The Temptations' Otis Williams: 'It's been a burden to be the last one alive'
If the internet is to be believed, The Temptations have performed approximately 3,300 concerts over their remarkable 65-year career. “It could even be more than that,” Otis Williams says with a smile. “After a while, I stopped counting.”
As the last surviving founding member of the Motown legends, the 84-year-old has been at every single show, guiding one of the great catalogues of American music – “My Girl”, “Papa Was a Rolling Stone”, “Ain’t Too Proud to Beg” and “Get Ready”, to barely scratch the surface – that defined the Motown glory years of the 60s and 70s.
“I look back on them with favourable thoughts,” he says of the concerts. “And some of it not so favourable. You’re going to have some clashes and misunderstandings. But then there are times when we shared and cried together. So it’s a potpourri of a lot of different things when it comes to reviewing my life story with The Temps.”
That story is one of triumph, trials and tribulations. The Temptations are one of the most successful vocal groups of all time, selling over 20 million albums, with four of their 37 top 40 Billboard hits reaching number one; they won the first of three Grammys in 1969 and in 2013 were handed the Lifetime Achievement Award; the group were inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 1989. The “classic five” lineup – Williams, Eddie Kendricks, Melvin Franklin, Paul Williams (no relation) and David Ruffin, younger brother of soul star Jimmy, who replaced the volatile Al Bryant in 1963 – brought class and sophistication to R’n’B and soul, with immaculate tailored suits and smoothly choreographed moves such as the famous “Temptations Walk”. But there was also pain and tragedy: break-ups, addictions, racism, lawsuits, suicides, and early deaths.
This part of the legend has been furnished by a hugely successful mini-series, 1998’s The Temptations, based on Williams’ 1988 memoir-cum-band history, Temptations, also the inspiration for the 2019 stage musical Ain’t Too Proud.
For more than 30 years, Williams has been keeper of the flame: a larger-than-life character, he’s talking to me on a video call from home in LA, wearing an official Motown Museum T-shirt with the faces of all the label’s stars: Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder, The Supremes, Smokey Robinson, Martha Reeves and the Vandellas, Junior Walker and the Four Tops, with whom The Temptations are currently co-touring. They head to the UK in late June and stop off at Love Supreme Festival on 4 July. “Wonderful,” he says of his T-shirt. “I love them all.”
He sees Motown as a divine intervention. It was built from the ground up by label boss Berry Gordy, who’d worked on late-50s hits with Jackie Wilson, in his run-down Detroit flat, where acts were recorded in the garage while Gordy and family lived upstairs. “The sound of young America”, as Gordy put it, came from humble origins to become the most successful independent record label in the US.
“Motown Records was no happenstance,” Williams says. “God and his infinite wisdom made that little two-storey family flat in Detroit. God picked Berry to be the one to helm it.” The house became known as Hitsville, a place where, at least in the early days, all the acts would hang out and collaborate. “Oh man, it was fun. We’d go up there and one of the producers would say ‘I need some hand claps!’ And you’d run in the studio with the Vandellas to clap for them. You could see a lot of wonderful things; you got shenanigans going on. You miss those kinds of days.”
Williams was born in Texas County, Texas, in 1941. He moved to Detroit aged 10 to live with his mother and stepfather – he’d been brought up on a farm in Texas by his two grandmothers – and came of age “just as rock ‘n’ roll was just beginning to take off”. He’d go to package rock n roll shows at the city’s legendary Fox Theatre. “You’d see people going crazy over what five guys are doing on the stage. I said: ‘That’s what I want to do’.”
He set about putting a band together, leading acts including the Siberians and the Distants, then a fledgling Temptations called the Elgins, before landing on the classic line-up in 1963. “I kind of went through a metamorphosis until I got to the right ones.”
Those right ones were Kendricks (“tall and lanky, but he was one of the sweetest singing tenor singers around – the girls were going goo goo gaga over him”), Williams (“Paul was the choreographer for the Temps, noted master dancer who had another kind of soul that he would emit when he sang”) and Franklin. “Who didn’t love Melvin? He had the voice and the personality to go along with it.” And then there was Ruffin, a magnetic performer but an egotistical character.
“David was something else, in a good sense. He had that dynamic kind of delivery and expression. He would throw the microphone up, drop down to his knees. So electrifying.” Williams, a second tenor/baritone, says he was the “elegant one trying to hold everything together”. He accidentally became the de facto leader of the band. “When I look back, it was meant for me to carry this. It’s been a burden, but it’s a wonderful burden at the same time.”
