Commodores

Biography

Milan Williams walked into Hitsville with a Clavinet and a busted synth line, cut the instrumental track for "Machine Gun" in 1974, and handed Motown the dirtiest southern funk groove they'd seen all decade. Before the stadium tours and before Lionel Richie realized he could write easy-listening royalty checks in his sleep, these guys were an absolute freight train of a rhythm section. Ronald LaPread's bass was thick as ditch water, Walter Orange battered the drums like he caught them stealing, and they could clear out an arena before the headliner even tuned up. Then Richie wrote "Sweet Love" and discovered the soft-rock goldmine. Producer James Anthony Carmichael spent the rest of the seventies navigating a brutal split personality: half the record would be pure sweat-soaked Tuskegee funk, and the other half was calculated easy-chair balladry engineered for top-forty radio. When Lionel took the ballads and walked in '82, everyone thought the band was dead in the water. Bringing in Dennis Lambert to cut "Nightshift" in '85 proved the band could still pull off a monster hit without him, but that was the last real punch before settling into the heritage touring circuit.

Bio from The Clerk