Podcast appearances and mentions of mickey stevenson

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 27, 2024 25:22 Transcription Available

Join @thebuzzknight for a return visit on the Takin A Walk Podcast with Mickey Stevenson. Mickey is known as Motown's A&R man, signing an iconic list of artists to the Motown label, including Stevie Wonder, Smokey Robinson, Diana Ross, Marvin Gaye and many others. Mickey gives us the behind-the-scenes music stories and also in this music interview talks about his latest projects. For suggestions or comments write buzz@buzzknightmedia.com. Connect with Buzz on Twitter @TheBuzzKnight and Instagram @takinawalkpodcast. Like the show? Please share it with your friends and leave us a review here. ReviewSupport the show: https://takinawalk.com/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

hall of fame buzz songwriter stevie wonder motown marvin gaye diana ross r man smokey robinson mickey stevenson

Classic Replay with Motown's A & R Man-Mickey Stevenson

The Bobby Bones Show

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 29, 2024 57:23 Transcription Available

Join @TheBuzzKnight for this classic replay with a man who has shaped the music of Motown, Mickey Stevenson. Working for Berry Gordy, Mickey helped launched the careers of The Four Tops, The Supremes, Stevie Wonder, Marvin Gaye and countless others. If you have questions, comments, or suggestions share them at buzz@buzzknightmedia.com Connect with Buzz on Twitter @TheBuzzKnight and Instagram @takinawalkpodcast. Like the show? Leave us a review here. Review See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

buzz stevie wonder motown marvin gaye r man supremes four tops berry gordy mickey stevenson

Classic Replay with Motown's A & R Man-Mickey Stevenson

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 29, 2024 57:23 Transcription Available

Join @TheBuzzKnight for this classic replay with a man who has shaped the music of Motown, Mickey Stevenson. Working for Berry Gordy, Mickey helped launched the careers of The Four Tops, The Supremes, Stevie Wonder, Marvin Gaye and countless others. If you have questions, comments, or suggestions share them at buzz@buzzknightmedia.com Connect with Buzz on Twitter @TheBuzzKnight and Instagram @takinawalkpodcast. Like the show? Leave us a review here. Review Support the show: https://takinawalk.com/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

buzz stevie wonder motown marvin gaye r man supremes four tops berry gordy mickey stevenson

Song 174A: “I Heard it Through the Grapevine” Part One, “If At First You Don’t Succeed…”

Play Episode Listen Later May 7, 2024

For those who haven't heard the announcement I posted , songs from this point on will sometimes be split among multiple episodes, so this is the first part of a two-episode look at the song “I Heard it Through the Grapevine”. This week we take a short look at the song’s writers, Norman Whitfield and Barrett Strong, and the first released version by Gladys Knight and the Pips. In two weeks time we’ll take a longer look at the sixties career of the song’s most famous performer, Marvin Gaye. This episode is quite a light one. That one… won’t be. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a half-hour bonus episode, on “Bend Me Shape Me” by Amen Corner. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ Resources Mixcloud will be up with the next episode. For Motown-related information in this and other Motown episodes, I've used the following resources: Where Did Our Love Go? The Rise and Fall of the Motown Sound by Nelson George is an excellent popular history of the various companies that became Motown. To Be Loved by Berry Gordy is Gordy's own, understandably one-sided, but relatively well-written, autobiography. Women of Motown: An Oral History by Susan Whitall is a collection of interviews with women involved in Motown. I Hear a Symphony: Motown and Crossover R&B by J. Andrew Flory is an academic look at Motown. The Motown Encyclopaedia by Graham Betts is an exhaustive look at the people and records involved in Motown's thirty-year history. Motown: The Golden Years is another Motown encyclopaedia. And Motown Junkies is an infrequently-updated blog looking at (so far) the first 693 tracks released on Motown singles. For information on Marvin Gaye, and his relationship with Norman Whitfield, I relied on Divided Soul: The Life of Marvin Gaye by David Ritz. I’ve also used information on Whitfield in Ain't Too Proud to Beg: The Troubled Lives and Enduring Soul of the Temptations by Mark Ribowsky, I’ve also referred to interviews with Whitfield and Strong archived at rocksbackpages.com , notably “The Norman Whitfield interview”, John Abbey, Blues & Soul, 1 February 1977 For information about Gladys Knight, I’ve used her autobiography. The best collection of Gladys Knight and the Pips’ music is this 3-CD set, but the best way to hear Motown hits is in the context of other Motown hits. This five-CD box set contains the first five in the Motown Chartbusters series of British compilations. The Pips’ version of “I Heard it Through the Grapevine” is on disc 2, while Marvin Gaye’s is on disc 3, which is famously generally considered one of the best single-disc various artists compilations ever. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Before I start, a brief note — this episode contains some brief mentions of miscarriage and drug abuse. The history of modern music would be immeasurably different had it not been for one car breakdown. Norman Whitfield spent the first fifteen years of his life in New York, never leaving the city, until his grandmother died. She’d lived in LA, and that was where the funeral was held, and so the Whitfield family got into a car and drove right across the whole continent — two thousand five hundred miles — to attend the old lady’s funeral. And then after the funeral, they turned round and started to drive home again. But they only got as far as Detroit when the car, understandably, gave up the ghost. Luckily, like many Black families, they had family in Detroit, and Norman’s aunt was not only willing to put the family up for a while, but her husband was able to give Norman’s father a job in his drug store while he saved up enough money to pay for the car to be fixed. But as it happened, the family liked Detroit, and they never did get around to driving back home to New York. Young Norman in particular took to the city’s nightlife, and soon as well as going to school he was working an evening job at a petrol station — but that was only to supplement the money he made as a pool hustler. Young Norman Whitfield was never going to be the kind of person who took a day job, and so along with his pool he started hanging out with musicians — in particular with Popcorn and the Mohawks, a band led by Popcorn Wylie. [Excerpt: Popcorn and the Mohawks, “Shimmy Gully”] Popcorn and the Mohawks were a band of serious jazz musicians, many of whom, including Wylie himself, went on to be members of the Funk Brothers, the team of session players that played on Motown’s hits — though Wylie would depart Motown fairly early after a falling out with Berry Gordy. They were some of the best musicians in Detroit at the time, and Whitfield would tag along with the group and play tambourine, and sometimes other hand percussion instruments. He wasn’t a serious musician at that point, just hanging out with a bunch of people who were, who were a year or two older than him. But he was learning — one thing that everyone says about Norman Whitfield in his youth is that he was someone who would stand on the periphery of every situation, not getting involved, but soaking in everything that the people around him were doing, and learning from them. And soon, he was playing percussion on sessions. At first, this wasn’t for Motown, but everything in the Detroit music scene connected back to the Gordy family in one way or another. In this case, the label was Thelma Records, which was formed by Berry Gordy’s ex-mother-in-law and named after Gordy’s first wife, who he had recently divorced. Of all the great Motown songwriters and producers, Whitfield’s life is the least-documented, to the extent that the chronology of his early career is very vague and contradictory, and Thelma was such a small label there even seems to be some dispute about when it existed — different sources give different dates, and while Whitfield always said he worked for Thelma records, he might have actually been employed by another label owned by the same people, Ge Ge, which might have operated earlier — but by most accounts Whitfield quickly progressed from session tambourine player to songwriter. According to an article on Whitfield from 1977, the first record of one of his songs was “Alone” by Tommy Storm on Thelma Records, but that record seems not to exist — however, some people on a soul message board, discussing this a few years ago, found an interview with a member of a group called The Fabulous Peps which also featured Storm, saying that their record on Ge Ge Records, “This Love I Have For You”, is a rewrite of that song by Don Davis, Thelma’s head of A&R, though the credit on the label for that is just to Davis and Ron Abner, another member of the group: [Excerpt: The Fabulous Peps, “This Love I Have For You”] So that might, or might not, be the first Norman Whitfield song ever to be released. The other song often credited as Whitfield’s first released song is “Answer Me” by Richard Street and the Distants — Street was another member of the Fabulous Peps, but we’ve encountered him and the Distants before when talking about the Temptations — the Distants were the group that Otis Williams, Melvin Franklin, and Al Bryant had been in before forming the Temptations — and indeed Street would much later rejoin his old bandmates in the Temptations, when Whitfield was producing for them. Unlike the Fabulous Peps track, this one was clearly credited to N. Whitfield, so whatever happened with the Storm track, this is almost certainly Whitfield’s first official credit as a songwriter: [Excerpt: Richard Street and the Distants, “Answer Me”] He was soon writing songs for a lot of small labels — most of which appear to have been recorded by the Thelma team and then licensed out — like “I’ve Gotten Over You” by the Sonnettes: [Excerpt: The Sonnettes, “I’ve Gotten Over You”] That was on KO Records, distributed by Scepter, and was a minor local hit — enough to finally bring Whitfield to the attention of Berry Gordy. According to many sources, Whitfield had been hanging around Hitsville for months trying to get a job with the label, but as he told the story in 1977 “Berry Gordy had sent Mickey Stevenson over to see me about signing with the company as an exclusive in-house writer and producer. The first act I was assigned to was Marvin Gaye and he had just started to become popular.” That’s not quite how the story went. According to everyone else, he was constantly hanging around Hitsville, getting himself into sessions and just watching them, and pestering people to let him get involved. Rather than being employed as a writer and producer, he was actually given a job in Motown’s quality control department for fifteen dollars a week, listening to potential records and seeing which ones he thought were hits, and rating them before they went to the regular department meetings for feedback from the truly important people. But he was also allowed to write songs. His first songwriting credit on a Motown record wasn’t Marvin Gaye, as Whitfield would later tell the story, but was in fact for the far less prestigious Mickey Woods — possibly the single least-known artist of Motown’s early years. Woods was a white teenager, the first white male solo artist signed to Motown, who released two novelty teen-pop singles. Whitfield’s first Motown song was the B-side to Woods’ second single, a knock-off of Sam Cooke’s “Cupid” called “They Call Me Cupid”, co-written with Berry Gordy and Brian Holland: [Excerpt: Mickey Woods, “They Call Me Cupid”] Unsurprisingly that didn’t set the world on fire, and Whitfield didn’t get another Motown label credit for thirteen months (though some of his songs for Thelma may have come out in this period). When he did, it was as co-writer with Mickey Stevenson — and, for the first time, sole producer — of the first single for a new singer, Kim Weston: [Excerpt: Kim Weston, “It Should Have Been Me”] As it turned out, that wasn’t a hit, but the flip-side, “Love Me All The Way”, co-written by Stevenson (who was also Weston’s husband) and Barney Ales, did become a minor hit, making the R&B top thirty. After that, Whitfield was on his way. It was only a month later that he wrote his first song for the Temptations, a B-side, “The Further You Look, The Less You See”: [Excerpt: The Temptations, “The Further You Look, The Less You See”] That was co-written with Smokey Robinson, and as we heard in the episode on “My Girl”, both Robinson and Whitfield vied with each other for the job of Temptations writer and producer. As we also heard in that episode, Robinson got the majority of the group’s singles for the next couple of years, but Whitfield would eventually take over from him. Whitfield’s work with the Temptations is probably his most important work as a writer and producer, and the Temptations story is intertwined deeply with this one, but for the most part I’m going to save discussion of Whitfield’s work with the group until we get to 1972, so bear with me if I seem to skim over that — and if I repeat myself in a couple of years when we get there. Whitfield’s first major success, though, was also the first top ten hit for Marvin Gaye, “Pride and Joy”: [Excerpt: Marvin Gaye, “Pride and Joy”] “Pride and Joy” had actually been written and recorded before the Kim Weston and Temptations tracks, and was intended as album filler — it was written during a session by Whitfield, Gaye, and Mickey Stevenson who was also the producer of the track, and recorded in the same session as it was written, with Martha and the Vandellas on backing vocals. The intended hit from the session, “Hitch-Hike”, we covered in the previous episode on Gaye, but that was successful enough that an album, That Stubborn Kinda Fellow, was released, with “Pride and Joy” on it. A few months later Gaye recut his lead vocal, over the same backing track, and the record was released as a single, reaching number ten on the pop charts and number two R&B: [Excerpt: Marvin Gaye, “Pride and Joy”] Whitfield had other successes as well, often as B-sides. “The Girl’s Alright With Me”, the B-side to Smokey Robinson’s hit for the Temptations “I’ll Be In Trouble”, went to number forty on the R&B chart in its own right: [Excerpt: The Temptations, “The Girl’s Alright With Me”] That was co-written with Eddie Holland, and Holland and Whitfield had a minor songwriting partnership at this time, with Holland writing lyrics and Whitfield the music. Eddie Holland even released a Holland and Whitfield collaboration himself during his brief attempt at a singing career — “I Couldn’t Cry if I Wanted To” was a song they wrote for the Temptations, who recorded it but then left it on the shelf for four years, so Holland put out his own version, again as a B-side: [Excerpt: Eddie Holland, “I Couldn’t Cry if I Wanted To”] Whitfield was very much a B-side kind of songwriter and producer at this point — but this could be to his advantage. In January 1963, around the same time as all these other tracks, he cut a filler track with the “no-hit Supremes”, “He Means the World to Me”, which was left on the shelf until they needed a B-side eighteen months later and pulled it out and released it: [Excerpt: The Supremes, “He Means the World to Me”] But the track that that was a B-side to was “Where Did Our Love Go?”, and at the time you could make a lot of money from writing the B-side to a hit that big. Indeed, at first, Whitfield made more money from “Where Did Our Love Go?” than Holland, Dozier, or Holland, because he got a hundred percent of the songwriters’ share for his side of the record, while they had to split their share three ways. Slowly Whitfield moved from being a B-side writer to being an A-side writer. With Eddie Holland he was given a chance at a Temptations A-side for the first time, with “Girl, (Why You Wanna Make Me Blue)”: [Excerpt: The Temptations, “Girl (Why You Wanna Make Me Blue)”] He also wrote for Jimmy Ruffin, but in 1964 it was with girl groups that Whitfield was doing his best work. With Mickey Stevenson he wrote “Needle in a Haystack” for the Velvettes: [Excerpt: The Velvettes, “Needle in a Haystack”] He wrote their classic followup “He Was Really Sayin' Somethin’” with Stevenson and Eddie Holland, and with Holland he also wrote “Too Many Fish in the Sea” for the Marvelettes: [Excerpt: The Marvelettes, “Too Many Fish In The Sea”] By late 1964, Whitfield wasn’t quite in the first rank of Motown songwriter-producers with Holland-Dozier-Holland and Smokey Robinson, but he was in the upper part of the second tier with Mickey Stevenson and Clarence Paul. And by early 1966, as we saw in the episode on “My Girl”, he had achieved what he’d wanted for four years, and become the Temptations’ primary writer and producer. As I said, we’re going to look at Whitfield’s time working with the Temptations later, but in 1966 and 67 they were the act he was most associated with, and in particular, he collaborated with Eddie Holland on three top ten hits for the group in 1966. But as we discussed in the episode on “I Can’t Help Myself”, Holland’s collaborations with Whitfield eventually caused problems for Holland with his other collaborators, when he won the BMI award for writing the most hit songs, depriving his brother and Lamont Dozier of their share of the award because his outside collaborations put him ahead of them. While Whitfield *could* write songs by himself, and had in the past, he was at his best as a collaborator — as well as his writing partnership with Eddie Holland he’d written with Mickey Stevenson, Marvin Gaye, and Janie Bradford. And so when Holland told him he was no longer able to work together, Whitfield started looking for someone else who could write lyrics for him, and he soon found someone: [Excerpt: Barrett Strong, “Money”] Barrett Strong had, of course, been the very first Motown act to have a major national hit, with “Money”, but as we discussed in the episode on that song he had been unable to have a follow-up hit, and had actually gone back to working on an assembly line for a while. But when you’ve had a hit as big as “Money”, working on an assembly line loses what little lustre it has, and Strong soon took himself off to New York and started hanging around the Brill Building, where he hooked up with Doc Pomus and Mort Shuman, the writers of such hits as “Save the Last Dance for Me”, “Viva Las Vegas”, “Sweets for My Sweet”, and “A Teenager in Love”. Pomus and Shuman, according to Strong, signed him to a management contract, and they got him signed to Atlantic’s subsidiary Atco, where he recorded one single, “Seven Sins”, written and produced by the team: [Excerpt: Barrett Strong, “Seven Sins”] That was a flop, and Strong was dropped by the label. He bounced around a few cities before ending up in Chicago, where he signed to VeeJay Records and put out one more single as a performer, “Make Up Your Mind”, which also went nowhere: [Excerpt: Barrett Strong, “Make Up Your Mind”] Strong had co-written that, and as his performing career was now definitively over, he decided to move into songwriting as his main job. He co-wrote “Stay in My Corner” for the Dells, which was a top thirty R&B hit for them on VeeJay in 1965 and in a remade version in 1968 became a number one R&B hit and top ten pop hit for them: [Excerpt: The Dells, “Stay in My Corner”] And on his own he wrote another top thirty R&B hit, “This Heart of Mine”, for the Artistics: [Excerpt: The Artistics, “This Heart of Mine”] He wrote several other songs that had some minor success in 1965 and 66, before moving back to Detroit and hooking up again with his old label, this time coming to them as a songwriter with a track record rather than a one-hit wonder singer. As Strong put it “They were doing my style of music then, they were doing something a little different when I left, but they were doing the more soulful, R&B-style stuff, so I thought I had a place there. So I had an idea I thought I could take back and see if they could do something with it.” That idea was the first song he wrote under his new contract, and it was co-written with Norman Whitfield. It’s difficult to know how Whitfield and Strong started writing together, or much about their writing partnership, even though it was one of the most successful songwriting teams of the era, because neither man was interviewed in any great depth, and there’s almost no long-form writing on either of them. What does seem to have been the case is that both men had been aware of each other in the late fifties, when Strong was a budding R&B star and Whitfield merely a teenager hanging round watching the cool kids. The two may even have written together before — in an example of how the chronology for both Whitfield and Strong seems to make no sense, Whitfield had cowritten a song with Marvin Gaye, “Wherever I Lay My Hat, That’s My Home”, in 1962 — when Strong was supposedly away from Motown — and it had been included as an album track on the That Stubborn Kinda Fellow album: [Excerpt: Marvin Gaye, “Wherever I Lay My Hat, That’s My Home”] The writing on that was originally credited just to Whitfield and Gaye on the labels, but it is now credited to Whitfield, Gaye, and Strong, including with BMI. Similarly Gaye’s 1965 album track “Me and My Lonely Room” — recorded in 1963 but held back – was initially credited to Whitfield alone but is now credited to Whitfield and Strong, in a strange inverse of the way “Money” initially had Strong’s credit but it was later removed. But whether this was an administrative decision made later, or whether Strong had been moonlighting for Motown uncredited in 1962 and collaborated with Whitfield, they hadn’t been a formal writing team in the way Whitfield and Holland had been, and both later seemed to date their collaboration proper as starting in 1966 when Strong returned to Motown — and understandably. The two songs they’d written earlier – if indeed they had – had been album filler, but between 1967 when the first of their new collaborations came out and 1972 when they split up, they wrote twenty-three top forty hits together. Theirs seems to have been a purely business relationship — in the few interviews with Strong he talks about Whitfield as someone he was friendly with, but Whitfield’s comments on Strong seem always to be the kind of very careful comments one would make about someone for whom one has a great deal of professional respect, a great deal of personal dislike, but absolutely no wish to air the dirty laundry behind that dislike, or to burn bridges that don’t need burning. Either way, Whitfield was in need of a songwriting partner when Barrett Strong walked into a Motown rehearsal room, and recognised that Strong’s talents were complementary to his. So he told Strong, straight out, “I’ve had quite a few hit records already. If you write with me, I can guarantee you you’ll make at least a hundred thousand dollars a year” — though he went on to emphasise that that wasn’t a guarantee-guarantee, and would depend on Strong putting the work in. Strong agreed, and the first idea he brought in for his new team earned both of them more than that hundred thousand dollars by itself. Strong had been struck by the common phrase “I heard it through the grapevine”, and started singing that line over some Ray Charles style gospel chords. Norman Whitfield knew a hook when he heard one, and quickly started to build a full song around Strong’s line. Initially, by at least some accounts, they wanted to place the song with the Isley Brothers, who had just signed to Motown and had a hit with the Holland-Dozier-Holland song “This Old Heart of Mine”: [Excerpt: The Isley Brothers, “This Old Heart of Mine (Is Weak For You)”] For whatever reason, the Isley Brothers didn’t record the song, or if they did no copy of the recording has ever surfaced, though it does seem perfectly suited to their gospel-inflected style. The Isleys did, though, record another early Whitfield and Strong song, “That’s the Way Love Is”, which came out in 1967 as a flop single, but would later be covered more successfully by Marvin Gaye: [Excerpt: The Isley Brothers, “That’s the Way Love Is”] Instead, the song was first recorded by the Miracles. And here the story becomes somewhat murky. We have a recording by the Miracles, released on an album two years later, but some have suggested that that version isn’t the same recording they made in 1966 when Whitfield and Strong wrote the song originally: [Excerpt: Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, “I Heard it Through the Grapevine”] It certainly sounds to my ears like that is probably the version of the song the group recorded in 66 — it sounds, frankly, like a demo for the later, more famous version. All the main elements are there — notably the main Ray Charles style hook played simultaneously on Hammond organ and electric piano, and the almost skanking rhythm guitar stabs — but Smokey Robinson’s vocal isn’t *quite* passionate enough, the tempo is slightly off, and the drums don’t have the same cavernous rack tom sound that they have in the more famous version. If you weren’t familiar with the eventual hit, it would sound like a classic Motown track, but as it is it’s missing something… [Excerpt: Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, “I Heard it Through the Grapevine”] According to at least some sources, that was presented to the quality control team — the team in which Whitfield had started his career, as a potential single, but they dismissed it. It wasn’t a hit, and Berry Gordy said it was one of the worst songs he’d ever heard. But Whitfield knew the song was a hit, and so he went back into the studio and cut a new backing track: [Excerpt: Marvin Gaye, “I Heard it Through the Grapevine (backing track only)”] (Incidentally, no official release of the instrumental backing track for “I Heard it Through the Grapevine” exists, and I had to put that one together myself by taking the isolated parts someone had uploaded to youtube and synching them back together in editing software, so if there are some microsecond-level discrepancies between the instruments there, that’s on me, not on the Funk Brothers.) That track was originally intended for the Temptations, with whom Whitfield was making a series of hits at the time, but they never recorded it at the time. Whitfield did produce a version for them as an album track a couple of years later though, so we have an idea how they might have taken the song vocally — though by then David Ruffin had been replaced in the group by Dennis Edwards: [Excerpt: The Temptations, “I Heard it Through the Grapevine”] But instead of giving the song to the Temptations, Whitfield kept it back for Marvin Gaye, the singer with whom he’d had his first big breakthrough hit and for whom his two previous collaborations with Strong – if collaborations they were – had been written. Gaye and Whitfield didn’t get on very well — indeed, it seems that Whitfield didn’t get on very well with *anyone* — and Gaye would later complain about the occasions when Whitfield produced his records, saying “Norman and I came within a fraction of an inch of fighting. He thought I was a prick because I wasn't about to be intimidated by him. We clashed. He made me sing in keys much higher than I was used to. He had me reaching for notes that caused my throat veins to bulge.” But Gaye sang the song fantastically, and Whitfield was absolutely certain they had a sure-fire hit: [Excerpt: Marvin Gaye, “I Heard it Through the Grapevine”] But once again the quality control department refused to release the track. Indeed, it was Berry Gordy personally who decided, against the wishes of most of the department by all accounts, that instead of “I Heard it Through the Grapevine” Gaye’s next single should be a Holland-Dozier-Holland track, “Your Unchanging Love”, a soundalike rewrite of their earlier hit for him, “How Sweet It Is”. “Your Unchanging Love” made the top thirty, but was hardly a massive success. Gordy has later claimed that he always liked “Grapevine” but just thought it was a bit too experimental for Gaye’s image at the time, but reports from others who were there say that what Gordy actually said was “it sucks”. So “I Heard it Through the Grapevine” was left on the shelf, and the first fruit of the new Whitfield/Strong team to actually get released was “Gonna Give Her All the Love I’ve Got”, written for Jimmy Ruffin, the brother of Temptations lead singer David, who had had one big hit, “What Becomes of the Brokenhearted” and one medium one, “I’ve Passed This Way Before”, in 1966. Released in 1967, “Gonna Give Her All the Love I’ve Got” became Ruffin’s third and final hit, making number 29: [Excerpt: Jimmy Ruffin, “Gonna Give Her All the Love I’ve Got”] But Whitfield was still certain that “Grapevine” could be a hit. And then in 1967, a few months after he’d shelved Gaye’s version, came the record that changed everything in soul: [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, “Respect”] Whitfield was astounded by that record, but also became determined he was going to “out-funk Aretha”, and “I Heard it Through the Grapevine” was going to be the way to do it. And he knew someone who thought she could do just that. Gladys Knight never got on well with Aretha Franklin. According to Knight’s autobiography this was one-sided on Franklin’s part, and Knight was always friendly to Franklin, but it’s also notable that she says the same about several other of the great sixties female soul singers (though not all of them by any means), and there seems to be a general pattern among those singers that they felt threatened by each other and that their own position in the industry was precarious, in a way the male singers usually didn’t. But Knight claimed she always *wished* she got on well with Franklin, because the two had such similar lives. They’d both started out singing gospel as child performers before moving on to the chitlin circuit at an early age, though Knight started her singing career even younger than Franklin did. Knight was only four when she started performing solos in church, and by the age of eight she had won the two thousand dollar top prize on Ted Mack’s Amateur Hour by singing Brahms’ “Lullaby” and the Nat “King” Cole hit “Too Young”: [Excerpt: Nat “King” Cole, “Too Young”] That success inspired her, and she soon formed a vocal group with her brother Bubba, sister Brenda and their cousins William and Eleanor Guest. They named themselves the Pips in honour of a cousin whose nickname that was, and started performing at talent contests in Atlanta Chitlin’ Circuit venues. They soon got a regular gig at one of them, the Peacock, despite them all being pre-teens at the time. The Pips also started touring, and came to the attention of Maurice King, the musical director of the Flame nightclub in Detroit, who became a vocal coach for the group. King got the group signed to Brunswick records, where they released their first single, a song King had written called “Whistle My Love”: [Excerpt: The Pips, “Whistle My Love”] According to Knight that came out in 1955, when she was eleven, but most other sources have it coming out in 1958. The group’s first two singles flopped, and Brenda and Eleanor quit the group, being replaced by another cousin, Edward Patten, and an unrelated singer Langston George, leaving Knight as the only girl in the quintet. While the group weren’t successful on records, they were getting a reputation live and toured on package tours with Sam Cooke, Jackie Wilson, and others. Knight also did some solo performances with a jazz band led by her music teacher, and started dating that band’s sax player, Jimmy Newman. The group’s next recording was much more successful. They went into a makeshift studio owned by a local club owner, Fats Hunter, and recorded what they thought was a demo, a version of the Johnny Otis song “Every Beat of My Heart”: [Excerpt: The Pips, “Every Beat of My Heart (HunTom version)”] The first they knew that Hunter had released that on his own small label was when they heard it on the radio. The record was picked up by VeeJay records, and it ended up going to number one on the R&B charts and number six on the pop charts, but they never saw any royalties from it. It brought them to the attention of another small label, Fury Records, which got them to rerecord the song, and that version *also* made the R&B top twenty and got as high as number forty-five on the pop charts: [Excerpt: Gladys Knight and the Pips, “Every Beat of My Heart (Fury version)”] However, just because they had a contract with Fury didn’t mean they actually got any more money, and Knight has talked about the label’s ownership being involved with gangsters. That was the first recording to be released as by “Gladys Knight and the Pips”, rather than just The Pips, and they would release a few more singles on Fury, including a second top twenty pop hit, the Don Covay song “Letter Full of Tears”: [Excerpt: Gladys Knight and the Pips, “Letter Full of Tears”] But Knight had got married to Newman, who was by now the group’s musical director, after she fell pregnant when she was sixteen and he was twenty. However, that first pregnancy tragically ended in miscarriage, and when she became pregnant again she decided to get off the road to reduce the risk. She spent a couple of years at home, having two children, while the other Pips – minus George who left soon after – continued without her to little success. But her marriage was starting to deteriorate under pressure of Newman’s drug use — they wouldn’t officially divorce until 1972, but they were already feeling the pressure, and would split up sooner rather than later — and Knight returned to the stage, initially as a solo artist or duetting with Jerry Butler, but soon rejoining the Pips, who by this time were based in New York and working with the choreographer Cholly Atkins to improve their stagecraft. For the next few years the Pips drifted from label to label, scoring one more top forty hit in 1964 with Van McCoy’s “Giving Up”, but generally just getting by like so many other acts on the circuit. Eventually the group ended up moving to Detroit, and hooking up with Motown, where mentors like Cholly Atkins and Maurice King were already working. At first they thought they were taking a step up, but they soon found that they were a lower tier Motown act, considered on a par with the Spinners or the Contours rather than the big acts, and according to Knight they got pulled off an early Motown package tour because Diana Ross, with whom like Franklin Knight had something of a rivalry, thought they were too good on stage and were in danger of overshadowing her. Knight says in her autobiography that they “formed a little club of our own with some of the other malcontents” with Martha Reeves, Marvin Gaye, and someone she refers to as “Ivory Joe Hunter” but I presume she means Ivy Jo Hunter (one of the big problems when dealing with R&B musicians of this era is the number of people with similar names. Ivy Jo Hunter, Joe Hunter, and Ivory Joe Hunter were all R&B musicians for whom keyboard was their primary instrument, and both Ivy Jo and just plain Joe worked for Motown at different points, but Ivory Joe never did) Norman Whitfield was also part of that group of “malcontents”, and he was also the producer of the Pips’ first few singles for Motown, and so when he was looking for someone to outdo Aretha, someone with something to prove, he turned to them. He gave the group the demo tape, and they worked out a vocal arrangement for a radically different version of the song, one inspired by “Respect”: [Excerpt: Gladys Knight and the Pips, “I Heard it Through the Grapevine”] The third time was the charm, and quality control finally agreed to release “I Heard it Through the Grapevine” as a single. Gladys Knight always claimed it had no promotion, but Norman Whitfield’s persistence had paid off — the single went to number two on the pop charts (kept off the top by “Daydream Believer”), number one on the R&B charts, and became Motown’s biggest-selling single *ever* up until that point. It also got Knight a Grammy nomination for Best R&B Vocal Performance, Female — though the Grammy committee, at least, didn’t think she’d out-Aretha’d Aretha, as “Respect” won the award. And that, sadly, sort of summed up Gladys Knight and the Pips at Motown — they remained not quite the winners in everything. There’s no shame in being at number two behind a classic single like “Daydream Believer”, and certainly no shame in losing the Grammy to Aretha Franklin at her best, but until they left Motown in 1972 and started their run of hits on Buddah records, Gladys Knight and the Pips would always be in other people’s shadow. That even extended to “I Heard It Through the Grapevine” when, as we’ll hear in part two of this story, Norman Whitfield’s persistence paid off, Marvin Gaye’s version got released as a single, and *that* became the biggest-selling single on Motown ever, outselling the Pips version and making it forever his song, not theirs. And as a final coda to the story of Gladys Knight and the Pips at Motown, while they were touring off the back of “Grapevine’s” success, the Pips ran into someone they vaguely knew from his time as a musician in the fifties, who was promoting a group he was managing made up of his sons. Knight thought they had something, and got in touch with Motown several times trying to get them to sign the group, but she was ignored. After a few attempts, though, Bobby Taylor of another second-tier Motown group, the Vancouvers, also saw them and got in touch with Motown, and this time they got signed. But that story wasn’t good enough for Motown, and so neither Taylor nor Knight got the credit for discovering the group. Instead when Joe Jackson’s sons’ band made their first album, it was titled Diana Ross Presents the Jackson 5. But that, of course, is a story for another time…

