talk box on its first four gold Top 10 R&B albums. After the deaths in 1999 of Roger, the frontman, and Larry, in an apparent murder-suicide, the band broke up, reuniting again in 2003 with other family members stepping up to perform on U.S. tours. The band's hits include "More Bounce to the Ounce," "I Can Make You Dance," "Computer Love," and the No. 1 "Dance Floor."

Con Funk Shun grew from a 1969 band called Project Soul, changing its name in 1971 after lineup additions. The soul-funk group moved to Memphis and Stax Records in 1973, playing studio and backup gigs before releasing its debut album "Organized Con Funk Shun." A step over to Mercury Records in 1976s lead to a string of Top 10 gold-selling albums in the '70s and '80s, with hits including "Ffun," "Shake and Dance with Me," "Chase Me," "Got to Be Enough," "Baby I'm Hooked (Right Into Your Love)," "Electric Lady," "Burning Love" and "Too Tight." Most of its original members remain.

Atlantic Starr landed several R&B hits through the '70s and '80s, crossing into mainstream success with the No. 1 singles "Secret Lovers," "Always," and "Masterpiece." Its other hits include "My First Love," "Love Crazy," "If Your Heart Isn't In It," "Silver Shadow," "Touch a Four Leaf Clover," "Circles" and "When Love Calls." After numerous lineup changes, original members and brothers Wayne and Jonathan Lewis have been joined by L'John Epps and Melessa Pierce since the band's 14th album, the 2017 "Metamorphosis."

How to get Flashback Funk Fest tickets

Tickets for Flashback Funk Fest, 6 p.m. May 28, will go on sale at 10 a.m. Friday, through www.ticketmaster.com, or at the Amphitheater box office, for $79.50, $59.50, $49.50 and $29.50, plus fees. For more, see www.tuscaloosaamphitheater.com.

This article originally appeared on The Tuscaloosa News: Flashback Funk Fest, featuring Morris Day and The Time, coming to Amphitheater