The Temptations – I Can't Get Next To You

There was some silly nonsense going on in music during the hazed 60’s, case in point being the fabricated band The Archies actually holding down the number one slot with “Sugar Sugar” before The Temptations swept them away with another sonic funky R&B number, this time “I Can’t Get Next To You,” delivered in the fall of 1969, where it topped on out both the R&B and pop charts.

Still sounding fantastically brilliant, though singer David Ruffin had been replaced by Dennis Edwards and the smoothies of Smokey Robinson’s straightforward soul approach to their sound had been overlaid with psychedelic arrangements by Norman Whitfield … meaning that the musical line between “My Girl,” which seemed so long ago, and “I Can’t Get Next To You,” had been psychically updated with a more complex and chilling delivery.

Before those luscious and stunning wah-wah guitars step in to emancipate and jump the song to somewhere in the future, the band sets the stage with canned applause along with a barrelhouse piano, seeming to make the song appear to be that of a live performance, where they continue the success of trading lines laced with differing vocal ranges, all of which add a kinetic energy of sorts, making me feel that Sly & The Family Stone had ed the band, or at least had been hanging around backstage giving the Temps advice. And if that weren’t enough, the song takes yet another step with the line “Girl, you’re blowing my mind … “ delivered by Edwards, a line so fitting and so unexpected that it instills a sense of sexuality ah-la James Brown, and perfectly melded with the concepts and constructs of the psychedelic material of the day. Truly, nothing the likes of this had ever happened in Motown before.

This was a song for all people, for all time, a song that would be embraced by jazz artist Woody Herman for its complexities, covered by Annie Lennox, a number of reggae artists, and is still heavily inspirational today … and while their track “Cloud 9” from the year before was still dancing in my heard, I was totally unaware that the song “Papa Was A Rolling Stone” was hanging out there, just around the corner in the ether, in the future, waiting patiently, headed straight for my favorite pair of dancing shoes, where the Temps would again blow my mind.

With all of this in mind, it’s absolutely impossible for some of the lysergic fueled lyrics that Jimi Hendrix brought to light in his number “Castles Made Of Sand” not to be contemplated as the Temps stroll out lines such as “I can turn a gray sky blue, I can make it rain, whenever I want it to, I can build a castle from a sing grain of sand, I can make a ship sail, on dry land … “ all laid on listeners with defined elements of swagger, grace and a sense of great joy.

This is a song that will never go out of fashion.

Review by Jenell Kesler