Ronald LaPread, who helped define the funky, soulful sound of the Commodores as the band’s bassist during the 1970s and ’80s, on hits like “Brick House,” “Three Times a Lady” and “Easy,” died on May 30 in Auckland, New Zealand. He was 76.
He had lived in Auckland since 1986 and died at a hospital, said his friend Tim Roxborogh, who did not disclose the cause.
Mr. LaPread joined the Commodores in 1970 and remained with them for 16 years, as they grew from their roots in Tuskegee, Ala., to become an opening act for the Jackson 5 as well as a Motown staple with a bounty of Top 10 singles and albums.
He faked his way into the group when it needed a new bass player to replace Michael Gilbert, who had been drafted to serve in the Vietnam War. Mr. LaPread was a talented musician who was playing keyboards at an American Legion hall show when Lionel Richie and Thomas McClary, two of the band’s members, asked if he knew anyone who played bass.
Without hesitation, he told them that he played bass. It was a lie.
“I said, ‘I’m the baddest-ass player in Tuskegee,’” he recalled in a video he posted on Instagram recently.
Mr. LaPread borrowed a friend’s bass and, in the days before his first rehearsal with the band, learned the bass line of James Brown’s funk single “Cold Sweat.” His fear that he would be handed music to read at the rehearsal was allayed when someone put “Liar,” a single that had recently been released by Three Dog Night, on the turntable.
“I got this,” he said, recalling his relief.
His bass playing turned out to be the Commodores’ rhythmic and harmonic bedrock — terse, precise and unshowy.
His syncopated part on “Brick House” (1977), a raucous ode to a voluptuous woman, was perhaps his best-known contribution. But he conceived most of the group’s bass parts.
“I never had to play another bassist’s music,” he told the podcast “Truth in Rhythm” in 2022.
Mr. LaPread collaborated with other band members on some of the Commodores’ funkier songs, including “Too Hot ta Trot” and “Fancy Dancer,” and, on his own, wrote “Gimme My Mule,” “Look What You’ve Done to Me” and others. He and Mr. Richie collaborated on “Zoom,” which was inspired in part by the cancer diagnosis of Mr. LaPread’s wife, the former Kathy Hogan, who died in 1977 at 23.
Ronald Cambrae LaPread was born on Sept. 4, 1949, in Tuskegee, to Paul and Lilyan (Guice) LaPread, a beautician known as Ruth. He was the great-grandson of at least one enslaved person.
As a teenager, he met the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. when he visited a neighbor who was active in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. Afterward, he said, he participated in a sit-in at a segregated church, where he and other protesters were attacked with dogs and water cannons.
“A lot of us got wet by water, bitten by dogs, beaten by batons,” he told The New Zealand Herald in 2018, “but next Sunday, we went back and sat down at the church again.”
Mr. LaPread played various instruments growing up, including the piano, tuba and sousaphone, and performed with his high school marching band. Before joining the Commodores, he also played in local bands and studied electrical engineering at the Tuskegee Institute (now University), which most members of the Commodores attended.
The Commodores were still a major act in 1982 when Mr. Richie left to pursue a solo career, a move that created tensions within the band.
“I’m sure it wasn’t easy for him, and it wasn’t easy for us, either,” Mr. LaPread said last year when Mr. Richie was promoting “Truly,” a memoir. “All we knew was each other.”
In the book, Mr. Richie wrote, “If I could choose my bass player for life, that would be Ronald LaPread.”
Mr. LaPread remained with the Commodores until 1986. Looking to refocus his life and career after Mr. Richie’s departure and the death of Benny Ashburn, the band’s manager, also in 1982, Mr. LaPread relocated to New Zealand with his wife, Farideh. There, they managed boardinghouses, and he mentored young artists and led the house band on a late-night talk show, among other activities.
“Some artists recorded in his home studio, and he’d pop up at gigs, at American-themed bars that had live music,” Mr. Roxborogh said in an interview.
Mr. LaPread also performed with Mr. Richie when he toured New Zealand, and he played with the Commodores last year during a tour stop in Auckland.
His survivors include his wife; their daughter, Soraya LaPread, a music producer; a son, Ronald Jr.; a stepson, Mark Walls; and a sister, Sharon LaPread.
On the “Truth in Rhythm” podcast, Mr. LaPread was asked how he had created the funky sound on “I Feel Sanctified,” a 1974 Commodores song.
His fingers had become so sore, he said, after what he described as about 115 takes, that he couldn’t pluck the strings of his bass anymore. “So I start hitting it like that,” he said, demonstrating how he slapped the strings with his thumb.
Rather than waiting for his fingers to heal, the band went with his slap-bass technique.
“It fell in the groove so well,” he said, “they kept the slap.”