love women new york money black world chicago soul fall british song girl pride detroit respect grammy blues female sea miracles heard atlantic mine vancouver tears cd succeed robinson released knight holland teenagers fury last dance norman peacock newman flame popcorn giving up mother in law temptations cry aretha franklin needle circuit motown hammond bmi stevenson marvin gaye bubba cupid lullabies tilt sweets ray charles diana ross my heart sam cooke brunswick brokenhearted supremes brahms grapevine viva las vegas smokey robinson wylie whitfield somethin gladys knight isley brothers joe jackson gordy ruffin pips spinners my girl dozier haystack make up your mind berry gordy scepter amateur hour contours shuman mohawks jackie wilson dells i heard my home best r buddah too young martha reeves vandellas hitchhike don davis lamont dozier david ruffin too proud atco brill building seven sins veejay daydream believer gege funk brothers otis williams jerry butler help myself holland dozier holland barrett strong bobby taylor nelson george to be loved my sweet answer me david ritz motown sound joe hunter how sweet it is jimmy ruffin norman whitfield van mccoy hitsville johnny otis kim weston doc pomus where did our love go don covay i heard it through isleys every beat melvin franklin alright with me my corner this old heart mickey stevenson tilt araiza

Classic Replay with the man behind Motown Mickey Stevenson

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 3, 2024 57:23

Mickey was Berry Gordy's A&R Man, responsible for signing the legends of the Motown Sound.Support the show: https://takinawalk.com/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Mickey Stevenson: Motown Records A and R Man

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 6, 2024 57:23 Transcription Available

Mickey Stevenson worked for Berry Gordy from Motown Records and was responsible for signing the biggest names from that era, Steve Wonder, The Supremes, The Temptations, The Four Tops, Martha Reeves, Marvin Gaye and others. Support the show: https://takinawalk.com/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

temptations marvin gaye r man supremes four tops motown records berry gordy martha reeves steve wonder mickey stevenson

Trailer for upcoming Mickey Stevenson Episode

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 5, 2024 1:00 Transcription Available

Mickey Stevenson is the legendary A and R man for Berry Gordy at Motown Records, responsible for signing every major legend from that era. This is a trailer for an upcoming episode airing February 6.Support the show: https://takinawalk.com/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Life's Interruptions: How To Deal

The Debbie Nigro Show

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 11, 2023 25:04

Lifes Interruptions. There's a lot of conversation going on in the world about learning how to harness our own minds. I swear to you, if it's not one person it's another who mentions they've been trying to figure out what the heck we learned last year that we can do different in 2023. Seems Everybody's Wrestling With Themselves. I was having this conversation with my buddy Paul Lambert. He's a Broadway Musical Producer living out in California. He's a guy who I've been talking to on the phone for 20 years. We talk about a lot of things that you wouldnt necessarily hear talked about on the radio. We talk business, life, whatever. He brought up this topic on the phone. "What the heck have we learned this past year?" I thought it was a good topic to bring to the radio, I invited him to talk about that on my live radio show and talk as if we're on the phone and nobody else was listening. Paul is working on some great upcoming musicals. In addition to the Four Tops Musical, the latest one is called, "Can You Hear Me? I know from talking often to Paul this show is fantastic and it's a very special thing in his life. I knew that recently related to it, somethin' just didn't quite go as expected that he had high hopes for. I figured he'd be totally bummed. But he wasn't. I think a lot of people can relate to having expectations that fall through and getting bummed out when what they hoped might happen doesn't happen. How you deal with those moments is what Paul I and talk about because we are wiser having been there multiple times. Rather than falling down and getting all disgusted and depressed when things that you hoped would work out don't...Paul shares some good ideas about how we're not going to do that anymore. He makes his point by sharing an homest and personal story. Paul Lambert spent weeks and weeks and weeks preparing for what the theater industry calls 'an investor showcase' for a musical called "Can You Hear Me". Word is it's a fabulous hit in the making, upcoming musical and thousands of dollars have already been put into it. Some of the best performers in the world were asked to do a favor and invest three or four days of their time for this showcase. The most brilliant creative team was assembled, including their conductor whos done over 20 Broadway shows. Their music arranger has done 8 Broadway shows and the Kennedy Center, the White House, etc. Paul was in his glory about all the work and the who's who's that were coming to this big presentation being held at J Lo's former nightclub in LA. One of the greatest days of his career he'll tell you. This is also the day if a show presenation goes as planned and the show is great enough, people write the checks necessary to help produce it. However, on the morning of this big day, the most important people that Paul wanted there who write big checks, and have big influence in the industry were calling one by one to say, "I can't come today". Four or five people he was really excited were coming, cancelled that morning. One key person Paul was hoping to talk to was a board member from the La Jolla Playhouse, one of the best 'Pre Broadway' playhouses in America. They've sent many shows to Broadway, including Jersey Boys which started right there. Paul got a message at 7 a.m. that day saying, 'Paul best of luck to you. I'm sorry I'm going to New York tomorrow and I have to prepare for my trip so I cannot make your presentation.' Paul called that moment, 'the gut punch'. Nobody owns the market on having things they hoped and wished for and kind of counted on, fall through. Learning how to deal with those moments mentally and emotionally is what is important. To the point of dealing with emotional 'gut punches' Paul said, "Well, I think what's important is you take a deep breath because these things are going to happen. And whether you're producing musicals or producing your daily life or anything else, the I hope, I hope, I hope, is going to get derailed by something you had not expected. What I learned this year more than ever, is to get past it and get to what I call 'a pivot' as fast as possible. It isn't going to change. It isn't going to go away. It's all about the pivot. I say to myself, Paul, pivot don't dwell. Don't get resentful. Don't get down into the briar patch. And it's so important because everybody has those emotional blows that are unexpected disruptions that happen in their lives, across the board, guaranteed there are going to be unexpected disruptions." "I say Okay, breathe. You don't want to dwell too long on these kind of moments. Let's get to the next possible positive thing as fast as possible. When you pivot emotionally and every other way that you have to, you realize, hey, what I just heard is simply information. It's not going to change the world. It's not going to stop any thing. It's just information. I'll take that information and move forward." It all turned around for Paul that day by the way, but out of another left field direction. That's often what goes on. One door closes, one door opens or one door closes and the whole corridor opens. "Okay, Paul said, so I looked out in the crowd that day and I said to myself someone here is meant for this day that I don't know about, and something very good is going to happen. I can't foresee what is already in the universe going on that is perfect for what is supposed to happen next." So two things happen. All of the Four Tops creative teams, the big Motown musical people and more luminaries are in the audience. Aretha Franklin's music director is sitting in the audience. Eddie Holland, and Brian Holland who wrote all the songs with the Supremes are there and so is Mickey Stevenson of Motown. This amazing crowd and all their friends are there to see this presentation. There was excitement and people loved it. Sure enough! Someone who came with someone, thought of someone ,who would just love the show and thought he'd call that someone to set up a meeting with Paul to talk about investing in this. Paul says, "I have to tell you within two days I'm back in LA. I'm being picked up in a Ferrari. and we're driving around. He pulls up to his big beautiful house in a Ferrari and on the other side of the garage is a Porsche. And of course, when I got out, I said, well, for heaven's sake, we've got to be successful because I hope you can afford a car big enough that I can get in and out of in the future." (Paul's very tall these fancy cars are very low. lol ) And the other thing good that happened? That Board member from the La Jolla Playhouse who had to cancel and go to N.Y. called Paul from N.Y. to say, that while she was there she met with the former managing director of La Jolla who has a very big position now in N.Y. at the New York City Theatre and told him all about the musical and told Paul should call him on Monday to tell him everything that's going on. Opportunities are going to find you and the right people are going to show up. Paul and I talk all the time about unexpected disruptions. These things are going to happen anyway so how fast you get past them or learn to get past them is really important. Surprises come from different directions you have to be open for those and dismiss the dark stuff mentally before resentment sets in and you get stuck. You just got to keep moving where your gut is telling you, and don't don't talk yourself out of what's meant for you. You're going to fit in where you're needed and appreciated and your struggle is not where your story ends what stopped you in the past will not stop you in 2023. Lets Roll! Enjoy the whole podcast conversation including more fun honesty of what would typically be a phone conversation between Paul Lambert and myself about ..Life's Interruptions. Goodness Knows More Are Coming. Recorded Live :The Debbie Nigro Show 11-12 noon ET WGCH & WGCH.com anywhere Follow Me For More Honest Stuff LOL Instagram: @therealdebbienigro Facebook: The Debbie Nigro Show LinkedIn: Debbie Nigro

s3e1 Mickey Stevenson (2016) interview on Nexxlegacy

Nexxlegacy

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 7, 2022 36:06

s3e1 Mickey Stevenson (2016) interview on Nexxlegacy Hosted by Charles iambranded Madison Listen to the radio station using the apps #ios - https://apps.apple.com/us/app/nexxlegacy/id1556213017 #googleplay - https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.radio.mfa6aedb1f Download the app for free #Nexxlegacy #Music #HipHop #Culture #Music #RnB #RythmnBlues #MotivationalSpeaker #Radio #Nexxlegacy #Rap or go to http://www.nexxlegacy.com --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/nexxlegacy/message

