Happy Anniversary: The Time, Ice Cream Castle

31 years ago today, The Time showed us their jungle love with the release of their third album, an effort which - despite providing them with the first top-20 pop hit of their career - also turned out to be a temporary swan song for the band.

During the first few years of the '80s, The Time -featuring flamboyant frontman Morris Day - predominantly found success on the R&B charts, earning three top-10 hits in two years: “Get It Up,” “Cool,” and “777-9311.” On the pop charts, however, the band was finding crossover relatively elusive, with “Cool” only hitting #90 on the Billboard Hot 100 and “777-9311” only doing slightly better by hitting #88. But their profile received a massive shot in the arm when their longtime connection to Prince led them into a significant spot in the Purple One's first film, Purple Rain, which turned out to be a very major motion picture, indeed. As a result, their third album, Ice Cream Castles, which was released on July 2, 1984, provided them with a top-20 hit (“Jungle Love,” which hit #20) as well as a top-40 hit (“The Bird,” which hit #36). Unfortunately, Mr. Day and Prince had some squabbles, and the end result led to Day departing from The Time, and when fellow member Jesse Johnson hit the road as well, the band called it quits.

As it turned out, the dissolution of The Time was only temporary: in 1990, after getting back together to appear in Prince's film Graffiti Bridge, the band recorded a new album, Pandemonium, which earned them the biggest pop hit of their career: “Jerk Out.” Unfortunately, the reunion didn't last much beyond the release of the album, but the band had a partial reunion in 1995 and began touring around as Morris Day and The Time, which is how they were billed when they turned up in Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back in 2001:

Ice Cream Castle may not have been the highest-charting album of The Time's career, but it's certainly become the most iconic, and that's fair enough: when it comes to '80s R&B, it doesn't get much better than “Jungle Love.”