Temptations major coverage on Ain't Too Ptoud

The Times London

The Temptations’ Otis Williams: ‘I called myself the Henry Kissinger of the group’
The 81-year-old sole survivor of the original line-up tells the story behind the Broadway musical Ain’t Too Proud, inspired by his memoir and opening in the West End this month
Paul Williams, Otis Williams, Eddie Kendricks, Melvin Franklin and Dennis Edwards on stage
Paul Williams, Otis Williams, Eddie Kendricks, Melvin Franklin and Dennis Edwards.
‘And the band played on.” The words from one of their biggest hits, Ball of Confusion, capture the show-must-go-on philosophy of the Temptations, a group that has gone through more than its share of upheavals and personal tragedies in the six decades since five young men signed a contract with the fledgling Motown label. From My Girl to Papa Was a Rollin’ Stone, Ain’t Too Proud to Beg to I Can’t Get Next to You, the singers took R&B to sophisticated new heights. Whether dressed in their sharpest supper club suits or sporting street threads and medallions, the group laid down a new template for soul music, notching up no fewer than 24 Top 20 singles on the Billboard Hot 100, including four No 1s.

That extraordinary legacy is celebrated in a Broadway musical, Ain’t Too Proud, which is previewing now in the West End and opens on April 20. Like Jersey Boys, the hit celebration of Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons, Ain’t Too Proud is the story of young men from the wrong side of the tracks who make the long and painful journey to become showbusiness royalty. Those of us who were raised on Motown would argue that the Temps’ songs — many of them written by the great Smokey Robinson — are even better.

Only one of the original members is still alive. At 81, Otis Williams still leads a revamped version of the band at venues around the world. Only last year they were in action at the O2 in London, alongside the current incarnation of those other Motown chartbusters, the Four Tops. It’s Williams’s memoir that provides the inspiration for the Broadway show, whose script was written by the Detroit playwright Dominique Morisseau. In their prime the Temps had a taste for high living; drink and drugs were, in fact, to cause mayhem in their ranks. But nowadays, the genial Williams explains over a Zoom call from America, the key word for the Temps is “temperance”.
We love what we do, and we love making money, but we don’t go crazy,” he says. “When we finish a show I go straight to my room. I’ve learnt that if you take care of your body you can do just about anything. I always carry books. I love to read.”

There’s certainly no lack of drama in the real-life story of Williams and his colleagues. [[It has been told before, in slightly doctored form, in an Emmy award-winning TV drama series first screened in 1998.) For all their intricate choreography, they were riven by disputes and fistfights. One early member, Al Bryant, was dropped soon after striking the mild-mannered baritone Paul Williams [[no relation to Otis) with a beer bottle in a post-gig dispute. Bryant’s replacement, the phenomenally gifted David Ruffin [[younger brother of the singer Jimmy) was one of the greatest singers of his generation, but succumbed to a toxic mixture of alcohol, cocaine and egomania. His relationship with his girlfriend, the singer Tammi Terrell, was marked by regular violence, to which Motown insiders seemed to turn a blind eye. But in 1968, when the group was scoring one chart hit after another, Ruffin’s drug-fuelled tantrums led to his departure. Convinced that he was the label’s next big solo act, he instead saw his career stall. In the years that followed he became almost better known for his court appearances than for his songs. By 1991 he was dead of a crack cocaine overdose.
Ruffin wasn’t the only one to die young. Paul Williams, who suffered from sickle cell disease, coped with depression by drinking heavily. His live performances grew so erratic that the other members arranged to have his microphone cut and his parts sung by a singer lurking backstage; in 1973 he was found dead from an apparently self-inflicted gunshot wound. Another founder member, Eddie Kendricks, blessed with a light tenor that shaded into a falsetto, became disenchanted and embarked on a solo career. Heavy smoking undermined his pure vocals and he died of lung cancer in 1992. The other founder member, Melvin Franklin — whose rumbling bass vocals were a key ingredient of the Temptations sound, particularly in the group’s psychedelic phase — suffered from a string of illnesses and died in 1995, aged only 52.
And so Otis Williams is the last man standing. Always happy to play a supporting role during the peak years — he rarely sang lead vocals — he had his share of adventures, including an affair with the ill-fated Supremes singer Florence Ballard, who was dropped from the group in 1967 and died in poverty nine years later. But he is credited as the conciliatory force that kept the Temptations afloat through one emergency after another. “My fixation was just on keeping the group together,” he says.

