Letter: The Platters just pretenders without Tony Williams

Friday, June 25, 1999 | 10:23 a.m.

It would be wonderful to imagine that the original artists who created the films and music of our lives would never grow old.

That they would have been permitted to escape what we all have to face -- that changing reflection in the bathroom mirror.

Alas, no such permission has been granted to them, and seeing the names of the groups they helped make part of history appearing without them because of a fiction created by booking agents and managers is worse than a fraud -- it is a shameful exhibition of commercialism substituting for respect.

Tony Williams is gone and all the smiling faces from those who now call themselves "The Platters" can't bring him back. They have indeed become "The Great Pretenders."

In all honesty, if Williams was still with us, he wouldn't sound like he did in those records of the '50s that we so fondly remember, and by no stretch of the imagination would he resemble the young singer who led the original group to glory.

But the reality of seeing him even as he might now be, would grant a dignity to his talent that is so absent when we applaud his imitators.

I could accept "A Tribute to ..." before the name. This would return dignity back to the original and bestow it in some measure to the young people who now offer for it, changing the experience from a desecrating of memories to a sharing of them.

PETER COLLINS