The 1970s File Feature
Get Ready
Rare Earth's "Get Ready": A Rock Cover That Became a Classic Rare Earth holds a distinctive position in the history of American popular music as the first wh…
01 The Story
Rare Earth's "Get Ready": A Rock Cover That Became a Classic
Rare Earth holds a distinctive position in the history of American popular music as the first white rock band signed to Motown Records, where they recorded under the imprint that bore their name. The band originated in Detroit, Michigan, and had been performing for several years under various names before coming to the attention of Motown's talent scouts. Their signing represented a significant strategic expansion for Berry Gordy's label, which was seeking to broaden its commercial reach beyond its core soul and R&B audience into the growing album rock market of the late 1960s.
The decision to record an extended, rock-inflected version of "Get Ready" was a natural one given the material's origins. The song had been written by Smokey Robinson and originally recorded by the Temptations, who released it in 1966 on Gordy Records, a Motown subsidiary. The Temptations' version reached number 29 on the Billboard Hot 100, making it a solid if not spectacular performer for the label. Rare Earth's approach to the material would be radically different in both conception and execution.
Where the Temptations' version was a tight, propulsive soul recording running under three minutes, Rare Earth's recording stretched to nearly 21 minutes on the album version, turning the song into an extended rock workout that gave each band member ample space to demonstrate their instrumental capabilities. The recording appeared on their debut album "Get Ready," released on Rare Earth Records in 1969, and the approach reflected the influence of the emerging album rock culture that valued extended improvisation and instrumental virtuosity alongside commercial songcraft.
A substantially edited version of the recording was released as a single, and it was this version that achieved significant chart success. The single debuted on the Billboard Hot 100 on March 14, 1970 at position 91, then climbed steadily through subsequent weeks: 77, 61, 36, 35, continuing its upward trajectory to eventually reach a peak of number 4 on June 13, 1970, spending a total of 20 weeks on the chart. This was a remarkable commercial achievement for a rock band recording on a label that had built its reputation almost entirely on soul and R&B, and it demonstrated the broad appeal of the material in Rare Earth's hard-driving interpretation.
The band's lineup during this period included Pete Rivera on drums and lead vocals, Gil Bridges on saxophone and flute, Rod Richards on guitar, John Persh on bass and trombone, and Kenny James on keyboards. Rivera's drumming was a particularly notable element of the band's live performances and recordings, combining technical precision with raw energy in a style that owed something to both jazz percussion traditions and the emerging hard rock aesthetic of the era. His extended drum solos on the live versions of "Get Ready" became a signature element of the group's concerts.
The record's success demonstrated that Motown's catalog contained material that could be effectively reinterpreted across genre lines, a lesson that other rock artists of the period were also learning as they explored the rich songwriting output of the Detroit label. Rare Earth followed their breakthrough with additional chart successes including "I Just Want to Celebrate" and "(I Know) I'm Losing You," establishing themselves as one of the more commercially successful rock acts on any label during the early 1970s.
The band's trajectory after their initial commercial success was complicated by personnel changes and shifting musical fashions, but their early recordings have continued to find appreciative audiences through subsequent decades. "Get Ready" in particular has retained its appeal as a document of a specific cultural moment when rock music was expanding its boundaries to encompass influences from soul, jazz, and R&B in ways that produced some of the most exciting popular music of the era.
02 Song Meaning
Energy, Transformation, and the Rock Spirit of "Get Ready"
Smokey Robinson's original composition for the Temptations was built around a simple but effective romantic proposition: an invitation to a potential partner to prepare themselves for a relationship that promises to be unlike anything they have previously experienced. The lyric communicates confidence, even bravado, and it is delivered with the cheerful assertiveness that characterized the best of Robinson's work for the Temptations during this period. When Rare Earth took possession of the material, they retained this emotional core while transforming its musical expression into something substantially more expansive.
The Rare Earth version transforms the song's meaning partly through sheer sonic weight and duration. By stretching the material across extended instrumental passages and giving the rhythm section and soloists room to develop themes over long stretches of time, the band turned a compact pop declaration into an exploration of the feeling the lyric describes. The readiness the song invites becomes, in this treatment, something that the music itself must prepare the listener for, building gradually toward moments of release that give the invitation its full emotional force.
Pete Rivera's drumming is central to this meaning-making process. His performance on the recording transforms the rhythm section from a functional backdrop into a driving, assertive force that insists on the listener's attention and physical engagement. The drum passages in particular function as a kind of call to readiness, demanding a bodily response that mirrors the emotional preparedness the lyric invokes. This alignment of musical form and lyrical content is one of the most satisfying aspects of the recording.
The song's invitation also carries implicit commentary on the nature of transformative experience more broadly. Getting ready, in the song's terms, means opening oneself to something new and potentially overwhelming, accepting vulnerability in the expectation that what follows will be worth the risk. This is a theme with resonance beyond the specifically romantic context of the original lyric, and in Rare Earth's extended treatment it takes on additional dimensions as the music itself performs a kind of transformation, moving from familiar structure into improvisatory territory and back again.
The fact that this was a white rock band performing a song originally written for and recorded by Black soul artists also contributed to the record's meaning in its specific historical moment. The early 1970s were a period of considerable cross-cultural musical exchange, and recordings that crossed genre lines were often experienced as significant cultural gestures as well as commercial products. Rare Earth's treatment of the Motown catalog was part of a broader dialogue about the shared roots and evolving relationships between rock and soul music, a dialogue that had important implications for how American popular music understood its own history and identity.
The record's sustained commercial success across 20 weeks on the Hot 100 suggests that it found listeners across different cultural communities who responded to different aspects of what it offered. The rock audience heard virtuosic performance within a framework they recognized; the soul audience heard a familiar song approached with genuine respect and transformed by creative ambition. Both audiences found something worth returning to, and the result was a recording that has outlasted most of its commercial contemporaries.
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