All hail the O’Jays as they bring their farewell (maybe) tour to Miami
We are gathered here today to bid farewell to a legend.
After 61 years, 15 gold and platinum records and a 2005 induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, the O’Jays are calling it quits. The group announced its retirement last year on CBS News’ “Sunday Morning.” Their publicists confirm it. The new album coming in April is even called “The Last Word.” So when they take the stage on Sunday at the Jazz in the Gardens Music Festival in Miami, it will be South Florida’s last chance to see one of the great vocal groups of all time.
Probably.
Maybe.
In a telephone interview, singer Walter Williams doesn’t sound so sure. He bobs and weaves when asked to discuss the end. Finally, asked straight out if this is, indeed, the end, he demurs.
“I wish I knew that,” he says. “I don’t know that because I still have a desire to do it as long as I can do it without looking ridiculous. That means basically performance-wise. My voice hasn’t changed much, my vocals haven’t changed much, other than a little more knowledge of how to do it and not harm myself.”
Looking ridiculous is something Williams, 75, wants to avoid at all costs. “I won’t be in that group they call the Old Jays,” he says wryly.
And at this juncture, can your humble correspondent get personal? The O’Jays headlined the first concert I ever saw — November 1973 at the old Los Angeles Memorial Sports Arena. Years before its 2016 demolition, they tore the place down, 16-year-old me watching in rapt amazement. They were like an electrical storm, all thunder and lightning and high winds, the atmosphere charged with this sense of events just barely under control, this sense that anything might happen.
The trio was then riding the crest of its first two hits, “Backstabbers” and “Love Train,” following almost 15 numbing years of watching contemporaries like the Temptations, Four Tops and Miracles go on to headline gleaming international concert palaces while they were still eking out a living on the nightclub circuit.
Though the group formed in 1958, its true origin might be said to lie in the moment, years earlier, when a boy named Eddie Levert moved with his family from Bessemer, Alabama, up to Canton, Ohio. “I met him,” says Williams, “when I was probably 7 or 8. He moved into the neighborhood, he and two brothers. I remember it like it was yesterday. I didn’t have a whole lot of guys and people my age. … And we hit it off right away.”
It wasn’t music that bonded them initially. “I think they may have been one of the first families in the neighborhood to have a real TV,” says Williams, “with the the antenna on top of the house. The face of the TV might have been a foot wide. I don’t even think it was that. Might not have been 12 inches. Might have been eight. But we hit it off really good. My family didn’t have a TV yet, so I used to watch the ‘Lone Ranger,’ Roy Rogers.”
They first sang together under the tutelage of Williams’ father, John “J.W.” Williams, in the junior choir at St. Mark Baptist Church. Eventually, together with William Powell, Bobby Massey and Bill Isles, they took their act out of the church. “We sang at sweater parties, anywhere anyone would listen, pretty much. … We would sing in the hallways in the school because the marble made it sound like you were in somewhat of an echo chamber and it sounded really good, good harmonies. Then we took it to the stage.
“There was a very nice nightclub in town on Cherry Street called the Baby Grand. And [the manager] hired us and realized that we had really, really good drawing power, and he would sell out weekends. I think it would only seat about maybe 300 people. Maybe. And we had a good time. We learned a lot.”
They called themselves the Triumphs back then. But the Triumphs didn’t. Then they became the Mascots, but that didn’t change their fortune either. In 1963, the group renamed itself yet again, this time in honor of a mentor, Cleveland disc jockey Eddie O’Jay. Along the way, Isles and Massey both left the group and were not replaced.
Finally, in 1972, the Philadelphia-based production team of Kenneth Gamble and Leon Huff brought the trio a song of paranoid love called “Backstabbers,” which smashed its way to the top of the charts. And the long drought was finally over. The O’Jays ruled what came to be called Philly soul, and Philly soul ruled R&B for much of the 1970s. It was a lushly orchestrated, big-city sound, strings sweeping high, horns punching like Ali, rhythm section carving a groove in the floor. This was the heyday of so-called “message music,” and the O’Jays were as likely to be found singing about social evils (“For the Love of Money”) and politics (“Give The People What They Want”) as they were sex (“Let Me Make Love To You”) and love (“Use Ta Be My Girl”).
William Powell died of cancer in 1977. Since 1995, the spot between Levert and Williams has been filled by a singer named Eric Nolan Grant. But really, the crux of the O’Jays is that friendship formed back when TV screens were eight inches across.
They are an unlikely pair. Levert is famously brash, blunt and aggressive, Williams just as famously suave, cool and laid back. When they sing, Levert is all high stakes and high drama, tearing into a song like a starving man into a steak, while Williams is all elegant subtleties and grace notes, his voice winding without apparent effort from bass up to high tenor.
It shouldn’t work, but it does. Indeed, Williams and Levert are the best tag team in R&B history. And while all the groups they started out with are either moribund or touring with new lead singers, some of them not even born when the songs they are singing were hits, Williams and Levert, the O’Jays, remain.
Of course, time has done what time does. You can see it on stage if you’ve been watching for awhile and know where to look. Levert, for example, used to fall to his knees in a dramatic gesture of “baby please” during “Let Me Make Love To You.” In a 1992 show at the James L. Knight Center, a roadie surreptitiously brought out a pillow for his then-49-year-old knees to land on. And there have no been no knee drops since. The electrical storm is now more of a hard rain with occasional blasts of thunder.
More substantively, time has brought tragedy and challenge. Levert has suffered the death of two sons: Gerald in 2006, Sean in 2008. Williams was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 1983. “My physical condition is good,” he says. “Little snafus here and there, but I’m good.”
Now time brings possible retirement and “The Last Word,” their first album — excluding a 2010 Christmas collection — in 15 years. The good news, at least for fans of a certain age, is that after years of chasing trends, the O’Jays sound like the O’Jays again, big orchestrations and social commentary you can dance to. The new single, “I Got You,” is an avowal of love and support for these anxious and uncertain times.
“Even if the sky begins to fall and even if they try to build that wall,” sings Levert, “and even if the bombs go off and the world is left on fire, I got your back.”
“We got a lot going on in this country now that’s just so unnecessary,” says Williams. “People running things that really shouldn’t be running things, will tell a lie as quick as you can blink an eye and try to make you believe that lie. Yeah, people need to know. Message in the music. It’s still happening.”
It’s a sobering thing to watch your icons go away. Those of us who came of age in the 1970s have seen a lot of that in the last few years, hero after hero retiring from the stage or the studio. George Clinton is landing the Mothership. Paul Simon is “Homeward Bound.” Elton John is letting the sun go down. And now, the “Love Train” makes its final stop.
Probably.
Maybe.
I’ll tell you this much: I have seen Levert and Williams do their thing almost every year since that first time in 1973 and I have yet to be disappointed. So consider this a word to the wise. The mighty O’Jays are coming to town — maybe for the last time.
Catch them while you can.
If you go
Jazz in the Gardens Music Fest will begin at 3 p.m. Saturday and Sunday at Hard Rock Stadium, 347 Don Shula Dr., Miami Gardens. Single-day passes cost $72-$110; two-day passes cost $99-$247. Go to JazzInTheGardens.com.
