Temptations (Updated), page 22
Toward the end of 1982 we started work on Surface Thrills, another of our more adventurous albums. Produced by Dennis Lambert and Steve Barri, it was dominated by what I call the “white rock” sound—lots of synthesizers, drum machines, out-front guitar breaks. It made for an interesting detour, but a detour nonetheless. The next record, Back to Basics, while not a blockbuster, marked several important changes, the arrivals of Ron Tyson and Ollie (later Ali Ollie) Woodson (who appears on one track), a battle of the groups with our old, dear friends the Four Tops, and a “reunion” with Norman Whitfield, who produced five of the eight tracks. He wrote the album’s hit single, and one of my favorite ballads, “Sail Away,” which was Ron Tyson’s record debut as a Tempt.
We’d noticed Ron for some time, and when Glenn started falling out on us during the reunion tour, we resumed what was threatening to become a perpetual search for the first tenor.
One day, out of the blue, Ron phoned me. “Man, I hear you’re looking for a tenor,” he said.
“Yeah, we are. Do you know one?” I asked.
“Yeah, I do,” he replied.
“Oh, yeah? Who?”
“Me!” he answered, laughing.
“Wow, Ron. I would have never guessed that you would say that. Are you really serious?”
“Of course I am,” he said.
“Well, Ty, I’ll keep that in mind. We’re going to Fort Lauderdale, and I’ll call you then.” We all liked Ron, who is one of the sweetest, most easygoing guys in the world. Of course, we knew of his writing projects and him having little groups, but for some reason his name just never came to mind when we thought of replacements.
I called him from Fort Lauderdale, and after a few delays, he flew down from Philly to audition. We almost knew before he sang for us that we wanted him, but we went through the motions anyway. He agreed to join up with us after the reunion tour ended.
Bringing Ron in was one of our better moves. Not only is he a great tenor, one I’d rank right up there with Eddie Kendricks, but an excellent songwriter. Plus, having been in the business for so many years, Ron knew the lay of the land. He’d been around the big time, so it wasn’t something that was going to work any changes on him. He had his head screwed on right.
Probably the biggest event of 1983 was the Motown 25 special, commemorating the label’s first quarter century. During the days of rehearsal and the final taping I saw people I hadn’t seen in years, and everywhere I turned I seemed to be facing another memory. More than once I caught myself tripping back into the past, thinking about how it was when we were all young and ambitious, starting out together.
Walking around backstage I ran into Marvin Gaye. We’d hardly seen him at all since 1976. We heard that he’d split to Hawaii, then Europe, where he wrote the material for his comeback album, Midnight Love. I regarded “Sexual Healing” as one of the most wonderful things I’d ever heard. I remembered driving along a Detroit street one day in 1971 when “What’s Going On” came over my radio. It so amazed me that I had to pull over and park my car until it was over.
As well as I’d known Marvin from before, I was somewhat in awe of him this day. Of course, after he was shot to death by his father in April 1984, just over a year later and one day before his forty-fifth birthday, the press portrayed him as a tormented genius on his way back, but it was only half true. As long as I’d known Marvin, he always seemed to be haunted; a beautiful man, a genius, but truly tortured. Shortly after he died, his closest friend Harvey Fuqua stopped by Shelly’s office and took me aside.
“Otis, I want to tell you something,” he said. “Marvin was on a death wish. He wanted to die. He was tired.”
That may have been so, but when I last ran into him, he seemed in good spirits.
“Where the hell you been?” he asked as we embraced. We couldn’t talk too long because we had to get ready. While I was getting my makeup done, my mind drifted back to twenty-some years before, to me and Marvin sitting at the piano in the old Hitsville studio. You’d often find him sitting down there, just playing whatever came to his mind.
“Sit down here,” Marvin said. “Let me see how good your ear is.”
I sat down on the bench, and Marvin ran down some notes and chords, and I’d sing whatever he played. “You have a good ear,” he said. He was a talented and sweet, wonderful man.
