06/02/2026
They almost left "Brick House" off the album because somebody said it was too Black. Ronald LaPread, the Commodores' bass player, had built that groove during a studio break and refused to let it go. He told them to put it on the record and let it speak, and it went top five and never stopped playing.
The bass line comes in first. Four notes, and half a century of cookouts, weddings, and packed dance floors have been built right on top of them.
You know it the second it drops. You have moved to it your whole life and never once asked who was playing it.
His name was Ronald LaPread, and that was his hand on the bass.
He stood at the back of the Commodores, the quiet one. While the spotlight chased Lionel Richie and the rest of them, Ronald held the bottom end and let everybody else shine.
He died in Auckland on the last day of May 2026. Most of America still did not know his name, even as that bass line was almost certainly playing in somebody's living room that very weekend.
It began at Tuskegee. Six young men at an Alabama college in the late 1960s, no money and a whole lot of nerve, calling themselves the Mystics before a dictionary handed them a better name.
Ronald played bass. Lionel had a saxophone, Walter Orange sat behind the drums, William King held a trumpet, Milan Williams took the keys, Thomas McClary picked up the guitar.
They worked local gigs around Alabama and got tight the way only broke young bands ever get tight.
Then in 1971 came the kind of break that turns a life all the way around. They were hired as the opening act for the Jackson 5, walking out night after night in front of arenas packed with people who had come to see somebody else entirely.
And every one of those nights, Ronald stood in the wings and studied the kid out front.
He was watching Michael Jackson before the world had finished learning the name.
Years later, he said Michael taught him everything he knew about the business, and he remembered the lesson in plain words.
"He taught me everything about the business," Ronald said. "We would play in the hotel, we would watch him laugh and joke like a little kid, and we would watch him get on stage and hold 150,000 people in the palm of his hand."
That was the schooling, a row of college kids from Tuskegee at the edge of the lights every night, watching the best in the world bend a crowd to his will.
They had auditioned for that opening slot and won it on their own playing. The tour set them down in front of the whole country, and by the end of it the labels had come calling.
By 1972 they had signed with Motown. The college band was about to become one of the biggest groups on the planet, and the song that would seal it had not even been written yet.
It started by accident. The year was 1977, the band was deep in a Hollywood studio, and the equipment broke down in the middle of a session.
While the engineers worked the problem, the band took a break. Ronald picked up his bass and started feeling out a riff, just something to fill the room while they waited.
One by one, the others drifted back in behind him.
Drums, then guitar, then the rest, until they had a groove nobody in that room wanted to put down.
Their producer, James Carmichael, heard it and knew right away. That little four-note thing Ronald had been fooling with was a hit standing there waiting for words.
The words came from Shirley Hanna-King, William King's wife, who wrote them at home one night while her husband slept. By morning there was a song, and the song was called "Brick House."
They handed the lead vocal to Walter Orange instead of Lionel, because that funk needed his deeper voice out front. Everything on the track had grown up out of the bass line Ronald started during the break.
And then, the way Ronald always told it, somebody in that room wanted it left off the record.
He said they called it too Black. A funk band's funkiest groove, and the worry was that it was too much of exactly what they were.
Ronald would not have it. Put it on the album, he told them, and let the thing speak for itself.
So they did. In his own words, they put "Brick House" on the tape recorder and they went crazy.
The album made them immortal. It sat eight weeks at the top of the R&B chart and became the first Commodores record to crack the pop top five.
"Brick House" was on it.
So was "Easy," the ballad Lionel sang, the one still drifting through slow dances and quiet Sunday kitchens to this very day.
There was also a dedication printed on that record. Most people never stopped to read it.
While the band was building the album that would change their lives, Ronald's wife was dying. Her name was Kathy Faye LaPread, and cancer took her during those same sessions.
So the record that carried "Brick House" and "Easy" out into the whole wide world carries her name too. It is dedicated to her.
Sit a minute with what those months actually were.
The groove the entire country would dance to forever came out of the hands of a man who was about to bury his wife.
He did not stop, and he did not make it anybody's business. He stood at the back, held the low end steady, and let the songs go do what songs do.
That was who he was, even in the worst of it, the steady one, the floor everybody else was standing on.
The Commodores only climbed higher from there. The next year "Three Times a Lady" went to number one, and the hits kept coming until the records had sold past seventy million.
Seventeen top forty singles.
Seven number ones on the R&B chart, ten Grammy nominations, a sound that owned the radio for the better part of a decade.
Ronald played on eleven of their albums, all the way through 1985's "Nightshift." His bass sat under "Still" and "Sail On" and a long row of songs that ran the radio for years.
And in 1986, Ronald LaPread walked away from every bit of it.
He had met a woman named Farideh on a flight between Australia and New Zealand. He fell in love, and he followed her clear across the planet.
He left the biggest band in the country and built a life in Auckland instead. The man whose bass line America could not stop playing chose a place where almost nobody knew he had played it.
He stayed forty years.
He built a recording studio inside his own house. Young local musicians, kids nobody had heard of yet, came through to cut their first songs with the man from the Commodores.
He produced them and pushed them and handed over his time without asking for anything back. He and Farideh also kept lodging houses in the city, renting rooms to some of its most vulnerable people.
Around town he became a familiar face in the local music scene, turning up to sit in and lend a hand. People there knew him first as the generous guy in the room, not as the man off the records.
A friend put it as simply as it can be said.
If you were lucky enough to know him, you were blessed.
He never lost his brothers, either. Whenever Lionel Richie or the Commodores came touring down that way, Ronald turned up, and more than once they reached out and pulled him onstage with them.
Then came the night that closed the whole circle.
Not long ago, for the first time in decades, Ronald reunited with the full Commodores on a sold-out Auckland stage.
The bass line he wrote in that broken-down studio dropped again in the room. This time he was standing right inside it, playing it, an ocean and a lifetime away from where it was born.
Lionel never forgot what Ronald meant to him. In his 2025 memoir he called Ronald the "best-natured human you'd be lucky to know" and "my bassist for life."
Days before the end, Ronald was out at the music awards, looking healthy, looking good, the way the people who loved him kept saying afterward. Then a sudden medical event took him on May 30, 2026.
He was seventy-five, and his daughter Soraya told the world, with a heavy heart, that her father was gone.
Not long before, he had been turning over what it even means to be remembered. He said it the way only a man who lived behind the spotlight could.
"It's good to be remembered," he said, "but you must also know that these people are human and they are fallible."
He never once asked to be the famous one. He asked for the song to make the album, then let it travel wherever it wanted, and it went everywhere.
It will be playing again this weekend, in some hall or somebody's backyard, the second that four-note line drops and a room full of strangers starts to move. Every one of them is dancing to Ronald LaPread.
He stood at the back for fifty years and let the song walk out in front of him. Now you know whose hand was holding it up.
I put a lot of effort into researching and sharing stories that matter. If you'd like to support the work, here's the link:
https://buymeacoffee.com/blackhistoryarchives
Every coffee helps me keep creating.
