18,000.We finally broke out in early 1964 with “The Way You Do the Things You Do,” a tune Smokey wrote with Bobby Rogers while they were driving on the Pennsylvania Turnpike. The first time we heard the song, we loved it. The melody swung, and the lyrics had lots of charm. They were silly in a way, talking about a girl you loved as a candle, a handle, a schoolbook, a cool crook, a broom, a perfume, but, typical of Smokey, he made it work. Paul sang lead on the flip, “Just Let Me Know.” “The Way” got a good response whenever we did it live, so our hopes were up. We knew from past experience that even the best tracks don’t always click.
Bringing in David was probably the best decision we made, but it wasn’t all that smooth. In the beginning it was David and I who hung together. We had many wonderful times because David was a lively, funny guy. We walked all over the place, and David, who was known around then for always carrying a knife, would throw his knife into trees along the sidewalk or break into doing flips and cartwheels.
As long as I’d known David, he was always a very complex guy, very intense about things. I suppose a lot of it might be related to how he was raised. When we first met in 1959, he was with Eddie Bush, who I believe was his foster father, and David was known back then as Little David Bush. He was recording then. We didn’t talk about it much, but from the little I did learn, it sounded like the Ruffins had come up from a rough beginning. He was originally from a little town called Wyanot, Mississippi, but up until the 1982 reunion tour, he’d always told us that he was from Meridian.
As badly as we wanted David in the group, the idea that he had been a solo artist played on our minds a little. When I finally asked David to join, I said, “Listen, David, we’re not playing around. I’m serious. We need somebody who’s going to stick with it.” He assured me that he would, and I was satisfied. Although David was replacing Al Bryant, the structure of the Temptations was going to remain: five guys, any one of which could take a lead, with most leads split among Paul, Eddie, and David.
It would be a few years yet before any kind of competitiveness among those three came out. But it must be said that at first Eddie was not crazy about David coming in. Eddie couldn’t have been threatened by David taking his spot because he was already splitting leads with Paul and, now and then, me. Besides, his voice and David’s were so different. Still, David was an intense, dynamic singer and a natural-born showman. I guess it was just a matter of chemistry. Added to that was Eddie’s suspicion that David planned to use the Temptations as a stepping-stone. We’re aware that some books have presented the story so that it seems that we all suspected David’s motives, but it’s not so. Eddie’s doubts about David cleared away as he saw that David was working as hard as the rest of us. And the other three of us never saw David in that light back then.
In actual fact, we were all tight with each other. Eddie and I were hanging pretty close. To give you an idea of the kind of friends we were, back in 1962, when we discovered—much to our surprise—that we were both seeing the same young lady, instead of one getting mad at the other, we laughed about it. It turned out she’d been playing us both, but we wouldn’t let a thing like that come between us. Eddie had a real soft side. I recall him warning me about a woman who he thought was going to hurt me. Eddie was that kind of guy.
After we recorded “The Way You Do the Things You Do,” we went out for a three-week gig in Saginaw, Michigan, hoping that our eighth single would be the one. Just about everyone who’d come to Motown around when we did was racking them up by then. Nineteen-sixty-three was a good year for Motown, what with Marvin Gaye’s “Pride and Joy,” “Hitch Hike,” and “Can I Get a Witness,” Martha and the Vandellas’ “Heat Wave,” “Quicksand,” and “Come and Get These Memories,” and the Miracles’ “You’ve Really Got a Hold on Me” (from late 1962) and “Mickey’s Monkey” (which we and Martha and the Vandellas sang backup on). Even Little Stevie Wonder had done it, with “Fingertips (Part 2).” Of all Motown’s big acts, we were the next-to-the-last ones out of the gate. The only ones slower than us finally to bust into the Top Twenty were the Supremes.
The minute we got back in from Saginaw we stopped in at Hitsville, something we’d do even before we would go home. Everyone we ran into was saying, “Hey, haven’t you all heard?”
“Heard what?” we asked.
“You’re all in the charts.”
We kept repeating, “Are you kidding me?” It was like a dream. Someone opened up the current issues of Billboard and Cash Box, and there it was: “The Way You Do the Things You Do” running up both charts with a bullet. By the time it was all over, “The Way” peaked at number eleven on the pop chart. When David saw those charts, he sat down on a long chaise lounge in the Motown lobby, took off his glasses, and cried like a baby.
“At last,” he said, tears running down his face, “at last. I have been trying to get in the charts, and at last I’m in the charts.”
I sat down beside him, kind of teary-eyed myself. All I could say was, “Yeah,” and “Oh, man.” There was no way to articulate that feeling. There’d be bigger hits, but nothing ever beat that first time. Everywhere we went, people were talking about us, or they’d see us in the street, point, and say, “Oh, that’s them.” We’d gotten a little of that with the Distants, but it was nothing like this.
