1975 · Behind the Songs
Two minutes and fifty-eight seconds of pure groove — how a guitarist’s warning sign became the Commodores’ first number one.
Before the Commodores were balladeers, they were a funk band — and “Slippery When Wet” is the proof. Released on 2 April 1975 as a single from the group’s second album Caught in the Act, the song was written by the band’s lead guitarist Thomas McClary and built on one of the greasiest grooves Motown ever released. It became the Commodores’ first number-one single on the American soul chart and their second top-forty pop hit, peaking at number nineteen on the Billboard Hot 100. At two minutes and fifty-eight seconds in its single edit, it is a masterclass in economy: no wasted motion, no pretty balladry, just rhythm. Years before “Brick House” and long before “Three Times a Lady,” “Slippery When Wet” announced that the funkiest band on Motown’s roster had arrived.
The song belonged to Thomas McClary, the group’s lead guitarist and one of its founding members — the Commodores formed at Tuskegee Institute in Alabama in the late sixties, and McClary’s wah-wah guitar was central to their early sound. Caught in the Act, the band’s second album, was the sound of a group still defining itself: half funk workouts, half searching ballads, all of it produced by the band with Motown veteran James Anthony Carmichael. “Slippery When Wet” was the funkiest thing on it — a title that promised danger and a groove that delivered it. The lyric is a come-on wrapped in a weather report, all sweat and suggestion, and McClary’s guitar snakes through the whole track like something with a mind of its own.
The chart story was a breakthrough. “Slippery When Wet” gave the Commodores their first number-one on the soul singles chart — the first time the group topped any national chart — and it became their second top-forty pop single, climbing to number nineteen on the Billboard Hot 100. For a band that had been grinding since the late sixties, playing everything from fraternity parties to opening slots, it was validation: the funk audience had found them, and the pop audience was starting to listen. The single’s B-side was “The Bump,” another album-track groove, and together the two sides made the case that the Commodores were Motown’s funkiest proposition since the Temptations’ psychedelic era.
Caught in the Act captured the Commodores at a crossroads. The Tuskegee-formed sextet — Lionel Richie, Thomas McClary, Milan Williams, Ronald LaPread, Walter Orange, and William King — could play anything: they had the chops for hard funk and the voices for sweet soul, and their early albums swung between the two. “Slippery When Wet” was the funkiest statement they had made to date, and its success pointed the way forward: within two years, “Brick House” would take the same formula to the top five. But the ballads were coming too — “Sweet Love” and “Just to Be Close to You” were already hinting at the softer sound that would make the band superstars. “Slippery When Wet” is the sound of the Commodores before the world decided they were balladeers: lean, hungry, and drenched in sweat.
The song’s afterlife belongs to the crate-diggers. In 1976, the Sons of Champlin — the Bay Area horn band — recorded it for their album A Circle Filled With Love, retitling it “Slippery When It’s Wet.” A decade and a half later, the Limbomaniacs sampled it heavily in their 1990 track “Shake It,” carrying McClary’s groove into the hip-hop era. These are the footnotes of a song that never quite got its due as a classic: too funky for the quiet-storm retrospectives, too early for the old-school hip-hop canon, “Slippery When Wet” lives in the sweet spot between, waiting for each new generation of DJs and dancers to rediscover it.
Motown in 1975 was a label in transition, and the Commodores were its funkiest bet. James Anthony Carmichael, the veteran producer who co-produced the track with the band, understood that the group’s strength was its self-containment: the Commodores wrote, arranged, and played everything themselves, a rarity on a label built around the studio system. “Slippery When Wet” shows off that self-sufficiency — the horn stabs, the bassline, the guitar, all of it the work of the six members. In a year when disco was beginning its takeover, the song was a reminder that funk played by a real band, with sweat on the brow, hit differently than anything assembled in a studio.
And then there is the title — “Slippery When Wet,” the warning sign on every highway, repurposed as one of the great double entendres in funk. The Commodores always had a mischievous streak, and McClary’s title winks at the listener before a note is played. It is the kind of song title that could only exist in the seventies, when innuendo was an art form and the groove did the talking. Half a century later, the song still does what it was built to do: it makes people move. The number-one soul single, the top-twenty pop hit, the crate-diggers’ favorite — “Slippery When Wet” is the Commodores at their most elemental, and it deserves to be remembered as one of the great funk singles of the decade.
What to listen for: McClary’s guitar, first and last. The wah-wah is drenched and dripping, the perfect match for a song about losing control — it squelches and slides through the verses like the whole track is melting. Then the rhythm section: the Commodores’ groove was always airtight, and here it is at its most disciplined, every hi-hat and bass note locked in. Listen to the economy of it — two minutes and fifty-eight seconds, not a second wasted, the single edit trimming the album cut to its fighting weight. And listen to the confidence: this is a young band that knows exactly how funky it is. Play it back to back with “Brick House” and you can hear the through-line — the Tuskegee funk machine hitting its stride, two years before the world caught up.