Day After Day #234: Brick House

Day After Day is an ambitious attempt to write about a song every day in 2024 (starting on Jan. 4).

Brick House (1977)

It's kind of amazing how you can go through life believing one thing and then one day learn you were wrong. "Brick House" by the Commodores came out when I was 9 and I have gone the nearly 48 years since then believing that Lionel Richie sang the song. It wasn't an outlandish belief, since he sang a lot of the group's hits before going solo. But sure enough, when I was researching this song, I found out that Ronald "Clyde" Orange was the lead singer on "Brick House." I suppose I could have just looked the song up on YouTube, but I never felt the need to until now.

The Commodores were formed in 1968 at Tuskegee University in Alabama, when two groups, the Mystics and the Jays, merged into a new band. They picked their name out of the dictionary. Richie and Orange, who joined in 1972, shared the lead singer duties. The group could play hard funk with the best of them, but they also had a strong pop sensibility. With their matching space funk outfits, the Commodores could have passed for a P-Funk clone, but they set themselves apart by writing pop hits like "Easy," "Three Times a Lady" and "Sail On." 

They became known more for their ballads, but "Brick House" established the group as funk legends. The second single from the band's self-titled album, guitarist William King was working on the lyrics and fell asleep. When he woke up, he found that his wife, Shirley Hanna-King, who was also as songwriter, had written a notepad full of lyrics. William King told the group that he had written the lyrics; eventually, his wife got a writing credit. 

"Ow, she's a brick house/She's mighty mighty, just lettin' it all hang out/She's a brick house/That lady's stacked and that's a fact/Ain't holding nothing back/Oh she's a brick house/Well put-together, everybody knows/This is how the story goes/She knows she got everything/That a woman needs to get a man, yeah, yeah/How can she lose with the stuff she use/Thirty-six, 24, 36, what a winning hand."

As you can see in the video below, Richie plays sax on the song, which has a killer groove. It's a go-to song for DJs when they want to get people on the dance floor. 

"The clothes she wears, her sexy ways/Make an old man wish for younger days, yeah, yeah/She knows she's built and knows how to please/Sure enough to knock a strong man to his knees/'Cause she's a brick house/Yeah, she's mighty mighty, just lettin' it all hang out/She's a brick house/The lady's stacked and that's a fact/Ain't holding nothing back."

The song's title comes from the term "built like a brick shithouse," which means, well, you have the measurements. 

"Brick House" went to #5 on the Billboard Hot 100 and remains one of the band's biggest songs. But once they started getting more success from love ballads, the Commodores leaned into it. The band took a hiatus in 1982 and Richie left to record a solo album and never looked back. The band kept going and had a hit in 1985 with "Nightshift," which paid tribute to the recently deceased Marvin Gaye and Jackie Wilson. They've only released three albums since then, but they tour regularly.

Richie had a lot of solo success, from his duet with Diana Ross on the single "Endless Love" and his three solo albums in the '80s, which were huge thanks to hits like "All Night Long," "Hello" and "Dancing on the Ceiling." He released seven albums after those, but those first three were the big ones. He also co-wrote "We Are the World" with Michael Jackson and in recent years has been known more as a judge on American Idol.

But it's Ronald Orange who provides the funk on my favorite Commodores song. The DJ at my wedding played it and it indeed filled the dance floor, which is a true test of the eternal funkiness of a song.