The summer of 1970 found the management of Motown Records holding a match over a tinderbox. A year earlier, with his finger in the air, the Detroit label’s go-to songwriter and producer Norman Whitfield had sensed the US public’s dwindling appetite for the unwinnable Vietnam War, and alongside Barrett Strong had written a song for The Temptations that lambasted the campaign in no uncertain terms: ‘War! Huh! Yeah! What is it good for? Absolutely nothin’!’.
Titled simply War, it appeared on the group’s 1970 album Psychedelic Shack, with Paul Williams, Dennis Edwards and Melvin Franklin delivering a chant vocal that sounded more purposeful than incandescent. But as requests flew in for the song to be released as a single, Motown bosses lost their nerve, fearing that America’s conservative hawks would kill the career of one of the label’s biggest sellers.