I remember being at the Graystone Ballroom, a place where a lot of us went to dance and hang out. Promotion guys and jocks were coming up to us and saying, “Man, you all are number one in Chicago,” and “You all’s record is number one in Philly.”
Back then disc jockeys ruled the airwaves, and could make or break just about anybody. Some of our earlier records, like “Dream Come True” and “I Want a Love I Can See,” had been picked up here and there, but not on any consistent basis. Once those jocks got “The Way You Do the Things You Do” they must have known they had a live one. After that, we could do no wrong.
And the money was better. Ever since Josephine and I married, her mother had criticized me for not being in a more stable line of work. Sometimes Josephine would take up the cause, too. But I wasn’t giving up. I’d felt in my heart that this day was going to come. Now it was here.
Between the release of “The Way You Do the Things You Do” and April 1964 when it peaked, Motown kept us busy. We sang backup for Liz Land, one of Motown’s earliest artists. I believe she was a trained singer, and her range spanned two or three octaves. She’d get so high, the hair on the nape of your neck would stand up. She was a beautiful woman and an excellent vocal stylist. Her material was quite sophisticated and unique, mostly ballads. We had the pleasure of backing her on two songs, “Keep Me,” which got a lot of play, and the flip side, “Midnight Johnny.” But she never went as far as she deserved. Of course, today, that’s another rare and valuable record.
Meet the Temptations, our debut album, was out in March, and though it barely snuck into the Top 100 albums chart, we couldn’t have been happier if it had gone to number one. We’d prayed for that album for so long, we cherished it. Each one of us had his own copy, and when we were on the road and staying someplace, walking down the hall, we’d hear it playing. In those days albums weren’t the main source of record sales, like singles, so having an album out then really meant something—that you had a hit, and you were on the rise.
Record companies’ philosophies about albums were much different, too. Basically, selling an album was like reselling one, two, or three hit singles plus some throwaway filler tracks that nobody really gave a damn about. With Meet you got “The Way You Do the Things You Do” and its B side, “Just Let Me Know,” along with ten other tracks culled from our seven-single string of flops. The only songs left out of our recorded legacy to that point were “Oh Mother of Mine” and “Romance without Finance,” the two obscure Pirates tunes, and the Northern songs.
One of our favorite things about the album was the cover. Early on, Motown often used pictures of white people or some silly cartoon on the covers, thinking, I guess, that record buyers would be turned off by seeing black faces. The photographer wanted to do something different, so he posed us against a dark background. By carefully lighting our faces, he achieved an almost silhouette effect, not unlike that used on the Beatles’ first American album. It was very dramatic and different for Motown and most other black albums of the day. I’m not sure that Berry deliberately chose that type of photograph and cover, thinking he would present us as an upscale act, but it fit in very well with the sort of classy image we were cultivating.
We continued to write songs, but with time and hits, Motown became considerably less receptive to our stuff. When it came to what artists could and should do, Berry was very clear: artists performed, writers wrote, and producers produced. It was that simple. Because Berry wrote and produced himself, he respected writers and producers, often more than the artists. In his paternal, sometimes condescending way, he let it be known that he wasn’t interested in having artists who wrote and produced. In the face of this, we got less diligent about pushing it. Maybe it was a mistake to let that happen, but once the Temptations became consistent hitmakers, Motown gave us the best material, the best production, and the best support. Maybe if we’d felt neglected things would have been different.
One of the last sixties tunes any Tempt had a writing credit on was our ninth single, “The Girl’s Alright with Me,” which Eddie wrote with Norman Whitfield and Eddie Holland. Onstage we did a thing where four of us stood around one microphone and snapped our fingers on the intro, and then glided right into our steps. It was hot. The more successful number, though, was the flip side, Smokey’s “I’ll Be in Trouble.” At number thirty-three, it wasn’t the smash follow-up we’d hoped for, but we’d take it. You’d think that Eddie’s voice was high enough, but several producers at Motown preferred to record songs a half step or step higher than what you were comfortable singing. In some instances, like David Ruffin singing “Ain’t Too Proud to Beg,” it worked great, because that extra strain gave the vocals a sharper edge. Using that approach with Eddie, though, left him sounding a little squeaky if it wasn’t done right, and what with “I’ll Be in Trouble” being in a minor key, it didn’t quite work. Our next hit was “Girl (Why You Wanna Make Me Blue),” a song of Norman’s that Eddie sang lead on. We still switched off leads in our shows, but until late 1964 all our hits featured Eddie.
