Trouble on the Dancefloor

On Eddie Kendricks's "Girl You Need a Change of Mind"

Simultaneously progressive and reactionary, communal and exclusive, Eddie Kendricks’s “Girl You Need a Change of Mind” is, for me, one of music’s great conflicted pleasures. It was successfully released as a two-part single in January of 1973 but most persists in the nearly eight-minute album version from the former Temptations tenor and falsetto’s second solo album, People … Hold On, from ’72. That extended version was embraced by DJ and impresario David Mancuso and other tastemakers and patrons of New York’s heterogeneous but largely gay disco underground, and it remained a staple for pioneering club DJs such as Larry Levan and Frankie Knuckles. The song was produced by Frank Wilson and Leonard Caston, both Motown staffers at the time, and cowritten by Caston and Anita Porée. Porée, who died in 2018, had earlier success as a cowriter of the Friends of Distinction’s “Love or Let Me Be Lonely” and “Going in Circles”—both smartly constructed but a bit goopy—and was later on the writing team for Kendricks’s “Keep on Truckin’,” a ’73 smash calculated to expand on the success of the record we’re discussing here.

I’m not sure how Porée and Caston divided writing duties on “Girl You Need a Change of Mind,” but she’s mainly remembered as a lyricist. She was also a talented painter. In an obituary published in Santa Rosa’s the Press Democrat, her brother, Greg, a fellow musician, describes her lifelong commitment to progressive causes. It’s likely she took the lead on the words for “Girl …,” writing, on commission for the Kendricks album, from a man’s perspective. Viewed as characterization, the lyric is very well done. Sung by a straight man to his romantic partner, the song is a condescending, defensive, needy response to second-wave feminism, its references ripped from the headlines rather than from drawn from texts. A familiar dynamic. Tony Tulathimutte’s short story, “The Feminist,” recently collected in Rejection, is an effective if obvious study of another type of man in such debates: a resentful, deranged pedant steeped in feminist discourse. Writing to order, Porée and Caston aimed for something dialogic, bridge-building, and, I guess, good-humored (“Now I’m for women’s rights / I just want equal nights”), and the results aren’t truly revanchist, closer to what the younger set now calls cringe. The lines sing very well; the title is memorable. But in shutting out much of its audience, the record complicates its ecstasies.

For the bulk of People … Hold On, the core backing band is the D.C.-based Young Senators, the first working band to play on a Motown session as outside contractors. “Girl …” is a gleaming but not glossy midtempo triumph in funky D-minor, tracked overnight in parts and spliced together from different takes, resulting in palpable tempo fluctuations, none of which disrupt the groove, or grooves. It’s a model of pocketed, spacious interplay from the syncopated intro through the all-things-must-pass fade. Listen to how pianist Frank Hooker finds his spots, sometimes doubling Wornell Jones’s brilliant, shifting bass part, sometimes digging into needling sixteenth-note A’s for a no-frills hook. When drummer James Johnson starts playing incessant quarter notes on his snare, he’s dosing you. There are multiple breakdowns and buildups, as gritty and imbricated as roof shingles. Calvin Charity’s treble-funk guitar shines on the first breakdown, Jimi Dougans’s conga on the next.

As on many of his great records, Kendricks emphasizes his falsetto but gives us his chest voice, too. Every line is inventively phrased. Lyrically, the song’s in part a clumsy come-on; as sound, I’m seduced. Kendricks’s voice is one of great erotic delicacy, and a frisson arrives with each improvisation. Mind altering.