Philippé Wynne, Housewrecker

The Spinners' great lead singer: a short time here, a long time gone

The managerial elite of the recording industry, ca. 1975, was certainly familiar with what was then known as “soul music,” but with the exception of those whose job it was to scout, produce, and market Black artists—Motown’s Berry Gordy, Philadelphia International’s Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff, Atlantic’s Ahmet Ertegun and Jerry Wexler, and Arista’s Clive Davis—the record-business executives of the day didn’t attend many shows by Kool and the Gang, Earth, Wind & Fire, or Teddy Pendergrass. The business was, and remains, ghettoized.

Which is why the audience at the 1975 Grammy Awards Show, held at Manhattan’s Uris Theater and hosted, for the fifth year in a row, by Andy Williams, was so mind-boggled by the combination of virtuosity, sweat, and high jinks that the Spinners, the evening’s showstoppers, gave their fan base as a matter of course on what had until only recently been known as the Chitlin’ Circuit.

The song The Spinners sang at the Grammys was “Mighty Love,” which stalled at #20 on Billboard’s Hot 100 but was, like five other ‘70s Spinners singles, a #1 R&B hit. “Mighty Love” was nominated for, but did not win, the 1975 Grammy for Best R&B Vocal Performance by a Duo or Group. Despite six nominations, The Spinners never took home a Grammy. Stevie Wonder, more familiar to white audiences (and sitting in the front row that night, bobbing his head to “Mighty Love”), won four in 1975 alone.

Formed in a Detroit housing project in 1954, the Spinners bounced from label to label for almost 20 years, charting only occasionally. Motown artists for most of the 1960s, they had so little success that Motown put them to work as road managers, chaperones, chauffeurs, and shipping clerks until Aretha Franklin, of all people, talked Atlantic, her label, into signing this somewhat hapless bunch. In 1972, lightning struck.

Philippé Wynne, born Philip Walker in Cincinnati, was abandoned by his parents and raised in the New Orphanage Asylum for Colored Children. Starting out as a gospel singer, he gravitated to R&B, sang with this and that small-time Cincinnati group, including Bootsy Collins’s Pacemakers. When Wynne joined the Spinners in 1972, the group’s fortunes changed radically.

Between 1972 and 1977, Wynne’s years with them, the Spinners scored seven Top 10 pop singles and six #1 R&B hits. In 1974, they teamed up with Dionne Warwick on “Then Came You,” Warwick’s first (and The Spinners’ only) #1 pop hit. Four Spinners albums went gold, one (Mighty Love) platinum. All five were produced by the wily veteran Thom Bell, late of Philadelphia International.

With his elaborate muttonchops, Philippé Wynne stood out from the other Spinners before he as much as opened his mouth. When he did, he took over the show. During the Wynne era, most Spinners songs followed an established routine that never grew stale. With all five members cutting intricate dance moves, Bobby Smith, the nominal lead singer, sang one or two verses before turning the mike over to Wynne, who launched into what, when the stars were aligned, turned into an unforgettable vocal improvisation, up to five minutes long, that combined scat singing, phrases Wynne reworked from the lyric (“Mighty mighty love jones comin’ down on ya baby”), and whatever else struck his fertile imagination. At the ‘75 Grammys show, as elsewhere, the rest of the Spinners exited after a few minutes, but Wynne stayed onstage. Shaking off Bobby Smith, who repeatedly emerged from the wings to pull him off, Wynne plunged into the audience, the other Spinners chasing him up and down the aisles until they all regrouped for a final bow, the audience on its feet. (Fifty years ago, standing ovations were earned, not pro forma.) The minstrel-show antics were fun, but what registers most deeply with me, and I’ve watched this particular “Mighty Love” until I’ve memorized it, is Philippé Wynne’s improvisational brilliance. And humor.

The Spinners, stopping the show at the 1975 Grammys with “Mighty Love.” Philippe Wynne is at far right, getting ready to take over.

A Spinners performance that I actually prefer to the Grammy show’s “Mighty Love” is a concert version of another #1 R&B hit, “One of a Kind (Love Affair).” It’s October 30, 1974 and the Spinners are in Kinshasa, Zaire (the Democratic Republic of the Congo today), part of a three-day buildup to the Ali-Foreman Rumble in the Jungle. An alert cameraman catches The Spinners in a pre-show huddle, heads together, all seriousness, perhaps praying. Smith and Wynne trade vocals for a bit longer this time before Wynne takes off, at the end of his solo tossing his mike up in the air, catching it, and the group sings the song’s hushed final line.

Zaire, 1974: Setting the stage for The Greatest.

The Wynne Era ended in bitterness. The star demanded that the group rename itself Philippé Wynne and the Spinners, which didn’t go down well, so Wynne quit. He performed solo for two years, with no hits, and then, bizarrely, joined George Clinton’s P-Funk. What could Wynne (and Clinton) have been thinking? It must have been the Bootsy Collins connection. In any case, surrounded, in his pinstriped suit and tie, by P-Funk’s outlandishly dressed, chaotic mob, Wynne looked and sounded like he’d wandered onto the wrong stage. Joining P-Funk was a singularly misguided idea, which lasted for only a year. Two solo albums, Wynne Jammin’ (1980) and Philippé Wynne (1984), the latter cut for the hip-hop label Sugar Hill, went nowhere. Wynne was in fine voice, but the songs and arrangements had no imaginative spark. Wynne had lost his way.

On July 13, 1984, singing in an Oakland, CA night club, he suffered a fatal heart attack. “Philippe Wynne, Soul Singer, is Stricken at Club and Dies,” reads the headline to an item buried on The New York Times’s July 16, 1984 obituary page. The 13-line obit ends, “The singer, who was born in Cincinnati and lived in Los Angeles, was dancing through the audience in an encore when he collapsed.”

The Spinners had two hits after Wynne’s departure: remakes of The Four Seasons’ “Workin’ My Way Back to You” (#2 on the Hot 100) and Sam Cooke’s “Cupid” (#4). Forty-five hitless years later, they continue to tour, with no members from the ‘70s golden years. On May 3, 2023, almost 40 years after Philippé Wynne’s death, The Spinners were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. There have been at least 18 Spinners. With the addition of John Edwards, who replaced Wynne, only five were chosen for induction:The Spinners of 1972-1977, the Philippé Wynne years.