"I want it to be a special night for me as well as them," Williams added. "And I'm going to just try to soak it up because I still have really good friends there and loved ones, and I'm looking forward to it. "I think there will be a lot of energy," Williams said of returning to where The O'Jays started. Popular songs also include “Livin’ For The Weekend," "I Love Music," "Forever Mine," “Use Ta Be My Girl," "Put Your Hands Together" and "Time to Get Down." Recording and performing since the 1960s, the R&B vocal group brings a legacy of seven Billboard top 20 songs to their hometown, including the enduring hits "Love Train," "For the Love of Money" and "Backstabbers." The O'Jays earned 10 gold albums and nine platinum albums, as well as three Grammy nominations for Best R&B Vocal. Fellow Rock & Roll Hall of Fame inductee Gladys Knight is the opening act scheduled for 7 p.m. The O'Jays will be headlining a show on the "Last Stop On The Love Train" tour at Tom Benson Hall of Fame Stadium presented by the Hall of Fame Village. But as the conversation shifted to music and Saturday's Canton homecoming concert, he spoke only with vigor and pep. More: O'Jays and 'Love Train' farewell tour making Canton stop with Gladys Knight in SeptemberĪ serious tone filled the Canton native's voice during a telephone interview last week as he recalled his bout with the coronavirus. "And that frightened me, and I asked the nurse if I was going to be all right, and she told me I would be fine." "When I became conscious, I remember a priest coming in and giving me last rites," said Williams, who was hospitalized for more than a month. "I needed dialysis because my kidneys had stopped working, and they took me to a ward, and I remember the guy who was pushing my bed asked the other guy who opened the door, 'Is this a warm body room or is this a cold body room?,' and they said, 'This is a warm body room,' and they pushed me in there. "I stayed in that coma for about a week-and-a-half and I woke up," the 79-year-old Williams recalled. The O'Jays singer had contracted COVID-19 around Christmas, and then fell into a diabetic coma. was severely ill with COVID and had been admitted into a Las Vegas hospital at the onset of the pandemic. Then you have to pay your taxes, then you have to pay your advance back," Levert says. So when you get that money, you're splitting it with three guys, you end up with maybe $30,000 or $40,000. "With Philadelphia International, it was about, 'OK, we're going to advance you $100,000 or $200,000. They began to rue the realities of the record business, in which labels provide hefty advance payments that often don't go very far. When disco crashed in 1979, the O'Jays began a long, slow commercial decline, despite a few comeback hits such as "Lovin' You" eight years later. There's some form of church in that music. When you talk about 'For the Love of Money' and 'Back Stabbers,' our gospel roots came out in those songs. When you say 'I can't get no satisfaction,' that is gospel, man. "R&B music, and all music, trends from gospel. "What we brought to Philadelphia (was) that church, that soulful feeling," Levert says. They soon found themselves applying their gospel-style harmonies to layered Philly funk rhythms, building the foundation for the disco era. Then you go through the roof."Īfter numerous minor hits throughout the '60s, the doo-wop group met Gamble and Huff while recording for a small label. "His theory was, you start off in the basement, then you go to the first floor, then you go to the second floor, then the third floor. "He's the one who taught me about how to approach a song - how to start off," recalls Levert, who makes up today's O'Jays with Williams and 20-year member Eric Nolan Grant. Mark Baptist Church, where Williams' dad directed the choir. Levert and Walter Williams had sung together at St. "We introduced (the label) to the other side of the coin - not talking about the young way of love, but dealing with the old-school way, and the grown-up passion," Levert says.īut Levert and his original bandmates were actually not from Philly - they'd met at McKinley High School, in Canton, Ohio, and formed the group (originally called the Triumps) after catching a show by Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers. The O'Jays, thanks to Gamble-Huff hits such as "Love Train" and "For the Love of Money," were a key exhibit of "The Philly Sound" - a soft, warm and melodic type of soul music that took over from the more urgent Motown Records in the early '70s.
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