In those days Motown booked the Tempts on any tour that would take us. Motown handled all the financial arrangements and made the deals. All we had to do was show up and sing. Promoters then paid us several hundred dollars a night, against which Motown deducted travel, food, lodging, and other expenses. I remember being told that all the money due us would be kept safely in an escrow account until the tour ended. Then Motown would settle each act’s account and write a check for the balance. Or so they said. In fact, we never saw a single penny from any of those early tours, nor did we see any kind of written statement breaking down where the money went. Since we rarely stayed in a hotel and weren’t eating in the finest restaurants, it’s hard to imagine what Motown’s “costs” were. Something about it didn’t hang right. Did this happen to anyone there besides us? I honestly cannot say. As success came to each of us, even if only in a small way, we kept to our own groups. You wouldn’t be sitting around with other people outside your group and talking about it, even if you suspected something. I can’t say why we were all like that. Countless times acts who were signed to smaller, less organized R&B labels or bigger, less friendly major companies told us how lucky we were and how they wished Motown would sign them. Hearing that gave us the impression that things were worse everywhere. In our case it was a matter of appreciating what you’d worked so hard to get and being mindful not to rock the boat. The five of us learned to carry a lot inside and, as they say in karate, suck wind.
Motown hadn’t yet given us the power to draw on the Temptations account on Melvin’s or my signature, but there never was a problem getting money if you needed it. If I saw a television I wanted to buy, I’d call up and there’d be a check waiting when I got to Hitsville. Every now and then, somebody might tell you your account was running a little low, or something along those lines, but money was coming in, so we probably didn’t think about it as much as we should have. Following Beans Bowles’s advice, we put ourselves on a budget. Even without an accountant’s advice, we knew to pay our estimated income taxes, so we made sure we had some socked away.
Things picked up considerably in 1964, and we were either out of town or at Hitsville working on our act or recording. We did the Motortown Revue tours, as well as tours sponsored by Irving Feld, Henry Wynn, and Dick Clark. I recall being on the Henry Wynn tours with people such as Maxine Brown, who was hot then, Chuck Jackson, Gladys Knight and the Pips, and lots of others. The acts traveled by bus, and some were nicer than others. Motown’s buses were in notoriously bad shape. As Melvin once remarked, a vehicle with wheels was a major improvement over what Motown had.
There wasn’t much to do on the bus, so if you weren’t into playing cards, reading, or constantly sleeping, you did a lot of talking. Generally, a bus carried five or six acts plus the band and whatever sidemen, chaperones, and other people there might be. It was very cramped, and there was no such thing as personal space, so you developed another kind of camaraderie.
These tours averaged thirty days each, and they weren’t as strategically planned as they might have been. You might close a show in one town and have to drive six or seven hundred miles to the next show the next day. There were days and days we’d go without our heads ever hitting a pillow. On the rare occasion when we did check into a hotel for a night’s rest or a few days’ relaxation, if we were down South we might drive for a while to find a hotel that would take blacks.
For many people in places we visited the “old ways” died hard. Generally speaking, blacks in Detroit were treated better than in most of the South, so we found some aspects of racism pretty shocking. Even though you could predict what you were going to find down there, it still made you angry. All I wanted to know was, why?
One tour took us through my home state of Texas. Several young ladies had to use the rest room but weren’t allowed to because they were black. The civil rights movement was growing, but in some of those little pockets, Martin Luther King, Jr., could have been marching on Mars for all those people cared. We had no choice but to reboard the bus and drive down the road a piece to where we could stop and people could go in the bushes. Some, such as Inez and Charlie Foxx, Maxine Brown, Blinky Williams, and Kim Weston, didn’t go along with this crap silently, and some situations came close to turning ugly. Sometimes it made you wonder if it would ever change. The thing about any act of racism is that no matter how much you tell yourself what to expect or how many times you see the same nonsense, it never loses its power to shake you up.
Our first full Motortown Revue, in 1964, took us to South Carolina. From the stage, you could look out across the auditorium and see a rope running smack down the middle of the aisle: blacks on one side, whites on the other. Same thing for the balcony. We couldn’t believe it. Angry, we asked, “What the fuck is the rope for?” but we knew the answer. There were far too many scenes like that to recount. Let’s just say they were dealt with.
Sometimes we did see progress. Take that town in South Carolina, for example. When we got back there about a year or so later, the rope was gone, and it was a different scene. Everyone—black and white—sat together. In only a matter of months, some of those barriers fell, at least among the young people. This is not to say that getting blacks and whites together for a show solves any major racial problem, but it is a step.
As we came up in the business, we shared the stage with many of our idols. One was the late Jackie Wilson, a tremendous singer and consummate performer; I’d followed his career since he was in Billy Ward and the Dominoes. In fact, Berry often compared the Temptations to the Dominoes because our lineup and sound were similar. We were working the Regal in Chicago, and every night we watched from the wings as Jackie did his show. His style was dynamic, very athletic, and women found him irresistible. But Jackie didn’t take care of himself. Back then he not only drank scotch and smoked cigarettes, but he snorted cocaine, and you could see that it was wearing on him. I knew he wouldn’t go on like that too much longer without burning himself out.
