THE LAST TEMPTATION
Otis Williams may be the band’s sensible core that the new musical makes him out to be,
There is, if you’ll pardon the expression, a temptation to view Otis Williams’s role as portrayed in the new Temptations musical, Ain’t Too Proud, as rather more level-headed and saintly than it really was, since his own autobiography provided much of the source material.
The last Temptation — or the last founding member of the beloved Motown vocal group still with us, anyway — seems every bit the pragmatic professional he’s made out to be in the play, however, when reached before a tour date with the present-day Tempts in Biloxi, Miss., just a couple of days after
Ain’t Too Proud’s Toronto premiere on Tuesday at the Princess of Wales Theatre. He’s still the sensible glue that holds the Temptations together.
He’s endlessly committed being on time, for instance. I was four minutes late calling him for our interview and he knew it.
“I always had a thing about being late. I never liked to be late for nothin’, even back when we first started,” says the affable 76-year-old, noting that his affinity for punctuality gave him a leg up in his first dealings with Motown founder Berry Gordy, Jr., back in the day.
“When the A&R director of Motown Records first set up a meeting with Berry he said, ‘If you wanna make Mr. Gordy mad, be late.’ And I said, ‘Oh, we don’t play late. We are always on time.’ And that was it. I’m a stickler for being late. Everybody in my organization knows you’re judged by the time you keep or you don’t keep. People think, ‘Oh, entertainers, they’re never on time, and when they do get here they come with attitude and they think the world should stop and revolve around them.’ We don’t think like that. We always look at this as a business. We do our job and we want to get paid and move on to the next place we’re performing, you know?”
In Ain’t Too Proud — which Detroit playwright Dominique Morisseau and former Stratford Festival artistic director Des McAnuff adapted from Williams’ 1988 book co-authored with Patricia Romanowski, Temptations — Williams is the stable workhorse content to fade into the background while such bandmates as David Ruffin and Eddie Kendricks assume a more prominent place in the spotlight, taking the reins as de facto bandleader while trying to keep the usual showbusiness afflictions of ego, substance abuse, money matters, familial strain and exhaustion from blowing the group apart. And, by the sounds of things, he’s still very much that person today.
This, no doubt, is why he’s managed to stay at the helm of the Temptations for 58 years even as 24 different singers have passed in and out of the band.
“My role has always been saying, ‘Fellas, let’s stay focused.’ Let’s make this money, let’s enjoy it because success don’t have to come, and now that we are having it let’s enjoy it with the mindset of trying to keep us together and not be caught up in the traditional stuff that showbiz and success can bring,” he says.
Williams credits the two grandmothers who raised him in Detroit — where his passion for singing rescued him from a slightly misspent youth that once sent him for a spell in a juvenile detention centre — with instilling in him “a lot of wonderful qualities in terms of being a good person and knowing how to treat the people who I cared for, all the way up to my present time.”
He’s religious about taking proper care of himself on the road, too, and while travelling is considerably harder on him at 76 than it was at 18, he regards the discomfort as a small price to pay for “making a great living” for working onstage just 90 minutes a day.And, yes, he’s still the Temptations’ resident den mother.
“Take care of yourself and get that rest,” he intones. “I always tell the guys that sing in the Temptations, ‘To see that you’re able to do what you do, you gotta get that rest.’ Parties are always being given and I like to party a little bit, but I’ve always had a cutoff switch that says, ‘OK, I gotta go and get ready for tomorrow and whatever we have to do.’
“I tell ’em, ‘Listen to your body.’ If you listen to your body, your body will be tellin’ you what you should and should not do.”
Williams was in town for the Toronto debut of Ain’t Too Proud — which will play at the Princess of Wales through Nov. 17 before heading to Broadway in March — and, while he con- cedes it initially felt a bit uncomfortable to sit in the audience while his life story played out onstage as a piece of musical theatre, he’s gradually grown more comfortable with the idea since the production first premiered at the Berkeley Repertory Theatre in 2017.
“You’d think it would be kinda strange, but the more I see it, the more I think this is a wonderful experience,” he says. “You could have tipped me over with a feather if you’d told me when we started singing that, 50-plus years later, your life story will be portrayed in front of thousands, possibly millions, of people. I never would have believed it. But here we are today.”
As brisk and lighthearted as Ain’t Too Proud is, it doesn’t shy away from touching on the personal demons and internecine struggles that often made the Temptations a volatile entity. Does Williams think his former bandmates — specifically, the “classic” lineup of Ruffin, Kendricks, Melvin Franklin and Paul Williams — would view the musical fondly if they, too, were able to sit back and watch it today?
“Oh, that’s a hard one. I don’t know because, truth be told, it’s tellin’ it the way we went through it,” he says. “What we went through, they might not want the world to see it but nevertheless it’s the truth. When we started out singing we were pure and innocent as the driven snow, but then as we became more and more successful other things started creeping into play and, next thing you know, we became fragmented. I don’t know that they would look at in such ingratiating terms.
“But I would never lie or denigrate any of those guys because I love them. We just had a different way of thinking and doing things, you know? I wouldn’t lie to make myself look better. If you’re gonna tell the truth, tell the truth and shame the devil. And it is the truth.”