mickey stevenson

Episode 156: “I Was Made to Love Her” by Stevie Wonder

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 25, 2022

Episode one hundred and fifty-six of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “I Was Made to Love Her", the early career of Stevie Wonder, and the Detroit riots of 1967. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a twenty-minute bonus episode available, on "Groovin'" by the Young Rascals. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ Resources As usual, I've put together a Mixcloud playlist of all the recordings excerpted in this episode. The best value way to get all of Stevie Wonder's early singles is this MP3 collection, which has the original mono single mixes of fifty-five tracks for a very reasonable price. For those who prefer physical media, this is a decent single-CD collection of his early work at a very low price indeed. As well as the general Motown information listed below, I've also referred to Signed, Sealed, and Delivered: The Soulful Journey of Stevie Wonder by Mark Ribowsky, which rather astonishingly is the only full-length biography of Wonder, to Higher Ground: Stevie Wonder, Aretha Franklin, Curtis Mayfield, and the Rise and Fall of American Soul by Craig Werner, and to Detroit 67: The Year That Changed Soul by Stuart Cosgrove. For Motown-related information in this and other Motown episodes, I've used the following resources: Where Did Our Love Go? The Rise and Fall of the Motown Sound by Nelson George is an excellent popular history of the various companies that became Motown. To Be Loved by Berry Gordy is Gordy's own, understandably one-sided, but relatively well-written, autobiography. Women of Motown: An Oral History by Susan Whitall is a collection of interviews with women involved in Motown. I Hear a Symphony: Motown and Crossover R&B by J. Andrew Flory is an academic look at Motown. The Motown Encyclopaedia by Graham Betts is an exhaustive look at the people and records involved in Motown's thirty-year history. How Sweet It Is by Lamont Dozier and Scott B. Bomar is Dozier's autobiography, while Come and Get These Memories by Brian and Eddie Holland and Dave Thompson is the Holland brothers'. Standing in the Shadows of Motown: The Life and Music of Legendary Bassist James Jamerson by "Dr Licks" is a mixture of a short biography of the great bass player, and tablature of his most impressive bass parts. And Motown Junkies is an infrequently-updated blog looking at (so far) the first 694 tracks released on Motown singles. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript A quick note before I begin -- this episode deals with disability and racism, and also deals from the very beginning with sex work and domestic violence. It also has some discussion of police violence and sexual assault. As always I will try to deal with those subjects as non-judgementally and sensitively as possible, but if you worry that anything about those subjects might disturb you, please check the transcript. Calvin Judkins was not a good man. Lula Mae Hardaway thought at first he might be, when he took her in, with her infant son whose father had left before the boy was born. He was someone who seemed, when he played the piano, to be deeply sensitive and emotional, and he even did the decent thing and married her when he got her pregnant. She thought she could save him, even though he was a street hustler and not even very good at it, and thirty years older than her -- she was only nineteen, he was nearly fifty. But she soon discovered that he wasn't interested in being saved, and instead he was interested in hurting her. He became physically and financially abusive, and started pimping her out. Lula would eventually realise that Calvin Judkins was no good, but not until she got pregnant again, shortly after the birth of her second son. Her third son was born premature -- different sources give different numbers for how premature, with some saying four months and others six weeks -- and while he apparently went by Stevland Judkins throughout his early childhood, the name on his birth certificate was apparently Stevland Morris, Lula having decided not to give another child the surname of her abuser, though nobody has ever properly explained where she got the surname "Morris" from. Little Stevland was put in an incubator with an oxygen mask, which saved the tiny child's life but destroyed his sight, giving him a condition called retinopathy of prematurity -- a condition which nowadays can be prevented and cured, but in 1951 was just an unavoidable consequence for some portion of premature babies. Shortly after the family moved from Saginaw to Detroit, Lula kicked Calvin out, and he would remain only a peripheral figure in his children's lives, but one thing he did do was notice young Stevland's interest in music, and on his increasingly infrequent visits to his wife and kids -- visits that usually ended with violence -- he would bring along toy instruments for the young child to play, like a harmonica and a set of bongos. Stevie was a real prodigy, and by the time he was nine he had a collection of real musical instruments, because everyone could see that the kid was something special. A neighbour who owned a piano gave it to Stevie when she moved out and couldn't take it with her. A local Lions Club gave him a drum kit at a party they organised for local blind children, and a barber gave him a chromatic harmonica after seeing him play his toy one. Stevie gave his first professional performance when he was eight. His mother had taken him to a picnic in the park, and there was a band playing, and the little boy got as close to the stage as he could and started dancing wildly. The MC of the show asked the child who he was, and he said "My name is Stevie, and I can sing and play drums", so of course they got the cute kid up on stage behind the drum kit while the band played Johnny Ace's "Pledging My Love": [Excerpt: Johnny Ace, "Pledging My Love"] He did well enough that they paid him seventy-five cents -- an enormous amount for a small child at that time -- though he was disappointed afterwards that they hadn't played something faster that would really allow him to show off his drumming skills. After that he would perform semi-regularly at small events, and always ask to be paid in quarters rather than paper money, because he liked the sound of the coins -- one of his party tricks was to be able to tell one coin from another by the sound of them hitting a table. Soon he formed a duo with a neighbourhood friend, John Glover, who was a couple of years older and could play guitar while Stevie sang and played harmonica and bongos. The two were friends, and both accomplished musicians for their age, but that wasn't the only reason Stevie latched on to Glover. Even as young as he was, he knew that Motown was soon going to be the place to be in Detroit if you were a musician, and Glover had an in -- his cousin was Ronnie White of the Miracles. Stevie and John performed as a duo everywhere they could and honed their act, performing particularly at the talent shows which were such an incubator of Black musical talent at the time, and they also at this point seem to have got the attention of Clarence Paul, but it was White who brought the duo to Motown. Stevie and John first played for White and Bobby Rodgers, another of the Miracles, then when they were impressed they took them through the several layers of Motown people who would have to sign off on signing a new act. First they were taken to see Brian Holland, who was a rising star within Motown as "Please Mr. Postman" was just entering the charts. They impressed him with a performance of the Miracles song "Bad Girl": [Excerpt: The Miracles, "Bad Girl"] After that, Stevie and John went to see Mickey Stevenson, who was at first sceptical, thinking that a kid so young -- Stevie was only eleven at the time -- must be some kind of novelty act rather than a serious musician. He said later "It was like, what's next, the singing mouse?" But Stevenson was won over by the child's talent. Normally, Stevenson had the power to sign whoever he liked to the label, but given the extra legal complications involved in signing someone under-age, he had to get Berry Gordy's permission. Gordy didn't even like signing teenagers because of all the extra paperwork that would be involved, and he certainly wasn't interested in signing pre-teens. But he came down to the studio to see what Stevie could do, and was amazed, not by his singing -- Gordy didn't think much of that -- but by his instrumental ability. First Stevie played harmonica and bongos as proficiently as an adult professional, and then he made his way around the studio playing on every other instrument in the place -- often only a few notes, but competent on them all. Gordy decided to sign the duo -- and the initial contract was for an act named "Steve and John" -- but it was soon decided to separate them. Glover would be allowed to hang around Motown while he was finishing school, and there would be a place for him when he finished -- he later became a staff songwriter, working on tracks for the Four Tops and the Miracles among others, and he would even later write a number one hit, "You Don't Have to be a Star (to be in My Show)" for Marilyn McCoo and Billy Davis Jr -- but they were going to make Stevie a star right now. The man put in charge of that was Clarence Paul. Paul, under his birth name of Clarence Pauling, had started his career in the "5" Royales, a vocal group he formed with his brother Lowman Pauling that had been signed to Apollo Records by Ralph Bass, and later to King Records. Paul seems to have been on at least some of the earliest recordings by the group, so is likely on their first single, "Give Me One More Chance": [Excerpt: The "5" Royales, "Give Me One More Chance"] But Paul was drafted to go and fight in the Korean War, and so wasn't part of the group's string of hit singles, mostly written by his brother Lowman, like "Think", which later became better known in James Brown's cover version, or "Dedicated to the One I Love", later covered by the Shirelles, but in its original version dominated by Lowman's stinging guitar playing: [Excerpt: The "5" Royales, "Dedicated to the One I Love"] After being discharged, Clarence had shortened his name to Clarence Paul, and had started recording for all the usual R&B labels like Roulette and Federal, with little success: [Excerpt: Clarence Paul, "I'm Gonna Love You, Love You Til I Die"] He'd also co-written "I Need Your Lovin'", which had been an R&B hit for Roy Hamilton: [Excerpt: Roy Hamilton, "I Need Your Lovin'"] Paul had recently come to work for Motown – one of the things Berry Gordy did to try to make his label more attractive was to hire the relatives of R&B stars on other labels, in the hopes of getting them to switch to Motown – and he was the new man on the team, not given any of the important work to do. He was working with acts like Henry Lumpkin and the Valladiers, and had also been the producer of "Mind Over Matter", the single the Temptations had released as The Pirates in a desperate attempt to get a hit: [Excerpt: The Pirates, "Mind Over Matter"] Paul was the person you turned to when no-one else was interested, and who would come up with bizarre ideas. A year or so after the time period we're talking about, it was him who produced an album of country music for the Supremes, before they'd had a hit, and came up with "The Man With the Rock and Roll Banjo Band" for them: [Excerpt: The Supremes, "The Man With The Rock and Roll Banjo Band"] So, Paul was the perfect person to give a child -- by this time twelve years old -- who had the triple novelties of being a multi-instrumentalist, a child, and blind. Stevie started spending all his time around the Motown studios, partly because he was eager to learn everything about making records and partly because his home life wasn't particularly great and he wanted to be somewhere else. He earned the affection and irritation, in equal measure, of people at Motown both for his habit of wandering into the middle of sessions because he couldn't see the light that showed that the studio was in use, and for his practical joking. He was a great mimic, and would do things like phoning one of the engineers and imitating Berry Gordy's voice, telling the engineer that Stevie would be coming down, and to give him studio equipment to take home. He'd also astonish women by complimenting them, in detail, on their dresses, having been told in advance what they looked like by an accomplice. But other "jokes" were less welcome -- he would regularly sexually assault women working at Motown, grabbing their breasts or buttocks and then claiming it was an accident because he couldn't see what he was doing. Most of the women he molested still speak of him fondly, and say everybody loved him, and this may even be the case -- and certainly I don't think any of us should be judged too harshly for what we did when we were twelve -- but this kind of thing led to a certain amount of pressure to make Stevie's career worth the extra effort he was causing everyone at Motown. Because Berry Gordy was not impressed with Stevie's vocals, the decision was made to promote him as a jazz instrumentalist, and so Clarence Paul insisted that his first release be an album, rather than doing what everyone would normally do and only put out an album after a hit single. Paul reasoned that there was no way on Earth they were going to be able to get a hit single with a jazz instrumental by a twelve-year-old kid, and eventually persuaded Gordy of the wisdom of this idea. So they started work on The Jazz Soul of Little Stevie, released under his new stagename of Little Stevie Wonder, supposedly a name given to him after Berry Gordy said "That kid's a wonder!", though Mickey Stevenson always said that the name came from a brainstorming session between him and Clarence Paul. The album featured Stevie on harmonica, piano, and organ on different tracks, but on the opening track, "Fingertips", he's playing the bongos that give the track its name: [Excerpt: Little Stevie Wonder, "Fingertips (studio version)"] The composition of that track is credited to Paul and the arranger Hank Cosby, but Beans Bowles, who played flute on the track, always claimed that he came up with the melody, and it seems quite likely to me that most of the tracks on the album were created more or less as jam sessions -- though Wonder's contributions were all overdubbed later. The album sat in the can for several months -- Berry Gordy was not at all sure of its commercial potential. Instead, he told Paul to go in another direction -- focusing on Wonder's blindness, he decided that what they needed to do was create an association in listeners' minds with Ray Charles, who at this point was at the peak of his commercial power. So back into the studio went Wonder and Paul, to record an album made up almost entirely of Ray Charles covers, titled Tribute to Uncle Ray. (Some sources have the Ray Charles tribute album recorded first -- and given Motown's lax record-keeping at this time it may be impossible to know for sure -- but this is the way round that Mark Ribowsky's biography of Wonder has it). But at Motown's regular quality control meeting it was decided that there wasn't a single on the album, and you didn't release an album like that without having a hit single first. By this point, Clarence Paul was convinced that Berry Gordy was just looking for excuses not to do anything with Wonder -- and there may have been a grain of truth to that. There's some evidence that Gordy was worried that the kid wouldn't be able to sing once his voice broke, and was scared of having another Frankie Lymon on his hands. But the decision was made that rather than put out either of those albums, they would put out a single. The A-side was a song called "I Call it Pretty Music But the Old People Call it the Blues, Part 1", which very much played on Wonder's image as a loveable naive kid: [Excerpt: Little Stevie Wonder, "I Call it Pretty Music But the Old People Call it the Blues, Part 1"] The B-side, meanwhile, was part two -- a slowed-down, near instrumental, version of the song, reframed as an actual blues, and as a showcase for Wonder's harmonica playing rather than his vocals. The single wasn't a hit, but it made number 101 on the Billboard charts, just missing the Hot One Hundred, which for the debut single of a new artist wasn't too bad, especially for Motown at this point in time, when most of its releases were flopping. That was good enough that Gordy authorised the release of the two albums that they had in the can. The next single, "Little Water Boy", was a rather baffling duet with Clarence Paul, which did nothing at all on the charts. [Excerpt: Clarence Paul and Little Stevie Wonder, "Little Water Boy"] After this came another flop single, written by Brian Holland, Lamont Dozier, and Janie Bradford, before the record that finally broke Little Stevie Wonder out into the mainstream in a big way. While Wonder hadn't had a hit yet, he was sent out on the first Motortown Revue tour, along with almost every other act on the label. Because he hadn't had a hit, he was supposed to only play one song per show, but nobody had told him how long that song should be. He had quickly become a great live performer, and the audiences were excited to watch him, so when he went into extended harmonica solos rather than quickly finishing the song, the audience would be with him. Clarence Paul, who came along on the tour, would have to motion to the onstage bandleader to stop the music, but the bandleader would know that the audiences were with Stevie, and so would just keep the song going as long as Stevie was playing. Often Paul would have to go on to the stage and shout in Wonder's ear to stop playing -- and often Wonder would ignore him, and have to be physically dragged off stage by Paul, still playing, causing the audience to boo Paul for stopping him from playing. Wonder would complain off-stage that the audience had been enjoying it, and didn't seem to get it into his head that he wasn't the star of the show, that the audiences *were* enjoying him, but were *there* to see the Miracles and Mary Wells and the Marvelettes and Marvin Gaye. This made all the acts who had to go on after him, and who were running late as a result, furious at him -- especially since one aspect of Wonder's blindness was that his circadian rhythms weren't regulated by sunlight in the same way that the sighted members of the tour's were. He would often wake up the entire tour bus by playing his harmonica at two or three in the morning, while they were all trying to sleep. Soon Berry Gordy insisted that Clarence Paul be on stage with Wonder throughout his performance, ready to drag him off stage, so that he wouldn't have to come out onto the stage to do it. But one of the first times he had done this had been on one of the very first Motortown Revue shows, before any of his records had come out. There he'd done a performance of "Fingertips", playing the flute part on harmonica rather than only playing bongos throughout as he had on the studio version -- leaving the percussion to Marvin Gaye, who was playing drums for Wonder's set: [Excerpt: Little Stevie Wonder, "Fingertips (Parts 1 & 2)"] But he'd extended the song with a little bit of call-and-response vocalising: [Excerpt: Little Stevie Wonder, "Fingertips (Parts 1 & 2)"] After the long performance ended, Clarence Paul dragged Wonder off-stage and the MC asked the audience to give him a round of applause -- but then Stevie came running back on and carried on playing: [Excerpt: Little Stevie Wonder, "Fingertips (Parts 1 & 2)"] By this point, though, the musicians had started to change over -- Mary Wells, who was on after Wonder, was using different musicians from his, and some of her players were already on stage. You can hear Joe Swift, who was playing bass for Wells, asking what key he was meant to be playing in: [Excerpt: Little Stevie Wonder, "Fingertips (Parts 1 & 2)"] Eventually, after six and a half minutes, they got Wonder off stage, but that performance became the two sides of Wonder's next single, with "Fingertips Part 2", the part with the ad lib singing and the false ending, rather than the instrumental part one, being labelled as the side the DJs should play. When it was released, the song started a slow climb up the charts, and by August 1963, three months after it came out, it was at number one -- only the second ever Motown number one, and the first ever live single to get there. Not only that, but Motown released a live album -- Recorded Live, the Twelve-Year-Old Genius (though as many people point out he was thirteen when it was released -- he was twelve when it was recorded though) and that made number one on the albums chart, becoming the first Motown album ever to do so. They followed up "Fingertips" with a similar sounding track, "Workout, Stevie, Workout", which made number thirty-three. After that, his albums -- though not yet his singles -- started to be released as by "Stevie Wonder" with no "Little" -- he'd had a bit of a growth spurt and his voice was breaking, and so marketing him as a child prodigy was not going to work much longer and they needed to transition him into a star with adult potential. In the Motown of 1963 that meant cutting an album of standards, because the belief at the time in Motown was that the future for their entertainers was doing show tunes at the Copacabana. But for some reason the audience who had wanted an R&B harmonica instrumental with call-and-response improvised gospel-influenced yelling was not in the mood for a thirteen year old singing "Put on a Happy Face" and "When You Wish Upon a Star", and especially not when the instrumental tracks were recorded in a key that suited him at age twelve but not thirteen, so he was clearly straining. "Fingertips" being a massive hit also meant Stevie was now near the top of the bill on the Motortown Revue when it went on its second tour. But this actually put him in a precarious position. When he had been down at the bottom of the bill and unknown, nobody expected anything from him, and he was following other minor acts, so when he was surprisingly good the audiences went wild. Now, near the top of the bill, he had to go on after Marvin Gaye, and he was not nearly so impressive in that context. The audiences were polite enough, but not in the raptures he was used to. Although Stevie could still beat Gaye in some circumstances. At Motown staff parties, Berry Gordy would always have a contest where he'd pit two artists against each other to see who could win the crowd over, something he thought instilled a fun and useful competitive spirit in his artists. They'd alternate songs, two songs each, and Gordy would decide on the winner based on audience response. For the 1963 Motown Christmas party, it was Stevie versus Marvin. Wonder went first, with "Workout, Stevie, Workout", and was apparently impressive, but then Gaye topped him with a version of "Hitch-Hike". So Stevie had to top that, and apparently did, with a hugely extended version of "I Call it Pretty Music", reworked in the Ray Charles style he'd used for "Fingertips". So Marvin Gaye had to top that with the final song of the contest, and he did, performing "Stubborn Kind of Fellow": [Excerpt: Marvin Gaye, "Stubborn Kind of Fellow"] And he was great. So great, it turned the crowd against him. They started booing, and someone in the audience shouted "Marvin, you should be ashamed of yourself, taking advantage of a little blind kid!" The crowd got so hostile Berry Gordy had to stop the performance and end the party early. He never had another contest like that again. There were other problems, as well. Wonder had been assigned a tutor, a young man named Ted Hull, who began to take serious control over his life. Hull was legally blind, so could teach Wonder using Braille, but unlike Wonder had some sight -- enough that he was even able to get a drivers' license and a co-pilot license for planes. Hull was put in loco parentis on most of Stevie's tours, and soon became basically inseparable from him, but this caused a lot of problems, not least because Hull was a conservative white man, while almost everyone else at Motown was Black, and Stevie was socially liberal and on the side of the civil rights and anti-Vietnam movements. Hull started to collaborate on songwriting with Wonder, which most people at Motown were OK with but which now seems like a serious conflict of interest, and he also started calling himself Stevie's "manager" -- which did *not* impress the people at Motown, who had their own conflict of interest because with Stevie, like with all their artists, they were his management company and agents as well as his record label and publishers. Motown grudgingly tolerated Hull, though, mostly because he was someone they could pass Lula Mae Hardaway to to deal with her complaints. Stevie's mother was not very impressed with the way that Motown were handling her son, and would make her opinion known to anyone who would listen. Hull and Hardaway did not get on at all, but he could be relied on to save the Gordy family members from having to deal with her. Wonder was sent over to Europe for Christmas 1963, to perform shows at the Paris Olympia and do some British media appearances. But both his mother and Hull had come along, and their clear dislike for each other was making him stressed. He started to get pains in his throat whenever he sang -- pains which everyone assumed were a stress reaction to the unhealthy atmosphere that happened whenever Hull and his mother were in the same room together, but which later turned out to be throat nodules that required surgery. Because of this, his singing was generally not up to standard, which meant he was moved to a less prominent place on the bill, which in turn led to his mother accusing the Gordy family of being against him and trying to stop him becoming a star. Wonder started to take her side and believe that Motown were conspiring against him, and at one point he even "accidentally" dropped a bottle of wine on Ted Hull's foot, breaking one of his toes, because he saw Hull as part of the enemy that was Motown. Before leaving for those shows, he had recorded the album he later considered the worst of his career. While he was now just plain Stevie on albums, he wasn't for his single releases, or in his first film appearance, where he was still Little Stevie Wonder. Berry Gordy was already trying to get a foot in the door in Hollywood -- by the end of the decade Motown would be moving from Detroit to LA -- and his first real connections there were with American International Pictures, the low-budget film-makers who have come up a lot in connection with the LA scene. AIP were the producers of the successful low-budget series of beach party films, which combined appearances by teen heartthrobs Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello in swimsuits with cameo appearances by old film stars fallen on hard times, and with musical performances by bands like the Bobby Fuller Four. There would be a couple of Motown connections to these films -- most notably, the Supremes would do the theme tune for Dr. Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine -- but Muscle Beach Party was to be the first. Most of the music for Muscle Beach Party was written by Brian Wilson, Roger Christian, and Gary Usher, as one might expect for a film about surfing, and was performed by Dick Dale and the Del-Tones, the film's major musical guests, with Annette, Frankie, and Donna Loren [pron Lorren] adding vocals, on songs like "Muscle Bustle": [Excerpt: Donna Loren with Dick Dale and the Del-Tones, "Muscle Bustle"] The film followed the formula in every way -- it also had a cameo appearance by Peter Lorre, his last film appearance before his death, and it featured Little Stevie Wonder playing one of the few songs not written by the surf and car writers, a piece of nothing called "Happy Street". Stevie also featured in the follow-up, Bikini Beach, which came out a little under four months later, again doing a single number, "Happy Feelin'". To cash in on his appearances in these films, and having tried releasing albums of Little Stevie as jazz multi-instrumentalist, Ray Charles tribute act, live soulman and Andy Williams-style crooner, they now decided to see if they could sell him as a surf singer. Or at least, as Motown's idea of a surf singer, which meant a lot of songs about the beach and the sea -- mostly old standards like "Red Sails in the Sunset" and "Ebb Tide" -- backed by rather schlocky Wrecking Crew arrangements. And this is as good a place as any to take on one of the bits of disinformation that goes around about Motown. I've addressed this before, but it's worth repeating here in slightly more detail. Carol Kaye, one of the go-to Wrecking Crew bass players, is a known credit thief, and claims to have played on hundreds of records she didn't -- claims which too many people take seriously because she is a genuine pioneer and was for a long time undercredited on many records she *did* play on. In particular, she claims to have played on almost all the classic Motown hits that James Jamerson of the Funk Brothers played on, like the title track for this episode, and she claims this despite evidence including notarised statements from everyone involved in the records, the release of session recordings that show producers talking to the Funk Brothers, and most importantly the evidence of the recordings themselves, which have all the characteristics of the Detroit studio and sound like the Funk Brothers playing, and have absolutely nothing in common, sonically, with the records the Wrecking Crew played on at Gold Star, Western, and other LA studios. The Wrecking Crew *did* play on a lot of Motown records, but with a handful of exceptions, mostly by Brenda Holloway, the records they played on were quickie knock-off album tracks and potboiler albums made to tie in with film or TV work -- soundtracks to TV specials the acts did, and that kind of thing. And in this case, the Wrecking Crew played on the entire Stevie at the Beach album, including the last single to be released as by "Little Stevie Wonder", "Castles in the Sand", which was arranged by Jack Nitzsche: [Excerpt: Little Stevie Wonder, "Castles in the Sand"] Apparently the idea of surfin' Stevie didn't catch on any more than that of swingin' Stevie had earlier. Indeed, throughout 1964 and 65 Motown seem to have had less than no idea what they were doing with Stevie Wonder, and he himself refers to all his recordings from this period as an embarrassment, saving particular scorn for the second single from Stevie at the Beach, "Hey Harmonica Man", possibly because that, unlike most of his other singles around this point, was a minor hit, reaching number twenty-nine on the charts. Motown were still pushing Wonder hard -- he even got an appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show in May 1964, only the second Motown act to appear on it after the Marvelettes -- but Wonder was getting more and more unhappy with the decisions they were making. He loathed the Stevie at the Beach album -- the records he'd made earlier, while patchy and not things he'd chosen, were at least in some way related to his musical interests. He *did* love jazz, and he *did* love Ray Charles, and he *did* love old standards, and the records were made by his friend Clarence Paul and with the studio musicians he'd grown to know in Detroit. But Stevie at the Beach was something that was imposed on Clarence Paul from above, it was cut with unfamiliar musicians, Stevie thought the films he was appearing in were embarrassing, and he wasn't even having much commercial success, which was the whole point of these compromises. He started to get more rebellious against Paul in the studio, though many of these decisions weren't made by Paul, and he would complain to anyone who would listen that if he was just allowed to do the music he wanted to sing, the way he wanted to sing it, he would have more hits. But for nine months he did basically no singing other than that Ed Sullivan Show appearance -- he had to recover from the operation to remove the throat nodules. When he did return to the studio, the first single he cut remained unreleased, and while some stuff from the archives was released between the start of 1964 and March 1965, the first single he recorded and released after the throat nodules, "Kiss Me Baby", which came out in March, was a complete flop. That single was released to coincide with the first Motown tour of Europe, which we looked at in the episode on "Stop! In the Name of Love", and which was mostly set up to promote the Supremes, but which also featured Martha and the Vandellas, the Miracles, and the Temptations. Even though Stevie had not had a major hit in eighteen months by this point, he was still brought along on the tour, the only solo artist to be included -- at this point Gordy thought that solo artists looked outdated compared to vocal groups, in a world dominated by bands, and so other solo artists like Marvin Gaye weren't invited. This was a sign that Gordy was happier with Stevie than his recent lack of chart success might suggest. One of the main reasons that Gordy had been in two minds about him was that he'd had no idea if Wonder would still be able to sing well after his voice broke. But now, as he was about to turn fifteen, his adult voice had more or less stabilised, and Gordy knew that he was capable of having a long career, if they just gave him the proper material. But for now his job on the tour was to do his couple of hits, smile, and be on the lower rungs of the ladder. But even that was still a prominent place to be given the scaled-down nature of this bill compared to the Motortown Revues. While the tour was in England, for example, Dusty Springfield presented a TV special focusing on all the acts on the tour, and while the Supremes were the main stars, Stevie got to do two songs, and also took part in the finale, a version of "Mickey's Monkey" led by Smokey Robinson but with all the performers joining in, with Wonder getting a harmonica solo: [Excerpt: Smokey Robinson and the Motown acts, "Mickey's Monkey"] Sadly, there was one aspect of the trip to the UK that was extremely upsetting for Wonder. Almost all the media attention he got -- which was relatively little, as he wasn't a Supreme -- was about his blindness, and one reporter in particular convinced him that there was an operation he could have to restore his sight, but that Motown were preventing him from finding out about it in order to keep his gimmick going. He was devastated about this, and then further devastated when Ted Hull finally convinced him that it wasn't true, and that he'd been lied to. Meanwhile other newspapers were reporting that he *could* see, and that he was just feigning blindness to boost his record sales. After the tour, a live recording of Wonder singing the blues standard "High Heeled Sneakers" was released as a single, and barely made the R&B top thirty, and didn't hit the top forty on the pop charts. Stevie's initial contract with Motown was going to expire in the middle of 1966, so there was a year to get him back to a point where he was having the kind of hits that other Motown acts were regularly getting at this point. Otherwise, it looked like his career might end by the time he was sixteen. The B-side to "High Heeled Sneakers" was another duet with Clarence Paul, who dominates the vocal sound for much of it -- a version of Willie Nelson's country classic "Funny How Time Slips Away": [Excerpt: Stevie Wonder and Clarence Paul, "Funny How Time Slips Away"] There are a few of these duet records scattered through Wonder's early career -- we'll hear another one a little later -- and they're mostly dismissed as Paul trying to muscle his way into a revival of his own recording career as an artist, and there may be some truth in that. But they're also a natural extension of the way the two of them worked in the studio. Motown didn't have the facilities to give Wonder Braille lyric sheets, and Paul didn't trust him to be able to remember the lyrics, so often when they made a record, Paul would be just off-mic, reciting the lyrics to Wonder fractionally ahead of him singing them. So it was more or less natural that this dynamic would leak out onto records, but not everyone saw it that way. But at the same time, there has been some suggestion that Paul was among those manoeuvring to get rid of Wonder from Motown as soon as his contract was finished -- despite the fact that Wonder was the only act Paul had worked on any big hits for. Either way, Paul and Wonder were starting to chafe at working with each other in the studio, and while Paul remained his on-stage musical director, the opportunity to work on Wonder's singles for what would surely be his last few months at Motown was given to Hank Cosby and Sylvia Moy. Cosby was a saxophone player and staff songwriter who had been working with Wonder and Paul for years -- he'd co-written "Fingertips" and several other tracks -- while Moy was a staff songwriter who was working as an apprentice to Cosby. Basically, at this point, nobody else wanted the job of writing for Wonder, and as Moy was having no luck getting songs cut by any other artists and her career was looking about as dead as Wonder's, they started working together. Wonder was, at this point, full of musical ideas but with absolutely no discipline. He's said in interviews that at this point he was writing a hundred and fifty songs a month, but these were often not full songs -- they were fragments, hooks, or a single verse, or a few lines, which he would pass on to Moy, who would turn his ideas into structured songs that fit the Motown hit template, usually with the assistance of Cosby. Then Cosby would come up with an arrangement, and would co-produce with Mickey Stevenson. The first song they came up with in this manner was a sign of how Wonder was looking outside the world of Motown to the rock music that was starting to dominate the US charts -- but which was itself inspired by Motown music. We heard in the last episode on the Rolling Stones how "Nowhere to Run" by the Vandellas: [Excerpt: Martha and the Vandellas, "Nowhere to Run"] had inspired the Stones' "Satisfaction": [Excerpt: The Rolling Stones, "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction"] And Wonder in turn was inspired by "Satisfaction" to come up with his own song -- though again, much of the work making it into an actual finished song was done by Sylvia Moy. They took the four-on-the-floor beat and basic melody of "Satisfaction" and brought it back to Motown, where those things had originated -- though they hadn't originated with Stevie, and this was his first record to sound like a Motown record in the way we think of those things. As a sign of how, despite the way these stories are usually told, the histories of rock and soul were completely and complexly intertwined, that four-on-the-floor beat itself was a conscious attempt by Holland, Dozier, and Holland to appeal to white listeners -- on the grounds that while Black people generally clapped on the backbeat, white people didn't, and so having a four-on-the-floor beat wouldn't throw them off. So Cosby, Moy, and Wonder, in trying to come up with a "Satisfaction" soundalike were Black Motown writers trying to copy a white rock band trying to copy Black Motown writers trying to appeal to a white rock audience. Wonder came up with the basic chorus hook, which was based around a lot of current slang terms he was fond of: [Excerpt: Stevie Wonder, "Uptight"] Then Moy, with some assistance from Cosby, filled it out into a full song. Lyrically, it was as close to social comment as Motown had come at this point -- Wonder was, like many of his peers in soul music, interested in the power of popular music to make political statements, and he would become a much more political artist in the next few years, but at this point it's still couched in the acceptable boy-meets-girl romantic love song that Motown specialised in. But in 1965 a story about a boy from the wrong side of the tracks dating a rich girl inevitably raised the idea that the boy and girl might be of different races -- a subject that was very, very, controversial in the mid-sixties. [Excerpt: Stevie Wonder, "Uptight"] "Uptight" made number three on the pop charts and number one on the R&B charts, and saved Stevie Wonder's career. And this is where, for all that I've criticised Motown in this episode, their strategy paid off. Mickey Stevenson talked a lot about how in the early sixties Motown didn't give up on artists -- if someone had potential but was not yet having hits or finding the right approach, they would keep putting out singles in a holding pattern, trying different things and seeing what would work, rather than toss them aside. It had already worked for the Temptations and the Supremes, and now it had worked for Stevie Wonder. He would be the last beneficiary of this policy -- soon things would change, and Motown would become increasingly focused on trying to get the maximum returns out of a small number of stars, rather than building careers for a range of artists -- but it paid off brilliantly for Wonder. "Uptight" was such a reinvention of Wonder's career, sound, and image that many of his fans consider it the real start of his career -- everything before it only counting as prologue. The follow-up, "Nothing's Too Good For My Baby", was an "Uptight" soundalike, and as with Motown soundalike follow-ups in general, it didn't do quite as well, but it still made the top twenty on the pop chart and got to number four on the R&B chart. Stevie Wonder was now safe at Motown, and so he was going to do something no other Motown act had ever done before -- he was going to record a protest song and release it as a single. For about a year he'd been ending his shows with a version of Bob Dylan's "Blowin' in the Wind", sung as a duet with Clarence Paul, who was still his on stage bandleader even though the two weren't working together in the studio as much. Wonder brought that into the studio, and recorded it with Paul back as the producer, and as his duet partner. Berry Gordy wasn't happy with the choice of single, but Wonder pushed, and Gordy knew that Wonder was on a winning streak and gave in, and so "Blowin' in the Wind" became Stevie Wonder's next single: [Excerpt: Stevie Wonder and Clarence Paul, "Blowin' in the Wind"] "Blowin' in the Wind" made the top ten, and number one on the R&B charts, and convinced Gordy that there was some commercial potential in going after the socially aware market, and over the next few years Motown would start putting out more and more political records. Because Motown convention was to have the producer of a hit record produce the next hit for that artist, and keep doing so until they had a flop, Paul was given the opportunity to produce the next single. "A Place in the Sun" was another ambiguously socially-aware song, co-written by the only white writer on Motown staff, Ron Miller, who happened to live in the same building as Stevie's tutor-cum-manager Ted Hull. "A Place in the Sun" was a pleasant enough song, inspired by "A Change is Gonna Come", but with a more watered-down, generic, message of hope, but the record was lifted by Stevie's voice, and again made the top ten. This meant that Paul and Miller, and Miller's writing partner Bryan Mills, got to work on his next two singles -- his 1966 Christmas song "Someday at Christmas", which made number twenty-four, and the ballad "Travellin' Man" which made thirty-two. The downward trajectory with Paul meant that Wonder was soon working with other producers again. Harvey Fuqua and Johnny Bristol cut another Miller and Mills song with him, "Yester-Me, Yester-You, Yesterday": [Excerpt: Stevie Wonder, "Yester-Me, Yester-You, Yesterday"] But that was left in the can, as not good enough to release, and Stevie was soon back working with Cosby. The two of them had come up with an instrumental together in late 1966, but had not been able to come up with any words for it, so they played it for Smokey Robinson, who said their instrumental sounded like circus music, and wrote lyrics about a clown: [Excerpt: The Miracles, "The Tears of a Clown"] The Miracles cut that as album filler, but it was released three years later as a single and became the Miracles' only number one hit with Smokey Robinson as lead singer. So Wonder and Cosby definitely still had their commercial touch, even if their renewed collaboration with Moy, who they started working with again, took a while to find a hit. To start with, Wonder returned to the idea of taking inspiration from a hit by a white British group, as he had with "Uptight". This time it was the Beatles, and the track "Michelle", from the Rubber Soul album: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Michelle"] Wonder took the idea of a song with some French lyrics, and a melody with some similarities to the Beatles song, and came up with "My Cherie Amour", which Cosby and Moy finished off. [Excerpt: Stevie Wonder, "My Cherie Amour"] Gordy wouldn't allow that to be released, saying it was too close to "Michelle" and people would think it was a rip-off, and it stayed in the vaults for several years. Cosby also produced a version of a song Ron Miller had written with Orlando Murden, "For Once in My Life", which pretty much every other Motown act was recording versions of -- the Four Tops, the Temptations, Billy Eckstine, Martha and the Vandellas and Barbra McNair all cut versions of it in 1967, and Gordy wouldn't let Wonder's version be put out either. So they had to return to the drawing board. But in truth, Stevie Wonder was not the biggest thing worrying Berry Gordy at this point. He was dealing with problems in the Supremes, which we'll look at in a future episode -- they were about to get rid of Florence Ballard, and thus possibly destroy one of the biggest acts in the world, but Gordy thought that if they *didn't* get rid of her they would be destroying themselves even more certainly. Not only that, but Gordy was in the midst of a secret affair with Diana Ross, Holland, Dozier, and Holland were getting restless about their contracts, and his producers kept bringing him unlistenable garbage that would never be a hit. Like Norman Whitfield, insisting that this track he'd cut with Marvin Gaye, "I Heard it Through the Grapevine", should be a single. Gordy had put his foot down about that one too, just like he had about "My Cherie Amour", and wouldn't allow it to be released. Meanwhile, many of the smaller acts on the label were starting to feel like they were being ignored by Gordy, and had formed what amounted to a union, having regular meetings at Clarence Paul's house to discuss how they could pressure the label to put the same effort into their careers as into those of the big stars. And the Funk Brothers, the musicians who played on all of Motown's hits, were also getting restless -- they contributed to the arrangements, and they did more for the sound of the records than half the credited producers; why weren't they getting production credits and royalties? Harvey Fuqua had divorced Gordy's sister Gwen, and so became persona non grata at the label and was in the process of leaving Motown, and so was Mickey Stevenson, Gordy's second in command, because Gordy wouldn't give him any stock in the company. And Detroit itself was on edge. The crime rate in the city had started to go up, but even worse, the *perception* of crime was going up. The Detroit News had been running a campaign to whip up fear, which it called its Secret Witness campaign, and running constant headlines about rapes, murders, and muggings. These in turn had led to increased calls for more funds for the police, calls which inevitably contained a strong racial element and at least implicitly linked the perceived rise in crime to the ongoing Civil Rights movement. At this point the police in Detroit were ninety-three percent white, even though Detroit's population was over thirty percent Black. The Mayor and Police Commissioner were trying to bring in some modest reforms, but they weren't going anywhere near fast enough for the Black population who felt harassed and attacked by the police, but were still going too fast for the white people who were being whipped up into a state of terror about supposedly soft-on-crime policies, and for the police who felt under siege and betrayed by the politicians. And this wasn't the only problem affecting the city, and especially affecting Black people. Redlining and underfunded housing projects meant that the large Black population was being crammed into smaller and smaller spaces with fewer local amenities. A few Black people who were lucky enough to become rich -- many of them associated with Motown -- were able to move into majority-white areas, but that was just leading to white flight, and to an increase in racial tensions. The police were on edge after the murder of George Overman Jr, the son of a policeman, and though they arrested the killers that was just another sign that they weren't being shown enough respect. They started organising "blu flu"s -- the police weren't allowed to strike, so they'd claim en masse that they were off sick, as a protest against the supposed soft-on-crime administration. Meanwhile John Sinclair was organising "love-ins", gatherings of hippies at which new bands like the MC5 played, which were being invaded by gangs of bikers who were there to beat up the hippies. And the Detroit auto industry was on its knees -- working conditions had got bad enough that the mostly Black workforce organised a series of wildcat strikes. All in all, Detroit was looking less and less like somewhere that Berry Gordy wanted to stay, and the small LA subsidiary of Motown was rapidly becoming, in his head if nowhere else, the more important part of the company, and its future. He was starting to think that maybe he should leave all these ungrateful people behind in their dangerous city, and move the parts of the operation that actually mattered out to Hollywood. Stevie Wonder was, of course, one of the parts that mattered, but the pressure was on in 1967 to come up with a hit as big as his records from 1965 and early 66, before he'd been sidetracked down the ballad route. The song that was eventually released was one on which Stevie's mother, Lula Mae Hardaway, had a co-writing credit: [Excerpt: Stevie Wonder, "I Was Made to Love Her"] "I Was Made to Love Her" was inspired by Wonder's first love, a girl from the same housing projects as him, and he talked about the song being special to him because it was true, saying it "kind of speaks of my first love to a girl named Angie, who was a very beautiful woman... Actually, she was my third girlfriend but my first love. I used to call Angie up and, like, we would talk and say, 'I love you, I love you,' and we'd talk and we'd both go to sleep on the phone. And this was like from Detroit to California, right? You know, mother said, 'Boy, what you doing - get off the phone!' Boy, I tell you, it was ridiculous." But while it was inspired by her, like with many of the songs from this period, much of the lyric came from Moy -- her mother grew up in Arkansas, and that's why the lyric started "I was born in Little Rock", as *her* inspiration came from stories told by her parents. But truth be told, the lyrics weren't particularly detailed or impressive, just a standard story of young love. Rather what mattered in the record was the music. The song was structured differently from many Motown records, including most of Wonder's earlier ones. Most Motown records had a huge amount of dynamic variation, and a clear demarcation between verse and chorus. Even a record like "Dancing in the Street", which took most of its power from the tension and release caused by spending most of the track on one chord, had the release that came with the line "All we need is music", and could be clearly subdivided into different sections. "I Was Made to Love Her" wasn't like that. There was a tiny section which functioned as a middle eight -- and which cover versions like the one by the Beach Boys later that year tend to cut out, because it disrupts the song's flow: [Excerpt: Stevie Wonder, "I Was Made to Love Her"] But other than that, the song has no verse or chorus, no distinct sections, it's just a series of lyrical couplets over the same four chords, repeating over and over, an incessant groove that could really go on indefinitely: [Excerpt: Stevie Wonder, "I Was Made to Love Her"] This is as close as Motown had come at this point to the new genre of funk, of records that were just staying with one groove throughout. It wasn't a funk record, not yet -- it was still a pop-soul record, But what made it extraordinary was the bass line, and this is why I had to emphasise earlier that this was a record by the Funk Brothers, not the Wrecking Crew, no matter how much some Crew members may claim otherwise. As on most of Cosby's sessions, James Jamerson was given free reign to come up with his own part with little guidance, and what he came up with is extraordinary. This was at a time when rock and pop basslines were becoming a little more mobile, thanks to the influence of Jamerson in Detroit, Brian Wilson in LA, and Paul McCartney in London. But for the most part, even those bass parts had been fairly straightforward technically -- often inventive, but usually just crotchets and quavers, still keeping rhythm along with the drums rather than in dialogue with them, roaming free rhythmically. Jamerson had started to change his approach, inspired by the change in studio equipment. Motown had upgraded to eight-track recording in 1965, and once he'd become aware of the possibilities, and of the greater prominence that his bass parts could have if they were recorded on their own track, Jamerson had become a much busier player. Jamerson was a jazz musician by inclination, and so would have been very aware of John Coltrane's legendary "sheets of sound", in which Coltrane would play fast arpeggios and scales, in clusters of five and seven notes, usually in semiquaver runs (though sometimes in even smaller fractions -- his solo in Miles Davis' "Straight, No Chaser" is mostly semiquavers but has a short passage in hemidemisemiquavers): [Excerpt: Miles Davis, "Straight, No Chaser"] Jamerson started to adapt the "sheets of sound" style to bass playing, treating the bass almost as a jazz solo instrument -- though unlike Coltrane he was also very, very concerned with creating something that people could tap their feet to. Much like James Brown, Jamerson was taking jazz techniques and repurposing them for dance music. The most notable example of that up to this point had been in the Four Tops' "Bernadette", where there are a few scuffling semiquaver runs thrown in, and which is a much more fluid part than most of his playing previously: [Excerpt: The Four Tops, "Bernadette"] But on "Bernadette", Jamerson had been limited by Holland, Dozier, and Holland, who liked him to improvise but around a framework they created. Cosby, on the other hand, because he had been a Funk Brother himself, was much more aware of the musicians' improvisational abilities, and would largely give them a free hand. This led to a truly remarkable bass part on "I Was Made to Love Her", which is somewhat buried in the single mix, but Marcus Miller did an isolated recreation of the part for the accompanying CD to a book on Jamerson, Standing in the Shadows of Motown, and listening to that you can hear just how inventive it is: [Excerpt: Marcus Miller, "I Was Made to Love Her"] This was exciting stuff -- though much less so for the touring musicians who went on the road with the Motown revues while Jamerson largely stayed in Detroit recording. Jamerson's family would later talk about him coming home grumbling because complaints from the touring musicians had been brought to him, and he'd been asked to play less difficult parts so they'd find it easier to replicate them on stage. "I Was Made to Love Her" wouldn't exist without Stevie Wonder, Hank Cosby, Sylvia Moy, or Lula Mae Hardaway, but it's James Jamerson's record through and through: [Excerpt: Stevie Wonder, "I Was Made to Love Her"] It went to number two on the charts, sat between "Light My Fire" at number one, and "All You Need is Love" at number three, with the Beatles song soon to overtake it and make number one itself. But within a few weeks of "I Was Made to Love Her" reaching its chart peak, things in Detroit would change irrevocably. On the 23rd of July, the police busted an illegal drinking den. They thought they were only going to get about twenty-five people there, but there turned out to be a big party on. They tried to arrest seventy-four people, but their wagon wouldn't fit them all in so they had to call reinforcements and make the arrestees wait around til more wagons arrived. A crowd of hundreds gathered while they were waiting. Someone threw a brick at a squad car window, a rumour went round that the police had bayonetted someone, and soon the city was in flames. Riots lasted for days, with people burning down and looting businesses, but what really made the situation bad was the police's overreaction. They basically started shooting at young Black men, using them as target practice, and later claiming they were snipers, arsonists, and looters -- but there were cases like the Algiers Motel incident, where the police raided a motel where several Black men, including the members of the soul group The Dramatics, were hiding out along with a few white women. The police sexually assaulted the women, and then killed three of the men for associating with white women, in what was described as a "lynching with bullets". The policemen in question were later acquitted of all charges. The National Guard were called in, as were Federal troops -- the 82nd Airborne Division, and the 101st Airborne from Clarksville, the division in which Jimi Hendrix had recently served. After four days of rioting, one of the bloodiest riots in US history was at an end, with forty-three people dead (of whom thirty-three were Black and only one was a policeman). Official counts had 1,189 people injured, and over 7,200 arrests, almost all of them of Black people. A lot of the histories written later say that Black-owned businesses were spared during the riots, but that wasn't really the case. For example, Joe's Record Shop, owned by Joe Von Battle, who had put out the first records by C.L. Franklin and his daughter Aretha, was burned down, destroying not only the stock of records for sale but the master tapes of hundreds of recordings of Black artists, many of them unreleased and so now lost forever. John Lee Hooker, one of the artists whose music Von Battle had released, soon put out a song, "The Motor City is Burning", about the events: [Excerpt: John Lee Hooker, "The Motor City is Burning"] But one business that did remain unburned was Motown, with the Hitsville studio going untouched by flames and unlooted. Motown legend has this being down to the rioters showing respect for the studio that had done so much for Detroit, but it seems likely to have just been luck. Although Motown wasn't completely unscathed -- a National Guard tank fired a shell through the building, leaving a gigantic hole, which Berry Gordy saw as soon as he got back from a business trip he'd been on during the rioting. That was what made Berry Gordy decide once and for all that things needed to change. Motown owned a whole row of houses near the studio, which they used as additional office space and for everything other than the core business of making records. Gordy immediately started to sell them, and move the admin work into temporary rented space. He hadn't announced it yet, and it would be a few years before the move was complete, but from that moment on, the die was cast. Motown was going to leave Detroit and move to Hollywood.

