Amid the tired oldies acts that reformed to tour on a string of decades-old hits, there’s the tireless O’Jays.

At a glance, people might think they fit the same profile. The soul act’s heyday was in the “70s, with songs like “Love Train,” “Use Ta Be My Girl,” and other hits penned by the songwriting team of Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff.

But the band never broke up – original members Eddie Levert and Walter Williams today perform with eight-year veteran Eric Grant – and they never stopped recording new music. Their last album, 2001’s “For the Love …” spawned a single that hit No. 63 on Billboard’s R&B charts.

Williams, interviewed via phone from his Ohio home, said the group has no problem being billed as a nostalgia act, though.

“Yes, I’m part of an oldies act, but I’ve been able to keep things going,” he said.

About 90 percent of their show is their classic music. “We do some as a medley. We’ve been blessed to have enough hits that we can’t sing all our songs in their entirety, or we’d be there many hours,” he said.

They were in Columbus, Ga., for the filming of “The Fighting Temptations” last fall.

Q: I hear during the filming of “The Fighting Temptations” you participated in a little makeshift performing, alongside other singers and actors – including a break-dancing Cuba Gooding Jr.

A: Aww, we were just clowning around. That was a fun movie. There were a lot of entertainers in that movie. Angie Stone performed. And Cuba is a ham of hams – he did some Michael Jackson dancing. So of course The O’Jays had to do “For the Love of Money.”

Q: Your legacies are songs like “Love Train,” and “For the Love of Money.” But is there any song that you feel really strongly should have been a legacy that never got its due?

A: I think there’s been a couple of them, and they were like really really strong message songs, which Gamble & Huff did a lot. One was “Don’t Call Me Brother.” The lyrics say, “Don’t call me brother, when you’re going around trying to hit on my woman behind my back.” That’s pretty heavy. The other one was, “Rich Get Richer.” And the poor just keep getting poorer, you know? It mentioned the Mellons, the Gettys, Howard Hughes. It named a few, you know? That song didn’t get much play.

Q: Ever get uncomfortable with how political Gamble & Huff’s songs were?

A: That’s the way they wrote in those days. I think, at the time, it was right. Gamble & Huff were the writers, we were kind of like the messengers.

All of the positive stuff, like “Love Train,” that’s the musical and lyrical content that got us over. It gave people some kind of inspiration, that tomorrow it will be better. A good love song will always work.

Q: You guys do a lot of dance in the show?

A: Yeah, we do. The old man that used to teach us to dance, he felt the more you do it, the better. That was Cholly Atkins. He died recently, but he was an old hoofer. We were with him last year at this time, working on our dance, and he was 89 years old.

The University of Oklahoma last year or two years ago gave him a doctorate degree of dance. He told us, “You will address me as “Doctor Atkins.’ And we loved it.

Q: You guys stopped ruling the charts when? As disco went away?

A: We got a couple songs off in that disco era. There was “992 Arguments,” and I believe even “Love Train” was in disco. … But what seems to have changed to me, and this probably was right after the disco era, was they started doing long versions of songs, 1,000 beats-per-minute and all that kind of stuff. They stopped using horns and strings. They used a lot of synthesized instruments. They stopped recording live, per se, and they started going to sequencers, computers. They stopped recording in analog, and they started recording in digital, which is just numbers. To me, the warmness of the music wasn’t on the tape any more. It seemed like we lost something there, but you can’t tell it for record sales at the time.

Q: So you guys didn’t go with electronic instruments, and you didn’t sound like the other stuff that was out there.

A: Right.

Q: Then tell me about the band. What players come with y’all?

A: It’s six pieces – bass, drums, piano, guitar, congas, and an effect piano that plays horns and strings, but mostly strings. And then, supplementing that, we’ve got four horns from the particular area where we play. We have to have readers, people who can read music.


Q: I hear there’s a pretty good story behind the group’s name.

A: I think I was probably 16 or 17 years old when they released our first record – “Lonely Rain,” and “The Story of My Heart” was the flip side. They started to play this a lot in Cleveland. Well, we lived in Canton, Ohio, which is where we grew up, and I got a call from a disc jockey named Eddie O’Jay. He asked us to come play our sock hop. (He pauses and laughs.) You know what a sock hop is, right? It was a big dance in a school gymnasium. You have to pull your shoes off and you’re in your socks, and you’re dancing. So he wanted us to come and more or less lip-sync our record. And we did. From there, we struck up a relationship with him. He worked at WAVQ, so he couldn’t really manage us. It was a conflict of interest. So his wife, Audrey, managed us. Her name was on the contract, you know. We’d been performing as The Mascots. But when we signed, we had no name. The label didn’t like Mascots. So Eddie O’Jay said, “Just call them O’Jay’s Boys for now, and we’ll come up with something later.” Well, it never changed.

Q: Ha. Do you think he knew it would stick?

A: He was a pretty shrewd old dude, he might’ve known. We knew who we were. We knew what we did. But the first time we knew we were the O’Jays was when they announced it on the radio.

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(c) 2003, Columbus Ledger-Enquirer (Columbus, Ga.).

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AP-NY-06-18-03 1135EDT