Jake Brennan (28:40)
Eddie Kendricks decided he'd had enough cocaine for one day. He pushed the old rolled up dollar bill, the one that smelled like oil and and sweat, back over to David Ruffin. David looked like his apartment was a mess. Eddie wondered if David's whole world had ended when he was kicked out of the Temptations. David filled Eddie's head with so much information that day, so much conflicting information, that Eddie didn't even know where to begin. Should Eddie push back on Barry Gordy? Would he be committing career suicide if he made a fuss? Should he just shut up and work himself to death? Did he want to end up like David Ruffin, his solo albums collecting dust on a shelf in Motown's office while his former band soldiered on without him? One question he didn't ask himself was whether or not David was playing with him, just like David played with everyone else in his life in order to insert himself back into the Temptations lineup. Not that the group was ready to take him back. The years since David had left have been some of the Temptations best, and that's not a slight on the David Ruffin years. But with tenor Dennis Edwards stepping into David's empty shoes and producer songwriter Norman Whitfield at the helm, the quintet made some of the most unique and impactful music of their career. The stretch from late 1968 when David left in 1973 would come to be known known as the Temptations psychedelic Soul period, lifting heavily from non Motown groups like Sly and the Family Stone and Funkadelic, the Temptations created an acid soul hybrid that was both funky and far out. It was new territory for Motown in so many ways. First was the aggressive and trippy musical style. Not to mention the way in which many songs had multiple lead singers instead of just one. The lyrical content of tracks like Runaway Child, Running Wild, Smiling Faces, Sometimes Ball of Confusion, that's what the World Is Today, and Papa Was a Rolling Stone reflected a country in constant upheaval, wracked with paranoia, confrontation and betrayal. And with Dennis Edwards gruff and intense voice, the tone of the Temptation's material became more urgent than ever. Less urgent were the song's need to end quickly, again. Breaking with Motown tradition. Many album tracks pushed well into the 6, 7, even 13 minute mark. Norman Whitfield had successfully seized his opportunity to refine Motown records when it was at its most vulnerable. And while the temps were blazing these LSD trails, David's solo act bordered on quaint nostalgia. Sure, he was. He looks dynamite in the Summer of Soul documentary. And his performance is classic. But to be singing my girl in 1969 was to be singing a song of innocence that was five years old an eternity ago in the fast paced cultural revolution of the 1960s. By comparison, the Temptations music wasn't just successful creatively. The group continued to score high on the R and B and pop charts during this era, including number one on both charts in the summer of 1969 for the Killer track I Can't Get Next to youo. In that same year, Norman Whitfield and the Temptation scored Motown its first Grammy Award with the song Cloud 9. It was an accomplishment that they'd never achieved, either with David Ruffin or Al Bryant. And therein lay Eddie Kendricks problem. The Temptations were more popular and more successful than they'd ever been before. And Berry Gordy was still screwing them over. Eddie appealed to Otis Williams and the other guys in the group. They needed to stage a strike. No singing, no touring. They wouldn't put a goddamn vocal on a goddamn track until Barry made things right. Eddie was overruled. The Temptations were successful, sure, but they didn't have the clout of a Diana or a Stevie or a Marvin. It was best to just keep working hard, day in and day out, making what money they could. And hoped that things would continue to work out in their favor down the road. Bullshit. Eddie wasn't satisfied with the position his group was taking. Frankly, he was pretty fucking unsatisfied. Eddie Kendricks marched down to the donovan Building at 2457 Woodward Avenue, the site of Motown's business offices. He hadn't calmed down. His head was full of the coked up conspiracies of David Ruffin. Eddie could be next. Any of them could be next, and they were being cheated. The time was right. Fuck dancing in the streets. It was time to get paid. Money, that's what I want. Eddie marched right through the front door, practically snapped the thing off its hinges. The other Temptations followed closely behind him. Come on, Eddie, chill out, they said. Let's all chill out and take a minute and figure this out. You're gonna blow your stack in there. You're gonna regret this, brother. Eddie didn't listen. He was done listening. Barry Gordy was going to listen now. That was where it was at. Eddie blew past the secretaries who asked if they could help. Blew right into Barry's office, and Barry looked at Eddie with a grin. Smiling faces sometimes, man, Eddie exploded. This is ripping us off. He yelled and pointed his finger at Barry Gordy. Do you know how many shows we've played