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Michelle Fletcher Stevenson & William Mickey Stevenson

Focus TV

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 29, 2022 31:26

mickey stevenson

Michelle Fletcher Stevenson & William Mickey Stevenson

Focus TV

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 29, 2022 31:26

mickey stevenson

Hitsville S.O.D. – July 12, 2022

ML Soul of Detroit

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 12, 2022 94:50

Motown HOF songwriter Mickey Stevenson takes ML, Marc, Shawn, Intern Patrick and Kaleena behind the scenes at Hitsville, U.S.A., while […]

ml hitsville mickey stevenson

Sadiki Bakari & Mickey Stevenson | Carl Nelson Show

The Carl Nelson Show

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 21, 2021 150:06

Futuristic Researcher Sadiki Bakari returns to the WOL classroom this afternoon. Sadiki will update us on the latest developments in Artificial Intelligence A.I. Sadiki will also discuss his preeminent work on Spiritual Technology, Transhumanism, 5th Dimensional Consciousness vs. the 5G Technology Continuum and its relationship to Human 2.0, Algorithmic Technology, Artificial Humanity, the Digital Future, Virtual Reality Interface, Medu Neter vs. Emotion Software and Emojis, "GOD" and more. Before we hear from Brother Sadiki, legendary Motown A&R man Mickey Stevenson checks in. First, we will get an update on the student protest at Howard University. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Episode 133: “My Girl” by the Temptations

