REMEMBERING DENNIS EDWARDS

The last thing I want this blog to be is about people who died. But I do think it’s worthwhile to note the occasional passing of someone like Dennis Edwards, who died February 1 at age 74.

In the late sixties, with society reaching some sort of boiling point, James Brown recorded the revolutionary and unhinged seven-minute Cold Sweat. Otis Redding sang Dock of the Bay with lyrics that were contemplative, almost brooding. Sly and Family Stone, out of groovy San Francisco, were making a mess of everything, shifting from R&B to rock to doo-wop, sometimes in the same song.

Motown, once the hippest cat in the room, was slowest to change. Still capable of releasing great singles in 1968 – For Once In My Life, I Second That Emotion – it still hadn’t figured out how to capture the spontaneity of a James Brown record or write lyrics that reflected the black experience. With a few exceptions, like Gladys Knight’s raucous I Heard It Through the Grapevine or the Marvelettes’ nutty My Baby Must Be A Magician, the label was more Sidney Poitier than H. Rap Brown.

When David Ruffin left the Temptations to start a solo career, Motown used the opportunity to recast the group and brought in Dennis Edwards. A Southern soul shouter in the same league as Redding or later, Edwin Starr and Teddy Pendergrass, Edwards did all the choreographed moves Motown insisted on, but on stage he was placed apart from the other four singers. Clearly, he was the new point guard on this team. 

With Edwards in the lead, the new Temptations came out of the gate with Cloud Nine. Opening with a kaleidoscope of doo-wop voices and distorted guitar, Edwards sings, with urgency and passion, “Childhood part of my life wasn’t very pretty,” and it’s like the scene in Being There when Peter Sellers, who has only known the inside of the mansion he grew up in, finally walks out the front door to find he’s been living in the middle of the inner city. Goodbye sweet soul, hello misery.

Here are some of Dennis Edwards’ greatest moments: counting down the start of Ball of Confusion with, “one, two, one, two, three, ow!” The frustrated “Ahhhhhhhh, Great Googa-Mooga can’t you hear me talkin’ to ya” that comes out of nowhere and serves as the bridge in the same song. The memorable opening line of Papa Was A Rolling Stone, which follows, on the album version, several minutes of percolating bass and strings, “It was the third of September/A day I’ll always remember.”

And let’s not forget Runaway Child and Psychedelic Shack and I Can’t Get Next to You.

The Ring was a boxing magazine and every month it ranked each weight class with, in order, the recognized champion followed by the top nine contenders. At one point, maybe because the heavyweight class was mostly black guys and I’m plagued by a need to organize stuff into lists, I thought about a monthly ranking of soul singers based on chart performance. From 1968 to 1972, Dennis Edwards would have either been my monthly champion or top contender. Like Ali, who spent a lot of time atop The Ring’s rankings, Edwards was the greatest. 

THE RUN-OUT GROOVE

Watching the CBS special on the 1968 “Game of the Century” between unbeaten UCLA and the University of Houston basketball teams got me remembering watching the game on the portable TV in my parents’ bedroom, probably on Channel 9 since the networks barely acknowledged the existence of college basketball back then.

Even for those days, the buildup was intense. UCLA had won 47 straight games and was ranked first, Houston second. Lew Alcindor missed the two games leading up to the showdown with a scratched cornea. And just to pump things up to an impossible level, the game was being played in the Astrodome. The Astrodome! Our minds reeled with the thought of a basketball court anchored in the infield with the fans, I don’t know, like five miles away from the court.

During the special, Elvin Hayes, the Houston center who completely outplayed Alcindor that night, reminisces that he and Alcindor were friendly and had once gone “record shopping.”

Record shopping.

I went record shopping with nearly every friend I had from high school on. With Mary when we were dating. After we got married. When I worked for the utility, I would take a company car and skip out for an hour or two to hit a record store across the road from one of our substations, where I’d park the car. Company business.

Check out the new releases, then the cut-out bins to see if anything cool had found its way there. And there was the internal discussion with the record hound in your head. Was this the time to buy the only Beatles record I was missing, the Yellow Submarine soundtrack? (not this time). This two-record greatest hits set by the Marvelettes, does it have “My Baby Must Be A Magician”? (buying it). Time to finally check out that Wes Montgomery Trio disc? (pass). Am I interested enough in this Springsteen cash-in, Welcome to Asbury Park, with songs by Jersey Shore artists, to buy it? (another pass).

When the first CD store opened around here (Square Circle at the Garden State Plaza in 1986) I entered cautiously and got the same feeling I have today when I drive through Hackensack. Everything is familiar, but somehow misplaced. There are houses and stores I recognize, but the context is out of whack. At Square Circle, albums were reduced to a size that fit in a coat pocket. And they were charging $18.99 for a disc? Seriously?

But it was more than just losing the end-product, the process was wrecked as well. Shopping for CDs had no mystery, no drama. All the stock was new, so you weren’t going to come across some weird, marked-down record like Drums of Passion by Olatunji. There were no CD 45s, no import section. The thrill was gone – and if you wanted the 45 version of BB King’s The Thrill Is Gone, you were going to have to look pretty hard to find it.

I’d hit the run-out groove, the dead space on an album between the last track and the label.

Those couple of years from the mid-eighties into the nineties marked a rocky transition if you were into these kinds of things. Ironically, there has been the comeback of vinyl albums, although I often suspect that story is more hype than anything. Their price today is pretty close to the $18.99 Square Circle once charged for CDs and those measly album displays in places like Barnes and Noble, and Bed, Bath and Beyond (Jesus, does anybody want to buy records there?) give them the feel of impulse buys, like the cold soda Home Depot sells by its checkout registers.

Too late for me. I moved on to CDs when their prices eventually dropped and the market for used CDs became a major retail sales driver. It was the music, the songs, I wanted, but when the record hound scratches nowadays, I just go online.  

Coming up: Part Two – the greatest record stores of all time.