The Sound of Younger America could have been Motown Information’ boastful tagline, however when you can again them up, boasts are simply truths spoken loudly. And the reality was that Motown had its finger on the heart beat. Not less than for some time. By the center of the 60s, music was shifting. And so was the world. The Motown Sound could have been what put them on the map, however the geography was altering in real-time. One of many key individuals at Motown that heard this transformation loud and clear was producer Norman Whitfield. He understood that Motown wanted to vary, wanted to satisfy listeners the place they have been, and the place they have been going. He started to mix the sounds of traditional Motown with the period’s psychedelic soul sounds, main to very large hits with The Temptations like “Psychedelic Shack” and “Cloud Nine.” However Whitfield knew he might go even additional with a brand new group, one unconstrained by the historical past of the imprint. Enter The Undisputed Reality.
Whitfield’s plan was to put in writing, produce, choose songs, craft a picture, and keep true to his imaginative and prescient. And, for temporary moments, the imaginative and prescient for The Undisputed Reality shone brightly, even when they by no means fairly reached the heights that anybody anticipated. Certainly, regardless of releasing eight albums, The Undisputed Reality nonetheless had a touch of the underground in them (as underground as a Motown act could be). Their under-the-radar profession path, nonetheless, implies that they’re a bunch ripe for rediscovery.
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Beginnings
The Undisputed Reality have been fashioned in 1970 with singers Billie Rae Calvin, Brenda Joyce Evans, and Joe Harris. Calvin and Evans had labored collectively in a vocal group known as The Delicates, whereas Harris had been with The Fabulous Peps. Neither group was setting the charts on hearth, however when Motown artist Bobby Taylor noticed The Delicates, their fortunes modified. The group was invited to hitch Motown Information, initially working as background singers. Detroit native Harris rounded out the unique trio. Whitfield, who’d been shaping The Temptations into his imaginative and prescient, now had one other group to mould.
The Undisputed Reality first hit with a canopy of The Temptations’ “Smiling Faces Sometimes.” As Joe Harris defined Norman Whitfield’s considering to Blues & Soul: “I think it’s important to realise that every time he does recut a song, he does it totally different. He’s the kind of guy that can come up with four different ways of saying something.” It’s true with this one. “Smiling Faces Sometimes” dials up the paranoia of the unique, including a form of muted suspicion, a fuzzy, light-psych really feel that may be a part of the group’s sound for albums to return.
Although their self-titled debut album solely hints at what’s to return, there may be no higher method to get the texture of what Whitfield’s plan was than their model of the Whitfield-penned “I Heard Through the Grapevine.” Recorded by at the least 5 Motown artists, this music works virtually like a musical management for the nice Motown experiment. It may be like Marvin Gaye’s mid-tempo, string-heavy plea. Or the danceable funk of Gladys Knight and the Pips’ model. And within the case of the Undisputed Reality, a slower funk-rock with a psychedelic guitar wail punctuating the verses. It seems like Whitfield’s playground as he experiments with instrumentation and voices.
The group’s second album, Face to Face With the Reality, additionally had a tracklist that regarded a bit like a Motown’s best hits. However have a hearken to “Ungena Za Ulimwengu (Unite The World),” in all of its distorted echo-y glory. Like “Smiling Faces,” this one has a haunting undercurrent, a trippy dissonance between the lyrics about unity (together with a brief medley of “Friendship Train”) and the music’s darkish uncertainty.
Whitfield by no means hid that his psych-soul flip was closely influenced by Sly and the Household Stone (although many accounts say that he wasn’t initially offered on the idea, considering it was only a fad). “What It Is?” has the essence of Sly, however as Whitfield informed Blues & Soul in 1977, it was greater than Sly Stone that introduced this aspect out of him, “To me, it was a case of the Black man coming forth from the sound that had been given to him. It was a case of the Black man doing his own thing for the first time and I was proud to be part of it.”
A brand new period
The Undisputed Reality’s third album, Legislation of the Land, could be the final with the unique lineup. The brand new album had a music that the group thought would lastly take them out of the shadows of The Temptations and put them on high of the charts: “Papa Was a Rollin’ Stone.” Calvin, like the opposite members, was typically annoyed by being seen as not way more than Whitfield’s pet undertaking and Temptation music remake artists. Because the album got here out, he informed the press, “Our next album is full of completely new songs… I hope that now we can forget about comparisons with The Temptations and any other groups.” Sadly, their model of the music reached quantity 63 on the pop charts and 24 on the R&B, and was eclipsed by The Temptations model only a few months later. However the album has some gems that maintain the group solidly within the psychedelic soul vein, particularly “Mama I Gotta Brand New Thing (Don’t Say No)” and their model of Site visitors’s “Feelin’ Alright,” later recorded by Joe Cocker.