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 24, 2021

Episode one hundred and thirty-three of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at "My Girl" by the Temptations, and is part three of a three-episode look at Motown in 1965. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on "Yeh Yeh" by Georgie Fame and the Blue Flames. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ Resources As usual, I've put together a Mixcloud playlist of all the recordings excerpted in this episode. This box set is the definitive collection of the Temptations' work, but is a bit pricey. For those on a budget, this two-CD set contains all the hits. As well as the general Motown information listed below, I've also referred to Ain't Too Proud to Beg: The Troubled Lives and Enduring Soul of the Temptations by Mark Ribowsky, and to Smokey Robinson's autobiography. For Motown-related information in this and other Motown episodes, I've used the following resources: Where Did Our Love Go? The Rise and Fall of the Motown Sound by Nelson George is an excellent popular history of the various companies that became Motown. To Be Loved by Berry Gordy is Gordy's own, understandably one-sided, but relatively well-written, autobiography. Women of Motown: An Oral History by Susan Whitall is a collection of interviews with women involved in Motown. I Hear a Symphony: Motown and Crossover R&B by J. Andrew Flory is an academic look at Motown. The Motown Encyclopaedia by Graham Betts is an exhaustive look at the people and records involved in Motown's thirty-year history. How Sweet It Is by Lamont Dozier and Scott B. Bomar is Dozier's autobiography, while Come and Get These Memories by Brian and Eddie Holland and Dave Thompson is the Holland brothers'. And Motown Junkies is an infrequently-updated blog looking at (so far) the first 694 tracks released on Motown singles. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript For the last few weeks we've been looking at Motown in 1965, but now we're moving away from Holland, Dozier, and Holland, we're also going to move back in time a little, and look at a record that was released in December 1964. I normally try to keep this series in more or less chronological order, but to tell this story I had to first show the new status quo of the American music industry after the British Invasion, and some of what had to be covered there was covered in songs from early 1965. And the reason I wanted to show that status quo before doing this series of Motown records is that we're now entering into a new era of musical segregation, and really into the second phase of this story. In 1963, Billboard had actually stopped having an R&B chart -- Cashbox magazine still had one, but Billboard had got rid of theirs. The reasoning was simple -- by that point there was so much overlap between the R&B charts and the pop charts that it didn't seem necessary to have both. The stuff that was charting on the R&B charts was also charting pop -- people like Ray Charles or Chubby Checker or the Ronettes or Sam Cooke. The term "rock and roll" had originally been essentially a marketing campaign to get white people to listen to music made by Black people, and it had worked. There didn't seem to be a need for a separate category for music listened to by Black people, because that was now the music listened to by *everybody*. Or it had been, until the Beatles turned up. At that point, the American charts were flooded by groups with guitars, mostly British, mostly male, and mostly white. The story of rock and roll from 1954 through 1964 had been one of integration, of music made by Black people becoming the new mainstream of music in the USA. The story for the next decade or more would be one of segregation, of white people retaking the pop charts, and rebranding "rock and roll" so thoroughly that by the early 1970s nobody would think of the Supremes or the Shirelles or Sam Cooke as having been rock and roll performers at all. And so today we're going to look at the record that was number one the week that Billboard reinstated its R&B chart, and which remains one of the most beloved classics of the time period. We're going to look at the careers of two different groups at Motown, both of whom managed to continue having hits, and even become bigger, after the British Invasion, and at the songwriter and producer who was responsible for those hits -- and who was also an inspiration for the Beatles, who inadvertently caused that invasion. We're going to look at Smokey Robinson, and at "My Girl" by the Temptations: [Excerpt: The Temptations, "My Girl"] The story of the Temptations both starts and ends with Otis Williams. As I write this, Williams is the only living member of the classic Temptations lineup, and is the leader of the current group. And Williams also started the group that, after many lineup changes and mergers, became the Temptations, and was always the group's leader, even though he has never been its principal lead singer. The group that eventually became the Temptations started out when Williams formed a group with a friend, Al Bryant, in the late 1950s. They were inspired by a doo-wop group called the Turbans, who had had a hit in 1956 with a song called "When You Dance": [Excerpt: The Turbans, "When You Dance"] The Turbans, appropriately enough, used to wear turbans on their heads when they performed, and Williams and Bryant's new group wanted to use the same gimmick, so they decided to come up with a Middle-Eastern sounding group name that would justify them wearing Arabic style costumes. Unfortunately, they didn't have the greatest grasp of geography in the world, and so this turban-wearing group named themselves the Siberians. The Siberians recorded one single under that name -- a single that has been variously reported as being called "The Pecos Kid" and "Have Gun Will Travel", but which sold so poorly that now no copies are known to exist anywhere -- before being taken on by a manager called Milton Jenkins, who was as much a pimp as he was a manager, but who definitely had an eye for talent. Jenkins was the manager of two other groups -- the Primes, a trio from Alabama who he'd met in Cleveland when they'd travelled there to see if they could get discovered, and who had moved with him to Detroit, and a group he put together, called the Primettes, who later became the Supremes. The Primes consisted of three singers -- Eddie Kendricks, Paul Williams (no relation to Otis, or to the soft-pop singer and actor of the same name), and Kell Osborne, who sang lead. The Primes became known around Detroit as some of the best performers in the city -- no mean feat considering that Jackie Wilson, Aretha Franklin, the Miracles and the Four Tops, just for a start, were performing regularly on the same circuit. Jenkins had big plans for his groups, and he sent them all to dance school to learn to perform choreographed routines. But then Jenkins became ill and disappeared from the scene, and the Primes split up. Kendricks and Paul Williams went back to Alabama, while Osborne moved on to California, where he made several unsuccessful records, including "The Bells of St. Mary", produced by Lester Sill and Lee Hazelwood and arranged by Phil Spector: [Excerpt: Kell Osborne, "The Bells of St. Mary"] But while the Primes had split up, the Siberians hadn't. Instead, they decided to get new management, which came in the person of a woman named Johnnie Mae Matthews. Matthews was the lead singer of a group called the Five Dapps, who'd had a local hit with a track called "Do Whap A Do", one of the few Dapps songs she didn't sing lead on: [Excerpt: The Five Dapps, "Do Whap A Do"] After that had become successful, Matthews had started up her own label, Northern -- which was apparently named after a brand of toilet paper -- to put out records of her group, often backed by the same musicians who would later become the core of the Funk Brothers. Her group, renamed Johnnie Mae Matthews and the Dapps, put out two more singles on her label, with her singing lead: [Excerpt: Johnnie Mae Matthews and the Dapps, "Mr. Fine"] Matthews had become something of an entrepreneur, managing other local acts like Mary Wells and Popcorn Wylie, and she wanted to record the Siberians, but two of the group had dropped out after Jenkins had disappeared, and so they needed some new members. In particular they needed a bass singer -- and Otis Williams knew of a good one. Melvin Franklin had been singing with various groups around Detroit, but Williams was thinking in particular of Franklin's bass vocal on "Needed" by the Voice Masters. We've mentioned the Voice Masters before, but they were a group with a rotating membership that included David Ruffin and Lamont Dozier. Franklin hadn't been a member of the group, but he had been roped in to sing bass on "Needed", which was written and produced by Gwen Gordy and Roquel Davis, and was a clear attempt at sounding like Jackie Wilson: [Excerpt: The Voice Masters, "Needed"] Williams asked Franklin to join the group, and Franklin agreed, but felt bad about leaving his current group. However, the Siberians also needed a new lead singer, and so Franklin brought in Richard Street from his group. Matthews renamed the group the Distants and took them into the studio. They actually got there early, and got to see another group, the Falcons, record what would become a million-selling hit: [Excerpt: The Falcons, "You're So Fine"] The Falcons, whose lead vocalist Joe Stubbs was Levi Stubbs' brother, were an important group in their own right, and we'll be picking up on them next week, when we look at a single by Joe Stubbs' replacement in the group. The Distants' single wouldn't be quite as successful as the Falcons', but it featured several people who would go on to become important in Motown. As well as several of the Funk Brothers in the backing band, the record also featured additional vocals by the Andantes, and on tambourine a local pool-hall hustler the group knew named Norman Whitfield. The song itself was written by Williams, and was essentially a rewrite of "Shout!" by the Isley Brothers: [Excerpt: The Distants, "Come On"] The Distants recorded a second single for Northern, but then Williams made the mistake of asking Matthews if they might possibly receive any royalties for their records. Matthews said that the records had been made with her money, that she owned the Distants' name, and she was just going to get five new singers. Matthews did actually get several new singers to put out a single under the Distants name, with Richard Street still singing lead -- Street left the group when they split from Matthews, as did another member, leaving the group as a core of Otis Williams, Melvin Franklin, and Al Bryant. But before the split with Matthews, Berry Gordy had seen the group and suggested they come in to Motown for an audition. Otis, Melvin, and Al, now renamed the Elgins, wanted to do just that. But they needed a new lead singer. And happily, they had one. Eddie Kendricks phoned up Otis Williams and said that he and Paul Williams were back in town, and did Otis know of any gigs that were going? Otis did indeed know of such a gig, and Paul and Eddie joined the Elgins, Paul as lead singer and Eddie as falsetto singer. This new lineup of the group were auditioned by Mickey Stevenson, Motown's head of A&R, and he liked them enough that he signed them up. But he insisted that the name had to change -- there was another group already called the Elgins (though that group never had a hit, and Motown would soon sign up yet another group and change their name to the Elgins, leading to much confusion). The group decided on a new name -- The Temptations. Their first record was co-produced by Stevenson and Andre Williams. Williams, who was no relation to either Otis or Paul (and as a sidenote I do wish there weren't so many people with the surname Williams in this story, as it means I can't write it in my usual manner of referring to people by their surname) was a minor R&B star who co-wrote "Shake a Tail Feather", and who had had a solo hit with his record "Bacon Fat": [Excerpt: Andre Williams, "Bacon Fat"] Andre Williams, who at this point in time was signed to Motown though not having much success, was brought in because the perception at Motown was that the Temptations would be one of their harder-edged R&B groups, rather than going for the softer pop market, and he would be able to steer the recording in that direction. The song they chose to record was one that Otis Williams had written, though Mickey Stevenson gets a co-writing credit and may have helped polish it: [Excerpt: The Temptations, "Oh Mother of Mine"] The new group lineup became very close, and started thinking of each other like family and giving each other nicknames -- though they also definitely split into two camps. Otis Williams and Melvin Franklin were always a pair, and Eddie Kendricks and Paul Williams had come up together and thought of themselves as a team. Al Bryant, even though he had been with Otis from the beginning, was a bit of an outlier in this respect. He wasn't really part of either camp, and he was the only one who didn't get a nickname from the other band members. He was also the only one who kept his day job -- while the other four were all determined that they were going to make it as professional singers, he was hesitant and kept working at the dairy. As a result, whenever there were fights in the group -- and the fights would sometimes turn physical -- the fighting would tend to be between Eddie Kendricks and Melvin Franklin. Otis was the undisputed leader, and nobody wanted to challenge him, but from the beginning Kendricks and Paul Williams thought of Otis as a bit too much of a company man. They also thought of Melvin as Otis' sidekick and rubber stamp, so rather than challenge Otis they'd have a go at Melvin. But, for the most part, they were extremely close at this point. The Temptations' first single didn't have any great success, but Berry Gordy had faith in the group, and produced their next single himself, a song that he cowrote with Otis, Melvin, and Al, and which Brian Holland also chipped in some ideas for. That was also unsuccessful, but the next single, written by Gordy alone, was slightly more successful. For "(You're My) Dream Come True", Gordy decided to give the lead to Kendricks, the falsetto singer, and the track also featured a prominent instrumental line by Gordy's wife Raynoma -- what sounds like strings on the record is actually a primitive synthesiser called an ondioline: [Excerpt: The Temptations, "(You're My) Dream Come True"] That made number twenty-two on the R&B chart, and was the first sign of any commercial potential for the group -- and so Motown went in a totally different direction and put out a cover version, of a record by a group called the Diablos, whose lead singer was Barrett Strong's cousin Nolan. The Temptations' version of "Mind Over Matter" wasn't released as by the Temptations, but as by the Pirates: [Excerpt: The Pirates, "Mind Over Matter"] That was a flop, and at the same time as they released it, they also released another Gordy song under their own name, a song called "Paradise" which seems to have been an attempt at making a Four Seasons soundalike, which made number 122 on the pop charts and didn't even do that well on the R&B charts. Annoyingly, the Temptations had missed out on a much bigger hit. Gordy had written "Do You Love Me?" for the group, but had been hit with a burst of inspiration and wanted to do the record *NOW*. He'd tried phoning the various group members, but got no answer -- they were all in the audience at a gospel music show at the time, and had no idea he was trying to get in touch with them. So he'd pulled in another group, The Contours, and their version of the song went to number three on the pop charts: [Excerpt: The Contours, "Do You Love Me?"] According to the biography of the Temptations I'm using as a major source for this episode, that was even released on the same day as both "Paradise" and "Mind Over Matter", though other sources I've consulted have it coming out a few months earlier. Despite "Paradise"'s lack of commercial success, though, it did introduce an element that would become crucial for the group's future -- the B-side was the first song for the group written by Smokey Robinson. We've mentioned Robinson briefly in previous episodes on Motown, but he's worth looking at in a lot more detail, because he is in some ways the most important figure in Motown's history, though also someone who has revealed much less of himself than many other Motown artists. Both of these facts stem from the same thing, which is that Robinson is the ultimate Motown company man. He was a vice president of the company, and he was Berry Gordy's best friend from before the company even started. While almost every other artist, writer, or producer signed to Motown has stories to tell of perceived injustices in the way that Motown treated them, Robinson has always positioned himself on the side of the company executives rather than as one of the other artists. He was the only person outside the Gordy family who had a place at the very centre of the organisation -- and he was also one of a very small number of people during Motown's golden age who would write, produce, *and* perform. Now, there were other people who worked both as artists and on the backroom side of things -- we've seen that Marvin Gaye and Stevie Wonder would sometimes write songs for other artists, and that Eddie Holland and Lamont Dozier had started out as performers before moving into songwriting. But these were mostly little dalliances -- in general, in Motown in the sixties, you were either a performer or you were a writer-producer. But Smokey Robinson was both -- and he was *good* at both, someone who was responsible for creating many of the signature hits of Motown. At this point in his career, Robinson had, as we've heard previously, been responsible for Motown's second big hit, after "Money", when he'd written "Shop Around" for his own group The Miracles: [Excerpt: The Miracles, "Shop Around"] The Miracles had continued to have hits, though none as big as "Shop Around", with records like "What's So Good About Goodbye?": [Excerpt: The Miracles, "What's So Good About Goodbye?"] But Robinson had also been writing regularly for other artists. He'd written some stuff that the Supremes had recorded, though like all the Supremes material at this point it had been unsuccessful, and he'd also started a collaboration with the label's biggest star at this point, Mary Wells, for whom he'd written top ten hits like "The One Who Really Loves You": [Excerpt: Mary Wells, "The One Who Really Loves You"] and "You Beat Me To The Punch", co-written with fellow Miracle Ronnie White, which as well as going top ten pop made number one on the R&B charts: [Excerpt: Mary Wells, "You Beat Me to The Punch"] Between 1962 and 1964, Robinson would consistently write huge hits for Wells, as well as continuing to have hits with the Miracles, and his writing was growing in leaps and bounds. He was regarded by almost everyone at Motown as the best writer the company had, both for his unique melodic sensibility and for the literacy of his lyrics. When he'd first met Berry Gordy, he'd been a writer with a lot of potential, but he hadn't understood how to structure a lyric -- he'd thrown in a lot of unrelated ideas. Gordy had taken him under his wing and shown him how to create a song with a beginning, a middle, and an end, and Robinson had immediately understood what he needed to do. His lyrics, with their clever conceits and internal rhymes, became the ones that everyone else studied -- when Eddie Holland decided to become a songwriter rather than a singer, he'd spent months just studying Robinson's lyrics to see how they worked. Robinson was even admired by the Beatles, especially John Lennon -- one can hear his melismatic phrases all over Lennon's songwriting in this period, most notably in songs like "Ask Me Why", and the Beatles covered one of Robinson's songs on their second album, With the Beatles: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "You Really Got a Hold On Me"] After writing the B-side to "Paradise", Robinson was given control of the Temptations' next single. His "I Want a Love I Can See" didn't do any better than "Paradise", and is in some ways more interesting for the B-side, "The Further You Look, The Less You See": [Excerpt: The Temptations, "The Further You Look, The Less You See"] That track's interesting because it's a collaboration between Robinson and Norman Whitfield, that pool-hall hustler who'd played tambourine on the Distants' first single. Whitfield had produced the records by the later Distants, led by Richard Street, and had then gone to work for a small label owned by Berry Gordy's ex-mother-in-law. Gordy had bought out that label, and with it Whitfield's contract, and at this point Whitfield was very much an apprentice to Robinson. Both men were huge admirers of the Temptations, and for the next few years both would want to be the group's main producer and songwriter, competing for the right to record their next single -- though for a good chunk of time this would not really be a competition, as Whitfield was minor league compared to Robinson. "I Want a Love I Can See" was a flop, and the Temptations' next single was another Berry Gordy song. When that flopped too, Gordy seriously started considering dropping the group altogether. While this was happening, though, Robinson was busily writing more great songs for his own group and for Mary Wells, songs like "What Love Has Joined Together", co-written with his bandmate Bobby Rogers: [Excerpt: Mary Wells, "What Love Has Joined Together"] And the Temptations were going through their own changes. Al was becoming more and more of an outsider in the group, while also thinking of himself as the real star. He thought this even though he was the weak link -- Paul and Eddie were the lead singers, Otis was the band's leader, Melvin had a hugely distinctive bass voice, and Al was... just "the other one". Things came to a head at a gig in October 1963, when a friend of the group showed up. David Ruffin was so friendly with Melvin Franklin that Franklin called him his cousin, and he was also a neighbour of Otis'. He had been a performer from an early age -- he'd been in a gospel group with his older brother Jimmy and their abusive father. Once he'd escaped his father, he'd gone on to perform in a duo with his brother, and then in a series of gospel groups, including stints in the Dixie Nightingales and the Soul Stirrers. Ruffin had been taken on by a manager called Eddie Bush, who adopted him -- whether legally or just in their minds is an open question -- and had released his first single as Little David Bush when he was seventeen, in 1958: [Excerpt: Little David Bush, "You and I"] Ruffin and Bush had eventually parted ways, and Ruffin had taken up with the Gordy family, helping Berry Gordy Sr out in his construction business -- he'd actually helped build the studio that Berry Jr owned and where most of the Motown hits were recorded -- and singing on records produced by Gwen Gordy. He'd been in the Voice Masters, who we heard earlier this episode, and had also recorded solo singles with the Voice Masters backing, like "I'm In Love": [Excerpt: David Ruffin, "I'm In Love"] When Gwen Gordy's labels had been absorbed into Motown, so had Ruffin, who had also got his brother Jimmy signed to the label. They'd planned to record as the Ruffin Brothers, but then Jimmy had been drafted, and Ruffin was at a loose end -- he technically had a Motown contract, but wasn't recording anything. But then in October 1963 he turned up to a Temptations gig. For the encore, the group always did the Isley Brothers song "Shout!", and Ruffin got up on stage with them and started joining in, dancing more frantically than the rest of the group. Al started trying to match him, feeling threatened by this interloper. They got wilder and wilder, and the audience loved it so much that the group were called back for another encore, and Ruffin joined them again. They did the same song again, and got an even better reaction. They came back for a third time, and did it again, and got an even better reaction. Ruffin then disappeared into the crowd. The group decided that enough was enough -- except for Al, who was convinced that they should do a fourth encore without Ruffin. The rest of the group were tired, and didn't want to do the same song for a fourth time, and thought they should leave the audience wanting more. Al, who had been drinking, got aggressive, and smashed a bottle in Paul Williams' face, hospitalising him. Indeed, it was only pure luck that kept Williams from losing his vision, and he was left with a scar but no worse damage. Otis, Eddie, and Melvin decided that they needed to sack Al, but Paul, who was the peacemaker in the group, insisted that they shouldn't, and also refused to press charges. Out of respect for Paul, the rest of the group agreed to give Al one more chance. But Otis in particular was getting sick of Al and thought that the group should just try to get David Ruffin in. Everyone agreed that if Al did anything to give Otis the slightest reason, he could be sacked. Two months later, he did just that. The group were on stage at the annual Motown Christmas show, which was viewed by all the acts as a competition, and Paul had worked out a particularly effective dance routine for the group, to try to get the crowd going. But while they were performing, Al came over to Otis and suggested that the two of them, as the "pretty boys" should let the other three do all the hard work while they just stood back and looked good for the women. Otis ignored him and carried on with the routine they'd rehearsed, and Al was out as soon as they came offstage. And David Ruffin was in. But for now, Ruffin was just the missing element in the harmony stack, not a lead vocalist in his own right. For the next single, both Smokey Robinson and Berry Gordy came up with songs for the new lineup of the group, and they argued about which song should be the A-side -- one of the rare occasions where the two disagreed on anything. They took the two tracks to Motown's quality control meeting, and after a vote it was agreed that the single should be the song that Robinson had written for Eddie Kendricks to sing, "The Way You Do the Things You Do": [Excerpt: The Temptations, "The Way You Do the Things You Do"] At first, the group hadn't liked that song, and it wasn't until they rehearsed it a few times that they realised that Robinson was being cleverer than they'd credited him for with the lyrics. Otis Williams would later talk about how lines like "You've got a smile so bright, you know you could have been a candle" had seemed ridiculous to them at first, but then they'd realised that the lyric was parodying the kinds of things that men say when they don't know what to say to a woman, and that it's only towards the end of the song that the singer stops trying bad lines and just starts speaking honestly -- "you really swept me off my feet, you make my life complete, you make my life so bright, you make me feel all right": [Excerpt: The Temptations, "The Way You Do the Things You Do"] That track was also the first one that the group cut to a prerecorded backing track, Motown having upgraded to a four-track system. That allowed the group to be more subtle with their backing vocal arrangements, and "The Way You Do the Things You Do" is the point at which the Temptations become fully themselves. But the group didn't realise that at first. They spent the few weeks after the record's release away from Detroit, playing at the Michigan state fair, and weren't aware that it was starting to do things. It was only when Otis and David popped in to the Motown offices and people started talking to them about them having a hit that they realised the record had made the pop charts. Both men had been trying for years to get a big hit, with no success, and they started crying in each other's arms, Ruffin saying ‘Otis, this is the first time in my life I feel like I've been accepted, that I've done something.'” The record eventually made number eleven on the pop charts, and number one on the Cashbox R&B chart -- Billboard, as we discussed earlier, having discontinued theirs, but Otis Williams still thinks that given the amount of airplay that the record was getting it should have charted higher, and that something fishy was going on with the chart compilation at that point. Perhaps, but given that the record reached the peak of its chart success in April 1964, the high point of Beatlemania, when the Beatles had five records in the top ten, it's also just possible that it was a victim of bad timing. But either way, number eleven on the pop charts was a significant hit. Shortly after that, though, Smokey Robinson came up with an even bigger hit. "My Guy", written for Mary Wells, had actually only been intended as a bit of album filler. Motown were putting together a Mary Wells album, and as with most albums at the time it was just a collection of tracks that had already been released as singles and stuff that hadn't been considered good enough to release. But they were a track short, and Smokey was asked to knock together something quickly. He recorded a backing track at the end of a day cutting tracks for a *Temptations* album -- The Temptations Sing Smokey -- and everyone was tired by the time they got round to recording it, but you'd never guess that from the track itself, which is as lively as anything Motown put out. "My Guy" was a collaborative creation, with an arrangement that was worked on by the band -- it was apparently the Funk Brothers who came up with the intro, which was lifted from a 1956 record, "Canadian Sunset" by Hugo Winterhalter. Compare that: [Excerpt: Hugo Winterhalter, "Canadian Sunset"] to “My Guy”: [Excerpt: Mary Wells, "My Guy"] The record became one of the biggest hits of the sixties -- Motown's third pop number one, and a million-seller. It made Mary Wells into a superstar, and the Beatles invited her to be their support act on their UK summer tour. So of course Wells immediately decided to get a better deal at another record label, and never had another hit again. Meanwhile, Smokey kept plugging away, both at his own records -- though the Miracles went through a bit of a dry patch at this point, as far as the charts go -- and at the Temptations. The group's follow-up, "I'll Be in Trouble", was very much a remake of "The Way You Do the Things You Do", and while it was good it didn't quite make the top thirty. This meant that Norman Whitfield got another go. He teamed up with Eddie Holland to write "Girl (Why You Wanna Make Me Blue)", which did only slightly better than "I'll Be in Trouble": [Excerpt: The Temptations, "Girl (Why You Wanna Make Me Blue)"] The competition between Robinson and Whitfield for who got to make the Temptations' records was heating up -- both men were capable of giving the group hits, but neither had given them the truly massive record that they were clearly capable of having. So Smokey did the obvious thing. He wrote a sequel to his biggest song ever, and he gave it to the new guy to sing. Up until this point, David Ruffin hadn't taken a lead vocal on a Temptations record -- Paul Williams was the group's official "lead singer", while all the hits had ended up having Eddie's falsetto as the most prominent vocal. But Smokey had seen David singing "Shout" with the group, and knew that he had lead singer potential. With his fellow Miracle Ronald White, Smokey crafted a song that was the perfect vehicle for Ruffin's vocal, an answer song to "My Guy", which replaced that song's bouncy exuberance with a laid-back carefree feeling: [Excerpt: The Temptations, "My Girl"] But it's not just Ruffin's record -- everyone talking about the track talks about Ruffin's vocal, or the steady pulse of James Jamerson's bass playing, and both those things are definitely worthy of praise, as of course are Robinson's production and Robinson and White's song, but this is a *Temptations* record, and the whole group are doing far more here than the casual listener might realise. It's only when you listen to the a capella version released on the group's Emperors of Soul box set that you notice all the subtleties of the backing vocal parts. On the first verse, the group don't come in until half way through the verse, with Melvin Franklin's great doo-wop bass introducing the backing vocalists, who sing just straight chords: [Excerpt: The Temptations, "My Girl (a capella)"] It's not until the chorus that the other group members stretch out a little, taking solo lines and singing actual words rather than just oohs: [Excerpt: The Temptations, "My Girl (a capella)"] They then drop back until the same point in the next verse, but this time rather than singing just the plain chords, they're embellishing a little, playing with the rhythm slightly, and Eddie Kendricks' falsetto is moving far more freely than at the same point in the first verse. [Excerpt: The Temptations, "My Girl (a capella)"] The backing vocals slowly increase in complexity until you get the complex parts on the tag. Note that on the first chorus they sang the words "My Girl" absolutely straight with no stresses, but by the end of the song they're all emphasising every word. They've gone from Jordanaires style precise straight harmony to a strong Black gospel feel in their voices, and you've not even noticed the transition: [Excerpt: The Temptations, "My Girl (a capella)"] The track went to number one on the pop charts, knocking off "This Diamond Ring" by Gary Lewis and the Playboys, before itself being knocked off by "Eight Days a Week" by the Beatles. But it also went to number one on the newly reestablished R&B charts, and stayed there for six weeks: [Excerpt: The Temptations, "My Girl"] Smokey Robinson was now firmly established as the Temptations' producer, and David Ruffin as the group's lead singer. In 1965 Robinson and Pete Moore of the Miracles would write three more top-twenty pop hits for the group, all with Ruffin on lead -- and also manage to get a B-side sung by Paul Williams, "Don't Look Back", to the top twenty on the R&B chart. Not only that, but the Miracles were also on a roll, producing two of the biggest hits of their career. Pete Moore and Marv Tarplin had been messing around with a variant of the melody for "The Banana Boat Song", and came up with an intro for a song: [Excerpt: The Miracles, "The Tracks of My Tears"] Robinson took that as a jumping-off point and turned it into the song that would define their career: [Excerpt: The Miracles, "The Tracks of My Tears"] And later that year they came up with yet another million-seller for the Miracles with "Going to a Go-Go": [Excerpt: The Miracles, "Going to a Go-Go"] Robinson and his collaborators were being rather overshadowed in the public perception at this point by the success of Holland-Dozier-Holland with the Supremes and the Four Tops, but by any standards the records the Temptations and the Miracles were putting out were massive successes, both commercially and artistically. But there were two things that were going to upset this balance. The first was David Ruffin. When he'd joined the group, he'd been the new boy and just eager to get any kind of success at all. Now he was the lead singer, and his ego was starting to get the better of him. The other thing that was going to change things was Norman Whitfield. Whitfield hadn't given up on the Temptations just because of Smokey's string of hits with them. Whitfield knew, of course, that Smokey was the group's producer while he was having hits with them, but he also knew that sooner or later everybody slips up. He kept saying, in every meeting, that he had the perfect next hit for the Temptations, and every time he was told "No, they're Smokey's group". He knew this would be the reaction, but he also knew that if he kept doing this he would make sure that he was the next in line -- that nobody else could jump the queue and get a shot at them if Smokey failed. He badgered Gordy, and wore him down, to the point that Gordy finally agreed that if Smokey's next single for the group didn't make the top twenty on the pop charts like his last four had, Whitfield would get his turn. The next single Smokey produced for the group had Eddie Kendricks on lead, and became the group's first R&B number one since "My Girl": [Excerpt: The Temptations, "Get Ready"] But the R&B and pop charts were diverging, as we saw at the start. While that was their biggest R&B hit in a year, "Get Ready" was a comparative failure on the pop charts, only reaching number twenty-nine -- still a hit, but not the top twenty that Gordy had bet on. So Norman Whitfield got a chance. His record featured David Ruffin on lead, as all the group's previous run of hits from "My Girl" on had, and was co-written with Eddie Holland. Whitfield decided to play up the Temptations' R&B edge, rather than continue in the softer pop style that had brought them success with Robinson, and came up with something that owed as much to the music coming out of Stax and Atlantic at the time as it did to Motown's pop sensibilities: [Excerpt: The Temptations, "Ain't Too Proud to Beg"] Whitfield's instinct to lean harder into the R&B sound paid off. "Ain't Too Proud to Beg" returned the group to the pop top twenty, as well as going to number one on the R&B charts. From this point on, the Temptations were no longer Smokey's group, they were Norman Whitfield's, and he would produce all their hits for the next eight years. And the group were also now definitively David Ruffin's group -- or so it seemed. When we pick up on the story of the Temptations, we'll discover how Ruffin's plans for solo stardom worked out, and what happened to the rest of the Temptations under Whitfield's guidance.

