Soul · Funk
The band that could make you dance, then make you cry.
The biography
The Commodores came together at Tuskegee Institute in Alabama in 1968 — six young musicians, most of them freshmen, who started playing parties and worked their way up the old-fashioned way. Lionel Richie sang and played saxophone, Thomas McClary played guitar, and the rhythm section of Ronald LaPread, Walter Orange, William King and Milan Williams gave them a funk foundation as solid as anything in the South. They were a band first and stars second, and it showed.
The hits split neatly in two. On one side, the funk: “Brick House” (1977), a strutting celebration powered by one of the great bass lines of the decade. On the other, the ballads: “Easy” (1977), “Three Times a Lady” (1978) and “Still” (1979) — songs that made Richie one of the defining slow-dance voices of his era. “Three Times a Lady,” written for his parents’ anniversary, showed a tenderness that arena funk rarely attempted, and audiences loved the band for both sides of the personality.
Richie left for a solo career in the early 1980s, and most bands would have faded. Instead the Commodores retooled and scored one of their biggest hits without him: “Nightshift” (1985), a tribute to Marvin Gaye and Jackie Wilson that won a Grammy. It was a fitting second act for a group built on musicianship rather than any single voice — proof that the groove, as they had always known, was the real star.