![]() With Whitfield, Starr recorded a new version of “War” that strayed a bit from what the Temptations had done with it. So when he got ahold of “War,” he did everything possible to make sure that it left an impact. But Starr wasn’t exactly a priority on Motown, and he knew it. Starr did make one big hit for Motown: the riotous 1969 barnstormer “ Twenty-Five Miles,” which peaked at #6 and which would’ve been a 9. Then, in 1968, Motown bought Ric-Tic and absorbed Starr into its roster. Recording for Ric-Tic, Starr honed his raspy preacher’s howl and landed a few minor hits. After starting out singing doo-wop, Starr eventually went to work with Ric-Tic, a smaller Detroit label that mostly served as an off-brand Motown. He’d been born in Nashville and raised in Cleveland. Edwin Starr had found his way to Motown by accident. The man formerly known as Charles Edwin Hatcher didn’t really have an image to put at risk. Edwin Starr, a journeyman soul belter who was low on the Motown totem pole, heard about what was going on with the song, and he volunteered his services. But Berry Gordy, the label’s founder, was worried that a nakedly political single like that would hurt the Temptations’ image, and the group wasn’t too into the idea of making that strong of a stand, either. Whitfield, who was also the Temptations’ producer, was into the idea. ![]() When the Psychedelic Shack album came out, a whole lot of earnest young college students wrote letters to Motown asking the label to make “War” into a single. And Edwin Starr’s “War” might be the greatest musical document of the movement that sprang up against a war - a hard, intense stomp-chant, as visceral as what the moment demanded. Vietnam was such a pointless, bloody absurdity of a war - a clusterfuck with no clear objective and no reason to keep spinning on beyond general national embarrassment - that its continued death toll made for an urgent, visceral crisis. (It’s hard to even imagine how a similar portrait of the Vietnamese dead might look.) This was a controversial story when it was published, and it remains sobering and horrifying today. ![]() It represented a single week’s worth of the war’s American death toll. In June of 1969, Life published a cover story called “The Faces Of The American Dead In Vietnam: One Week’s Toll.” It’s nothing but photos: page after page of black-and-white images of young men with military uniforms and blank expressions, 242 of them, all doomed. In The Number Ones, I’m reviewing every single #1 single in the history of the Billboard Hot 100, starting with the chart’s beginning, in 1958, and working my way up into the present. ![]()
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