His early career is obscured by the fact that he rose to fame in a band that did not carry his name: Harold Melvin & the Blue Notes. The legend of Teddy Pendergrass, who died of cancer in 2010, might be better known had it not been cruelly curtailed at both ends. “He wasn’t built like Arnold Schwarzenegger or nothing, he came out in that wife-beater T-shirt and they went crazy. “I think the tone of his voice hit a certain centre in them, or something,” suggests James Carter, who played drums in his band for seven years, and therefore had a ringside seat on the Pendergrass effect. Gordon’s big idea was to put on women-only concerts – “Spend the night with Teddy” – where women would be given chocolate teddy-bear lollies to suck as they swooned to slow jams such as Turn Off the Lights (sample lyrics: “Turn off the lights and light a candle / Tonight I’m in a romantic mood / Let’s take a shower together / I’ll wash your body and you’ll wash mine / Rub me down with some hot oils, baby, yeah / And I’ll do the same thing to you”). They disguised themselves as maids to get into his hotel room. They rushed the stage and threw their underwear at him when he performed. By all accounts, women found him irresistible, and Pendergrass felt obliged to love as many of them back as he possibly could. Think Barry White in the body of Idris Elba. He was a tall, handsome, stylish man, given to performing in a white vest and a layer of sweat. “And all the guys loved Teddy because he’d get the women in the mood for them. “One guy said to me: ‘Teddy Pendergrass was an early form of Viagra,’” says Olivia Lichtenstein, the documentary’s director. His music, especially at the peak of his solo career, was very much in the groove of smooth, seductive soul, powered by a husky, passionate-yet-effortless baritone.
Gordon didn’t have to do a lot of market research to come that conclusion: Teddy Pendergrass oozed sex – in his music, in his stage act, in his lifestyle.
“W ith Teddy, we realised it was all about sex,” says his manager Shep Gordon at one point in new doc Teddy Pendergrass: If You Don’t Know Me.
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