Some farewell records announce themselves. This one whispers. Please Return Your Love to Me, released in July 1968, is a gentle, aching ballad in which Eddie Kendricks begs a departing lover to come back — and almost nobody who bought it realised they were also hearing the end of an era. Singing somewhere in the background harmony, inaudible as a soloist for the first time in years, is David Ruffin: the voice of My Girl, Ain’t Too Proud to Beg and I Wish It Would Rain, reduced to a backing part on the final Temptations single to carry his name. Within days of its release, he was out of the group, and the Classic Five — for many fans the only true Temptations — were history.
The Classic Five Come Apart
By the spring of 1968, success had become corrosive. Ruffin had joined in 1964 as the replacement for Elbridge Bryant and had promptly become the group’s most recognisable voice — the bespectacled, erupting tenor who turned My Girl into an anthem and Ain’t Too Proud to Beg into a threat. But he increasingly behaved as though the other four were his backing band: he travelled separately, arrived in his own limousine, let his drug use grow impossible to ignore, and pressed Berry Gordy to rename the act David Ruffin and the Temptations. The others — Kendricks, Paul Williams, Franklin and Otis Williams, men who had built the Temptations as a brotherhood of equals — watched the singer they had hired dismantle the democracy that made the group work, and hardened in response. The breaking point came in June 1968, when Ruffin missed a performance in Cleveland. The four remaining Temptations voted to fire him, and Dennis Edwards — a former Contours singer with a voice built in Ruffin’s register — was installed as his replacement, introduced to audiences on July 9, 1968, at a show in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania.
The split was not clean. Ruffin, convinced the group could not survive without him, kept appearing at Temptations concerts, leaping onstage when his songs came up in the set and seizing the microphone, to crowds who roared for him. The group hired extra security to keep their own former lead singer away from the stage. It was against this chaos that Motown prepared the third single from the album The Temptations Wish It Would Rain — an album whose very title song was a suicide note set to music: co-writer Roger Penzabene, the young Motowner behind I Wish It Would Rain and I Could Never Love Another (After Loving You), had taken his own life on New Year’s Eve 1967 after the collapse of the love affair those songs describe. The Temptations’ world in 1968 was full of endings.
A Lead for Eddie
The song itself had been written by producer Norman Whitfield with Barrett Strong and Barbara Neely, and Whitfield made a decision that now reads like a deliberate changing of the guard: the lead went to Kendricks. Strong’s presence on the writing credit is its own quiet symmetry — this was the singer of Money (That’s What I Want), Motown’s very first hit back in 1959, and Whitfield’s partner on nearly every great Temptations record of the era, helping to draft the last single of the group’s classic age. The song passed, in other words, through the hands of the two men who bookended the label’s first decade. It was Kendricks’ first solo lead on a Temptations single since Get Ready in 1966, and he sings it in the weightless falsetto that was his alone — a voice that sounds like it is pleading across a great distance. Ruffin, the group’s erupting volcano of a tenor, is confined to the blend, supporting the man who had preceded him as the group’s romantic lead and would now briefly succeed him.
The record sat on Wish It Would Rain, released on April 29, 1968 — the final album of the Classic Five era, and the last Temptations album devoted to the classic Motown sound, with Smokey Robinson contributing production alongside Whitfield for the final time. For listeners who bought the LP that summer, the sequencing told the story: Ruffin leads the heartbreak epics, Kendricks leads the plea for love to return, and the group’s centre of gravity visibly shifts from one singer to the other across a single record.
The sound of the single is a deliberate act of nostalgia inside that transition. By 1968 Whitfield was Motown’s agent of change, pushing toward the fuzz guitars and social commentary of Cloud Nine, yet for Please Return Your Love to Me he reached back to the ballad language of the Smokey era: a slow, swaying arrangement, the five voices blended close, Kendricks’ falsetto floating above them like a voice calling from another room. It could almost be 1965 again — and that is the point, and the heartbreak of it. The record asks the past to come back in a lyric, in its arrangement, and in the career of the group releasing it, and on every level the answer arriving from the summer of 1968 was the same: it couldn’t, and it didn’t. Songs rarely know this much about their own circumstances. This one knew everything.
Even the single’s flip side carries the transition in miniature. How Could I Forget, led by Paul Williams, was newly recorded on June 29, 1968 — among the very first Temptations recordings made after Ruffin’s departure — and then left off albums for decades, surfacing only on the 1994 box set Emperors of Soul. Marvin Gaye thought enough of the song to record his own version. A B-side cut in the first days of a new era, sung by the member whose own story would end soonest: the archaeology of this single is endlessly poignant.
On the Charts, Between Two Eras
Released on July 16, 1968 — one week after Edwards’ live debut — Please Return Your Love to Me entered the Hot 100 on August 3 at No. 83 and climbed to No. 26 on the pop chart, peaking at No. 4 on the R&B singles chart and No. 5 on the rival Cash Box survey. By the modest standard of what came immediately before and after, those are respectable rather than spectacular numbers, and that is part of the record’s fascination: it is a hinge, not a monument. Its parent album had already produced two far bigger Ruffin-led singles — I Wish It Would Rain, a No. 4 pop and No. 1 R&B hit, and I Could Never Love Another (After Loving You), which reached No. 13 pop and No. 2 R&B — and measured against those, the Kendricks ballad looks like an epilogue. But epilogues have their own weight: this was the final charted single of the Classic Five era, closing the book on the lineup that had defined Motown’s vocal-group ideal. The song stayed in the act long after the man in its background was gone — it appears, still sung by Kendricks, on the group’s Live at the Copa album that December, with Edwards now standing in the five-man line, the new Temptations already performing the old one’s farewell.
What followed could hardly have been more different. By October the Temptations were back with Cloud Nine, Edwards out front, Whitfield steering the group into psychedelic soul, and all five voices trading leads like a funk ensemble. The whisper of July had become the storm of the seventies. But it is the whisper that completists return to: the last sound of five particular men in one room, one of them already a ghost in his own group, while Eddie Kendricks’ falsetto floats over the top asking — on behalf of the singer, the group and every fan who has ever had a favourite lineup — for love to please, please come back.
The Aftermath
History, characteristically, refused to keep the story tidy. Ruffin launched a solo career and promptly scored a Top 10 hit of his own with My Whole World Ended (The Moment You Left Me) in 1969, as if to prove his point about who the star had been — then watched his momentum dissolve amid addiction and litigation with Motown. Kendricks, too, would walk away, leaving in 1971 after friction that this single quietly foreshadowed: the falsetto who had begged for love to return spent his last years in the group feeling just as displaced as the man he had harmonised behind. And in 1982, in one of pop’s great reconciliations, Ruffin and Kendricks returned together for the album Reunion and a hit, Standing on the Top, written and produced by Rick James — two ghosts of the Classic Five, welcomed back by the group that had fired one and lost the other.
That is why Please Return Your Love to Me endures beyond its chart numbers. It is documentary evidence of a transition that no press release announced: the Temptations changing lead singers in mid-flight, on a ballad, with the departing giant still audible in the harmony stack. Other groups have broken up louder. Very few have ever broken up this beautifully.