It begins with a warning disguised as an invitation. A horn-and-bass pulse, low and growling, and then a voice in falsetto, cool and certain, telling somebody to get ready — because a love that’s true is on its way. When the Temptations released “Get Ready” in February 1966, it sounded like the most confident record Motown had ever made: two minutes and thirty-nine seconds of pure dance-floor dare. It topped the R&B chart. It became one of the most famous songs the group ever recorded. And it cost the man who wrote it his job. The story of “Get Ready” is the story of a hit that was judged a failure, of a dance craze that changed a drumbeat, and of the moment Motown’s smoothest era gave way to something harder — all inside a song that never stops moving.
To understand why the record mattered, you have to understand where the Temptations stood in early 1966. They were not newcomers, and they were not a cult act. They were Motown’s premier male group, the five voices — Otis Williams, Paul Williams, Eddie Kendricks, Melvin Franklin and David Ruffin — who had turned Smokey Robinson’s songwriting into gold. “My Girl,” released at the end of 1964 with Ruffin singing lead, had gone to number one on the pop chart and made them stars. The four singles that followed it had all done well on the crossover charts, and the group was, by Motown’s exacting standards, on a roll. But a roll at Hitsville U.S.A. was a fragile thing. Berry Gordy ran his label like a factory with a quality-control department, and every Friday the company’s producers and executives voted on which records would be released. A single that topped the R&B chart but stalled on the pop chart was not a triumph. It was a problem. And “Get Ready” was about to become the biggest problem of Smokey Robinson’s career.
The song itself began with a dance. Robinson wrote “Get Ready” as an answer to the latest dance craze, “The Duck” — a novelty step that was sweeping dance floors — and he built the record to match: an up-tempo number driven by a prominent rhythm, with Kendricks singing lead in his soaring falsetto and Franklin taking the pre-chorus in his deep bass. It was, as Robinson later called it, the most direct thing he had ever written: less polished than his usual work, more physical, a song that told its listener, plainly, to get ready because love was coming. The group recorded it at Hitsville USA’s Studio A in Detroit in December 1965, in sessions on December 5, 9 and 29 — almost exactly a year after they had recorded “My Girl” in the same room. The first version, though, did not survive the Friday meeting. Engineer Harold Taylor recalled that the original take “featured a very complicated drumbeat, which was different from the signature Motown rhythm,” and that at the Quality Control meeting it was suggested Robinson record a more standard drumbeat, which he did. Taylor added a detail that tells you how unusual the fix was: “It was the first time I remember overdubbing drums.” Motown’s house drummer, Benny Benjamin, whose playing drives the finished record, was thus heard twice over — the standard beat laid down, and then, on top of it, the very thing the meeting had asked for, made to sound effortless.
The recording captures that tension between complication and simplicity, and it is why the record still sounds so alive. The finished “Get Ready” runs just 2:39, and almost nothing in it is wasted: the growling horn-and-bass opening, Benjamin’s drumming, Kendricks’ falsetto floating above the beat, Franklin’s bass voice answering him in the pre-chorus, and the other Temptations weaving harmonies around both. It was released on February 7, 1966, on Motown’s Gordy label (G 7049), backed with “Fading Away” — a song written by Robinson with fellow Miracles Pete Moore and Bobby Rogers, and produced by Robinson as well. Both sides would later appear on the group’s fourth album, Gettin’ Ready, released on June 15, 1966, an album that went to number one on the R&B albums chart and number 12 on the pop albums chart. But before the album, there was the single, and before the single’s chart run was over, there was a decision that changed the group’s history.
The single’s chart story is a study in how success can be measured two ways at once — and how, at Motown in 1966, only one of those ways counted. “Get Ready” entered the Billboard Hot 100 in the issue dated February 26, 1966, at number 84, climbed to its peak of number 29 on April 2, spent three weeks in the Top 40 and seven weeks on the chart in total, and also reached number 29 on Cash Box and number 23 on Record World. On the R&B chart, it was a different story entirely: it reached number one on Billboard’s Top Selling R&B Singles chart on April 30, 1966 — the group’s third R&B number one, and their first since “My Girl.” In Britain, the single was released on Tamla Motown (TMG 557) in April 1966, and it would eventually reach number 10 on the UK Singles Chart in 1969. By any ordinary measure, this was a hit. But Gordy had made a deal, and the deal had a number in it. Norman Whitfield, a younger Motown writer-producer who had been asking for a chance with the group’s material, had been promised that if Robinson’s “Get Ready” failed to reach the pop Top 20, the next Temptations single would be his. Number 29 was not the Top 20. So on May 3, 1966 — the very week “Get Ready” topped the R&B chart — Motown released Whitfield’s “Ain’t Too Proud to Beg,” with Ruffin back on lead vocals. It reached number 13 on the Hot 100 and spent eight weeks at number one on the R&B chart, and Gordy made Whitfield the Temptations’ new main producer. “Get Ready” was, in the end, the last song Robinson wrote and produced for the group.
