Touring the world with the 5th Dimension, LaMonte McLemore liked to say he had a microphone in one hand and his camera in the other.
Mr. McLemore, who died Feb. 3 at age 90, was best known as a founding member of the 5th Dimension, the genre-blending vocal group behind cheery, chart-topping hits like 1969’s “Aquarius/Let the Sunshine In,” a medley from the rock musical “Hair.” In an era of political violence and racial unrest, he and his fellow singers honed a fizzy style they called “champagne soul,” reaching a post-hippie audience — “This is the dawning of the Age of Aquarius,” they sang — while fusing jazz, pop and R&B.
Between 1967 and 1973, the group won six Grammy Awards, landed 20 songs on the Top 40 of the Billboard Hot 100 and performed in Las Vegas with Frank Sinatra and at the White House for President Richard M. Nixon. Mr. McLemore was a key part of that run, singing bass on hits like “One Less Bell to Answer” and “(Last Night) I Didn’t Get to Sleep at All,” in addition to serving as an occasional emcee, introducing his bandmates onstage by their zodiac sign.
He was the only Virgo of the bunch.
“LaMonte would be the first to tell you he may not have been our group’s strongest lead singer,” his former bandmates Marilyn McCoo and Billy Davis Jr. said in a statement. Yet it was Mr. McLemore “who brought us all together,” they said, adding that it was also Mr. McLemore who helped keep the group whole for 10 years, persuading the singers to postpone solo careers that ultimately led the original lineup to split apart in 1975.
“Every time you hear a 5th Dimension harmony, every time you hear an Original 5th Dimension melody, pause and give thanks for our beloved friend,” McCoo and Davis said. “Without his grace, the egos of everyone else might have kept that dream from ever coming true.”
Mr. McLemore, a onetime medical photographer for the Navy, toured with the 5th Dimension even as he pursued his other vocation, photography. He took pictures of fellow musicians including Marvin Gaye and Stevie Wonder; contributed to Harper’s Bazaar, where he was said to be the first Black photographer the magazine ever hired; and freelanced for publications including Ebony, Playboy and People.
For more than four decades, his photos were also a mainstay of Jet magazine, which once reached more than 1 million print subscribers each week. Mr. McLemore photographed more than 500 women — most of them nonprofessional models — for the publication’s “Beauty of the Week” feature, a reader favorite designed to showcase Black style and beauty from around the world.
“LaMonte had a good eye. He was a sure shot,” said Sylvia Flanagan, a former Jet senior editor who worked with Mr. McLemore for 35 years. “And I knew that if LaMonte was shooting it, it was going to be perfect.”
That was partly because Mr. McLemore was able to put his subjects at ease, Flanagan said. It was also because Mr. McLemore knew the assignment: “If a person was more voluptuous on the top, not so much on the bottom, LaMonte would put them in water. Because that magnifies everything.”
Jet’s “Beauty of the Week” subjects were everyday women — college students, nurses, postal workers, confidently posing in a swimsuit or stockings. A brief caption identified them by name, noting their profession and hobbies along with their measurements.
“They looked like someone whom you might catch a glimpse of at the Jersey Shore one day,” Jennifer Wilson wrote in the New Yorker in 2024, in an essay that praised the column for having “democratized the thirst trap.” “‘Hey, did I see you in Jet?’ was a pickup line someone once tried on my aunt.”
According to Flanagan, some of Mr. McLemore’s subjects were women he encountered while on tour with the 5th Dimension. Others were more personal: Mr. McLemore photographed his daughter, Ciara McLemore, 23 years after he photographed her mother, Lisa Starnes, wearing the same leopard-print swimsuit.
Many of his Jet photographs were collected in a 2024 book, “Black Is Beautiful,” which he prepared with Washington gallerist Chris Murray. Artist Mickalene Thomas, who cited Mr. McLemore as an inspiration, wrote in an introductory essay that the pictures “served as a radical depiction of the Black female body as both effortlessly beautiful and exceedingly powerful.” Mr. McLemore’s images also “provided a much-needed space for Black women to see themselves represented as desirable,” she wrote.