Change was coming, although. Legislation of the Land failed to provide any large hits, Calvin quickly left the group, changed by Diana Evans, who additionally left quickly after becoming a member of. Quite than discover one other alternative for the trio, Whitfield envisioned one thing totally different. As Graham Betts writes in Motown Encyclopedia, “with the opportunity to pretty much recreate the group, Norman decided to expand.” The trio turned a quintet with the addition of Tyrone Douglas, Tyrone Barkley, and Virginia McDonald. The subsequent album, 1974’s All the way down to Earth, was a transitional document, resulting in a radical shift.
The cosmic period
Within the mid-Nineteen Seventies, soul went to area. The psych-soul of only a few years earlier was giving method to the funk. In his ebook Funk: The Music, the Folks, and the Rhythm of the One, Rickey Vincent describes it because the “James Brown Bomb,” an plain shift in how music was performed and felt. Funk, Vincent writes, “became an essential aspect of any black artist’s ability to reach the people in the 1970s.” However whereas James Brown detonated the funk bomb, there was one group of the period that personified the funk: Parliament. They have been flying their mothership to some entire different dimension, and Whitfield and The Undisputed Reality adopted go well with. This was a cosmic change, not simply in how the music sounded, however in how the performers regarded.
“We’re very heavily involved in a complete concept change in terms of music,” Joe Harris informed Blues & Soul in 1975. “We’ve been into this cosmic thing for a long time and our albums have always had cosmic sleeves to them.” Harris and the group delivered on that promise with their subsequent three albums (Cosmic Reality, Increased Than Excessive, and Technique to the Insanity). “They were now heavily made up, wearing giant white Afro wigs and heavy face-paint, something of a funky looking Kiss,” wrote Betts in Motown Encyclopedia. A change in look and a slight change in line-up with the addition of Calvin ‘Dhaak’ Stephenson, and the group was able to launch.
Goodbye, Motown
Not solely did the mid-70s carry a change to the group artistically, it additionally introduced a label change. Whitfield was annoyed with the Motown construction, and the way his initiatives weren’t getting the assist he felt they wanted. Whitfield left the label in 1975, and took The Undisputed Reality with him to document on his personal Whitfield Information. The Undisputed Reality’s first Whitfield-era document was 1975’s Technique to the Insanity. The alien-funk intro “Cosmic Contact” makes it look like that is one other funk entry. And it’s, in a approach. The area funk sound was nonetheless there, however disco was quick on its heels, and this album reveals the connection between the 2 genres. They aren’t at odds, however in dialog, with one voice typically talking over the opposite. Whitfield was stunned on the disco love the album obtained, “It was never intended to even be a disco record.” Songs like “You + Me = Love” and “Let’s Go Down to the Disco” make that tough to consider, however there’s nonetheless a stable funk base, and even a touch of their psych-soul previous. There’s additionally one other new member: Taka Increase, Chaka Khan’s little sister and vocalist on Technique. A closing album adopted, 1979’s Smokin’, however it didn’t trouble the charts in a significant approach.
The Undisputed Reality have been at all times good, at all times underrated, however it additionally seems like, for many of their profession, they have been only a step behind. Or forward. The final two albums from the group had components of what would develop into Whitfield’s future hit undertaking: Rose Royce. It might be that lack of an identifiable Undisputed Reality sound that stored the group below the radar, even throughout their best durations. When the final of the unique members, Joe Harris, left in 1979, it marked the top for the group.
In a 2001 Goldmine article reflecting on the group’s legacy, journalist Dave Thompson, like so many earlier than him, lamented the dearth of recognition for the Undisputed Reality. What might it have been if only one extra music had topped the charts? If only one Motown high quality management listening session had lifted only one extra of their album tracks into pop traditional standing? “Backstage at Motown,” Thompson writes. “The hierarchy was strangely unimpressed. Promotion was limited and advertising was scant.” However there’s one thing there, then and now. As Thompson continues, “it isn’t simply the music that explodes from the grooves. It is a revolution, and it should have been televised.”
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