THE COMMODORES – "Three Times A Lady"

Routine smoocher. Nothing special. Pleasant. Forgettable. Nothing much to say really.

What was it like to be President of the Motown Corporation in 1978? The words “utterly lost” seem to come to mind too easily. Overtaken by Philly, Miami and disco, despite attempts to emulate all of these (David Ruffin’s “Walk Away From Love,” Yvonne Fair’s “It Should Have Been Me” and Diana Ross’ “Love Hangover” respectively), Motown seemed out of touch and hopelessly adrift in a no-man’s-land of bland showbiz. Old reliables like Diana and Smokey weren’t exactly setting the charts on fire (La Ross had a lot of #32-type “hits” in the four-year dry spell between “Hangover” and “Upside Down”); meanwhile, the Corporation was about to sink millions into three huge loss-making projects – the movie musical The Wiz, Stevie Wonder’s Journey Through The Secret Life Of Plants and Marvin Gaye’s Here, My Dear. The first was of course vital for reasons unrelated to its artistic merit since it was where Michael met Quincy. The second is most assuredly a neglected, overgrown lost classic. The third – Marvin’s divorce settlement but with music and free snakes and ladders board game – is Gaye’s fourth masterpiece of the seventies, and is as pitiless and unforgiving a listen as the electrified/electrocuted Miles of Pangaea and Agharta; brilliant but it was never going to go platinum. Meanwhile, back in 1978, Teena Marie and Rick James were idle notions yet to be fully realised. The Temptations were in limbo; the Four Tops and the Jacksons (save Jermaine) long gone.

I mention all of this to emphasise that at this point in time, the Commodores were, commercially, all that Motown had. Although previously best known as a comparatively hard-hitting funk band (the nearest Motown came to a Funkadelic or a Parliament, which was still some considerable distance away) with hits like “Machine Gun,” “The Zoo (The Human Zoo)” and “Brickhouse,” 1977’s ballad “Easy” had been a major international hit, and so the focus systematically changed in favour of the Lionel factor.

“(Just To Be) Close To You,” the single which preceded “Three Times A Lady” in the States and which followed it up in Britain (where typically it stalled at #62), was by far the Commodores’ finest ballad; the grit was still evident and the feeling true – it’s a lost classic and readers should look it up forthwith. “Three Times A Lady,” in contrast, feels somewhat forced.

The ballad is taken as a very slow waltz. The lyric is fairly concise; the pot of gold has been reached (or so Gordy hoped) – “And now that we’ve come to the end of our rainbow” – and the stifled sob in Richie’s voice over the extended, suspended “must” in the line “There’s something I must say out loud” as he struggles to articulate his love is, admittedly, quite touching.

Thereafter, however, the song settles for spurious banalities. What exactly does Richie mean by proclaiming “You’re once…twice…three times a lady”? It might signify something at a dim distance, but close up implies not an awful lot of anything. It’s suspicious for triteness.

Musically the song is happy with poignancy-by-numbers, with its major-minor shifts in the verse and the chorus, whose chord sequence seems to owe something to Lou Reed’s “Perfect Day,” but its performance seems to shirk away from any real commitment – the real star of the record is the drummer, with his discreet tympani-like rolls at the beginning, the tripartite cymbal kiss after “end of the rainbow,” the hissing cymbal like steam being reluctantly evicted from a foreclosing kettle which announces each new verse; and the sudden surge in the instrumental break which with equal suddenness recedes again. It’s not hard to understand why “Three Times A Lady” was such a massive hit – in Britain it reached number one in its third week of release, the first Motown single to top the chart since “I’m Still Waiting” seven years previously – but in truth it might just as well have been (as “Lady,” a Richie song, would go on to prove) Kenny Rogers, and somehow I don’t think that was Motown’s point.

I can’t find much good to say about this. It is, as Rosie says, routine.

The only time that this song has ever much impinged upon my life was in somebody else’s story. In a first year devised theatre course, radical feminist comedian Jackie Clune was telling us about how a sense of sexual otherness was not, in itself, indicative of a wider sense of a radical approach to the world for many people. To illustrate this story, she told us about spending a night in Northampton, visiting ‘Sinatra’s’, the only lesbian club in town, and being disappointed to see women slow dancing to ‘Three Times A Lady’. Poor Lionel – creator of a song so blandly functional that it was held up to be the absolute epitome of the humdrum and conventional!