Mary Wells, the Miracles, Martha Reeves, Jr. Walker, Stevie, Smokey, the Supremes, the Jacksons—the whole “family” was there. Even though no acknowledgment of them made it onto the final program, those who’d passed, like Paul and Flo, were deeply missed. How proud Paul would have been to see us there. Maybe he did. For some it was less like a homecoming than a little visit. Motown’s old guard had continued to dwindle; even Diana Ross had left Motown for another label back in 1981.
Most people regard Michael Jackson’s appearance as one of the show’s highlights, and it was. I couldn’t look at him without remembering the first time we met. Being out of town so much, we’d just heard rumors about these five little dynamos. When we finally met face-to-face, which is a funny way to put it, since my face was about three feet up from his, he and I formed an instant mutual-appreciation society.
I’d always known Michael to be a sensitive, kind person. One time we coheadlined an Operation PUSH benefit for Jesse Jackson in the late sixties with Michael and his brothers. The crowd got so wild that security hustled us off the stage and into a paneled U-Haul truck, slammed the doors, and drove us to safety. It was pitch-dark inside, and there were no seats, so we had to hold on to the metal bars running up the inner walls. I heard Michael’s little voice asking, “Where’s Otis? Where’s Otis?”
“He’s in here, Michael,” someone said.
A second or two later the light came on, and Michael looked up at me as if to say, “Okay.” Like everything was cool, because I was there. I was touched by his concern. There’s not much I can add to all that’s been said about his records. They’re great, and I’m very proud to see that Michael’s done so well.
Another guy we hadn’t seen in years was Bill Cosby. In the sixties, he’d tell people about us and get them to check us out. His friend and I Spy costar Robert Culp came to see us at the Whiskey-a-Go-Go in Los Angeles, and after the show he said, “I like you guys, but all the Cos talks about is the Temptations, the Temptations.” Cos gave us an even bigger compliment once when he told Berry, “You can make a whole lot of changes to your company, but do not mess with the Temptations.”
In those years he and I played tennis together, and Melvin and I would sit in on his recording sessions. He was every bit as witty and funny in real life as he is onstage. We were hanging out at his house in Beverly Hills when he announced that he and his family were moving to Boston. Having just discovered California’s wonderful climate, I asked him why. He replied that making love is better when it’s cold outside.
For the Motown 25 special, someone thought it would be cute to present the Tempts and the Four Tops together in a little battle, like the ones we did back in Detroit. We switched off between medleys of our respective hits, then they’d sing parts of ours and we’d do parts of theirs. In the middle of the taping, though, Dennis and Levi Stubbs really got into it, and seeing Dennis singing, “I can’t help myself, I love you and nobody else” to a gloating Levi was pretty funny by itself. We got such a good response that after the show I said, half-kidding to Duke Fakir, “Maybe we should take this out on the road.”
“You’re right,” he replied. “We should sit and talk about that.”
“You serious?” I asked.
“Yeah.”
“Then let’s get our managers on it,” I said, thinking this would be good for a few dates. By the time it was over, the T ’n’ T tour ran for nearly three years and went all over the world.
Now, being cooped up with your own guys can be tough enough, let alone somebody else’s, but we all truly loved one another. And being pros, we knew how to keep little things from getting in the way. One thing about hanging with those guys, you had to know how to cap or your ass was grass, especially with Levi around. Each of their guys has a close friend in one of our guys. My personal favorite is Levi, who’s a wonderful guy, but almost untoppable, pardon the pun, when it comes to being a wit. One day in New Zealand I tried to crack on an outfit he was wearing—red and green, if you can believe it—by addressing him as “Christmas,” when without missing a beat, he turned around and said, “Yeah, and Otis, and when that shit you’re wearing comes back in you’ll be in style.”
I remember seeing them back in the fifties, when we were still the Distants, or whatever. They were very hot, and sort of like the Primes in that their style was very sophisticated and refined without being stiff. They often played the Flame Show Bar, and every now and then I’d work up the courage to stick my head in the door, just to see what was happening. Of course, someone at the door always chased me away because I kept trying to peek. There were fine women there, too, but that’s another story.
