The Manhattans – Kiss and Say Goodbye

Blue Lovett wrote the 400th No.1 in Hot 100 history as a country song, and the Manhattans themselves thought it was the wrong record to release.

Winfred “Blue” Lovett, the Manhattans’ bass singer, said he heard Kiss and Say Goodbye in someone else’s voice. He had been listening to a lot of country and liked what Glen Campbell was doing, and the song he wrote was the kind of slow, wounded story Campbell might have sung. Lovett kept it for his own group instead. In July 1976 it became the 400th No.1 in the history of the Billboard Hot 100, a Philadelphia soul record that had started as a country song.

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The Manhattans had been chasing a hit like it for more than a decade. Five friends who had all served in the armed forces formed the group in Jersey City in 1962, and they first reached the charts in 1965 with I Wanna Be (Your Everything). Their lead singer, George “Smitty” Smith, died of a brain tumor on December 16, 1970. To replace him they went back to Gerald Alston, a young singer from Henderson, North Carolina, who had led a group called the New Imperials and sang in churches as Gospel Jubilee. He was the nephew of the Shirelles’ Shirley Alston Reeves. The group had asked him once before, and this time he said yes.

Lovett’s song was built for the two of them. It opens with Lovett speaking, his bass voice laying out the situation like a man at a kitchen table: two people who love each other but have to part because one of them is already committed. Then Alston comes in and sings the heartbreak. The group cut a demo with its own band, Little Harlem, and then recorded the finished version in early 1975 at Sigma Sound Studios in Philadelphia, with MFSB as the backing band. Bobby Martin produced and arranged it with the group. Lovett admitted later that he was critical of everything. “I was critical, a perfectionist in the studio,” he said, and he could still hear the spot where the background vocals slipped off pitch.

The ballad nobody wanted to release

Then the record sat for about fourteen months. Lovett said the group itself thought it was the wrong song to release. Columbia finally issued it in March 1976, with Wonderful World of Love on the B-side and Lovett’s spoken opening intact on the commercial single. Pop stations didn’t care for the talking, so a DJ version cut it, and Lovett went along with whatever would sell records. The Hot 100 put it at No.1 on the charts dated July 24 and July 31, 1976, and Billboard’s soul chart had it at No.1 as well. The RIAA had only just created a Platinum award for singles. Johnnie Taylor’s Disco Lady earned the first, and Kiss and Say Goodbye earned the second.

It traveled further than any Manhattans record before it. It went to No.1 in the Netherlands, Belgium and New Zealand, No.4 in Britain and No.7 in Canada, and it carried the album The Manhattans to No.16 on the Billboard 200 and No.6 on the R&B album chart. Four years later the group had another major hit with Shining Star, which won them a Grammy in 1981. Alston went solo in 1988 and recorded for Motown, then reunited with Lovett in 1995. In June 2005, UB40 took a reggae version of the song to No.19 on the UK chart, and Wu-Tang Clan brought Alston onto Stick Me for My Riches in 2007.

The classic lineup is gone now except for Alston. Richard Taylor died in 1987. Edward “Sonny” Bivins and Blue Lovett died within a week of each other in December 2014, and Kenneth Kelly died in February 2015. Alston still sings the song on tour, and the spoken opening is still there before he comes in, though Lovett is no longer the one speaking it.

The song works because of the space between those two voices. A country songwriter would have given the whole story to one singer. Lovett split it between the man explaining and the man feeling it, and the Philadelphia strings around them make a painful decision sound almost graceful. Lovett wrote it with Glen Campbell’s voice in his head, and the group almost left it in the vault. What reached No.1 was a record only the Manhattans could have made, because only they had both a bass voice like Lovett’s to open it and a lead voice like Alston’s to finish it.