There is a footnote to the release that tells you something about how hard the group worked to sell a record they believed in, even as the label’s arithmetic turned against it. Otis Williams recalled in his autobiography that the group learned the Quality Control vote had gone in favour of “Get Ready” as their next release while they were on the road, booked to appear on Dick Clark’s American Bandstand. With the taping less than an hour away, Paul Williams rounded the group up in a hotel room, and in thirty-two minutes they devised, learned, rehearsed and mastered the dance routine for the song. They were ready — the pun writes itself, and the group earned it. The routine, the harmonies, the suits, the steps: “Get Ready” was built to be performed, and the Temptations performed it as if the chart position did not matter. In a sense, it didn’t. What mattered was what came next, and what came next was Whitfield, and with him a harder, brassier, more socially charged sound that would carry the group through “Beauty Is Only Skin Deep,” “(I Know) I’m Losing You,” “Cloud Nine” and “Ball of Confusion” into the psychedelic-soul era. Robinson’s silken era did not end because it failed. It ended because, at Motown, number 29 was failure enough.
The song’s afterlife began with other people’s versions, and it ran in exactly the direction its title promised: onward, into rooms the Temptations themselves had never played. The Supremes covered it on their 1966 album The Supremes A’ Go-Go, produced by Holland-Dozier-Holland. Robinson himself remade it twice — with the Miracles, and then as a six-minute disco version on his 1979 solo album Where There’s Smoke…, which reached number 82 on the R&B chart. But the afterlife that matters most belongs to a band nobody at Hitsville had planned for. Rare Earth, the Detroit rock band Motown had signed in 1968, had been closing their live shows with “Get Ready” for years, stretching it into a jam that ran more than twenty-one minutes, with each member taking a solo. When Motown asked them to re-record it for their first release on the label’s new rock subsidiary, the first attempt was scrapped; the band re-recorded it with their own equipment, and the label finally released a three-minute edit as a single in February 1970. It reached number four on the Billboard Hot 100 and number 20 on the R&B chart, and went gold — a bigger pop hit than the Temptations’ original had ever been. The song Robinson wrote as a dance-floor dare had become, four years later, a rock anthem, and the irony was not lost on anyone at Motown: the record that had cost Robinson the Temptations became, in other hands, the Top 5 hit Gordy had wanted all along.
The song has kept travelling since, in ways its writer could not have foreseen. In 1983, millions of NBC viewers watched the Temptations perform it on the Motown 25 television spectacular, in the famous “battle of the bands” segment with the Four Tops. In 1990, CBS signed up the song and the group to promote the network’s fall season of television shows, and millions more viewers saw a new music video made for the occasion, with the group re-recording the song for the promos during the 1990–91 TV season. It has been covered, sampled, licensed and shouted back at concert crowds for six decades, and it remains what it was on the day it was cut: a command disguised as a chorus. Get ready. The words are simple, the beat is insistent, and the demand is absolute — not someday, not eventually, but now.
There is a final pleasure in the story, and it belongs to the number that ended an era. Twenty-nine is a strange number to hang a career on. It is not a flop — it is a Top 30 hit, a Top 40 hit three weeks running, a number one on the chart that measured the audience the Temptations came from. But at Motown in 1966, crossover was the currency, and Gordy had set the price at twenty. Robinson paid it, and Whitfield collected. That is why “Get Ready” still works, sixty years later, for listeners who have never bought Gettin’ Ready and never will. It is not the Temptations’ biggest hit, and it was never trying to be. It is the one that tells the truth about how Motown worked at its peak: that a record could top one chart and end a partnership, that a dance craze could change a drumbeat, and that a song about being ready could arrive at the exact moment its makers were not ready at all for what came next. The charts gave it number one on R&B and number 29 on pop. The label gave it a successor. And the song gave the rest of us the rest: a two-and-a-half-minute dare that outlived the argument it started, and that still sounds, on first hearing, like somebody telling you, with complete confidence, to get ready — because love, or history, or both, is already on its way.
Watch the video below and listen for the moment Kendricks’ falsetto first lifts over Benjamin’s drums, and the growl of the opening gives way to the invitation. It is the sound of Motown at its smoothest and its most ruthless at once — and of a song that topped one chart, missed another by nine places, and changed a great group forever.