As 1963 turned to 1964, The Temptations were starting to have hits with Robinson-penned songs, like breakthrough hit “The Way You Do the Things You Do”. “Smokey was fantastic, unique lyrics, very clever with words.” One night at the 20 Grand Club in Detroit, Robinson came backstage to see the group, armed with a new song for them to work on. It was “My Girl”. They recorded it soon afterwards.
“After we put the voices down, when I heard the string arrangement, I went: ‘Oh, this song’s taking on a whole other attitude.’ I went in the control room and I said: ‘Smokey, I don’t know how big a record this is going to become, but this is going to be a big record.'”
Released in December 1964, “My Girl” is arguably the ultimate Motown song. The first Temptations tune on which Ruffin takes lead vocals joyfully encapsulates the romantic vulnerability of naive young love, set to an unforgettable melody line. It topped the US charts, sold one million copies and became their everlasting calling card (it has 1.3 billion streams on Spotify, the most for a Motown song). “I got telegrams congratulating us from the Beatles. I got one from the Supremes.” He smiles. “We’ve been riding the hair off the horse ever since.”
But their success came against the backdrop of the Civil Rights movement during a divided time for America. Being a household name didn’t save the group from the racism of the era: Williams recalls one incident stopping off on tour at a restaurant for some food. “Somebody said: ‘Excuse me, we don’t serve n****rs.’ And we stopped, we said: ‘Oh, we don’t eat then.’ So we lived those tumultuous times.”
Professionally, too, there were segregated concerts. He recalls one in North Carolina. “They had whites on one side, blacks on the other side, a rope right down the centre of the auditorium. We said: ‘Oh man, you got to be kidding.’ We did what we had to do.” He means they performed. “The next year, in the same place that we played, there was no rope, blacks and whites sitting side by side, high-fiving. But we dealt with that stuff.”
The hits kept coming, but trouble was brewing. There were conflicts with Motown over both creative direction – Gordy always insisted on using his team of writers and producers over artists writing their own material – and contracts. The group were taken advantage of when they first signed to Motown. “The royalty rates and percentages were so low.” They hired a specialist entertainment lawyer called Abe Sumners. “He said: ‘Otis, these are ‘let my people go’ contracts. I’m going to straighten this out.’ It’s much better now.” He also found out in 1976 that Gordy had trademarked The Temptations’ name (he eventually handed back the rights).
The band was also heading for conflict. Ruffin began to see himself as bigger than the group, insisting on travelling to gigs alone in a limousine and demanding to change the name of the group to David Ruffin and the Temptations to emulate Diana Ross and the Supremes. “We said: ‘Ha, that’s not gonna happen.’ David was a wonderful, spirited person. We used to hang together like wet clothes. But we had become so successful that he started acting up.”
Ruffin left in 1968, replaced by Dennis Edwards, before their pivot to the groundbreaking “psychedelic soul” sound of more socially charged hits like “Ball of Confusion” and “Papa Was a Rolling Stone”. “We got bigger after David left. A lot of times, they just stop the story just at the point of when David left the group.”
Kendricks left the group in 1971 to launch a solo career, while Paul Williams left a year later due to alcoholism. “We had to let him go – he could hardly perform.” In 1973, Williams was found dead from a gunshot wound, dressed in swimming trunks, in a car in a Detroit car park. It was ruled a suicide, though some still suspect foul play.
After an ill-fated reunion tour of original members in 1982 – Ruffin was later sacked again for drug abuse – Williams and Franklin steered the ship for over a decade. But in a four-year period in the early 90s, Williams lost the remaining classic five Temps. In 1995, Franklin died due to complications with Rheumatoid arthritis, aged 52; Kenricks died of cancer, aged 52, in 1992; and Ruffin died in 1991 of a cocaine overdose, aged 51. “David got caught up with the drugs. I would never denigrate any of them, because to me they’re very great personalities, great talent. But when you become successful, you’ll find out what kind of person you are.”
But to quote “Ball of Confusion”, the band played on. Williams has continued to tour as The Temptations with a total of 22 different singers. Does he feel like it’s his duty to carry on? “I do now, yeah,” he says. Can the Temptations live on after him? “Well, that’s a good question,” he says. “Because I said, ‘Otis, if you should leave, retire, whatever, it ain’t gonna be the same Temptations then.’ Because I’m the last one that’s holding it. Because I still love what I do.”
The Temptations & The Four Tops tour the UK from today. The Temptations & The Four Tops perform at the Love Supreme Jazz Festival, Glynde Place in East Sussex, 3-5 July