and not gotten paid? We sold out Shea Stadium. Didn't see a dime. I'm sick of this. Eddie Kendricks looked like he was about to jump on top of Barry Gordy's desk. Like a replay of when Abdullah jumped on A R man, Ralph Seltzer's desk. Barry Gordy didn't tremble, didn't back down. The calmer he stayed, the more Eddie raged and the more Eddie raged, the more things remained the same between Motown and the Temptations. Eddie was fighting a losing battle. As far as the rest of the group was concerned, there was no battle. But it drained Eddie Kendrickson pretty soon. Still, bullshit. He quit the Temptations. So did Paul Williams, the group's baritone, who had taken a beer bottle to the face back in 1963. But Paul didn't quit in solidarity with Eddie's money drama. Paul had his own damn problems. His voice had been destroyed by alcohol, so at his liver he suffered from sickle cell anemia and had to use an oxygen tank. He had to take off the oxygen mask every time he lit up a smoke, which was often. He owed the federal government back taxes to the tune of 80 grand and he was currently shacking up with a girlfriend, seeing his wife had recently kicked him out of the house. All these facts led the police to believe it was suicide. When a stranger stumbled upon Paul's body in the early hours of August 17, 1973, he was on the pavement directly beneath the open driver's side door of his Ford Maverick, the kind of car that David Ruffin wouldn't be caught dead in. The pavement was bloody beneath Paul's head. Cops found a smashed bottle of booze nearby and a gun and two bullets missing from the chamber. Single gunshot wound to the left temple. Close range killed him instantly. Self inflicted, open and shot. Otis Williams was devastated when he heard the news, but he wasn't shocked. Paul had been in a bad way for a long time. And not everyone was so sure that Paul Williams had taken his own life. Paul was right handed. And the investigation determined that Paul did in fact fire the gun with his right hand. But he had been shot in his left temple. How could he have done that? But why didn't he just shoot himself in the right temple instead of twisting his arm around to the other side of his body? And what about the broken bottle on the ground? There was also the fact that the gun had two bullets missing, despite the other fact that Paul had been shot only once. Had someone else been there? Had there been a struggle? Was Paul Williams murdered? To Paul's family, these questions were valid and required answers. And the answers were never good enough. Speaking about the tragedies of people like Paul Williams and the Supremes, Florence Ballard, Marvin Gaye said those people were victims. The business turned them inside out. They couldn't cope. Back at his apartment, David Ruffin did another line. His paranoia reached a fever pitch as the powder hit his bloodstream. He worried that he had said too much to Eddie Kendricks. According to the pretzel logic going on inside his head, he had offered counsel to Eddie. Counsel that ultimately meant Eddie's ejection from the band and thus gave David the upper hand to rejoin. And that plan had backfired and it had somehow gotten Paul killed. David knew it. Was it just his imagination, you know, running away with him? In David's paranoid mind, the fantastical truth was staring them all in the face. Motown had murdered Paul Williams to serve as an example to guys like David and Eddie. Or so went David's fucked up thinking. What becomes of the brokenhearted if the brokenhearted tried to fight back against Motown to get off? That's what becomes becomes of them. Whether or not that was actually true, there was one thing in David's mind that was indisputable. And it was something he had said to Eddie. Any of them could be next. Tammy Terrell took Marvin Gaye's hand in hers as they reached the climax of Ain't no Mountain High Enough. And the spotlight was as locked on them as their eyes were locked on each other. They weren't lovers in life. They were lovers in song. Not the audience in Hampden Sydney College could hear it in their voices and see it in their faces. But then Tammy's face changed. Tammy felt dizzy. She looked at the microphone in her hand, and it suddenly looked like a fuzzy square. The room spun. The sound of the band playing behind them became cavernous. The music echoed in her head. She looked over at Marvin, who was doing his best to to soldier on despite the obvious fact that his duet partner was panicking. And then Tammy fell. The mic dropped to the floor. Marvin was there on the double. Just as fast as he could, he caught her in his arms. The white stretched limo came to a stop, and David Ruffin, sitting in the back seat, came out of a daze. He'd been thinking about Tammy again. It was 1991, more than two decades since her death, and David was still thinking about her. He hadn't been there on that night back in 1967 when she collapsed, but he heard the story of what happened. Moments like these. Riding in the back of a borrowed limo, half stoned out of his mind and on the prowl for the next fix to get him stoned the other half