10.30.2007

Dekes In History Vol. 1

Deke Richards - Motown songwriter!

From some guy in some other band from the 60s:
I had a band in the 60s called the Four Sounds, a very successful bar band. Our friends were The Turtles, The Byrds, and we’d play Sunset Boulevard, and in the 60s there were tons of clubs. We did that for a few years and the guitar player was Deke Richards, he and Freddie Perren produced some of the biggest R&B songs of all time. Had a thing about never taking a bath. A white guy that always thought he was black, he would say “I cant take a bath because it would wash the soul off”. Another guy, the organ player, went on to form the Grass Roots. Well, we decided to get rid of Deke because he was getting kind of crazy, he said he was going to Hollywood and write R&B hits and he did just that and made millions. He wrote ‘ABC’ for the Jackson 5, amazingly huge copyrights.

Fuck. Yes. The guy's a combination of prodigious naming and KEEF, man! This dude was a member of "The Corporation" which were Berry Gordy's hired-gun hitmakers at Motown. "A white guy who always thought he was black..." Hang on, I just found a picture of him