“We were supposed to be through when we lost David Ruffin. But with Berry [Gordy, the Motown founder] believing in Melvin and myself, we just never gave up hope. We had always been fortunate enough to get good replacements. We had guys that could really carry that load they had created.”

They may have made some of the best pop records of modern times, but the Temptations’ ascent to the pantheon was no overnight success story. The thoughtful, warts-and-all group biography by the veteran American author Mark Ribowsky details the long years of waiting for the first big hit. Before they arrived at a winning formula, Williams and his colleagues had sung in a variety of different groups. One was called the Siberians because the unworldly youngsters — impressed by another outfit called the Turbans — wrongly assumed that Siberia was somewhere in the Middle East. By the time they finally got an audition with Detroit’s up-and-coming Motown label, the singers, mixing doo-wop, gospel and Tin Pan Alley standards, had been known as the Distants and the Elgins. The new name was plucked out of the blue, although at one point Gordy later tried unsuccessfully to change it again, to the Pirates.



It wasn’t until 1964, when Smokey Robinson provided them with a hit in the form of The Way You Do the Thing You Do, that the Temps finally hit their stride. Another Robinson classic, My Girl, soon followed. Before long the song was everywhere. In his elegiac Vietnam War memoir In Pharaoh’s Army the great American writer Tobias Wolff recalls troops making parachute jumps while singing the melody to calm their nerves.

The British music writer Adam White, author of a handsomely illustrated history of Motown, remembers the impact the Temps made in Britain. He first saw them perform on a Rediffusion TV show in 1965.

“It was, of course, their choreography that moved me the most,” he explains in an email, “because it was so perfectly synchronised with the songs. It was rare enough to see young black American vocal groups on British television in the early to mid-1960s, which made the impact of the Temps’ style even greater. With the Supremes you’re watching these three attractive young women and distracted by their sexiness. With the Temps it was about these five sharp-looking guys with moves so cool. As a teenager I started to dance like them.”

Cameron Bernard Jones, Tosh Wanogho-Maud, Mitchell Zhangazha, Sifiso Mazibuko and Kyle Cox as The Temptations in Ain’t Too Proud
Cameron Bernard Jones, Tosh Wanogho-Maud, Mitchell Zhangazha, Sifiso Mazibuko and Kyle Cox as The Temptations in Ain’t Too Proud

For the first few years the Temps were indelibly associated with Robinson. From 1967 the singers were increasingly in the hands of the fiendishly talented songwriter and producer Norman Whitfield. Ruffin’s departure — he was replaced by the equally powerful voice of Dennis Edwards — also marked a radical change in direction towards a grittier, funkier style borrowed from Sly and the Family Stone. These Temps were cooler and more attuned to the social issues of the day. With lyrics by Barrett Strong, who died in January, hits such as Cloud Nine, Psychedelic Shack and Ball of Confusion tackled drugs, racial discrimination and street violence. The new approach reached its apogee in 1972’s Papa Was a Rollin’ Stone, which turned an absent father and family breakdown into chart-topping material.

The history books usually credit the mercurial Whitfield for tacking towards Sly territory. Both Ribowsky’s book and Williams himself give a slightly different version of events. He recalls hearing Sly’s music in New York in 1968 and then raving about it to Whitfield back in Detroit, who dismissed it as a passing fad. “I said, ‘Norman, you ever heard of Sly and the Family Stone? We got Dennis Edwards, we need to do something different.’ Norman, he was talented and a great guy, but cocky. He could make you mad at times. He said, ‘Oh man, we ain’t doing that stuff.’ He used some expletives and whatever. Then we went out of town to play some shows and when we got back he’d recorded the track to Cloud Nine.”


And with that a new and even more potent phase in the Temps’ history had begun.

In Ribowsky’s account Williams emerges as an inexhaustibly patient mediator who is constantly on call to defuse arguments about questions of artistic policy or the all-important subject of royalties. As Ribowsky puts it: “He was the one who had to take charge — hell, someone had to take charge with a screwed-up crew like them.” Does Williams consider himself to be the house disciplinarian?

“At the beginning I kind of had to be like that. I called myself the Henry Kissinger of the group,” he says. “I had to let the guys know this is a business — a fun business, but nevertheless a business. Just don’t take it for granted that we’ll sing and make money.”