of the way, he replayed the story in his head. He thought about going to see Tammy at the hospital right after it happened, and the doctors said it was a brain tumor. Tammy didn't tell the doctors about all the times David had hit her in the head, but David heard the rumors around Motown that Tammy was in a bad way, all because of him. And no one dared confront David about the rumors. They didn't want to be next. As the surgeries piled on and then the chemo started and Tammy's hair fell out and she lost her eyesight and became partially paralyzed, David just stopped showing up. He'd moved on to the next woman well before Tammy passed on in March 1970. Now, on June 1, 1991, David Ruffin was 50 years old, but looked and felt at least 15 years older. He'd been addicted to cocaine for about as long as Tammy had been dead, probably even longer, if he was being honest. He used his coke pipe as a bonding mechanism with Eddie Kendricks and Dennis Edwards when in 1982, he and Eddie at long last rejoined the Temptations for a reunion tour. In an album, their routine of days gone past, gin and soda followed by cocaine, followed by pills, was now replaced with all hits from the pipe, all flight time. You can only imagine how quickly that reunion went off the rails. He and Eddie felt the warm glow of the spotlight one more time when they played support to hall and oates on their 1985 album Live at the Apollo, even taking the stage with the Blue Eyed Soul Brothers at Live Aid and cracking the top 20 with a medley of the way you do the things you do in my girl that same year. But that was a brief ray of sunshine in a long line of cloudy days for David Ruffin. After he did time in rehab in the late 80s, David still couldn't quit the coke. He was thrown in jail for possession, did a year on the inside, and now a former rehabber, former inmate and former temptation, David Ruffin wasn't holding. He needed to score. It was after midnight. He gazed out the window at a three story house at the corner of Viola and North 52nd, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He was in Philly because that's where the plane had landed. He'd flown back from London after a quasi Temptations reunion tour he'd participated in with Eddie and Dennis. He carried a briefcase filled with money he made on tour. $40,000 in British travelers checks. Like most of David's money, he knew it wouldn't last him long. The three story house outside his window window was an oasis in an otherwise shady part of town for junky luminaries like him, a crack house to the stars. A crack house palace. The place didn't just have the best it had sofas and TVs and stereos so that you could make yourself at home while taking a trip to Cloud 9. According to the limo's driver, Donald Brown, he and David walked inside shortly after midnight and proceeded to smoke between five and 10 vials of crack. Three hours later, Donald Brown frantically pulled the white stretched limo up to the entrance of the University of Pennsylvania Hospital and laid on his horn. David Ruffin was slumped in the back seat, unconscious. Attendants from the hospital rushed outside and carried David into the er. Less than an hour later, he was pronounced dead. Some, like the surviving Temptations, were dismayed over another senseless tragedy that took another member of the Motown family away before his time. For others, like David's family, there were unanswered questions. Like where was the $40,000 in travelers checks that David was carrying? At the hospital he was found with a meager $53 in his pocket and the 4040 grand had up and vanished. Was David set up? Had he been fed more drugs than he could handle so that it would make him an easy target to rob? The questions drew parallels to the supposed suicide of Paul Williams two decades earlier, similar conspiracy theories began to bubble to the surface. How strong was the long arm of the Motown law? Was there a temptation's curse? Was hard to know. Many of those questions would go unanswered, maybe forever. But the death of David Ruffin, just like the deaths of Tammy Terrell, Florence Ballard, Paul Williams and Marvin Gaye before him, did make one thing clear. It's a dog eat dog world out there, and that ain't no lie. In fact, it's a disgrace. I'm Jake Brennan and this is Disgraceland. Disgraceland was created by yours truly and is produced in partnership with Double Elvis. Credits for this episode can be found on the show notes page@gracelandpod.com if you're listening, as a Disgraceland All Access member, thank you for supporting the show. We really appreciate it. And if not, you can become a member right now by going to Disgracelandpod.com Membership members can listen to every episode of Disgraceland ad free. Plus you'll get one brand new exclusive episode every month, weekly unscripted bonus episodes, special audio collections, and early access to merchandise and events. Visit disgracelandpod.com membership for details, rate and review the show and follow us on Instagram, TikTok, Twitter and Facebook Disgracelandpod and on YouTube@YouTube.com Disgracelandpod Rocka Rolla He's a bad, bad man.
