Post by Diamond Girl on Nov 2, 2008 19:28:32 GMT -5
A song that took the Temptations up, up and away
Dorian Lynskey
November 3, 2008
FORTY years ago, at the end of 1968, the Temptations released a single that would change the face of Motown. Martin Luther King had been gunned down in Memphis, the Vietnam War was at its height, the Black Panthers were on the rise, and now here were the clean-cut quintet famed for their tender ballads, declaring: "The childhood part of my life wasn't very pretty / See I was born and raised in the slums of the city," over tumultuous, wah-wahing funk. Soul had found a new destination: Cloud Nine.
Many of the men who made it are no longer around. Paul Williams, who sang the lines, "depressed and downhearted I took to cloud nine", fell ill and was shot in a Detroit parking lot in 1973. Eddie Kendricks and Melvin Franklin died in the '90s. The visionary producer Norman Whitfield died recently, and his co-writer Barrett Strong is seriously ill. Of the band's 1968 line-up, only two survive, and just one was a founding member: Otis Williams.
Williams, always the band's de facto spokesman, remembers standing outside Detroit's Casino Royale club one night in 1968 and suggesting to Whitfield that the Temptations take some cues from Sly & the Family Stone's raucous psychedelic soul. "That ain't nothing but a little passing fancy," the producer sniffed. "That was Norman being Norman," laughs Williams. "If [an idea] didn't come from him he would be that way."
Whatever his initial reservations, Whitfield was a shrewd operator. An ambitious, watchful character, he joined the label in 1962, and wrested creative stewardship of the Temptations from Smokey Robinson four years later.
A few weeks after the Casino Royale conversation, Whitfield and Strong presented the Temptations with Cloud Nine. Whitfield's brand of psychedelic soul was more tense and ominous than Sly Stone's. Cloud Nine opens with snaking wah-wah and suspenseful rhythms, exploding skywards halfway through with the words "up, up and away".
It wasn't the song's ghetto angst that bothered the ever-cautious Motown boss, Berry Gordy. Although neither Whitfield nor Strong used drugs, Gordy thought he detected a narcotic undercurrent. Reluctantly, he bowed to majority opinion and let it be released. Cloud Nine was a slow-burning phenomenon, eventually winning Motown's first Grammy.
Eventually, the Temptations tired of both Whitfield's material and his increasingly demanding and egotistical behaviour. But for a while the band was in the vanguard of a bold musical revolution: up, up and away.
Guardian News and Media
This story was found at: www.smh.com.au/articles/2008/11/02/1225560639699.html
Editted by poster.
Dorian Lynskey
November 3, 2008
FORTY years ago, at the end of 1968, the Temptations released a single that would change the face of Motown. Martin Luther King had been gunned down in Memphis, the Vietnam War was at its height, the Black Panthers were on the rise, and now here were the clean-cut quintet famed for their tender ballads, declaring: "The childhood part of my life wasn't very pretty / See I was born and raised in the slums of the city," over tumultuous, wah-wahing funk. Soul had found a new destination: Cloud Nine.
Many of the men who made it are no longer around. Paul Williams, who sang the lines, "depressed and downhearted I took to cloud nine", fell ill and was shot in a Detroit parking lot in 1973. Eddie Kendricks and Melvin Franklin died in the '90s. The visionary producer Norman Whitfield died recently, and his co-writer Barrett Strong is seriously ill. Of the band's 1968 line-up, only two survive, and just one was a founding member: Otis Williams.
Williams, always the band's de facto spokesman, remembers standing outside Detroit's Casino Royale club one night in 1968 and suggesting to Whitfield that the Temptations take some cues from Sly & the Family Stone's raucous psychedelic soul. "That ain't nothing but a little passing fancy," the producer sniffed. "That was Norman being Norman," laughs Williams. "If [an idea] didn't come from him he would be that way."
Whatever his initial reservations, Whitfield was a shrewd operator. An ambitious, watchful character, he joined the label in 1962, and wrested creative stewardship of the Temptations from Smokey Robinson four years later.
A few weeks after the Casino Royale conversation, Whitfield and Strong presented the Temptations with Cloud Nine. Whitfield's brand of psychedelic soul was more tense and ominous than Sly Stone's. Cloud Nine opens with snaking wah-wah and suspenseful rhythms, exploding skywards halfway through with the words "up, up and away".
It wasn't the song's ghetto angst that bothered the ever-cautious Motown boss, Berry Gordy. Although neither Whitfield nor Strong used drugs, Gordy thought he detected a narcotic undercurrent. Reluctantly, he bowed to majority opinion and let it be released. Cloud Nine was a slow-burning phenomenon, eventually winning Motown's first Grammy.
Eventually, the Temptations tired of both Whitfield's material and his increasingly demanding and egotistical behaviour. But for a while the band was in the vanguard of a bold musical revolution: up, up and away.
Guardian News and Media
This story was found at: www.smh.com.au/articles/2008/11/02/1225560639699.html
Editted by poster.
