Recently, we saw Blue Magic, the black five-man vocal group from Philadelphia, perform at the Felt Forum, and they were so incredibly good that they revived for us the word “copacetic.” Not many things ever get to be copacetic these days. A truly outstanding thing might be called “cool” or “right on” or “solid” or “together,” but very rarely is it outstanding enough to be called copacetic. Blue Magic, though, is outstanding enough to be called that. Blue Magic is the promise of The Temptations (who could be called “cool” or “right on” or “solid” or “together”) fulfilled.
Blue Magic performing: Five peanut-brown men onstage, wearing identical sky-blue, formally tailored suits, white shoes, white bowlers, and singing, in the sweetest harmony possible, love songs. The lead singer has a choirboy tenor voice, and one of his tricks is to hold a note until he gets at least three standing ovations. A couple of times at the Felt Forum, he got five. But the real thrill in seeing Blue Magic is the
way they dance. Every set of movements seems to culminate in pirouettes. Sometimes they pirouette while standing up straight, sometimes while leaning backward, sometimes while leaning forward, sometimes with hands on hips, sometimes with arms outstretched, sometimes while appearing to curtsey. It is at once graceful and dazzling. At the end of the performance, they disappear in a big cloud of blue smoke. Just like that.
A few days after seeing them at the Felt Forum, we saw them in the bar at the Dorset Hotel, on West Fifty-fourth Street, and they were having refreshments. They introduced themselves: Ted Mills (the lead singer), Vernon Sawyer, or Y.M.P., short for Young Mr. Plush (the group’s clothes designer). Wendell Sawyer (Vernon’s brother and the group’s vocal arranger), Keith Beaton (the group’s choreographer), and Richard Pratt. They were all wearing neatly tailored suits made of natural-looking fibre, and they all wore tons of expensive-looking jewelry around their necks and on their fingers.
We asked them how old they were, and Ted said that none of them was younger than twenty-three or older than twenty-six.
We asked Keith how he went about his choreography, and he said, “Well, I figure it out mathematically, and we all have good memories. Like one song might have fifty to seventy-five different steps, and we will have to do twenty-five of them before Ted sings the first note. Sometimes, while Richard and Vernon are doing one thing, me and Wendell will be doing the opposite. I have my own ideas, plus I borrow from the old
Temptations. I have even borrowed things from female artists. See, most groups just dance and do steps with no conception of what’s going on, but we try to tell the story. The way I figure it, the way we move isn’t ordinary, it’s out of this world. It’s kind of magic, really.”
After that, Ted Mills told us that though Blue Magic was part of the W.M.O.T. Productions Family in Philadelphia, the group itself is a corporation known as Mystic Dragon. We asked him what W.M.O.T. stands for, and why a corporation is called Mystic Dragon. He said, “W.M.O.T. stands for We Men Of Talent, and they are responsible for our record production. Mystic Dragon means that we own ourselves. It means that Vernon will not just design clothes for Blue Magic or Keith choreograph only for Blue Magic, and Wendell can arrange voices for other people as well. Richard is our accountant, and I can handle corporate business. We are very smart. I was studying law when I first joined the group, and we each read at least one book every four days. We chose the name Mystic Dragon because it reflects Blue Magic. We are in tune with the harmony of man itself. We are what happens when the limited seeks the unlimited. One day, through us, I hope to reveal the secrets of Blue Magic.”
Just before we left, we told them that Blue Magic’s performance was so appealing it made us wish we had lots of miniature sets of Blue Magic to carry with us wherever we go. They laughed, and Vernon Sawyer said, “That’s such a nice idea we just might start working on it.”
—August 11, 1975