united states women american california history money black uk soul fall british michigan girl alabama detroit cleveland miracles atlantic beatles paradise cd bush robinson rock and roll holland atlanta falcons trouble shake billboard compare northern john lennon playboy jenkins matthews arabic mother in law temptations stevie wonder bells aretha franklin middle eastern motown stevenson marvin gaye osborne four seasons smokey tilt ray charles mixcloud sam cooke rock music supremes mind over matter smokey robinson whitfield paul williams british invasion isley brothers emperors beg gordy ruffin stax beatlemania my girl dapps four tops dozier primes berry gordy contours eight days ronettes shop around chubby checker diablos jackie wilson do you love me kendricks shirelles gary lewis lamont dozier david ruffin too proud dave thompson mary wells eddie kendricks funk brothers otis williams cashbox georgie fame andre williams brian holland turbans holland dozier holland my guy barrett strong nelson george james jamerson to be loved motown sound how sweet it is have gun will travel levi stubbs norman whitfield jordanaires pete moore where did our love go lee hazelwood blue flames soul stirrers banana boat song things you do melvin franklin siberians tail feather mickey stevenson you beat me scott b bomar tilt araiza

Episode 132: “I Can’t Help Myself” by the Four Tops

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 8, 2021

Episode one hundred and thirty-two of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “I Can't Help Myself” by the Four Tops, and is part two of a three-episode look at Motown in 1965. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on "Colours" by Donovan. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ Resources No Mixcloud this week, as too many of the songs were by the Four Tops. Amazingly, there are no books on the Four Tops, so I've had to rely on the information in the general Motown sources I use, plus the liner notes for the Four Tops 50th Anniversary singles collection, a collection of the A and B sides of all their Motown singles. That collection is the best collection of the Four Tops' work available, but is pricey -- for a cheaper option this single-disc set is much better value. For Motown-related information in this and other Motown episodes, I've used the following resources: Where Did Our Love Go? The Rise and Fall of the Motown Sound by Nelson George is an excellent popular history of the various companies that became Motown. To Be Loved by Berry Gordy is Gordy's own, understandably one-sided, but relatively well-written, autobiography. Women of Motown: An Oral History by Susan Whitall is a collection of interviews with women involved in Motown. I Hear a Symphony: Motown and Crossover R&B by J. Andrew Flory is an academic look at Motown. The Motown Encyclopaedia by Graham Betts is an exhaustive look at the people and records involved in Motown's thirty-year history. How Sweet It Is by Lamont Dozier and Scott B. Bomar is Dozier's autobiography, while Come and Get These Memories by Brian and Eddie Holland and Dave Thompson is the Holland brothers'. And Motown Junkies is an infrequently-updated blog looking at (so far) the first 694 tracks released on Motown singles. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript This is the second part of a two-part look at the work of Holland, Dozier, and Holland, and part of a three-part look at Motown Records in the mid-sixties. If you've not listened to the last episode, on the Supremes, you might want to listen to that one before this. There's a clip of an old radio comedy show that always makes me irrationally irritated when I hear it, even though I like the programme it's from: [Excerpt of The Mark Steel Lectures, “Aristotle” episode. Transcript: "Which led him back to the problem, what is it that makes something what it is? Is an apple still an apple when it's decomposing? I went to see the Four Tops once and none of the original members were in the band, they were just session musicians. So have i seen the Four Tops or not? I don't know" ] That's the kind of joke that would work with many vocal groups -- you could make the joke about the Drifters or the Ink Spots, of course, and it would even work for, for example, the Temptations, though they do have one original member still touring with them. Everyone knows that that kind of group has a constantly rotating membership, and that people come and go from groups like that all the time. Except that that wasn't true for the Four Tops at the time Mark Steel made that joke, in the late 1990s. The current version of the Four Tops does only have one original member -- but that's because the other three all died. At the time Steel made the joke, his only opportunity to see the Four Tops would have been seeing all four original members -- the same four people who had been performing under that name since the 1950s. Other groups have had longer careers than that without changing members -- mostly duos, like Simon & Garfunkel or the Everly Brothers -- but I can't think of another one that lasted as long while performing together continuously, without taking a break at any point. So today, we're going to look at the career of a group who performed together for forty-four years without a lineup change, a group who were recording together before Motown even started, but who became indelibly associated with Motown and with Holland-Dozier-Holland. We're going to look at the Four Tops, and at "I Can't Help Myself": [Excerpt: The Four Tops, "I Can't Help Myself"] The Four Tops have turned up in the background in several episodes already, even though we're only now getting to their big hits. By the time they became huge, they had already been performing together for more than a decade, and had had a big influence on the burgeoning Detroit music scene even before Berry Gordy had got involved with the scene. The group had started out after Abdul "Duke" Fakir, a teenager in Detroit, had gone to see Lucky Millinder and his band perform, and had been surprised to see his friend Levi Stubbs turn up, get on stage, and start singing with the band in a guest spot. Fakir had never realised before that his friend sang at all, let alone that he had an astonishing baritone voice. Stubbs was, in fact, a regular on the Detroit amateur singing circuit, and had connections with several other performers on that circuit -- most notably his cousin Jackie Wilson, but also Hank Ballard and Little Willie John. Those few singers would make deals with each other about who would get to win at a particular show, and carved things up between them. Stubbs and Fakir quickly started singing together, and by 1953 they had teamed up with two other kids, Obie Benson and Lawrence Payton. The four of them sang together at a party, and decided that they sounded good enough together that they should become a group. They named themselves the Four Aims, and started playing local shows. They got a one-off record deal with a small label called Grady Records, and released their only single under the name "The Four Aims" in 1956: [Excerpt: The Four Aims, "She Gave Me Love"] After that single, they tried teaming up with Jackie Wilson, who had just quit Billy Ward and the Dominoes, but they found that Wilson and Stubbs' voices clashed -- Wilson's then-wife said their voices were too similar, though they sound very different to me. Wilson would, of course, go on to his own massive success, and that success would be in part thanks to Roquel Davis, who was Lawrence Payton's cousin. As we saw in the episode on "Reet Petite", Davis would co-write most of Wilson's hits with Berry Gordy, and he was also writing songs for the Four Aims -- who he renamed the Four Tops, because he thought the Four Aims sounded too much like the Ames Brothers, a white vocal quartet who were popular at the time. They explained to Davis that they were called the Four Aims because they were *aiming* for the top, and Davis said that in that case they should be the Four Tops, and that was the name under which they would perform for the rest of their career. In the early fifties, before Wilson's success, Davis was the person in the group's circle with the most music industry connections, and he got them a deal with Chess Records. I already talked about this back in the episode on Jackie Wilson, but the group's first record on Chess, with Davis as the credited songwriter: [Excerpt: The Four Tops, "Kiss Me Baby"] Sounds more than a little like a Ray Charles record from a couple of years earlier, which Davis definitely didn't write: [Excerpt: Ray Charles, "Kissa Me Baby"] But that wasn't a success, and it would be another four years before they released their next single -- a one-off single on Columbia Records. It turned out that Chess had mostly signed the Four Tops not for the group, but to get Davis as a songwriter, and songs he'd originally written for the Tops ended up being recorded by other acts on Chess, like the Moonglows and the Flamingoes. The group's single on Columbia would also be a flop, they'd wait another two years before another one-off single on Riverside, and then yet another two years before they were signed by Motown. Their signing to Motown was largely the work of Mickey Stevenson, Motown's head of A&R. Of course, Stevenson was responsible, directly or otherwise, for every signing to the label at this point in time, but he had a special interest in the Four Tops. Stevenson had been in the Air Force in the 1950s, when he'd wandered into one of the Detroit amateur shows at which the Four Aims had been performing. He'd been so impressed with them that he immediately decided to quit the air force and go into music himself. He'd joined the Hamptones, the vocal group who toured with Lionel Hampton's band, and he'd also become a member of a doo-wop group called The Classics, who'd had a minor hit with "If Only the Sky Was a Mirror": [Excerpt: The Classics, "If Only the Sky Was a Mirror"] Stevenson had moved into a backroom position with Motown, but it was arguably the most important position in the company other than Gordy's. He was responsible for putting together the Funk Brothers, for signing many of the label's biggest acts, and for co-writing a number of the label's biggest hits, including "Stubborn Kind of Fellow" and "Dancing in the Street". Stevenson had wanted to sign the group from the start -- given that they were the group who were directly responsible for everything that had happened in his career, they were important to him. And Berry Gordy was also a fan of the group, and had known them since his time working with Jackie Wilson, but it had taken several years for everything to fall into place so that the group were able to sign to Motown. When they did, they naturally became a priority. When they were signed to the label, it was initially with the intention of recording them as a jazz group rather than doing the soul pop that Motown was best known for. Their first recordings for Motown were for their subsidiary Workshop Jazz. They recorded an entire album of old standards for the label, titled "Breaking Through": [Excerpt: The Four Tops, "This Can't be Love"] Unfortunately for the group, that album wouldn't be released for thirty-five years -- Workshop Jazz had been founded because Berry Gordy was still a jazz fanatic, but none of the records on it had been very successful (or, frankly, very good -- the Four Tops album was pretty good, but most of the music put out on the label was third rate at best), and so the label closed down before they released the Four Tops album. So the group were at a loose end, and for a while they were put to work as session vocalists on other people's records, adding backing to records by the Supremes: [Excerpt: The Supremes, "Run Run Run"] And even after they started having hits of their own they would appear on records by other people, like "My Baby Loves Me" by Martha and the Vandellas: [Excerpt: Martha and the Vandellas, "My Baby Loves Me"] You'll notice that both of these records were ones where the Four Tops were added to a female group -- and that would also be the case on their own records, once Holland, Dozier, and Holland took over producing them. The sound on the Four Tops' records is a distinctive one, and is actually made up of seven voices. Levi Stubbs, of course, took the lead on the singles, but the combination of backing vocalists was as important as the lead. Unlike several other vocal groups, the Four Tops were never replaced on their records -- Stubbs was always resistant to the idea that he was more important than the rest of his group. Instead, they were augmented -- Motown's normal session singers, the Andantes, joining in with Fakir, Payton, and Benson. The idea was to give the group a distinctive sound, and in particular to set them apart from the Temptations, whose recordings all featured only male vocals. The group's first hit single, "Baby I Need Your Loving", was a song that Holland, Dozier, and Holland had written but weren't too impressed with. Indeed, they'd cut the backing track two years earlier, but been too uninspired by it to do anything with the completed track. But then, two years after cutting the backing, Dozier was hit with inspiration -- the lines "Baby, I need your loving/Got to have all your loving" fit the backing track perfectly. Eddie Holland was particularly excited to work with the Four Tops. Even though he'd somehow managed never to hear the group, despite both moving in the same musical circles in the same town for several years, he'd been hearing for all that time that Levi Stubbs was as good as his rivals Little Willie John and Jackie Wilson -- and anyone that good must be worth working with. When they took the song into the studio, though, Levi Stubbs didn't want to sing it, insisting that the key was wrong for his voice, and that it should be Payton who sang the song. The producers, though, insisted that Stubbs had the perfect voice for the song, and that they wanted the strained tone that came from Stubbs' baritone going into a higher register than he was comfortable with. Eddie Holland, who always coached the lead vocalists while his brother and Lamont Dozier worked with the musicians, would later say that the problem was that Stubbs was unprepared and embarrassed -- they eventually persuaded Stubbs to take the song home and rehearse it over the weekend, and to come in to have a second go at the track the next Monday. On the Monday, Stubbs came in and sang the song perfectly, and Stubbs' baritone leads became the most distinctive sound to come out of Motown in this period: [Excerpt: The Four Tops, "Baby I Need Your Loving"] According to at least one source, Stubbs was still unhappy with his vocal, and wanted to come in again the next day and record it again. Holland, Dozier, and Holland humoured him, but that wasn't going to happen. "Baby I Need Your Loving" became a hit, making number eleven, and so of course the next record was a soundalike. "Without the One You Love (Life's Not Worthwhile)" even started with the line "Baby, I need your good loving". Unfortunately, this time Holland, Dozier, and Holland copied their previous hit a little *too* closely, and people weren't interested. Dozier has later said that they were simply so busy with the Supremes at the time that they didn't give the single the attention it deserved, and thought that cranking out a soundalike would be good enough. Because of this, they weren't given the group's next single -- the way Motown worked at the time, if you came up with a hit for an act, you automatically got the chance to do the follow-up, but if you didn't have a hit, someone else got a chance. Instead, Mickey Stevenson and Ivy Joe Hunter came up with a ballad called "Ask the Lonely", which became a minor hit -- not as big as "Baby I Need Your Loving", but enough that the group could continue to have a career. It would be the next single that would make the Four Tops into the other great Holland-Dozier-Holland act, the one on which their reputation rests as much as it does on the Supremes: [Excerpt: The Four Tops, "I Can't Help Myself"] "I Can't Help Myself" was inspired by Dozier's grandfather, who would catcall women as they passed him on the street -- "Hey, sugar pie! Hi there honey bunch!" Dozier married those words to a chord progression that's almost identical to the one from "Where Did Our Love Go?". Both songs go C-G-Dm-F-G, with the same number of beats between changes: [demonstrates] There's only one tiny change in the progression -- in the last beat of the last bar, there's a passing chord in "I Can't Help Myself", a move to A minor, that isn't there in "Where Did Our Love Go?" Even the melody lines, the syllabics of the words, and their general meanings are very similar. "Where Did Our Love Go?" starts with "Baby baby", "I Can't Help Myself" starts with "Sugar pie, honey bunch". "Baby don't leave me" is syllabically similar to "You know that I love you". The two songs diverge lyrically and melodically after that, but what's astonishing is how a different vocalist and arrangement can utterly transform two such similar basic songs. Compare the opening of "Where Did Our Love Go?": [Excerpt: The Supremes, "Where Did Our Love Go?"] With the opening of "I Can't Help Myself": [Excerpt: The Four Tops, "I Can't Help Myself"] It's a perfect example of how Holland, Dozier, and Holland would reuse musical ideas, but would put a different spin on them and make the records sound very different. Of course, some of the credit for this should go to the Funk Brothers, the session musicians who played on every Motown hit in this period, but there's some question as to exactly how much credit they deserved. Depending on who you believe, either the musicians all came up with their own instrumental lines, and the arrangement was a group effort by the session musicians with minimal interference from the nominal producers, or it was all written by Brian Holland and Lamont Dozier, and the musicians just did what they were told with no creative input at all. The arguments about who did what tend to get quite vicious, with each side pointing out, accurately, that the other needed them. It's true that Holland, Dozier, and Holland didn't do anything like as well as writers and producers after they left Motown. It's also true that the Funk Brothers didn't write or produce any hits themselves, but were reliant on the Motown staff writers and producers for material. I suspect, and it is only a suspicion, that the truth lies between the two, and that it was a collaborative process where Holland and Dozier would go into the studio with a good idea of what they wanted, but that there was scope for interpretation and the musicians were able to make suggestions, which the producers might take up if they were good ones. If Brian Holland sketched out or hummed a rough bassline to James Jamerson, saying something like "play bum-bum-bum-bum", and then Jamerson embellished and improvised around that rough bassline, it would be easy to see how both men could come out of the session thinking they had written the bassline, and having good reason to think so. It's also easy to see how the balance could differ in different sessions -- how sometimes Holland or Dozier could come in with a fully worked out part, and other times they might come in saying "you know the kind of thing I want", and how that could easily become remembered as "I came up with all the parts and the musicians did nothing" or "Us musicians came up with all the parts and the producers just trusted us". Luckily, there's more than enough credit to go around, and we can say that the Four Tops, Holland, Dozier, and Holland, the Funk Brothers, and the Andantes all played an important part in making these classic singles: [Excerpt: The Four Tops, "I Can't Help Myself"] "I Can't Help Myself" knocked the Supremes' "Back in My Arms Again" off the number one spot, but was itself knocked off the top by "Mr. Tambourine Man" -- but then a week later, "I Can't Help Myself" was at number one again, before being knocked off again by "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction". The success of "I Can't Help Myself" meant that the group's singles on their old labels suddenly had some value. Columbia Records reissued "Ain't That Love", a single the group had originally released four years earlier, in the hope of having some success because of the group's new-found fame. As we saw last time when the Supremes rushed out "Come See About Me" to prevent someone else having the hit with it, there was nothing that Berry Gordy hated more than the idea that someone else could have a hit based on the success of a Motown act. The Four Tops needed a new single *now* to kill the record on Columbia, and it didn't matter that there were no recordings or even songs available to put out. Holland, Dozier, and Holland went into the studio to record a new backing track with the Funk Brothers, essentially just a remake of the backing from "I Can't Help Myself", only very slightly changed. By three o'clock in the afternoon on the day they found out that the Columbia record was being released, they were in the studio, Dozier fine-tuning the melody while Brian Holland rehearsed the musicians and Eddie Holland scribbled lyrics in another corner. By five PM the track had been recorded and mixed. By six PM the master stamper was being driven the ninety miles to the pressing plant so they could start pressing up copies. The next day, DJs started getting copies of the record, and it was in the shops a couple of days later. Of course, the record being made in such a rush meant that it was essentially a remake of their previous hit -- something that was acknowledged in the tongue-in-cheek title: [Excerpt: The Four Tops, "It's the Same Old Song"] "It's the Same Old Song" wasn't as big a hit as "I Can't Help Myself", but it made number five on the charts, a more than respectable follow-up, and quite astonishing given the pressure under which the record was made. The next few singles that Holland, Dozier, and Holland wrote for the group weren't quite as successful -- this was early 1966, and Holland, Dozier, and Holland were in a mini slump -- they'd had a number one with "I Hear a Symphony", as we heard in the last episode, but then they produced two singles for the Supremes that made the top ten, but not number one -- "My World is Empty Without You" and "Love is Like an Itching in My Heart". And as the Four Tops weren't quite as big as the Supremes, so their next two singles, "Something About You" and "Shake Me, Wake Me (When It's Over)", only just scraped into the bottom of the top twenty. Still hits, but not up to Holland, Dozier, and Holland's 1965 standards. And so as was the common practice at Motown, someone else was given a chance to come up with a song for the group. "Loving You is Sweeter Than Ever" was written by Ivy Jo Hunter, a songwriter and producer whose biggest contribution to this point had been co-writing "Dancing in the Street", and Stevie Wonder, a child star who'd had a hit a couple of years earlier but never really followed up on it, and who also played drums on the track: [Excerpt: The Four Tops, "Loving You is Sweeter Than Ever"] Within a few months, Wonder would begin a run of hit singles that would continue for more than a decade, and would become arguably the most important artist on Motown. But that golden period hadn't quite started yet, and "Loving You is Sweeter Than Ever" didn't make the top forty. At this point, it would have been easy for the Four Tops to have been relegated to the same pile as artists like the Contours -- people who'd had a couple of hits on Motown, but had then failed to follow up with a decent career. Motown was becoming ever more willing to drop artists as dead weight, as Gordy was increasingly concentrating on a few huge stars -- Marvin Gaye, Smokey Robinson and especially the Supremes – to the exclusion of everyone else. But then Holland, Dozier, and Holland got back up on top. They came up with two more number ones for the Supremes in quick succession. "You Can't Hurry Love" was recorded around the same time that "Loving You is Sweeter Than Ever" was failing to chart, and quickly became one of the Supremes' biggest ever hits. They followed that with a song inspired by the sound of the breaking news alert on the radio, replicating that sound with the staccato guitars on what was their most inventive production to date: [Excerpt: The Supremes, "You Keep Me Hanging On"] Not only was that a number one record, it was soon followed by a top ten cover version by the heavy rock band Vanilla Fudge: [Excerpt: Vanilla Fudge, "You Keep Me Hanging On"] Holland, Dozier, and Holland were back on top, and they brought the Four Tops back to the top with them. The next single they recorded with the group, "Reach Out, I'll Be There", started with an instrumental introduction that Brian Holland was noodling with on the piano: [Excerpt: The Four Tops, "Reach Out I'll Be There"] Holland was playing that part, over and over, and then suddenly Lamont Dozier was hit with inspiration -- so much so that he literally pushed Holland to one side without saying anything and started playing what would become the verse: [Excerpt: The Four Tops, "Reach Out I'll Be There"] The interesting thing about that track is that it shows how the different genres that were charting at the time would have more influence on each other than it might appear from this distance, where we put them all into neat little boxes named "folk-rock" or "Motown". Because Lamont Dozier was very specifically being influenced by Bob Dylan and "Like a Rolling Stone", when it came to how the song was phrased. Now, this is not something that I would ever in a million years have thought of, but once you know it, the influence is absolutely plain -- the way the melody stresses and elongates the last syllable of each line is pure Dylan. To show this, I am afraid I'm going to have to do something that I hoped I'd never, ever, have to do, which is do a bad Bob Dylan impression. Everyone thinks they can impersonate Dylan, everyone's imitations of Dylan are cringeworthy, and mine is worse than most. This will sound awful, but it *will* show you how Dozier was thinking when he came up with that bit of melody: [demonstrates] Let us never speak of that again. I think we'd better hear how Levi Stubbs sang it again, hadn't we, to take that unpleasant sound away: [Excerpt: The Four Tops, "Reach Out I'll Be There"] That became the group's second and last number one single, and also their only UK number one. Unfortunately, Holland, Dozier, and Holland were so hot at this point that they ended up competing with themselves. Norman Whitfield, one of the other Motown songwriter-producers, had wanted for a while to produce the Temptations, whose records were at this point mostly written and produced by Smokey Robinson. He called on Eddie Holland to help him write the hit that let him take over from Robinson as the Temptations' producer, "Ain't Too Proud to Beg": [Excerpt: The Temptations, "Ain't Too Proud to Beg"] Dozier and Brian Holland were fine with Eddie working with another writer -- they all did that kind of thing on occasion -- until the date of the BMI Awards. The previous two years, the trio had been jointly given BMI's award for most successful songwriter of the year. But that year, Eddie Holland got the award on his own, for having written more hits than anyone else (he'd written eight, Dozier and Brian Holland had written six. According to a contemporary issue of Billboard, John Sebastian was next with five, then Lennon/McCartney and Jagger/Richards with four each.) Holland felt bad that he'd inadvertently prevented his collaborators from winning the award for a third year in a row, and from this point on he'd be much more careful about outside collaborations. Holland, Dozier, and Holland wrote two more classic singles for the Four Tops, "Standing in the Shadows of Love", and "Bernadette". That latter had been inspired by a coincidence that all three of Holland, Dozier, and Holland had at one time or another dated or felt unrequited love for different girls called Bernadette, but it proved extremely difficult to record. When the trio wrote together, Eddie Holland would always sing the songs, and the melodies were constructed around his tenor vocal range. Stubbs was a baritone, and sometimes couldn't hit some of the higher notes in the melodies, and he was having that problem with "Bernadette". Eddie Holland eventually solved the problem by inviting in a few fans who had been hanging around outside hoping for autographs. Stubbs being a performer wasn't going to make himself look bad in front of an audience, and sang it perfectly: [Excerpt: The Four Tops, "Bernadette"] "Bernadette" made the top five, and it was followed by a couple more top twenty hits with lesser Holland/Dozier/Holland songs, but then the writer-producers quit Motown, for reasons we'll look at in a few months when we take our last look at the Supremes. This left the Four Tops stranded -- they were so associated with their producers that nobody else could get hits with them. For a while, Motown turned to an interesting strategy with them. It had been normal Motown practice to fill albums up with cover versions of hits of the day, and so the label put out some of this album filler as singles, and surprisingly had some chart success with cover versions of the Left Banke's baroque pop hit "Walk Away Renee": [Excerpt: The Four Tops, "Walk Away Renee"] and of Tim Hardin's folk ballad "If I Were a Carpenter": [Excerpt: The Four Tops, "If I Were a Carpenter"] And so for a while many of the singles the group released, both in the US and elsewhere, were covers of songs that were very far from the normal Motown style -- the Jimmy Webb ballad "Do What You Gotta Do" made the UK top twenty, their cover of another Jimmy Webb song, "MacArthur Park", made the lower reaches of the US top forty, their version of the old standard "It's All in the Game" made number twenty-four, and they released a version of "River Deep, Mountain High", teaming up with the Supremes, that became more successful in the US than the original, though still only just made the top forty. But they were flailing. Motown had no idea what to do with them other than release cover versions, and any time any of Motown's writing and production teams tried to come up with something new for the group it failed catastrophically. In 1972 they signed to ABC/Dunhill, and there they had a few hits, including a couple that made the top ten, but soon the same pattern emerged -- no-one could reliably get hits with the group, and they spent much of the seventies chasing trends and failing to catch them. They had one more big US hit in 1981, with "When She Was My Girl", which made number eleven, and which went to number one on the R&B charts: [Excerpt: The Four Tops, "When She Was My Girl"] But from that point on they were essentially a nostalgia act, though they carried on releasing records through the eighties. The group's career nearly came to a premature end in 1988. They were in the UK to promote their single "Loco in Acapulco", co-written by Lamont Dozier and Phil Collins, from the soundtrack of Collins' film Buster: [Excerpt: The Four Tops, "Loco in Acapulco"] That was a UK top ten hit, but it nearly led to the group's death -- they were scheduled to fly out of the UK on Pan Am flight 103 to Detroit on the twenty-first of December 1988. But the group were tired after recording an appearance on Top of the Pops the night before, slept in, and missed the flight. The flight fell victim to a terrorist bombing -- the Lockerbie bombing -- and everyone on it died. The group carried on performing together after that, but their last new single was released in 1989, and they only recorded one more album, a Christmas album in 1995. They performed together, still in their original lineup, until 1997 when Lawrence Payton died from cancer. At first the group continued as a trio, retiring the Four Tops name and just performing as The Tops, but eventually they got in a replacement. By the turn of the century, Levi Stubbs had become too ill to perform as well -- he retired in 2000, though he came back for a one-off performance for the group's fiftieth anniversary in 2004, and he died in 2008. Obie Benson continued performing with the group until three months before his death in 2005. A version of the Four Tops continues to perform, led by Abdul Fakir, and also featuring Lawrence Payton's son Roquel, named after Roquel Davis, who performs under the name Lawrence Payton Jr. The Four Tops were one of those groups that never quite lived up to their commercial potential, thanks in large part to Holland, Dozier, and Holland leaving Motown at precisely the wrong moment, and one has to wonder how many more hits they could have had under other circumstances. But the hits they did have included some of the greatest records of the sixties, and they managed to continue working together, without any public animosity, until their deaths. Given the way the careers of more successful groups have tended to end, perhaps it's better this way.