One thing about the touring I enjoyed was being around women and getting to learn more about them, not necessarily in the romantic sense but as friends. Maxine Brown, Yvonne Fair, Dionne Warwick, and others would sit around and tell us how they liked men to treat them, and what they looked for in a guy. I never will forget Yvonne Fair saying, “If I look down at a man’s shoes and he has those funny clodhopper shoes with the triple stitches, I don’t give a shit how fine he is from the ankles on up, I will not talk to him. He will get no time, nor will he get any stuff.” And then Maxine Brown said, “Yeah, child, if his hands ain’t right—his fingernails right—if his teeth is cruddy, I’d say ‘uh, uh.’ ” I’d listen to them talk for hours, fascinated and making mental notes.
Another one I liked to hang with on tour was Chuck Jackson. Chuck was a great singer, slick onstage, and always something of a ladies’ man. He was a few years older than we were, and had been in the Del-Vikings. Around this time he had two substantial hits: “I Don’t Want to Cry” and “Any Day Now.” Girls couldn’t seem to get enough of him. We made it a point to stick around Chuck because you could count on catching his overflow, if you know what I mean.
The one guy everybody loved was Stevie Wonder. He was much younger than the rest of us, about fourteen or fifteen, but he had a great personality and so much talent, you couldn’t help thinking of him as a peer. Stevie liked to make people laugh and had an impish charm. Usually he sat at the back of the bus with the musicians and played his harmonica for hours. Everyone understood that he was woodshedding, but only to a point. When it got to be about two or three in the morning, someone would yell, “Stevie, man, put that damn harmonica down and go to sleep.” If that didn’t work, we tried, “Steven, we’re going to beat your ass if you don’t take that damn harmonica . . .” and he’d laugh, because he knew we’d never do that. Not that the thought didn’t cross our minds now and then.
On a later tour Edwin Starr brought along his pet chimpanzee, who was cute but full-grown and not very well trained. This chimp amused himself—and Edwin, too, I guess, since he didn’t try to stop him—by running around and peeing on people. Finally we put it to Edwin: “You got to get that monkey off the bus, or you get off.” I forget what happened to the chimp, but he was gone.
So not everything ran that smoothly. You had to make an effort to readjust. You really liked everybody or you’d find out who you didn’t like on there. And there were some times when we were not one big happy family. Once the Tempts went at it with the Contours. They were nice guys but a little rough around the edges, and a couple were downright unsavory. Not to brag, but we got our share of women, which one of their guys didn’t like. I think we argued with them over that and a bottle of wine.
The young ladies from Motown were truly ladies, but some of them found the tours a little stifling. Motown made sure they were heavily chaperoned. That was probably not a bad idea, considering the fact that we guys were pretty much left to our own devices, and even though we were just in our twenties, Motown management treated us like grown men. Beans Bowles or one of the older gentlemen might lecture us now and then about using protection and how discretion was the better part of valor—a good thing to remember down South when white girls were after us—but that was the extent of it. We also managed to sneak in a few little love affairs and made friendships that continue today.
Around this time Josephine and I called it quits. Work took me out of town so much that even under the best of circumstances a real family life was hard to manage. I got an apartment over on LaSalle Boulevard and began dating again. One thing Hitsville did not lack was fine-looking women, and I wasn’t the only guy to notice. At different times I dated Jeana Jackson, Sandy Tilley, Martha Reeves, Kim Weston, and Billie Jean Brown. Those were good times, but work always came first.
In 1964 we made our first and last appearance in Bermuda. We played at a club called the Forty Thieves and stayed in a big house up on a hill. Bermuda was beautiful, the people were friendly, and every night a bunch of girls followed us home and camped out on our front lawn. We’d come in during the wee hours, and there they’d be—dozens of beautiful women. Being young and wild, we’d party until five or six in the morning. The neighbors complained to the police and yelled out their windows at us, but we didn’t care. It was just too damned good.
Despite all that, something happened, and Eddie and David locked ass one night. Melvin and I shared one room, David and Eddie had another, and Paul slept by himself. Melvin was asleep, snoring that big, thunderous bass snore, when suddenly, from the other room, Paul and I heard shouting. David was sitting on the edge of his bed, saying something that Eddie didn’t like, so Eddie came at David as if he was going to belt him in the face. I grabbed Eddie, and Paul held David, and after making a lot of racket, they cooled out. I went into my room, sure that Melvin would be wide awake, but he continued sleeping like a baby. As a result of the commotion, the government of Bermuda banned us from the country, and we’ve never been back.
