IN 1967, a promising R&B singer named Ural Thomas with a voice somewhere between the grit of Otis Redding and the silkiness of Smokey Robinson went into an LA studio to cut a single called “Pain Is The Name Of Your Game” The song was a gut-wrenching tale of abandonment sung in searing, soulful style over a funk-fuelled arrangement by Gene Page. It deserved to be a hit but instead bombed, with the song’s title seeming to foretell Thomas’s life to come.
He followed up with “Can You Dig It”, another great 45 on which his backing singers were Mary Wells, Merry Clayton and Brenda Holloway. Yet within a year he had returned in disillusionment to his hometown of Portland, Oregon, where he worked as a hotel bellman and machinist. After his house burned down in the 1970s, he slept under a bridge and washed his work shirts in the river.