Biography (© By Daniel Gedup.com) | About the Band
BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION:
Group formed 1970 (Detroit, MI) Original Group Members: Joe Harris
Billie Rae Calvin
Brenda Joyce Evans
Taka Boom
Tyrone Berkeley
Tyrone Douglas
Carl Smalls
Calvin Stephenson
Virginia McDonald
From: Loud Basson record Guide !
Certainly one of the freakiest bands to ever be released on Motown, the Undisputed Truth combined a heavy "psychedelic soul" sound with increasingly bizarre subject matter to produce some f'n weird but really good music. This best-of collects the highlights from their brief (1971-75)career, charting their path from street-smart preachers to space-rockers over the course of six albums.

The band was essentially comprised of Motown backup band members and singers, and was producer Norman Whitfield's self-conscious attempt to make a "fresh, relevant" band for Motown, which was perceived as having fallen away from young America. Through a series of line-up changes, the Truth maintained its hard-edged multi-vocalist sound, more or less a slightly crazy Sly & the Family Stone with Funkadelic guitars thrown all around for "hipness." Whatever this music meant at the time, it's some of the better Motown stuff to listen to nowadays. Some of the songs are classics: "Smiling Faces Sometimes" (similar to, and as good as, the O'Jays "Back Stabbers"), "You Make Your Own Heaven and Hell Right Here on Earth," the original "Papa Was a Rollin' Stone," "Superstar (Remember How You Got Where You Are." These songs typify the Undisputed Truth's approach in general, but not every song is a sanctimonious bit of soulful advice. "Help Yourself" dips into some shufflin' Georgia soul that isn't far off from the Allman Brothers, while a cover of Chicago's "Just You 'N' Me" demonstrates the band's ability to make cheesy ballads funky.

My favorite track is "If I Die," an almost oppressively heavy song about Vietnam that escapes the impatient eye-rolling I usually reserve for Vietnam-themed "classics" from the same era. Truly chilling stuff, not at all what you'd expect from Motown. It seems like after awhile Motown wasn't even really listening to what these guys were doing, as the songs get more and more spaced out (there is, in fact, a song called "Spaced Out") and drug-oriented. Although the word "reefer" is bleeped out in the song "Big John is My Name," a few tracks later they're singing about being "Higher Than High." The most wacked-out tune is "UFO's," on which the singer is either making fun of Bootsy Collins, or utterly pot-addled as he keeps pondering life in outer space and whether we will be invaded. This one may be the best recorded example of pot paranoia, except possibly my own "Pot Paranoia" from the album "DEF! Dope!"
From AMG All Music
It's not exactly fair to peg the Undisputed Truth as a one-hit wonder, because they did have a few hits for Motown in the first half of the 1970s (albeit only big one), as well as making half a dozen albums for the label. Still, it's not that far from the truth. Nothing else they did matched the strength of "Smiling Faces Sometimes," which made #3 in 1971. Crafted by Norman Whitfield, Motown's most adventurous producer of the time, it employed the funk-psychedelic guitars and ominous, socially aware lyrics that were also characteristic of his work with the Temptations during the period.

The Undisputed Truth came into being after Bobby Taylor brought Billie Rae Calvin and Brenda Joyce to Motown as part of the Delicates. When the Delicates broke up, the pair kept busy doing background vocals for the Four Tops, Diana Ross, and Edwin Starr. Whitfield teamed them up with Joe Harris of the Preps, laying the groundwork for the male-female vocal interplay that would typify their Motown sessions.

It's fair to say that the Undisputed Truth were little more than a mouthpiece for Whitfield. He wrote most of their material (sometimes in association with Barrett Strong), and used their sessions as a laboratory to devise funk rhythms and psychedelic guitar effects. He was doing the same thing with the Temptations, and the Undisputed Truth's records couldn't help but suffer in comparison. As vocalists they weren't in the same league as the Temps, and Whitfield was most likely reserving his real killer songs for the more famous group.

The group never approached the success of "Smiling Faces Sometimes" again, although they racked up a series of modest R&B hits through the mid-'70s. The best of these were "You Make Your Own Heaven and Hell Right Here on Earth" (which perhaps recalled "Smiling Faces" a little too closely) and the original version of "Papa Was a Rollin' Stone," which Whitfield would quickly redo with the Temptations for a much more definitive (and massively successful) version. Little else in the Undisputed Truth discography demands attention, though Motown scholars will find their work worth a listen to investigate some of the ideas rattling around Whitfield's head in the 1970s. Richie Unterberger, All Music Guide