During the fall we did a nine-day stint at the Brooklyn Fox with Dusty Springfield, the Shangri-Las, Jay and the Americans, the Contours, the Ronettes, Martha and the Vandellas, Little Anthony and the Imperials, Marvin Gaye, and others. It was a lineup you couldn’t slack off on. And we weren’t slacking off a bit. Paul kept at us, and we worked like dogs. It’s funny, but sometimes having a little success makes you hungrier than you were when you had none. Suddenly, great success seemed not only possible but probable. All we had to do was keep at it.
Aside from our singing and strutting onstage, we were known for our stage uniforms, which over the years would run the gamut from black-tux elegance to the psychedelic stomach-churning combinations of the late sixties. It was around this time that our uniforms started getting wild. Eddie was definitely ahead of his time in picking our clothes. Whenever we played the Apollo a salesman from F & F Clothiers named Dave would stop by and visit all the acts to show them fabric swatches. You could order just about anything your heart desired.
One day he showed up with some purple material, and Eddie fell in love with it.
“Eddie!” I exclaimed. “I’m too black to wear that purple!” And this was purple, as in pimp-clothes purple.
“Don’t worry, man,” Eddie said, laughing. “We’re going to be sharp. They’re going to love that purple on us.”
Eddie ordered five purple suits with a white button, which we wore with white shirts and white shoes. I’d always trusted Eddie, but I couldn’t see how this was going to work. The accepted thing then was red, white, and black. Maybe another color, but never purple.
But I was wrong. The minute the crowd got an eyeful of us in those suits, they went berserk. That purple drove the audience out of their minds.
The year 1964 closed on a high note for not only us but everyone at Motown. The Supremes racked up three number-one records in a row, then became the first Motown act to appear on national television when they debuted on The Ed Sullivan Show. It was exciting to see our friends on a program we watched every Sunday. When the Supremes made that historic appearance, they represented not just themselves, but everyone at Motown. As they would in several other areas, the Supremes blazed a trail the rest of us would follow, and we were all very proud. There were plenty of great female singers around Hitsville, and some truly fine-looking ones, too. But, as the world discovered, Diane, Flo, and Mary were born to this; they had “it,” or as we’d say, the Jim Johnson. They were stars. Meanwhile, Marvin Gaye, Mary Wells, Brenda Holloway, Stevie Wonder, Martha and the Vandellas, the Miracles, and the label’s latest signing, the Four Tops, kept spinning out the hits. After “Girl (Why You Wanna Make Me Blue)” charted in the twenties, we were looking for the next tune.
Back home in Detroit, Smokey Robinson caught our act at the Twenty Grand one evening. One of our numbers featured each of us singing a part. The title of it escapes me, but I do remember that we brought the house down with it. After we came offstage that night, Smokey approached us and, pointing directly at David, said, “I’ve got a song for you.”
It turned out to be a tune Smokey and Ronnie White had written and planned to cut with the Miracles. It was midtempo ballad with a pretty, sweet melody. From the first lines—“I’ve got sunshine on a cloudy day / When it’s cold outside, I’ve got the month of May”—we knew we had something very special. That fall, during a run at the Apollo, Smokey came to New York to work with us in our dressing room between shows. He taught us to sing the parts as he heard them and perfect those intricate harmonies. On December 21 we recorded “My Girl” in Detroit. It was David’s first lead on a single.
We recorded our vocals over a basic track, so what we heard was basically bass, drums, and guitar. Smokey worked up those lush string parts with Paul Riser, a classically trained musician who wrote most of the orchestral music on Motown records. We listened in the studio as Smokey added the “sweetening,” and by the time he was finished with the mix, it was the most gorgeous, magical love song I’d ever heard. There was no question in our minds that we had the big one here.
Sometime around then, the five of us were talking one day about how it seemed that so many good groups broke up just when things got good. We were thinking specifically of Tony Williams’s leaving the Platters, but we knew of dozens of groups who’d let their petty nonsense ruin a good thing. It seemed to be one of the hazards of the business. Paul said, “Well, we don’t care how big we get, we’re going to stay together.” And so we took a vow, promising one another that we wouldn’t fall into that trap. Paul, Eddie, David, Melvin, and I were the Temptations and always would be. We truly believed that.
Christmas Day we did a Motortown Revue at the Brooklyn Fox with the Supremes, the Marvelettes, Marvin Gaye, the Miracles, and Stevie Wonder. The next day Motown released “My Girl,” and it charted at number seventy-six three weeks later. Talk about a merry Christmas.