We once appeared with Duke, Levi, Obie Benson, and Lawrence Payton in the early sixties at a little club, and they did a routine with Ray Charles’s “What’d I Say” where they’d all go down to the floor and jump up into these fantastic moves. It was something to see. I couldn’t believe how well they were moving then and hoped we’d get to be half as good.
The Temptations are still dancing onstage, despite the ravages of time, but the Tops are very open about their less exhausting presentation today. As I write this, the Tops have been together without a single personnel change for over thirty-five years. As one of them told me, “We’re too old for that shit now. We just get out there and sing.” But that’s enough. Back in Detroit, we considered them hot competition, and during the T ’n’ T tours it was clear that they hadn’t lost their touch. We love their records, and with the exception of maybe one other group I know, we think the Tops are the greatest.
Right after the Motown 25 taping, we got down to completing Back to Basics. We’d started having trouble with Dennis during the Reunion sessions, with his showing up late or being messed up from partying. All I could think was, “Oh no, not again. He can’t be blowing it a second time.” But he was, and we knew from experience to start lining up a replacement rather than wait for the inevitable.
Melvin’s mother, Momma Rose, was good friends with a Bobby Goodnews, Ollie Woodson’s father. Melvin, who’s always been very close to his mother, had kept her up to date on our problems with Dennis, and she offered to talk to Goodnews and put Ollie in touch with us.
We were in Atlanta when we decided that Dennis had crossed the line one time too many and was going to be leaving. The whole situation made me absolutely furious. That a great talent like Dennis would let distractions make him stray struck me as the dumbest thing in the world. To earn good money making yourself and thousands of people happy was, to me, a dream come true. That guys like Dennis couldn’t grasp this never fails to confound me. But, what the hell, he blew it.
We met Ollie in Atlanta, and he auditioned for us. He’d done something with his hair, so he looked much better. Richard asked him to squall for us, and he squalled; the audition was over. We told him to be packed and ready to leave for Los Angeles, where we were recording Basics.
Ollie came with us to Florida, where Cholly was rehearsing us for the next show. The rehearsal space was a big room on the second floor of a building that you entered from an exterior staircase. All along the wall were windows, so you could see right in. This one day, the five of us—Melvin, Ron, Richard, Ollie, and I—were working when Dennis came up the stairs. We saw his face in one of the windows for just a second, then he turned around and left without saying a word. He knew it was over.
Like Ron, Ollie was a songwriter, so when Melvin’s interest in writing with me declined, I paired up with Ollie. His strong suit was melodies; he played several instruments in addition to being a fantastic, flexible singer. Unlike Ron, Ollie hadn’t gotten that many breaks, and he expressed his frustration over the fact that no one would listen to his stuff. It’s hard to say why, because when we heard his songs, we thought they were very good. We’d sit together in the music room at my house and cook up new tunes. One of our first collaborations, “Treat Her Like a Lady,” became one of our biggest-selling hits of the eighties, and the album it came from, Truly for You, is one of our best. On the three albums we recorded with Ollie—Truly for You, Touch Me, and To Be Continued—eleven of the twenty-seven tracks were written by one or more Tempts, another thing we were very pleased with.
Through the years, except for visits with me, my son Lamont lived with his mother Josephine. Jo and I remain friends, and kept in touch about Lamont. We were in Atlantic City, appearing at Trump Plaza. Just a short while before, I’d sent Lamont some money so he could get a car he wanted, and decided to find out if he’d received it and check in. When I called, he mentioned something about not getting along with his mother, and I just listened. Being away so much, I saw my role as a sympathetic ear, a shoulder for Lamont to lean on. It wasn’t my place to interfere between him and his mother. I advised him to keep cool, and so on. It was a generally nice talk, and, as always, I told him I loved him.
The next day we were rehearsing with Maurice King. He was teaching us a song called “I Want to Know What Love Is,” when Ken Harris, our road manager, came in with a very troubled look on his face.
Kind of kidding, I said, “Damn, Ken, is it that bad?”
“Yeah,” he replied.
“Well, what’s wrong?” I asked.
He hesitated for a minute, then said, “Otis, Lamont is dead.”
