Forty-two years after Morris Day and The Time played First Avenue’s stage in Purple Rain and nearly stole the entire film from Prince himself, Day is still moving through it all with the same easy authority — sharper suits, maybe, Jerome Benton still at his side, and a catalog that sounds as clean in 2026 as it did when Minneapolis funk was the most interesting thing on Black radio. He brings The Time south for the Flashback Funk Fest at Smart Financial Centre at Sugar Land on Saturday, July 11.
About Morris Day and the Time
The story begins in a Minneapolis high school, where a teenager named Morris Day attended school alongside a kid named Prince Rogers Nelson. The two sang together in Prince’s earliest band, Grand Central, long before either had a record deal. When Prince later built The Time as a deliberate creative counterpoint to his own sound — a cool, street-wise funk ensemble to contrast his more introspective R&B — he went back to that old school friend for the lead.
Three albums followed: the self-titled The Time, then What Time Is It? and Ice Cream Castle — tracks like “Get It Up,” “777-9311,” “Wild and Loose,” and “Jungle Love” moving through Black radio and dance clubs before most of the country had a face to put to the name. The national introduction came with Purple Rain in 1984, where The Time played the house band at First Avenue and Day, flanked by Jerome Benton in his role as valet and comic foil, proceeded to steal nearly every scene he walked into. The dynamic between the two was part Abbott-and-Costello, part pure showbiz — Day has described it simply: “we were just doing our thing, talking the way we talked and dressing the way we dressed.” “Jungle Love” and “The Bird” both became Top 40 hits from that soundtrack. Combined sales for The Time and Day’s solo catalog have exceeded 10 million units.
What you get now — the reunited lineup with Jellybean Johnson on drums and Monte Moir on keyboards alongside Benton and Day — is a band that has been playing this material together for four decades and no longer needs to prove anything. That ease looks like grace from the floor. Reviewers who have caught recent shows report that the dance moves hold, the stage command is as sharp as ever, and the music doesn’t lean on nostalgia as a crutch because it doesn’t have to.
The Full Bill: Flashback Funk Fest
This is a festival evening — four acts, one stage — and the lineup built around Morris Day is substantial in its own right.
Zapp brings the legacy of the Troutman brothers out of Dayton, Ohio — Larry, Roger, and Lester — and specifically the talkbox mastery of Roger Troutman, who made that instrument central to funk the way the clavinet had been a decade before. The band’s 1980 self-titled Warner Bros. debut went platinum; within five years they had accumulated more than four gold records and a devoted following built on records and live shows. Roger’s reach extended deep into hip-hop: his 1995 collaboration with 2Pac and Dr. Dre on “California Love” reached number one on the Billboard Hot 100 and earned a Grammy nomination. Roger Troutman died in 1999, but the band continues, and his talkbox is encoded in the DNA of hip-hop production from Jay-Z to Snoop Dogg to Ice Cube. Seeing Zapp perform is a lesson in where all of that groove originated.
Con Funk Shun, out of Vallejo, California, has been at this since 1969. Signed to Mercury Records in 1976, they recorded eleven albums over a decade, five of which went gold. Their debut hit, “Ffun,” written by Michael Cooper, topped Billboard’s Top Soul Singles chart in July 1977. The interplay between Cooper’s tenor and Felton Pilate’s falsetto remains the signature of the act and plays as well live as on record.
The S.O.S. Band — Sounds of Success — formed in Atlanta in 1977 and broke through in 1980 with “Take Your Time (Do It Right),” a platinum-certified boogie-funk anthem that topped the R&B chart and reached number three on the Billboard Hot 100. It is one of the genre’s cleaner examples of how to balance a groove and the space around it, and the band has been performing it for forty-six years without wearing the record out.
Four acts. One evening. One 6,400-seat theater in Sugar Land.
Smart Financial Centre at Sugar Land
Smart Financial Centre at Sugar Land sits at 18111 Lexington Blvd in Sugar Land, Texas, near Sugar Land Town Square. The 6,400-capacity venue is one of the Houston area‘s primary indoor concert destinations for touring acts of this scale, with full accessibility services and food and drink available throughout. Doors open at 6:00 PM CT; showtime is 7:00 PM.
Tickets
Tickets for the Flashback Funk Fest — Morris Day and the Time, Zapp, Con Funk Shun, and The S.O.S. Band — are on sale now. Official resale is available through StubHub, the official resale partner for this event.