christmas love women history game babies uk fall detroit standing dancing columbia shadows fellow rolling stones sugar robinson air force holland lonely steel depending bob dylan billboard classics djs compare chess temptations stevie wonder symphony pops riverside tops aristotle motown bmi stevenson excerpt loco marvin gaye panam phil collins tilt ray charles colours my heart acapulco rock music garfunkel supremes smokey robinson reach out stubbs dominoes drifters columbia records itching gordy four tops dozier everly brothers get no satisfaction motown records berry gordy contours lockerbie fakir my world loving you jackie wilson jimmy webb lionel hampton vandellas lennon mccartney john sebastian moonglow lamont dozier mountain high too proud dave thompson macarthur park chess records same old song ink spots mark steel funk brothers jamerson hurry love brian holland tim hardin something about you help myself holland dozier holland nelson george james jamerson to be loved motown sound how sweet it is levi stubbs norman whitfield billy ward little willie john that love flamingoes left banke where did our love go shake me bmi awards walk away renee mickey stevenson scott b bomar tilt araiza

1965 - June: Tom Jones “Along Came Jones”

What the Riff?!?

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 7, 2021 27:48

This week we introduce you to the debut album from a 24 year-old lad from Wales. Thomas John Woodward - today Sir Thomas John Woodward - is better known as Tom Jones. He got his start as the front man for a beat group called Tommy Scott and the Senators, but they really didn't go anywhere beyond South Wales. Gordo Mills became his manager, took him to London, and renamed him Tom Jones after the Academy Award winning film of the same name released in 1963.Jones' first hit would be the one for which he is always remembered. "It's Not Unusual" went to number 1 in the UK within a month of its release, and it went to number 10 on the Billboard Hot 100 when released in America. Mills and Les Reed worked quickely with Jones to get an album out to take advantage of the quick success, and the result is this album - Along Came Jones. Jones would have only moderate success with the rest of the songs on the album, but would see more fame when he recorded songs from movies, including "What's New Pussycat," by Burt Bacharach, and the theme song to the James Bond film "Thunderball."Tom Jones is synonymous with Las Vegas, and he spend a good bit of time there almost from the beginning. His first stint was at the Flamingo in 1967. He made a lot of money in club performances in Vegas rather than in extensive recording. After moderate success with his first few albums, Mills directed Jones more in the direction of the crooner we know today.We hope you enjoy this early foray into this iconic singer. I've Got A HeartThis is the opening track on the album, and a very positive song. The boy is singing about having "a heart that really needs somebody, " and "a mind to keep her, to hold her tight, oh yeah, yeah, yeah." Not the most sophisticated lyrics you will encounter, but it is early in the rock era after all..Whatcha Gonna DoThe album was a mix of cover songs and songs written for Jones, and this is one of the covers. Originally written by American blues and rock singer Chuck Willis, it cautions against running around on your girl. The RoseGordon Mills wrote this song for Jones. It is basically the knights errand to win his love by finding the rose of love. "For my true love I yearn, but I'll never, ever return till I find where that red lady grows."It's Not UnusualThis is where it all started for Tom Jones. Gordon Mills and Les Reed wrote this song which was released in February 1965, and it entered the charts the week it was released. It was number 1 on the UK charts a month later, and would define Tom Jones' career. ENTERTAINMENT TRACK:What's New Pussycat? by Burt Bacharach (from the motion picture What's New Pussycat?)Woody Allen's first screenplay would become this comedy film. Peter Sellers and Peter O'Toole starred in this movie. Tom Jones would achieve success from singing this song for the soundtrack as well. STAFF PICKS:I'll Keep Holding On by The MarvelettesRob starts off our staff picks with this female Motown act. They were the first successful Motown act after The Miracles. This song was written by Mickey Stevenson and Ivy Jo Hunter, and peaked at number 34 on the Billboard Hot 100. The original members were Gladys Horton, Katherine Anderson, Georgeanna Tillman, Juanita Cowart Motley, and Wanda Young. Young is on lead for this one.Help Me Rhonda by The Beach BoysBrian brings us a well known surfing standard and rebound song. This song has guitarist Al Jardine on lead vocals, and Glen Campbell was playing lead guitar as a session musician. Darryl Dragon (aka The Captain from Captain & Tennille ) is also playing on this track. Take a Heart by The SorrowsWayne's staff pick is the title track off the debut album from “Freakbeat” band The Sorrows. One of the most aggressive R&B bands of their time, The Sorrows were known for their fast guitar solos and thudding drums. They never achieved much success, perhaps because their style of music was just ahead of its time. The song itself cautions against breaking hearts and turnabout.Feeling Good by Nina SimoneBruce's staff pick is a song from Broadway recorded by Nina Simone in 1965. It was not released as a single at the time, but has seen a resurgence recently in period pieces and commercials. INSTRUMENTAL TRACK:No Matter What Shape (Your Stomach's In) by the T-BonesThis instrumental drew its inspiration from an Alka-Seltzer commercial and was recorded by Dave Pell and members of The Wrecking Crew.

america american uk las vegas heart broadway captain miracles james bond academy awards wales senators mills motown beach boys woody allen nina simone flamingos feeling good sorrows tom jones south wales billboard hot burt bacharach glen campbell wrecking crew thunderball along came alka seltzer marvelettes al jardine new pussycat help me rhonda dave pell not unusual freakbeat les reed captain tennille tommy scott mickey stevenson

