(I Know) I’m Losing You

The Zoo Crew has got Rare Earth on the turntable again, and if you have been riding with the Zoo Freaks over at THE ZOO for any stretch of time, you already know why this one keeps coming back around. "(I Know) I'm Losing You" is the long, hard-edged cut from Ecology, the 1970 album that caught the Detroit outfit at the height of their stretch on the label that carried their own name. The Temptations had already taken the song to the top of the soul chart in 1966, written by Norman Whitfield, Eddie Holland, and Cornelius Grant, and produced by Whitfield. Rare Earth did not tiptoe around that history. They walked into Hitsville and turned a Motown heartbreak number into a funk-rock workout that ran nearly eleven minutes on the album and still found room for every player in the room.

Pete Rivera, the drummer and lead singer, told the story later in his book Born to Wander. The band's first pass at the tune was built the way they thought the Temps would have wanted it, and Whitfield was not having it. He listened, then told them they sounded great, but they ought to give the song a different flavor and a different presentation. Rivera said that correction put a much harder edge on the record. The take they first laid down was, by his memory, something like forty-five minutes long. Whitfield cut it down to about twelve minutes for Ecology and then down to a little over three minutes for the single. Rivera called him a master at editing, which is a polite way of saying the producer knew exactly which jam to keep and which stretch of the night to leave on the floor. The single, backed with "When Joanie Smiles," came out in the summer of 1970 on Rare Earth Records and climbed to number seven on the pop chart, one slot higher than the Temptations original had gone. It also landed in the soul top twenty and reached number fifteen in Canada. A white rock band from Detroit, on a Motown imprint, sitting on both charts at once. That did not happen every week.

Joe Summers, the Motown executive who ran the Rare Earth label in those days, said the band broke out of Baltimore and Washington. That fits the way Ecology moved. The album hit the chart in July 1970, peaked at number fifteen, and hung around for the better part of a year. It went gold. Along with the Temptations cover, the record carried "Born to Wander" and "Long Time Leavin'," songs that felt written for kids who had already left the driveway and were not sure they were coming back, plus a stretch on the Beatles' "Eleanor Rigby" that closed the side with a different kind of loneliness. Conga player Edward Guzman had come aboard as the sixth man, and the grooves on Ecology gave him room. The album version of "(I Know) I'm Losing You" is the one the freeform stations lived with. The single was the calling card. Same song, two different lengths of the night.

Rare Earth were not the only Motown act to take another run at the tune after the Temptations. Gladys Knight and the Pips cut it. Junior Walker and the All Stars did it live. The Jackson 5 had a pass at it. The Undisputed Truth recorded it. Diana Ross and the Supremes sang it with the Temptations on the TCB television special. A year after Ecology, Rod Stewart and the Faces put their own rough version on Every Picture Tells a Story. The song had legs. What Rare Earth did with it was the version that sounded like a club band that had finally been turned loose in Studio A with a producer who understood both the Motown pocket and the long FM jam. Gil Scott-Heron even name-checked the band, not kindly, in "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised," listing them among the voices that would not be singing the theme song. That is a strange kind of fame, but it tells you how far the name had traveled by 1970.

The band did not start as Rare Earth. Back around 1960 and 1961, saxophonist Gil Bridges and drummer Peter Hoorelbeke, the man listeners know as Pete Rivera, put together a Detroit group called the Sunliners. John Persh came in on bass and trombone. Guitarist Rod Richards and keyboard player Kenny James settled in a few years later. They worked the Motor City clubs for the better part of a decade, playing the R&B and Top 40 that Motown had locked up on the local radio, cutting a few records that did not travel, and learning the music by standing in the same rooms where that music lived. Bridges said later that people were surprised a white group could play that music, but it was what they had grown up hearing and what they loved. They were not thinking about crossing a line. They were thinking about the gig.

By 1968 the old name felt out of step. Bands were calling themselves things like Iron Butterfly, and the Sunliners sounded like a cruise-ship combo. They changed the name to Rare Earth because it felt more of the moment, signed with Verve, and made Dreams/Answers, an album that already included a version of the Temptations' "Get Ready." Session guitarist Dennis Coffey pointed them toward Motown. Berry Gordy wanted a rock imprint that could reach the audience his soul roster was not built for. Other white acts had signed to Motown before and gone nowhere, mostly because the company had no real road into the rock market. When the new division still needed a name, Bridges joked that they ought to call it Rare Earth. Motown took the joke and ran with it. The band signed because they figured the company would finally be behind them. They were the first all-white act on the label to make that bet pay off in a lasting way.

The first Motown album, Get Ready, stretched Smokey Robinson's song past twenty minutes and gave them a top-five single once somebody had the sense to edit it. Ecology was the follow-through. Whitfield, who had already been handed a trial production with the band after an early session with a teenage Stevie Wonder was shelved, shaped "(I Know) I'm Losing You" into the record that proved the first hit was not a fluke. The lineup that made it, Rivera up front and behind the kit, Bridges on sax and flute, Persh on bass, Richards on guitar, James on keys, and Guzman on percussion, was the band at its most convincing. They would later split, fight over the name, and keep some version of the group on the road for decades. Bridges, the last original member still in the lineup, died in 2021. A later edition of the band still carries the name, with his family's blessing, out of Detroit.

If you want the band's own front door, the official site is Rare Earth. The same outfit keeps an official Facebook page at Rare Earth on Facebook, an official Instagram at Rare Earth on Instagram, and an official X account at Rare Earth on X. Fans who still trade old photos and argue about which album got overlooked keep a public Facebook group, the Rare Earth Fan Page. Pull Ecology off the shelf, drop the needle on the long version, and let the room find out what Whitfield heard when he told those Detroit boys to stop imitating the Temps and play it like themselves.