Very sad to hear today about the passing of Dramatics lead vocalist Ron Banks, of an apparent heart attack at the age of 58. While inevitably doomed to exist in the shadow of the Temptations (another Detroit vocal group who used a employed a similar vocal sound and stage presentation), the Dramatics rattled off one amazing single after another in the early 1970s: ""Whatcha See Is Whatcha Get," "Get Up and Get Down," ""Toast to the Fool," "Hey You! Get Off My Mountain," "And I Panicked," "The Devil Is Dope," etc. The latter song always amused me with its wacky syntax, which made me hear the hard-hitting anti-drug song as a pro-Satan anthem. (As in, "Yo, homey, the Devil sure is DOPE!!!") They also recorded the extremely pro-weed song, "Mary Don't Cha Wanna," but of course this was back when it was still considered okay in pop culture to draw the very real distinction between hard and soft drugs...
My all-time favorite Dramatics tune (and one of my all-time favorite slow jams in general) will always be their 1971 R&B smash, "In The Rain." I remember the first time I ever heard it, in 1989 on Chicago's old WGCI AM, aka "Dusty Radio 1390". I was stopped in my tracks by the incredibly wet tape-echo effects on the guitar, then pulled all the way in by Banks' emotional vocals and the song's slow-burning arrangement. (Big props to producer Don Davis, even if he did get a little heavy-handed with the thunder and rain effects!) Here's a great vintage clip of them miming the song on Soul Train... watch out for those lightning bolts!
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