“To me, women are the miracle of life,” Mr. McLemore told Ebony in a 1989 interview. “As mysterious as they are, I got tired of trying to figure out the mystery. It’s better enjoyed than understood.”
‘A rare mixture’
The first of four children, Herman LaMonte McLemore was born in St. Louis on Sept. 17, 1935. His first love was baseball, although he sang doo-wop ever since he was a boy, harmonizing on street corners with friends.
When Mr. McLemore was 5, his father, a janitor and sometime musician, left the family. He was raised by his mother and maternal grandmother, who taught him a lesson that Mr. McLemore adopted as his motto: “We are only in this world to help one another.”
After graduating from high school, Mr. McLemore enlisted in the Navy, buying his first 35mm camera while stationed in Alaska. He went on to play minor league baseball, pitching in the Los Angeles Dodgers’ farm system before breaking his arm in a car crash, he said.
In the offseason, he took pictures, working as a freelance photographer whenever he could. His assignments took him to the Miss Bronze California beauty pageant, where he photographed two contestants, McCoo and Florence LaRue, who became founding members of the 5th Dimension.
Formed in 1965, the group was originally known as the Versatiles, and also included two of Mr. McLemore’s friends from St. Louis, Billy Davis Jr. and Ron “Sweets” Townson.
“I pulled them together as friends,” Mr. McLemore told the Stuart News of Florida in 2004. “Ron happened to sing opera, Billy sang rock-and-roll, me and Marilyn were singing jazz and Florence was singing pop. It was just a rare mixture, but it blended.”
The group had success almost immediately, scoring their first Top 40 hit with a cover of the Mamas & the Papas’ “Go Where You Wanna Go.” Later in 1967, they released their first million-selling record, “Up — Up and Away,” written by Jimmy Webb, a rising songwriter and pianist who backed them in the studio. The song’s title, usually rendered with a comma instead of a dash, became a national catchphrase, and the group went on to find repeated success with Webb and songwriter Laura Nyro, who crafted their hits “Stoned Soul Picnic” and “Wedding Bell Blues,” which went to No. 1.
Their music resonated even behind the Iron Curtain. When the 5th Dimension embarked on a State Department cultural tour in 1973, performing in Eastern Europe and Turkey, they stopped to chat with admiring fans at embassies and elementary schools. “A lot of soul in Czechoslovakia,” Mr. McLemore observed on his return.
His death — at his home in Henderson, Nevada, a few years after suffering a stroke — was confirmed by Murray and by Robert-Allan Arno, who co-wrote Mr. McLemore’s memoir, “From Hobo Flats to the 5th Dimension.”
In addition to his daughter, Ciara, survivors include his wife, the former Mieko Tone, whom he married in 1995; a son, Darin; a sister; and three grandchildren.
Mr. McLemore and the 5th Dimension received renewed attention in 2021, when they were featured in “Summer of Soul (… Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised),” Questlove’s Oscar-winning documentary about the 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival.
Intended to promote Black pride and unity, the concert series featured acts including Nina Simone and Sly & the Family Stone. The 5th Dimension headlined the series’s first weekend, though as the film noted, the singers had a mixed reputation among Black audiences. Hearing echoes of pop and folk rock acts like the Mamas & the Papas, some listeners mistakenly assumed that Mr. McLemore and his bandmates were White.
Ebony magazine summed up the confusion in a 1967 cover story headlined, “The Fifth Dimension: White sound in a black group.”
“Black people, when we first started … they didn’t understand what we were doing at all,” Mr. McLemore told an interviewer in 2017. He and his fellow singers were put off — “We said, ‘How can you color a sound? This is our sound. And it’s different and we ain’t gonna change it’” — but were gratified when the mood began to shift, just as the group notched its first No. 1 hit with “Aquarius.”
“All of a sudden,” he said, “all the Black people came up and said, ‘We were with y’all all along!’”
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