I heard the words, but they didn’t register, and I stood there a minute looking at him as he spoke.
“We just got a call, and you’d better call Detroit.”
I was totally numb as I walked back to my suite. All the guys—Melvin, Richard, Ron, Ollie, Maurice—came up to try to comfort me, hug me, rub my shoulder. The only thing I could say was, “I just talked to him last night.” It was so unbelievable. You expect your parents and your peers to pass in your lifetime, but not your child. Never your child. It was one of those freak things. Lamont was working for a construction business and had fallen from a roof. He was just twenty-three.
It’s impossible to describe how I felt. Lamont was my only child, and every time I see any of the other guys with their boys, it still hurts deeply. Several years later, when my grandmother Lucinda passed at eighty-eight, Josephine said, “Otis, don’t worry. Everything will be all right. God doesn’t give you more than you can stand. There’s a reason for all of that.” I often remember and find comfort in Jo’s words. We cannot question God’s work.
Beginning in 1985 we started branching out, doing other things in addition to recording and touring. We made a bunch of commercials and were invited to make cameo appearances on television shows, including The Fall Guy, The Love Boat, and Moonlighting. Bruce Willis is a great fan, and after the taping we gave him and Cybill Shepherd Temptations jackets and agreed to appear with Bruce on his album. He said that one of his dreams was to sing with us, so we did “Under the Boardwalk” with him on The Return of Bruno. We were offered parts on Webster, but when we couldn’t fit it into our schedule, they gave our lines to the Four Tops. Having to act a little was a big departure from our previous television experience. We’d done little skits here and there, played members of the French Foreign Legion on Laugh-In and Sonny and Cher’s show and the deacons in Flip Wilson’s Church of What’s Happening Now, but never “acted.” We quickly learned that it was a whole different thing, lots of fun but a challenge, too.
When you and your friends have some degree of fame, you have to make a conscientious effort to separate what you know about them as people from what you read in the press. There’s probably no one who gets more bizarre press than Michael Jackson, most of which I cannot believe. I’d heard rumors that Michael Jackson had been spotted around wearing a Joker’s mask, modeled after the Cesar Romero character from the Batman TV series, but felt that they were not true.
About three years ago, I stopped at a newsstand on Ventura Boulevard in the Valley. When I first got out of my car, I noticed someone standing nearby wearing a San Francisco 49ers football jacket. Suddenly I heard a voice saying, “Otis?”
I took a closer look. “Michael?” I asked. Sure enough, he was wearing the Joker mask.
“Yeah,” he answered softly.
“Well, I’ll be damned.”
We embraced and I congratulated him on the success of Thriller and told him how much I liked it. He thanked me politely in that soft voice, and asked how the Temptations were doing, what we were up to. After several more minutes of conversation, he said, “Well, I have to be going,” got into his Rolls-Royce with a buddy and drove away.
A minute later the guy at the newsstand came up to me and asked, “Wasn’t that Michael Jackson?”
“Yeah,” I answered.
“That’s a shame,” he said, shaking his head, “that poor kid’s gotta go around in a mask just so he can go down the street.”
“Yeah,” I said.
“Hey, why did he come up to you?”
“Oh, we shared a few stages together.”
“Oh. Okay.” We said good-bye, and I left.
It was about time for another personnel change. Things with Ollie were breaking down, and had been ever since he’d passed the eighteen-month probation period. It was the same tired story. After his lateness almost cost us a guest shot on a television show, I laid into him but good.
“Ollie,” I’d say time and again, “you cannot do it like this. You’ve got to have some discipline. I’ve been around some singing-ass brothers, and you can hold your own with the best of them, and I’m including David Ruffin and Dennis Edwards. But if you don’t get your act together, you’re going to be sorry.”
These pep talks would take place in hotel rooms, usually, and he’d say, “I appreciate that,” and so on, but he’d slide back into that old thing again.
The stupidity of it got to me. I couldn’t see why someone would say, “Well, I’ve got a bunch of shows to do, I’ve got to be on time and look sharp. I guess I’ll stay up all night doin’ whatever.”
