Richie once confessed it would take “miracle” if he can get all of the Commodores to rejoin him again on stage, because two of them were still holding onto the bitter feelings from 30+ years ago.
Commodore, William King, Told It All
Now, we know what the root to all of their bitterness is- Commodores member, William King, laid it ALL out on the table in a 1985 interview he did with L.A. Times, but most people missed this, so here is King’s side of the story as reported in RS:
“I like to think that bitterness is behind me,” said [William] King…forcing a laugh. “I’d love to forget what happened and think nice thoughts about the whole thing. But that’s like living in a fairy tale.”
King still hasn’t forgiven Richie. The problem, King explained, isn’t that Richie left. It’s the way he left. The Commodores were in limbo throughout 1982 while their most valuable member worked on outside projects.
“He kept saying he’d be back,” King recalled, anger in his voice. “First he was coming back after working with Kenny Rogers. Then he had to do Diana Ross. Then he had to do his own album. Meanwhile we couldn’t work. He wouldn’t go on tour. And what promoter would book us without Richie? Would they book the Beatles without Paul McCartney? Richie was our McCartney.
“We weren’t mad because he decided to leave. We were mad at the procrastination. He never called up and said I’m going over there to do this and I won’t be there to work with the group. Not one of the days that he promised to be back did he show up. Finally we had to go on without him.”
Wait, there’s more…King also explained how much Richie’s absence affected their money…
“People gave Richie credit for everything,” King said in an exasperated tone. “The world thinks he produced, arranged and wrote everything we did. We all built that sound. He wrote many of the hits but he didn’t write all of them. But that didn’t matter. People thought he did it all. So when he left nobody wanted to know about us. It was a rude awakening.”
King, the group member closest to Richie, said bitterness about the split hasn’t soured him on his old pal: “We still talk but not as much as we used to. We used to be together all the time. The honest truth is that I miss him very much. I miss the camaraderie we had. I miss the fun we had. The memories of the fun stand out over everything. I’m disappointed that we couldn’t work things out and stay together.”
King revealed that their producer-arranger decided to leave them for Lionel Richie and that just before Richie left the group in 1982, their long time manager, whom King refers to as “the glue” of their group, passed away from a heart attack. All three of those losses left the remaining Commodores in a limbo that forced them to have to keep pushing through their adversity. Nowadays they are successfully continuing to tour and bring the house down everywhere they perform and Lionel Richie is of course still doing his thing also and packing arenas.
Lionel Richie Says A Reunion will Take A “Miracle”
As far as what Richie thinks of all of this, peep what he said in a 2014 Rolling Stone interview about the pending bitterness among them, when asked about a reunion with his Commodores brothers:
Lionel Richie- Believe it or not, it can be hard to get five guys onstage. We lost Milan Williams, the keyboard player, to cancer. Over the years, I’ve experimented with guys. I said, “Let me just get three of them.” We’ve done a couple of shows together. But to get the other two, if I could pull that off, I will be the miracle worker of life.
You have to pull away the 30 years of whatever you are thinking about each other. You have to forget about it and just come on stage.
Then again, when you’re in a group, you have to understand it’s hard to break those old guys. No one cares anymore about whatever you were mad at 30 years ago. No one cares. That’s called the group thing. Every group experiences that stupid kind of paralysis.
This is what happens all too often to groups, but it sounds like all of these dudes have love for each other when it really gets down to it. It’s just like a relationship that ended badly- guards are now up on both sides because no one wants to make themselves vulnerable to getting hurt again. The good thing is that all of the members are able to continue to live life healthy and making a living doing what they are most passionate about. Until they reunite (if ever) we’ll just keep vibin’ to their classics.
-ILoveOldSchoolMusic, old school news with a new point of view
