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.