Between Tom’s post, and the above comments, I think just about everything’s been said already.

With this song, familiarity very definitely bred contempt. At the time, I remember it as a pleasant, if rather non-descript, end-of-the-night smoocher; either a wedding song (in its entirety), or a “pulling” song (title part of chorus only); although wtf the phrase “three times a lady” actually means, who knows?

Now, it turns my stomach.

The Commodores were another of these bands who changed their overall style as a result of having a major hit which was slightly different from their usual offerings, “Easy” having suggested they could be a soul ballad band, as opposed to the damn good funk band they had been.

The “Live” album, which came out the year before this, caught them just on the cusp, with several great funk performances (e.g. “Brick House”, “I Feel Sanctified”) and three big ballad performances including a stand-out version of the previously mentioned “(Just To Be) Close To You”.

Unfortunately, they couldn’t sustain it, and Mr Richie was to leave to pursue his solo career; some sources say because the rest of the band didn’t want to be a ballad band. Although they are still going now, and there has been talk of a reunion with Richie, they never really did much of note after he left, apart from the rather splendid Marvin Gaye/Jackie Wilson tribute “Nightshift”.

‘Easy’ is the one that goes “easy like Sunday morning”, yeah? I love that. Though I don’t own a copy.

(It’s mostly boy-r&b ballads which get tarred with the generic/clichéd brush now – Usher, Lloyd, Bobby Valentino et al. Difficult because there’s such a fine line between gloop and greatness sometimes, but a lot of the latter gets dismissed v easily as the former.)

According to Wikipedia, Richie wrote it to commemorate his love for his wife, mother and daughter, hence the title.

I’m not fussed either way about “Three Times A Lady”, but I’m glad it was successful as it only encouraged ‘the Lionel factor’ as MC puts it and soon led to a pop masterpiece (“Sail On”, in case you were wondering, h8rs).

Gloop.

Still, it reminds me of one of my favourite Record Mirror picture captions: “Lionel Richie: he loves his mum”

The song’s a lot more bearable now that I know who he’s singing it to, the title never made any sense to me before, unless he was singing it to Charlie’s Angels or something…still, “Easy” pwns this for me, as he sings the most mellow song about rejecting all known ties ever recorded.

Oh sorry Tom, forgot where that got in the charts. Back off Bunny, I apologized!

got to say i can’t get along with sweaty stax/atlantic soul either – there’s little that makes my heart sink more than the opening bars of
“mustang sally” or “soul man”. though strangely my favourite motown record is “reach out i’ll be there” which is probably the closest they ever got to grunty “real soul”. anyway, gloopy is the right word for ttal which is a long way from being the the best thing lionel richie has done, let alone being a match for the glories of prime motown.

Bilbo were a decent Scottish pop band, formerly known (obviously) as Bilbo Baggins, featuring perennial nearly-man Brian Spence. This was the first Bilbo single, and their only hit, although the previous single, the slightly punky “I Can Feel Mad”, by Bilbo Baggins was far superior, boasting the rather iffy lines :-

I wanna take my sister out
But I haven’t got one,
My mother had to spoil it all
I wish she would adopt one!

At Last I Am Free

strawberry letter 23, if that counts

Ha! And Three Times A Lady was as representative of that logo as the Blakes Seven cast singing Mother Of Mine. It’s much more Machine Gun, isn’t it? Futur-synth-shiny-metallic pop.

I can’t imagine Lionel came up with it.

“Can’t we have a rose, instead?” he (probably) simpered.

The whole ethos behind it of course comes from number one secret seventies soulboy causator Sun Ra.

“a sci-fi story which has this triple whammy Oedipal twist”

are you thinking of Heinlein’s All You Zombies where the protagonist turns out to be his own father AND MOTHER

got no problem with this song at all. it’s uncomplex and direct, and, if you like gloopy. as if gloopy is a bad thing. more like a 6 from me.

Awful then – awful now.

Poor old Darts – three times in a row the bridesmaid, never the bride…