The Talent of Eddie’s Team
WORKING THE RHYTHM SECTION TO DEATH
The biggest-selling records by any former member of the Temptations belonged to Eddie Kendricks.
“We just decided,” said the late Frank Wilson, the man responsible for co-writing and co-producing both of those hits, “we would try and do something to show Eddie’s versatility as a vocalist.”
The two towering titles are, of course, “Keep On Truckin’ ” and “Boogie Down.” In November 1973, the first of these topped both the Billboard and Cash Box pop charts. In March 1974, “Boogie Down” repeated the feat in Cash Box, while stopping one slot short in Billboard (denied by Terry Jacks’ “Seasons In The Sun”).
Kendricks had wanted to record on his own while still a member of the Temptations. “Motown sort of gave him the green light,” Wilson once told me for The Billboard Book of Number One Rhythm & Blues Hits, “because he asked if I would be his producer. I agreed after checking with [company executives] Ralph Seltzer and Barney Ales, to make sure they were actually going to promote it.”
The sessions which led to Kendricks’ first album, the Wilson-produced All By Myself, took place during the last few months of 1970 – while he was still recording with the group. In fact, work on his first solo 45, “It’s So Hard For Me To Say Good-Bye,” began that September, before he laid down the lead vocal for his last Temptations single, “Just My Imagination (Running Away With Me).”
When released in March 1971, “It’s So Hard For Me To Say Good-Bye” had a flipside (“This Used To Be The Home Of Johnnie Mae”) co-authored by the man who was, with Wilson, later to create “Keep On Truckin’ ” and “Boogie Down”: Leonard Caston Jr.
Wilson remembered Caston as “this writer who was sitting out in the hallway, trying to get on with Motown. And Motown had decided he was not going to be useful.” Which seems curious in retrospect, because Caston already had a decent pedigree at Chess Records as one of the hit-making Radiants (“Voice Your Choice”) and as the co-writer of Mitty Collier’s career-defining “I Had A Talk With My Man.”
“Motown basically put thumbs down on him,” continued Wilson, “but he convinced me to listen to ‘This Used To Be The Home Of Johnnie Mae,’ and I loved the song. I loved the story, and I said, ‘I think I’ll do this on Eddie,’ and that helped to set the pace for the rest of the album [All By Myself] because a lot of that song we had to do in Eddie’s lower register. We decided that would form the basis of the concept we would do with him. We had a lot of fun doing that particular project.
BOOSTING EDDIE’S CONFIDENCE
“When Leonard and I would get together, we would look at just different pieces of grooves. Things would start musically, and if we really liked it, we’d work at coming up with the melody and the structure. Then we’d get with Anita Porée. She’d come up with the basic lyric idea, and we’d work together to completion.” Porée was another character with an interesting background, first as an actress, then as a lyricist, working with Jerry Peters and creating hits for the Friends of Distinction (“Going In Circles,” “Love Or Let Me Be Lonely”).
“We’d cut the tracks first,” Wilson recalled, “and then get with Eddie and rehearse. Both Leonard and I could sing falsetto so we could actually select a key and everything without him. Having sung with a group for all those years, Eddie really had to be produced – especially when it came to convincing him about the lower register. I thought to listen to falsetto all the way through an album might be somewhat boring. Just getting his confidence up, number one, was the key thing, so he would actually try it. But he was very good to work with.”
“Positive things are…what I best like singing about,” Kendricks told Bob Talbert of the Detroit Free Press in the spring of 1973. “There are so many negatives today, I hope I can put a little positiveness into what I do.”
“Keep On Truckin’ ” and other tracks on Eddie Kendricks, his third solo album, were cut in Los Angeles at the Motown facilities and mixed at Crystal Sound, while the singer recorded his vocal parts in Detroit. Session musicians included bass players James Jamerson (on his Fender) and Darrell Clayborn (standup), drummers Ed Greene and Kenny “Spider” Rice, guitarists Dean Parks and Greg Porée (Anita’s brother), percussionists Gary Coleman and Jack Ashford. “Leonard played on all of the things that he participated in as a writer,” said Wilson. “He would play acoustic piano, and if I remember correctly, Jerry Peters played organ.” Many of the same musicians cut material for the follow-up album, Boogie Down! “We were basically interested in making sure we did not lose what we had gained with ‘Keep On Truckin’.’
“We knew that they were both club records. They were groove tracks with a gospel, churchy kind of background feel. We did an awful lot in terms of just letting the background ride over the vamp, so most of those songs were half-background grooves and the other half, of course, were leads.”
Among the arrangers on Boogie Down! was David Van DePitte. “Frank was difficult on the players,” he remembered, “but he was a piece of cake for me to work with because he had a lot of confidence in what I did, and we had a fairly good run for a while. When you had a guy like Leonard coming over to play you the tunes or make a demo, you couldn’t miss. The guy was an impeccable player. I loved his powerful touch, he really beat the hell out of a piano.
“The rhythm section guys hated Frank,” Van DePitte added, “because he believed that the tune was made in the rhythm section, and he would work them to death, right down to the last detail.”
What Wilson believed has been endorsed at least thrice since then. As music author Dave Marsh noted in his well-regarded The Heart of Rock & Soul, “The elements that keep ‘Truckin’ ’ alive are jittery horns and fatback drums, chugging bass and wah-wah guitar, and a rhythmic bed of organ, strings and horns,” he wrote, adding, “Kendricks rides the mix with shrieks and imprecations, demanding that dancers show him some endurance out there. They came through as well as he did.”
In 2001, the rapper known as Mr. Cheeks (born the same month that Kendricks left the Temptations) sampled “Keep On Truckin’ ” in his Top 20 hit, “Lights, Camera, Action!” More recently, in 2022, the same samples were reprised in “Bills Paid” by DJ Khaled, part of his Number One album, God Did.
Evidently, truckin’ doesn’t go out of style.
Music notes: from 1964’s “Voice Your Choice” to 2022’s “Bills Paid,” this WGB playlist contains tracks cited above, aurally illustrating the breadth of the music made (or inspired) by Eddie’s team over the past 60 years.
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