Album: Gettin’ Ready
Year: 1966
. . .
Like “Get Ready,” I first heard “Ain’t Too Proud To Beg” on the AM radio as a cover version by a white group. In this case, it was a now-obscure group of English cultural appropriators called “The Rolling Stones,” whose version I heard all the time on 13 KYNO AM all the time during the autumn of 1974.
That version made it to #17, making the Rolling Stones kinda sorta one-hit wonders before they drifted off into obscurity. After all, their pedestrian arrangement of the song had none of the wit and interplay of what the Funk Brothers put down, and instead relied on the tired rock trick of speeding up at the end. Yawn. Let us never speak of The Rolling Stones ever again.
As written and arranged by Norman Whitfield — with a writing assist from Eddie Holland — “Ain’t Too Proud To Beg,” has an utterly dynamite opening, dominated by Funk Brother Uriel Jones pounding on the bell of his ride cymbal while Funk Brother Jack Ashford whacks a tambourine and Funk Brother Johnny Griffin sneaks in piano as David Ruffin already sounds desperate and weary, his voice already in tatters before the second word is out of his mouth.
I know you wanna leave me
But I refuse to let you go
If I have to beg and plead for your sympathy
I don’t mind, ’cause you mean that much to me
There wasn’t just an artistic reason for Ruffin to sound broken-down, there was a practical reason: Norman Whitfield. According to Mark Ribowsky’s entertaining and informative Ain’t Too Proud to Beg: The Troubled Lives and Enduring Soul of the Temptations, Whitfield forced Ruffin to do take after take of those lead vocals, looking for . . . well, what he got, the contrast between the unhinged verses and the machine-tooled precision of the the choruses, driven by Griffin’s piano and guitar stabs from Funk Brother Robert White. (Note: I got White from Ribowsky’s book, but the Wikipedia page has Funk Brother Joe Messina playing guitar. Could be neither, could be both.)
Ain’t too proud to beg and you know it (sweet darlin’)
Please don’t leave me girl (don’t you go)
Ain’t too proud to plead, baby, baby
Please don’t leave me, girl (don’t you go)
As “Ain’t To Proud to Beg” goes forward, it rides along on the constant tension between the ever-more-unhinged stalkery verses — at one point, Ruffin is sleeping on her doorstep — which now feature the bongos of Funk Brother Eddie “Bongo” Brown, and a ridiculously great bass figure from Funk Brother James Jamerson, which is nearly as weird and crazed as Ruffin’s vocal. Nearly.
At some point Funk Brother Henry Cosby takes a sax solo, just to try and calm things down, but it doesn’t really work, and “Ain’t Too Proud To Beg” storms to its fade, an absolute home run on every level.
That said, while it topped the R&B chart again, “Ain’t Too to Beg” didn’t quite crack the U.S. top ten, stalling out at #13, but they were getting closer to getting back into the top ten, where they would be putting singles for the next several years. And of course “Ain’t Too Proud to Beg” is in retrospect one of their most popular songs, covered a lot, though the only other charting version was Rick Astley’s, which was even worse than the Rolling Stones.
“Ain’t Too Proud to Beg”
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