The Spices That Make You Cry: The Lyrics of Nickolas Ashford
The world is just a great big onion
And pain & fear are the spices that make you cry
Oh, and the only way to get rid of this great big onion
Is to plant love seeds until it dies
When Ray Charles left St. Francis Hospital for rehabilitation from heroin addiction in 1965, he boldly released his next two singles, consecutively: “Let’s Go Get Stoned” and “I Don’t Need No Doctor". Both tracks were featured on the Crying Time album on his own Tangerine label. The former song went to number one on the Billboard R&B charts while the latter seemed to gain traction throughout the years as part of a standard blues repertoire in the mostly white rock circuit.
The popularity of these songs can be credited to the strength of Ray Charles and his band as performers, but can also be equally attributed to the blunt and unique songwriting of Nickolas Ashford and Valerie Simpson.
While "stoned" in this context does not refer to drugs, but rather alcohol, the rest of America might have responded in a way that made it seem more loose in it's interpretation. This coupled with the fact that Uncle Ray had just gotten out of rehab and was noted to have specifically ignored the doctor's orders and wade through the tremors, cold turkey.
The near-comedic straightforwardness of "Let's Go Get Stoned" brought to light the genius of Ashford & Simpson. As the lyricist of the duo, Nick Ashford notably employed very direct metaphors to subjects of real love, spite and yearning.
Throughout his career, Ashford has highlighted the range of human emotions through various lenses: vegetables ("The Onion Song"), property management ("The Landlord"), topography ("Ain't No Mountain High Enough"), weather ("Clouds"), space travel ("Ride-O-Rocket") and prehistory ("Dinosaurs Are Coming Back Again"); to name a few.
When Ashford and Simpson became staff writers for Motown at the close of the 1960's, they took the notion of silly lyrics to a deeper level and kept it going through their entire* career. Ashford was not the only wordsmith to pen unique lyrics in a pop format, but it was done with such sincerity that it had a voice of its own. He was part of a transition in pop music that went from silly to cynical, yet he managed to stay the course. Also the fact that he was crafting these sentiments within an R&B sound, which was typically more straightforward in it's lyrics, made it all the more special.
R. Kelly took this notion to the next level with many imitators to follow. He weaved comical and far-fetched sexual fantasies into the tiny world of 4 minute serenades by comparing women and the act of sex to jeeps, remote controls, zoos, Oreos, and marching bands. Not to mention his freestyling.
Although Ashford was not as blatantly raunchy as the "Pied Piper of R&B", there is a similar attraction to the off-kilter frankness of his lyrics. At some point you find yourself dancing to gospel-tinged Black Pop with metaphors that compare the mundane and inanimate to the most personal of human emotions. He could've written for Pixar.
I always thought Ashford & Simpson looked like action figures and if they were, the back of their packaging would list their superpowers as the ability to transcend expectations for pop music, black music, love songs, heartbreak ballads, marriage and songwriting partnerships with their resilience and originality. They also had the secret power to rearrange their own songs drastically for other artists while sounding fresh and original.
I'll leave you with a quote from Valerie Simpson which may sum up why they stood out and stuck together for so long:
Sometimes you want a person to read your mind and the other person can’t. Nick would say, “Those chords don’t have enough purple in them.” And I’d say, “Well, every word out of your mouth ain’t golden” (laughs).
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