“My Girl” continued to climb to and hit number one on March 6, 1965. By then it had sold at least a million copies. Berry sent us a congratulatory telegram, which we received while we were playing the Apollo, and setting more records. I remember feeling like I was going to burst from pride. Everywhere you walked in Detroit that spring all you heard was “My Girl.” By then, Motown had come to own Detroit. Wherever you went, if they knew you were with Motown, out came the red carpet. There was no more standing in line, no more waiting for anything. Despite all the success, Motown remained more a family than a business. When we didn’t have shows, rehearsals, or recording, all of us would stand out on the front lawn and crack jokes half the day. I remember Marvin Gaye, Norman Whitfield, Shorty Long, Smokey, Lamont Dozier, the Holland brothers, and us out there. People would ride by and honk their horns at us and wave. Some fans even made pilgrimages to Hitsville as part of their vacations, like going to Disneyland. Once when I saw Esther Edwards leading a pack of tourists through the studios, I stopped one of them and asked, “You mean to tell me you all left beautiful L.A. to come and spend your time here in Detroit?”
“Oh yeah,” the star-struck man replied. “We just couldn’t help it. We wanted to see you guys.”
Living in the middle of it, we had no real grasp of what Motown was becoming. For one thing, we had nothing to compare it to. How other record companies functioned was a total mystery to us, though as we would learn, there are two ways to run a record company: the industry way and the Motown way. And at that time, the Motown way was doing just fine by us. I remember somebody from the office boarding a tour bus and handing each of us a check—the royalties off one hit. Mine was for 18,000.
We felt that we were on our way, but even before the first hit, Paul had his sights set on where we should be going. “Man,” Paul would say, “we’ve got to play Vegas and Atlantic City. The white folks don’t want to see no guys out there bumpin’ and grindin’ and carrying on.” Plus, we didn’t want to be guys out there bumpin’ and grindin’ and carrying on.
The company was starting to boom. In March 1965 Harvey Fuqua convinced Motown to bring Cholly Atkins into artist development. We’d long been admirers of Cholly’s choreography for Gladys Knight and the Pips, the Cadillacs, the Cleftones, Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers, the Moonglows, Little Anthony and the Imperials, and others. We’d finally gotten some of that magic ourselves when he devised a routine for us to use on “The Way You Do the Things You Do” in 1964.
Cholly was in his early fifties when he came to Motown after a long and successful career as a professional dancer. During the 1930s, Cholly was one half of a song-and-dance team called the Rhythm Pals, which appeared in several Hollywood films. After that, he joined forces with Charles “Honi” Coles, a tap dancer who at one time also managed the Apollo. It was through working at the Apollo that Cholly met many of the young vocal groups he later choreographed.
There weren’t a lot of guys doing what Cholly did. What set Cholly’s work apart from other choreographers’ was that he built everything around the singing. Anybody can cook up a series of eye-popping moves, but to create dance that takes into consideration such things as the stage layout, the placement of microphones and cords, and how the hell you are going to move, sing, and still breathe takes a scientific approach and attention to detail. His routines incorporated dozens of tiny, nearly imperceptible movements—hitch steps, subtle turns and shifts, a little sway here or there—that when you followed them to the letter landed you in the precise spot at the exact second. However, miss one of those suckers and you were totally out of it. Just about anyone else’s choreography allowed you a few beats for “correction,” but not Cholly’s.
It was one thing for Cholly to dream up these things, but it was something else for us to learn them. Of course, Paul had started us, and he’d even made a dancer out of me, the kid whose dance-hall name was “Wallflower.” But as good as we were with that, Cholly took us into a whole other dimension. On average, learning a new routine took about two or three weeks of dance rehearsals for five or six hours a day. And while Cholly was a gentleman in all respects, he could be tough. His goal was to turn out acts with routines so ingrained in their minds that once the opening chords of any song hit your ears, your body went on automatic pilot. I remember going home after a long rehearsal, sitting down to watch television, and in my head hearing a little voice saying, “Kick, step, two, three, turn, one, two, three.” In the studio Cholly didn’t allow for one iota of deviation, and if you messed up he let you know it. We’d be sweating and concentrating, then one guy would miss something, and Cholly would yell, “You greasy snotsucker! Can’t you count?”
“Pops, why do you have to call me that?” I asked once.
“I don’t know. Because you are! Now, come on,” he’d reply as he marched over and grabbed one of us by the wrist and start walking him through the steps.
Pairing us up with Cholly was a match made in heaven and would be so for years to come. In 1983 he worked up a routine for our song “Sail Away,” a pretty ballad that ends with an African beat. During that part, Cholly had us moving back off the mike, tightening our midsections and hunching our shoulders. It was quite dramatic, and one day a woman who saw us said, “You know, when you all do that move at the end of ‘Sail Away,’ my seat gets wet.”
When I relayed the story to Cholly, now in his seventies, he replied, “That’s right. You want to touch them women and make them start thinking sexual. I know what them women like.” And he did.
