They dressed like diplomats and sang like they'd just left church. The Temptations were the most elegant thing Motown ever built -- five men moving in formation, every step choreographed, every harmony locked so tight you couldn't slide a razor blade between the voices. David Ruffin's rasp -- a baritone that could plead and demand in the same phrase. Eddie Kendricks's falsetto -- floating above the mix like a bird that refused to land. Melvin Franklin's bass -- a rumble that came up from the floor and settled in your chest. Paul Williams's desperate tenderness. And later, Dennis Edwards, who walked in after Ruffin was fired and made Papa Was a Rollin' Stone sound like a reckoning.

The first act was the love songs: My Girl, Ain't Too Proud to Beg, Since I Lost My Baby, Get Ready. Smokey Robinson wrote most of them, and the Temptations delivered them like letters from someone who knew exactly how you felt. "I've got sunshine on a cloudy day," Ruffin sang on My Girl. He was 23. It sounded like a man twice his age. The precision was the Motown machine at its peak -- Berry Gordy's assembly line of songwriters and session musicians and choreographers, all working to make five young men from Detroit look and sound like destiny.

Then the second act: Cloud Nine. Psychedelic Shack. Ball of Confusion. Papa Was a Rollin' Stone. Producer Norman Whitfield took over from Smokey, and the Temptations went from love songs to protest funk without missing a step. Ball of Confusion catalogued the chaos of 1970 -- Vietnam, Watergate, segregation -- over a wah-wah guitar and a bassline that refused to sit still. Papa Was a Rollin' Stone, all twelve minutes of it, is a funeral disguised as a groove, a son interrogating the ghost of a father who was never there. Dennis Edwards's vocal is cold fury, and the rhythm section -- the Funk Brothers, Motown's secret weapon -- played like they were trying to outrun their own shadows.

The casualties mounted. Paul Williams, the original lead, descended into alcoholism and depression; he was found dead of a self-inflicted gunshot at 34. David Ruffin died of a cocaine overdose in a crack house at 50, his body dumped at the hospital by a driver who didn't leave a name. Eddie Kendricks died of lung cancer at 52. Melvin Franklin died at 52 of heart failure after a series of seizures. The Temptations were less a group than a proving ground, and the proving ground took its toll. But the songs -- My Girl, Ain't Too Proud to Beg, Papa Was a Rollin' Stone, Just My Imagination -- are still out there. Still moving like five brothers who can't be stopped.