Also that March, the Motown Revue went to England. “My Girl” was not that high on the British charts, but from the moment we landed in London, we were in love with the country and its people, who ever since, for the past two and a half decades, have always treated us with love and respect. We didn’t stay for the whole tour but did appear with the Supremes, the Miracles, the Marvelettes, Martha and the Vandellas, Stevie Wonder, and Dusty Springfield on a BBC special called The Sounds of Motown, which is now available on videocassette under the title Ready Steady Go! Special Edition: The Sounds of Motown. We performed “My Girl,” “The Way You Do the Things You Do,” and our then-latest single, “It’s Growing.”
At the time, we each had a group responsibility. Eddie took care of uniforms, Paul fined you if he caught you messing up onstage, Melvin handled finances, and David oversaw transportation. My job as group spokesperson and de facto leader was to see that nobody got too far out of pocket. I levied fines for things like lateness, excessive drinking, and smoking dope. This one day we were all at the Cumberland Hotel, and I decided to go down to David and Eddie’s room and see what was happening. I knocked on the door, then one of them yelled, “Who is it?”
“It’s me. Otis.”
“Oh, shit!” one of them whispered loud enough that I could hear. A second later, the other one called out, “Just a minute,” using one of those “I’m freaked but I’m cool” tones you get from guilty kids.
One minute, two minutes, three minutes went by. What the hell was going on in there? If I’d caught them smoking dope, I’d have fined their asses a hundred dollars, which in those days wasn’t chump change. But whatever they might have been up to, I never did find out.
During the summer we did one of Murray the K’s shows at the Brooklyn Fox. Murray the K was a hot New York City disc jockey who was also known as the fifth Beatle and, for a while, the sixth Temptation. Murray was a nice guy, and his shows always had the top acts. I recall one bill with us, Little Anthony and the Imperials, Tom Jones, the Ronettes, and the Shangri-Las. All of the girls were real cute, but, of course, the Ronettes were the hottest. At the time, Tom Jones’s career had just taken off with “It’s Not Unusual.” He later smoothed out his appearance a bit, but then he was pretty rugged and chasing Ronnie Bennett (later Spector) of the Ronettes.
What I remember most vividly about that run was walking out the stage door in the wee hours of the morning and seeing people lined up, bundled in sleeping bags, waiting for the next show. These were great shows, and you worked your ass off for pay that averaged out to about ten bucks per guy per show. Still there was no place else I wanted to be then.
“My Girl” opened the door for us, and slowly but surely things got bigger and better. The crowds were wilder, the halls were bigger—even the groupies were classier. Of course that didn’t mean that next week they wouldn’t all be with the O’Jays or whoever else came through, but that was how it was. All that female attention could compromise your judgment, so you had to watch yourself. But overall, these were good times.
More than once, each of us was the target of a jealous boyfriend’s rage. One night we were playing the Twenty Grand to a packed house. From backstage we could hear women hollering, “The Tempts! The Tempts!” Once the show ended, I was walking toward my car when a young lady called out, “Oh, please, would you sign your autograph for me?”
I said, “Sure,” and took the paper and pen she offered me, but the whole time I could see that she wanted me to say, “What’s your name, darlin’? What’s your number?” As I was signing my name, a guy came and grabbed her tightly by the arm and snapped, “Not this one, motherfucker, this is mine.”
“Hey, man,” I replied coolly, “I’m just signing the autograph. I wasn’t saying nothin’ else to your woman.”
“I just want to make sure,” the guy said, “because she’s my wife, and all I’ve been hearing from her is ‘Temptations this, Temptations that.’ I got so tired of hearing about the damn Temptations that I decided to come down and see you guys.” He paused for a minute. “And you know what? Yeah, you all are bad. I like you. But this is my woman.”
“Fine,” I said. He offered his hand, we shook, and I split.
One time the jealous boyfriend was Kenny Gamble, who thought that David was moving in on his girlfriend (later wife), singer Dee Dee Sharp of “Mashed Potato Time” fame. Kenny was in a group called Kenny Gamble and the Romeos, which included future producer Thom Bell. We were playing the Uptown in Philadelphia when we got wind that Kenny might be thinking of bringing down some guys to jump David Ruffin. Naturally the four of us went to David’s defense, and I told Kenny, “You might be in your hometown, but it ain’t like we can’t pick up the phone.” David was unharmed, and Kenny and I became close friends. By the mid-sixties he and Leon Huff had their own label, and through the years produced Wilson Pickett, the O’Jays, Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes, the Jacksons, and others. Kenny and I would shoot pool and talk about the business.
For the most successful Motown acts this was the dawn of a golden era. But for others, the so-called B acts, whose hits weren’t as big or as consistent, it was the beginning of a slow and, for some, bitter decline. Smokey wrote and produced most of our hits then, and since he was one of Berry’s closest friends and a vice president of the company, some other artists assumed that we had an “in.” We’d come to Motown with a group organization, and I dealt with Berry directly, just as I’d dealt with Johnnie Mae. Not all acts had that kind of thing with him, but I don’t know why. We pretty much kept to our own business. Each act was out on the road almost constantly, so Hitsville wasn’t the same friendly hangout.
Being back in Detroit meant being back in the studio. We recorded live then, with all the musicians in the room playing as we sang. The Funk Brothers, Motown’s studio band, must go down in history as one of the best groups of musicians anywhere. Each of them was a master in his own right, and sometimes I’d get so wrapped up listening to them, I’d miss my cue and forget to sing. They’d also get their little barbs in. James Jamerson was a funny guy, and so was Eddie “Bongo” Brown, a percussionist. If one of us goofed, it meant starting the song over from the top, and that was always the musicians’ chance to make a nasty crack, like, “Those damn doo-wops.” Then someone else would say, “Yeah, you know they can’t even doo-wop right.” Or, “You guys better be glad that you got the Funk Brothers behind you, or you wouldn’t sound like nothin’.” Generally, we could cut a track in three to four hours and wrap up a whole album inside a week. Even though today technology affords artists the chance to make perfect records, they still haven’t come up with the machine that puts in that special electricity and energy of those live records.
Our following two singles, “It’s Growing” and “Since I Lost My Baby,” featured David. “Since I Lost My Baby” is one of my favorite songs. That fall we released one of the few singles to feature Paul, “Don’t Look Back.” Although Norman Whitfield was getting in a song here and there, we were still primarily Smokey Robinson’s act, and Smokey wrote with David or Eddie in mind. Paul wasn’t exactly bitter about this, but he did make it known that he’d like to do more singing. “Shit,” he would say, “I can sing too!” No one could argue with that, but no one seemed to be writing for him either.
I remember doing “Don’t Look Back” during a run at Leo’s Casino in Cleveland a couple years later. Leo’s was small but well known for bringing in great acts, such as Chuck Jackson and the O’Jays. Once again we were in a battle of the groups, this time against the O’Jays. Cleveland being their hometown put us at a disadvantage. In those days there were five O’Jays—Eddie Levert, Walter Williams, William Powell, Bobby Massey, and Bill Isles—and from the dressing room we heard the applause through the walls. They were killing that audience with a tune called “Stand in for Love.” We’d been on the road for a week, doing four shows a day, and we were dead tired, but somehow we rose to the challenge. “Okay, guys,” I said, “we’re really going to have to go for it.”
We got onstage, did a little this, a little that, went into “My Girl,” and bingo! We had that crowd dying for us. But the real capper came when Paul did “Don’t Look Back” because we had a part in the routine where we all fanned out across the stage slick as water, leaving Paul in the center. At that point he’d start breaking the song down and really milking it as only he could. By the time we wrapped the show up, it was “O’Jays who?” From then on we did “Don’t Look Back” just about every place we played.
Late in 1965 Motown released our third LP, titled after our now-famous introduction, Temptin’ Temptations. Starting with the second album, The Temptations Sing Smokey, more thought went into the filler tracks, and so these records still hold up today. But as much as I liked most of the tunes (including “Born to Love You,” on which Jimmy Ruffin sings with us), I can’t look at the cover—with us in white suits and black shoes—without wincing a little. For all of our style and class, we didn’t have those damn white shoes when we needed them.
Everything seemed to happen in 1965, and things moved in a flash, so it’s hard to find any benchmark. It was that year, though, when it struck me and, I’m sure the rest of the guys, that we were bigger than we ever dared imagine. I remembered back to when I’d have been walking on air just to get into the Arcadia and challenge the Cadets. Everything seemed so unreal, and the extent of our success didn’t finally sink in until we did The Ed Sullivan Show.
The fact that the show was broadcast live and we would be seen by tens of millions of people didn’t escape us. We stood backstage in our sleek black-and-gray tuxes, praying to God, “Please, please, please let me hit my note and make my steps. Don’t let me make a fool of myself.” Our tuxes were wringing wet with perspiration, and our mouths were dry as cotton. Of course, Eddie always had that cool exterior, so he seemed fine, and David had a way of making things seem more manageable: “It ain’t nothin’ but another television show,” he said, then proceeded to go out and kick ass. I couldn’t stop having one of my many conversations with myself. “Otis, there are millions of people out there watching your black ass. Do not mess up!”
Came showtime, we went out and sang “My Girl” and another tune. While we were singing, one part of me was really trying to focus on what my feet and my mouth were doing, while another part of me kept saying, “Shit, I am on Ed Sullivan. I am on Ed Sullivan.” Then, almost the moment we started, it was over. It still didn’t seem quite real until we got home to Detroit. My friends, neighbors, relatives—everyone, especially Haze and my stepdad, were so proud. I knew then I wasn’t dreaming anymore.