Episode 111: “Heat Wave” by Martha and the Vandellas

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 20, 2021

Episode one hundred and eleven of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Heat Wave” by Martha and the Vandellas, and the beginnings of Holland-Dozier-Holland. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on “My Boyfriend’s Back” by the Angels. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt’s irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ —-more—- Resources As usual, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. For Motown-related information in this and other Motown episodes, I’ve used the following resources: Where Did Our Love Go? The Rise and Fall of the Motown Sound by Nelson George is an excellent popular history of the various companies that became Motown. To Be Loved by Berry Gordy is Gordy’s own, understandably one-sided, but relatively well-written, autobiography. Women of Motown: An Oral History by Susan Whitall is a collection of interviews with women involved in Motown, including Martha and the Vandellas. I Hear a Symphony: Motown and Crossover R&B by J. Andrew Flory is an academic look at Motown. The Motown Encyclopaedia by Graham Betts is an exhaustive look at the people and records involved in Motown’s thirty-year history. How Sweet It Is by Lamont Dozier and Scott B. Bomar is Dozier’s autobiography, while Come and Get These Memories by Brian and Eddie Holland and Dave Thompson is the Holland brothers’. And Motown Junkies is an infrequently-updated blog looking at (so far) the first 694 tracks released on Motown singles. Girl Groups by John Clemente contains potted biographies of many groups of the era, including Martha and the Vandellas. And Dancing in the Street: Confessions of a Motown Diva by Martha Reeves and Mark Bego is Reeves’ autobiography. And this three-CD set contains all the Vandellas’ Motown singles, along with a bunch of rarities. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Today we’re going to take a look at the career of one of the great girl groups to come out of Motown, and at the early work of the songwriting team that went on to be arguably the most important people in the definition of the Motown Sound. We’re going to look at “Heatwave” by Martha and the Vandellas, and the beginning of the career of Holland, Dozier, and Holland: [Excerpt: Martha and the Vandellas, “Heatwave”] By the time she started recording for Motown, Martha Reeves had already spent several years in groups around Detroit, with little success. Her singing career had started in a group called The Fascinations, which she had formed with another singer, who is variously named in different sources as Shirley Lawson and Shirley Walker. She’d quickly left that group, but after she left them, the Fascinations went on to make a string of minor hit records with Curtis Mayfield: [Excerpt: The Fascinations, “Girls Are Out To Get You”] But it wasn’t just her professional experience, such as it was, that Reeves credited for her success — she had also been a soloist in her high school choir, and from her accounts her real training came from her High School music teacher, Abraham Silver. In her autobiography she talks about hanging around in the park singing with other people who had been taught by the same teacher — Mary Wilson and Florence Ballard, who would go on to form the Supremes, Bobby Rogers and Claudette Robinson, who were founder members of the Miracles, and Little Joe Harris, who would later become lead singer of the minor Motown act The Undisputed Truth. She’d eventually joined another group, the Del-Phis, with three other singers — Gloria Williams (or Williamson — sources vary as to what her actual surname was — it might be that Williamson was her birth name and Williams a stage name), Annette Beard, and Rosalind Ashford. The group found out early on that they didn’t particularly get on with each other as people — their personalities were all too different — but their voices blended well and they worked well on stage. Williams or Williamson was the leader and lead singer at this point, and the rest of the DelPhis acted as her backing group. They started performing at the amateur nights and talent contests that were such a big part of the way that Black talent got known at that time, and developed a rivalry with two other groups — The Primes, who would later go on to be the Temptations, and The Primettes, who had named themselves after the Primes, but later became the Supremes. Those three groups more or less took it in turns to win the talent contests, and before long the Del-Phis had been signed to Checkmate Records, one of several subsidiaries of Chess, where they released one single, with Gloria on lead: [Excerpt: The Del-Phis, “I’ll Let You Know”] The group also sang backing vocals on various other records at that time, like Mike Hanks’ “When True Love Comes to Be”: [Excerpt: Mike Hanks, “When True Love Comes to Be”] Depending on who you believe, Martha may not be on that record at all — the Del-Phis apparently had some lineup fluctuations, with members coming and going, though the story of who was in the group when seems to be told more on the basis of who wants credit for what at any particular time than on what the truth is. No matter who was in the group, though, they never had more than local success. While the Del-Phis were trying and failing to become big stars as a group, Martha also started performing solo, as Martha LaVelle. Only a couple of days after her first solo performance, Mickey Stevenson saw her perform and gave her his card, telling her to pop down to Hitsville for an audition as he thought she had talent. But when she did turn up, Stevenson was annoyed at her, over a misunderstanding that turned out to be his fault. She had just come straight to the studio, assuming she could audition any time, and Stevenson hadn’t explained to her that they had one day a month where they ran auditions — he’d expected her to call him on the number on the card, not just come down. Stevenson was busy that day, and left the office, telling Martha on his way out the door that he’d be back in a bit, and to answer the phone if it rang, leaving her alone in the office. She started answering the phone, calling herself the “A&R secretary”, taking messages, and sorting out problems. She was asked to come back the next day, and worked there three weeks for no pay before getting herself put on a salary as Stevenson’s secretary. Once her foot was in the door at Motown, she also started helping out on sessions, as almost all the staff there did, adding backing vocals, handclaps, or footstomps for a five-dollar-per-session bonus. One of her jobs as Stevenson’s secretary was to phone and book session musicians and singers, and for one session the Andantes, Motown’s normal female backing vocal group, were unavailable. Martha got the idea to call the rest of the DelPhis — who seem like they might even have been split up at this point, depending on which source you read — and see if they wanted to do the job instead. They had to audition for Berry Gordy, but Gordy was perfectly happy with them and signed them to Motown. Their role was mostly to be backing vocalists, but the plan was that they would also cut a few singles themselves as well. But Gordy didn’t want to sign them as the Del-Phis — he didn’t know what the details of their contract with Checkmate were, and who actually owned the name. So they needed a new name. At first they went with the Dominettes, but that was soon changed, before they ever made a record What happened is a matter of some dispute, because this seems to be the moment that Martha Reeves took over the group — it may be that the fact that she was the one booking them for the sessions and so in charge of whether they got paid or not changed the power dynamics of the band — and so different people give different accounts depending on who they want to seem most important. But the generally accepted story is that Martha suggested a name based on the street she lived on, Van Dyke Street, and Della Reese, Martha’s favourite singer, who had hits like “Don’t You Know?”: [Excerpt: Della Reese, “Don’t You Know?”] The group became Martha and the Vandellas — although Rosalind Ashford, who says that the group name was not Martha’s work, also says that the group weren’t “Martha and the Vandellas” to start with, but just the Vandellas, and this might be the case, as at this point Gloria rather than Martha was still the lead singer. The newly-named Vandellas were quickly put to work, mostly working on records that Mickey Stevenson produced. The first record they sang on was not credited either to the Vandellas *or* to Martha and the Vandellas, being instead credited to Saundra Mallett and the Vandellas – Mallett was a minor Motown singer who they were backing for this one record. The song was one written by Berry Gordy, as an attempt at a “Loco-Motion” clone, and was called “Camel Walk”: [Excerpt: Saundra Mallett and the Vandellas, “Camel Walk”] More famously, there was the record that everyone talks about as being the first one to feature the Vandellas, even though it came out after “Camel Walk”, one we’ve already talked about before, Marvin Gaye’s “Stubborn Kind of Fellow”: [Excerpt: Marvin Gaye, “Stubborn Kind of Fellow”] That became Gaye’s breakout hit, and as well as singing in the studio for other artists and trying to make their own records, the Vandellas were now also Marvin Gaye’s backing vocalists, and at shows like the Motortown Revue shows, as well as performing their own sets, the Vandellas would sing with Gaye as well. While they were not yet themselves stars, they had a foot on the ladder, and through working with Marvin they got to perform with all sorts of other people — Martha was particularly impressed by the Beach Boys, who performed on the same bill as them in Detroit, and she developed a lifelong crush on Mike Love. But while the Vandellas were Motown’s go-to backing vocalists in 1962, they still wanted to make their own records. They did make one record with Gloria singing lead, “You’ll Never Cherish A Love So True (‘Til You Lose It)”: [Excerpt: The Vells, “You’ll Never Cherish A Love So True (‘Til You Lose It)”] But that was released not as by the Vandellas, but by the Vells, because by the time it was released, the Vandellas had more or less by accident become definitively MARTHA and the Vandellas. The session that changed everything came about because Martha was still working as Mickey Stevenson’s secretary. Stevenson was producing a record for Mary Wells, and he had a problem. Stevenson had recently instituted a new system for his recordings at Motown. Up to this point, they’d been making records with everyone in the studio at the same time — all the musicians, the lead singer, the backing vocalists, and so on. But that became increasingly difficult when the label’s stars were on tour all the time, and it also meant that if the singer flubbed a note a good bass take would also be wrecked, or vice versa. It just wasn’t efficient. So, taking advantage of the ability to multitrack, Stevenson had started doing things differently. Now backing tracks would be recorded by the Funk Brothers in the studio whenever a writer-producer had something for them to record, and then the singer would come in later and overdub their vocals when it was convenient to do that. That also had other advantages — if a singer turned out not to be right for the song, they could record another singer doing it instead, and they could reuse backing tracks, so if a song was a hit for, say, the Miracles, the Marvelettes could then use the same backing track for a cover version of it to fill out an album. But there was a problem with this system, and that problem was the Musicians’ Union. The union had a rule that if musicians were cutting a track that was intended to have a vocal, the vocalist *must* be present at the session — like a lot of historical union rules, this seems faintly ridiculous today, but no doubt there were good reasons for it at the time. Motown, like most labels, were perfectly happy to break the union rules on occasion, but there was always the possibility of a surprise union inspection, and one turned up while Mickey Stevenson was cutting “I’ll Have to Let Him Go”. Mary Wells wasn’t there, and knowing that his secretary could sing, Stevenson grabbed her and got her to go into the studio and sing the song while the musicians played. Martha decided to give the song everything she had, and Stevenson was impressed enough that he decided to give the song to her, rather than Wells, and at the same session that the Vandellas recorded the songs with Gloria on lead, they recorded new vocals to the backing track that Stevenson had recorded that day: [Excerpt: Martha and the Vandellas, “I’ll Have to Let Him Go”] That was released under the Martha and the Vandellas name, and around this point Gloria left the group. Some have suggested that this was because she didn’t like Martha becoming the leader, while others have said that it’s just that she had a good job working for the city, and didn’t want to put that at risk by becoming a full-time singer. Either way, a week after the Vandellas record came out, Motown released “You’ll Never Cherish A Love So True (‘Til You Lose It)” under the name The Vells. Neither single had any chart success, but that wouldn’t be true for the next one, which wouldn’t be released for another five months. But when it was finally released, it would be regarded as the beginning of the “Motown Sound”. Before that record, Motown had released many extraordinary records, and we’ve looked at some of them. But after it, it began a domination of the American charts that would last the rest of the decade; a domination caused in large part by the team of Holland, Dozier, and Holland. We’ve heard a little from the Holland brothers and Lamont Dozier, separately, in previous episodes looking at Motown, but this is the point at which they go from being minor players within the Motown organisation to being the single most important team for the label’s future commercial success, so we should take a proper look at them now. Eddie Holland started working with Berry Gordy years before the start of Motown — he was a singer who was known for having a similar sounding voice to that of Jackie Wilson, and Gordy had taken him on first as a soundalike demo singer, recording songs written for Wilson so Wilson could hear how they would sound in his voice, and later trying to mould him into a Wilson clone, starting with Holland’s first single, “You”: [Excerpt: Eddie Holland, “You”] Holland quickly found that he didn’t enjoy performing on stage — he loved singing, but he didn’t like the actual experience of being on stage. However, he continued doing it, in the belief that one should not just quit a job until a better opportunity comes along. Before becoming a professional singer, Holland had sung in street-corner doo-wop groups with his younger brother Brian. Brian, unlike Eddie, didn’t have a particularly great voice, but what he did have was a great musical mind — he could instantly figure out all the harmony parts for the whole group, and had a massive talent for arrangement. Eddie spent much of his early time working with Gordy trying to get Gordy to take his little brother seriously — at the time, Brian Holland was still in his early teens, and Gordy refused to believe he could be as talented as Eddie said. Eventually, though, Gordy listened to Brian and took him under his wing, pairing him with Janie Bradford to add music to Bradford’s lyrics, and also teaching him to engineer. One of Brian Holland’s first engineering jobs was for a song recorded by Eddie, written as a jingle for a wine company but released as a single under the name “Briant Holland” — meaning it has often over the years been assumed to be Brian singing lead: [Excerpt: Briant Holland, “(Where’s the Joy) in Nature Boy?”] When Motown started up, Brian had become a staffer — indeed, he has later claimed that he was the very first person employed by Motown as a permanent staff member. While Eddie was out on the road performing, Brian was writing, producing, and singing backing vocals on many, many records. We’ve already heard how he was the co-writer and producer on “Please Mr. Postman” by the Marvelettes: [Excerpt: The Marvelettes, “Please Mr. Postman”] That had obviously been a massive hit, and Motown’s first number one, but Brian was still definitely just one of the Motown team, and not as important a part of it as Berry Gordy, Smokey Robinson, or Mickey Stevenson. Meanwhile, Eddie finally had a minor hit of his own, with “Jamie”, a song co-written by Barrett Strong and Mickey Stevenson, and originally recorded by Strong — when Strong left the label, they took the backing track intended for him and had Holland record new vocals over it. [Excerpt: Eddie Holland, “Jamie”] That made the top thirty, which must have been galling at the time for Strong, who’d quit in part because he couldn’t get a hit. But the crucial thing that lifted the Holland brothers from being just parts of the Motown machine to being the most important creative forces in the company was when Brian Holland became friendly with Anne Dozier, who worked at Motown packing records, and whose husband Lamont was a singer. Lamont Dozier had been around musical people all his life — at Hutchins Junior High School, he was a couple of years below Marv Johnson, the first Motown star, he knew Freda Payne, and one of his classmates was Otis Williams, later of the Temptations. But it was another junior high classmate who, as he puts it, “lit a fire under me to take some steps to get my own music heard by the world”, when one of his friends asked him if he felt like coming along to church to hear another classmate sing. Dozier had no idea this classmate sang, but he went along, and as it happens, we have some recordings of that classmate singing and playing piano around that time: [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, “There Is a Fountain Filled With Blood”] That’s fourteen-year-old Aretha Franklin, and as you can imagine, being classmates with someone who could perform like that caused Lamont Dozier to radically revise his ideas of what it was possible for him to do. He’d formed a doo-wop group called the Romeos, and they released their first single, with both sides written by Lamont, by the time he was sixteen: [Excerpt: The Romeos, “Gone Gone Get Away”] The Romeos’ third single, “Fine Fine Fine”, was picked up by Atlantic for distribution, and did well enough that Atlantic decided they wanted a follow-up, and wrote to them asking them to come into the studio. But Lamont Dozier, at sixteen, thought that he had some kind of negotiating power, and wrote back saying they weren’t interested in just doing a single, they wanted to do an album. Jerry Wexler wrote back saying “fair enough, you’re released from your contract”, and the Romeos’ brief career was over before it began. He joined the Voice Masters, the first group signed to Anna Records, and sang on records of theirs like “Hope and Pray”, the very first record ever put out by a Gordy family label: [Excerpt: The Voice Masters, “Hope and Pray”] And he’d continued to sing with them, as well as working for Anna Records doing odd jobs like cleaning the floors. His first solo record on Anna, released under the name Lamont Anthony, featured Robert White on guitar, James Jamerson on bass, Harvey Fuqua on piano, and Marvin Gaye on drums, and was based on the comic character “Popeye”: [Excerpt: Lamont Anthony, “Popeye the Sailor Man”] Unfortunately, just as that record was starting to take off, King Features Syndicate, the owners of Popeye, sent a cease and desist order. Dozier went back into the studio and recut the vocal, this time singing about Benny the Skinny Man, instead of Popeye the Sailor Man: [Excerpt: Lamont Anthony, “Benny the Skinny Man”] But without the hook of it being about Popeye, the song flopped. Dozier joined Motown when that became the dominant part of the Gordy family operation, and signed up as a songwriter and producer. Robert Batemen had just stopped working with Brian Holland as a production team, and when Anne Dozier suggested that Holland go and meet her husband who was just starting at Motown, Holland walked in to find Dozier working at the piano, writing a song but stuck for a middle section. Holland told him he had an idea, sat next to him at the piano, and came up with the bridge. The two instantly clicked musically — they discovered that they almost had a musical telepathy, and Holland got Freddie Gorman, his lyricist partner at the time, to finish up the lyrics for the song while he and Dozier came up with more ideas. That song became a Marvelettes album track, “Forever”, which a few years later would be put out as a B-side, and make the top thirty in its own right: [Excerpt: The Marvelettes, “Forever”] Holland and Dozier quickly became a strong musical team — Dozier had a great aptitude for coming up with riffs and hooks, both lyrical and musical, and rhythmic ideas, while Brian Holland could come up with great melodies and interesting chord changes, though both could do both. In the studio Brian would work with the drummers, while Lamont would work with the keyboard players and discuss the bass parts with James Jamerson. Their only shortfall was lyrically. They could both write lyrics — and Lamont would often come up with a good title or hook phrase — but they were slow at doing it. For the lyrics, they mostly worked with Freddie Gorman, and sometimes got Janie Bradford in. These teams came up with some great records, like “Contract on Love”, which sounds very like a Four Seasons pastiche but also points the way to Holland and Dozier’s later sound: [Excerpt: Little Stevie Wonder, “Contract on Love”] Both Little Stevie Wonder and the backing vocalists on that, the Temptations, would do better things later, but that’s still a solid record. Meanwhile, Eddie Holland had had a realisation that would change the course of Motown. “Jamie” had been a hit, but he received no royalties — he’d had a run of flop singles, so he hadn’t yet earned out the production costs on his records. His first royalty statement after his hit showed him still owing Motown money. He asked his brother, who got a royalty statement at the same time, if he was in the same boat, and Brian showed him the statement for several thousand dollars that he’d made from the songs he’d written. Eddie decided that he was in the wrong job. He didn’t like performing anyway, and his brother was making serious money while he was working away earning nothing. He took nine months off from doing anything other than the bare contractual minimum, — where before he would spend every moment at Hitsville, now he only turned up for his own sessions — and spent that time teaching himself songwriting. He studied Smokey Robinson’s writing, and he developed his own ideas about what needed to be in a lyric — he didn’t want any meaningless filler words, he wanted every word to matter. He also wanted to make sure that even if people misheard a line or two, they would be able to get the idea of the song from the other lines, so he came up with a technique he referred to as “repeat-fomation”, where he would give the same piece of information two or three times, paraphrasing it. When the next Marvelettes album, The Marvellous Marvelettes, was being finished up by Mickey Stevenson, Motown got nervous about the album, thinking it didn’t have a strong enough single on it, and so Brian Holland and Dozier were asked to come up with a new Marvelettes single in a hurry. Freddie Gorman had more or less stopped songwriting by this point, as he was spending most of his time working as a postman, and so, in need of another writing partner, they called on Eddie, who had been writing with various people. The three of them wrote and produced “Locking Up My Heart”, the first single to be released with the writing credit “Holland-Dozier-Holland”: [Excerpt: The Marvelettes, “Locking Up My Heart”] That was a comparative flop for the Marvelettes, and the beginning of the downward slump we talked about for them in the episode on “Please Mr. Postman”, but the second Holland-Dozier-Holland single, recorded ten days later, was a very different matter. That one was for Martha and the Vandellas, and became widely regarded as the start of Motown’s true Golden Age — so much so that Brian and Eddie Holland’s autobiography is named after this, rather than after any of the bigger and more obvious hits they would later co-write. The introduction to “Come and Get These Memories” isn’t particularly auspicious — the Vandellas singing the chorus: [Excerpt: Martha and the Vandellas, “Come and Get These Memories”] Hearing all three of the Vandellas, all of whom have such strong, distinctive voices, sing together is if anything a bit much — the Vandellas aren’t a great harmony group in the way that some of the other Motown groups are, and they work best when everyone’s singing an individual line rather than block harmonies. But then we’re instantly into the sound that Holland, Dozier, and Holland — really Brian Holland and Lamont Dozier, who took charge of the musical side of things, with Eddie concentrating on the lyrics — would make their own. There’s a lightly swung rhythm, but with a strong backbeat with handclaps and tambourine emphasising the two and four– the same rhythmic combination that made so many of the very early rock and roll records we looked at in the first year of the podcast, but this time taken at a more sedate pace, a casual stroll rather than a sprint. There’s the simple, chorded piano and guitar parts, both instruments often playing in unison and again just emphasising the rhythm rather than doing anything more complex. And there’s James Jamerson’s wonderful, loping bass part, doing the exact opposite of what the piano and guitar are doing. [Excerpt: Martha and the Vandellas, “Come and Get These Memories”] In almost every record in the rock and roll, soul, and R&B genres up to this point — I say “almost every” because, as I’ve said many times before, there are always exceptions and there is never a first of anything — the bass does one of two things: it either plods along just playing the root notes, or it plays a simple, repeated, ostinato figure throughout, acting as a backbone while the other instruments do more interesting things. James Jamerson is the first bass player outside the jazz and classical fields to prominently, repeatedly, do something very different — he’s got the guitars and piano holding down the rhythm so steadily that he doesn’t need to. He plays melodies, largely improvised, that are jumping around and going somewhere different from where you’d expect. “Come and Get These Memories” was largely written before Eddie’s involvement, and the bulk of the lyric was Lamont Dozier’s. He’s said that in this instance he was inspired by country singers like Loretta Lynn, and the song’s lyrical style, taking physical objects and using them as a metaphor for emotional states, certainly seems very country: [Excerpt: Martha and the Vandellas, “Come and Get These Memories”] “Come and Get These Memories” made number twenty-nine on the pop charts and number six on the R&B charts. Martha and the Vandellas were finally stars. As was the normal practice at Motown, when an artist had a hit, the writing and production team were given the chance to make the follow-up with them, and so the followup was another Holland/Dozier/Holland song, again from an idea by Lamont Dozier, as most of their collaborations with the Vandellas would be. “Heat Wave” is another leap forward, and is quite possibly the most exciting record that Motown had put out to this point. Where “Come and Get These Memories” established the Motown sound, this one establishes the Martha and the Vandellas sound, specifically, and the style that Holland, Dozier, and Holland would apply to many of their more uptempo productions for other artists. This is the subgenre of Motown that, when it was picked up by fans in the North of England, became known as Northern Soul — the branch of Motown music that led directly to Disco, to Hi-NRG, to electropop, to the Stock-Aitken-Waterman hit factory of the eighties, to huge chunks of gay culture, and to almost all music made for dancing in whatever genre after this point. Where “Come and Get These Memories” is mid-tempo, “Heat Wave” races along. Where “Come and Get These Memories” swings, “Heat Wave” stomps. “Come and Get These Memories” has the drums swinging and the percussion accenting the backbeat, here the drums are accenting the backbeat while the tambourine is hitting every beat dead on, four/four. It’s a rhythm which has something in common with some of the Four Seasons’ contemporary hits, but it’s less militaristic than those. While “Pistol” Allen’s drumming starts out absolutely hard on the beat, he swings it more and more as the record goes on, trusting to the listener once that hard rhythm has been established, allowing him to lay back behind the beat just a little. This is where my background as a white English man, who has never played music for dancing — when I tried to be a musician myself, it was jangly guitar pop I was playing — limits me. I have a vocabulary for chords and for melodies, but when it comes to rhythms, at a certain point my vocabulary goes away, and all I can do is say “just… *listen*” It’s music that makes you need to dance, and you can either hear that or you can’t — but of course, you can: [Excerpt: Martha and the Vandellas, “Heat Wave”] And Martha Reeves’ voice is perfect for the song. Most female Motown singers were pop singers first and foremost — some of them, many of them, *great* pop singers, but all with voices fundamentally suited to gentleness. Reeves was a belter. She has far more blues and gospel influence in her voice than many of the other Motown women, and she’s showing it here. “Heat Wave” made the top ten, as did the follow-up, a “Heat Wave” soundalike called “Quicksand”. But the two records after that, both still Holland/Dozier/Holland records, didn’t even make the top forty, and Annette left, being replaced by Betty Kelly. The new lineup of the group were passed over to Mickey Stevenson, for a record that would become the one for which they are best remembered to this day. It wasn’t as important a record in the development of the Motown sound as “Come and Get These Memories” or “Heat Wave”, but “Dancing in the Street” was a masterpiece. Written by Stevenson, Marvin Gaye, and Ivy Joe Hunter, it features Gaye on drums, but the most prominent percussive sound is Hunter, who, depending on which account you read was either thrashing a steel chain against something until his hands bled, or hitting a tire iron. And Martha’s vocal is astonishing — and has an edge to it. Apparently this was the second take, and she sounds a little annoyed because she absolutely nailed the vocal on the first take only to find that there’d been a problem recording it. [Excerpt: Martha Reeves and the Vandellas, “Dancing in the Street”] That went to number two in the charts, and would be the group’s cultural and commercial high point. The song also gained some notoriety two years later when, in the wake of civil rights protests that were interpreted as rioting, the song was interpreted as being a call to riot — it was assumed that instead of being about dancing it was actually about rioting, something the Rolling Stones would pick up on later when they released “Street Fighting Man”, a song that owes more than a little to the Vandellas classic. The record after that, “Wild One”, was so much of a “Dancing in the Streets” soundalike that I’ve seen claims that the backing track is an alternate take of the earlier song. It isn’t, but it sounds like it could be. But the record after that saw them reunited with Holland/Dozier/Holland, who provided them with yet another great track, “Nowhere to Run”: [Excerpt: Martha Reeves and the Vandellas, “Nowhere to Run”] For the next few years the group would release a string of classic hits, like “Jimmy Mack” and “Honey Chile”, but the rise of the Supremes, who we’ll talk about in a month, meant that like the Marvelettes before them the Vandellas became less important to Motown. When Motown moved from Detroit to LA in the early seventies, Martha was one of those who decided not to make the move with the label, and the group split up, though the original lineup occasionally reunited for big events, and made some recordings for Ian Levine’s Motorcity label. Currently, there are two touring Vandellas groups. One, Martha Reeves and the Vandellas, consists of Martha and two of her sisters — including Lois, who was a late-period member of the group before they split, replacing Betty in 1967. Meanwhile “The Original Vandellas” consist of Rosalind and Annette. Gloria died in 2000, but Martha and the Vandellas are one of the very few sixties hitmaking groups where all the members of their classic lineup are still alive and performing. Martha, Rosalind, Betty, Annette, and Lois were all also inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1995, becoming only the second all-female group to be inducted. The Vandellas were one of the greatest of the Motown acts, and one of the greatest of the girl groups, and their biggest hits stand up against anything that any of the other Motown acts were doing at the time. When you hear them now, even almost sixty years later, you’re still hearing the sound they were in at the birth of, the sound of young America.

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Episode 111: "Heat Wave" by Martha and the Vandellas

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 20, 2021 44:51

Episode one hundred and eleven of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at "Heat Wave" by Martha and the Vandellas, and the beginnings of Holland-Dozier-Holland. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on "My Boyfriend's Back" by the Angels. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ ----more---- Resources As usual, I've created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. For Motown-related information in this and other Motown episodes, I've used the following resources: Where Did Our Love Go? The Rise and Fall of the Motown Sound by Nelson George is an excellent popular history of the various companies that became Motown. To Be Loved by Berry Gordy is Gordy's own, understandably one-sided, but relatively well-written, autobiography. Women of Motown: An Oral History by Susan Whitall is a collection of interviews with women involved in Motown, including Martha and the Vandellas. I Hear a Symphony: Motown and Crossover R&B by J. Andrew Flory is an academic look at Motown. The Motown Encyclopaedia by Graham Betts is an exhaustive look at the people and records involved in Motown's thirty-year history. How Sweet It Is by Lamont Dozier and Scott B. Bomar is Dozier's autobiography, while Come and Get These Memories by Brian and Eddie Holland and Dave Thompson is the Holland brothers'. And Motown Junkies is an infrequently-updated blog looking at (so far) the first 694 tracks released on Motown singles. Girl Groups by John Clemente contains potted biographies of many groups of the era, including Martha and the Vandellas. And Dancing in the Street: Confessions of a Motown Diva by Martha Reeves and Mark Bego is Reeves' autobiography. And this three-CD set contains all the Vandellas' Motown singles, along with a bunch of rarities. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Today we're going to take a look at the career of one of the great girl groups to come out of Motown, and at the early work of the songwriting team that went on to be arguably the most important people in the definition of the Motown Sound. We're going to look at "Heatwave" by Martha and the Vandellas, and the beginning of the career of Holland, Dozier, and Holland: [Excerpt: Martha and the Vandellas, "Heatwave"] By the time she started recording for Motown, Martha Reeves had already spent several years in groups around Detroit, with little success. Her singing career had started in a group called The Fascinations, which she had formed with another singer, who is variously named in different sources as Shirley Lawson and Shirley Walker. She'd quickly left that group, but after she left them, the Fascinations went on to make a string of minor hit records with Curtis Mayfield: [Excerpt: The Fascinations, "Girls Are Out To Get You"] But it wasn't just her professional experience, such as it was, that Reeves credited for her success -- she had also been a soloist in her high school choir, and from her accounts her real training came from her High School music teacher, Abraham Silver. In her autobiography she talks about hanging around in the park singing with other people who had been taught by the same teacher -- Mary Wilson and Florence Ballard, who would go on to form the Supremes, Bobby Rogers and Claudette Robinson, who were founder members of the Miracles, and Little Joe Harris, who would later become lead singer of the minor Motown act The Undisputed Truth. She'd eventually joined another group, the Del-Phis, with three other singers -- Gloria Williams (or Williamson -- sources vary as to what her actual surname was -- it might be that Williamson was her birth name and Williams a stage name), Annette Beard, and Rosalind Ashford. The group found out early on that they didn't particularly get on with each other as people -- their personalities were all too different -- but their voices blended well and they worked well on stage. Williams or Williamson was the leader and lead singer at this point, and the rest of the DelPhis acted as her backing group. They started performing at the amateur nights and talent contests that were such a big part of the way that Black talent got known at that time, and developed a rivalry with two other groups -- The Primes, who would later go on to be the Temptations, and The Primettes, who had named themselves after the Primes, but later became the Supremes. Those three groups more or less took it in turns to win the talent contests, and before long the Del-Phis had been signed to Checkmate Records, one of several subsidiaries of Chess, where they released one single, with Gloria on lead: [Excerpt: The Del-Phis, "I'll Let You Know"] The group also sang backing vocals on various other records at that time, like Mike Hanks' "When True Love Comes to Be": [Excerpt: Mike Hanks, "When True Love Comes to Be"] Depending on who you believe, Martha may not be on that record at all -- the Del-Phis apparently had some lineup fluctuations, with members coming and going, though the story of who was in the group when seems to be told more on the basis of who wants credit for what at any particular time than on what the truth is. No matter who was in the group, though, they never had more than local success. While the Del-Phis were trying and failing to become big stars as a group, Martha also started performing solo, as Martha LaVelle. Only a couple of days after her first solo performance, Mickey Stevenson saw her perform and gave her his card, telling her to pop down to Hitsville for an audition as he thought she had talent. But when she did turn up, Stevenson was annoyed at her, over a misunderstanding that turned out to be his fault. She had just come straight to the studio, assuming she could audition any time, and Stevenson hadn't explained to her that they had one day a month where they ran auditions -- he'd expected her to call him on the number on the card, not just come down. Stevenson was busy that day, and left the office, telling Martha on his way out the door that he'd be back in a bit, and to answer the phone if it rang, leaving her alone in the office. She started answering the phone, calling herself the "A&R secretary", taking messages, and sorting out problems. She was asked to come back the next day, and worked there three weeks for no pay before getting herself put on a salary as Stevenson's secretary. Once her foot was in the door at Motown, she also started helping out on sessions, as almost all the staff there did, adding backing vocals, handclaps, or footstomps for a five-dollar-per-session bonus. One of her jobs as Stevenson's secretary was to phone and book session musicians and singers, and for one session the Andantes, Motown's normal female backing vocal group, were unavailable. Martha got the idea to call the rest of the DelPhis -- who seem like they might even have been split up at this point, depending on which source you read -- and see if they wanted to do the job instead. They had to audition for Berry Gordy, but Gordy was perfectly happy with them and signed them to Motown. Their role was mostly to be backing vocalists, but the plan was that they would also cut a few singles themselves as well. But Gordy didn't want to sign them as the Del-Phis -- he didn't know what the details of their contract with Checkmate were, and who actually owned the name. So they needed a new name. At first they went with the Dominettes, but that was soon changed, before they ever made a record What happened is a matter of some dispute, because this seems to be the moment that Martha Reeves took over the group -- it may be that the fact that she was the one booking them for the sessions and so in charge of whether they got paid or not changed the power dynamics of the band -- and so different people give different accounts depending on who they want to seem most important. But the generally accepted story is that Martha suggested a name based on the street she lived on, Van Dyke Street, and Della Reese, Martha's favourite singer, who had hits like "Don't You Know?": [Excerpt: Della Reese, "Don't You Know?"] The group became Martha and the Vandellas -- although Rosalind Ashford, who says that the group name was not Martha's work, also says that the group weren't "Martha and the Vandellas" to start with, but just the Vandellas, and this might be the case, as at this point Gloria rather than Martha was still the lead singer. The newly-named Vandellas were quickly put to work, mostly working on records that Mickey Stevenson produced. The first record they sang on was not credited either to the Vandellas *or* to Martha and the Vandellas, being instead credited to Saundra Mallett and the Vandellas – Mallett was a minor Motown singer who they were backing for this one record. The song was one written by Berry Gordy, as an attempt at a "Loco-Motion" clone, and was called "Camel Walk": [Excerpt: Saundra Mallett and the Vandellas, "Camel Walk"] More famously, there was the record that everyone talks about as being the first one to feature the Vandellas, even though it came out after "Camel Walk", one we've already talked about before, Marvin Gaye's "Stubborn Kind of Fellow": [Excerpt: Marvin Gaye, "Stubborn Kind of Fellow"] That became Gaye's breakout hit, and as well as singing in the studio for other artists and trying to make their own records, the Vandellas were now also Marvin Gaye's backing vocalists, and at shows like the Motortown Revue shows, as well as performing their own sets, the Vandellas would sing with Gaye as well. While they were not yet themselves stars, they had a foot on the ladder, and through working with Marvin they got to perform with all sorts of other people -- Martha was particularly impressed by the Beach Boys, who performed on the same bill as them in Detroit, and she developed a lifelong crush on Mike Love. But while the Vandellas were Motown's go-to backing vocalists in 1962, they still wanted to make their own records. They did make one record with Gloria singing lead, "You’ll Never Cherish A Love So True (‘Til You Lose It)": [Excerpt: The Vells, "You’ll Never Cherish A Love So True (‘Til You Lose It)"] But that was released not as by the Vandellas, but by the Vells, because by the time it was released, the Vandellas had more or less by accident become definitively MARTHA and the Vandellas. The session that changed everything came about because Martha was still working as Mickey Stevenson's secretary. Stevenson was producing a record for Mary Wells, and he had a problem. Stevenson had recently instituted a new system for his recordings at Motown. Up to this point, they'd been making records with everyone in the studio at the same time -- all the musicians, the lead singer, the backing vocalists, and so on. But that became increasingly difficult when the label's stars were on tour all the time, and it also meant that if the singer flubbed a note a good bass take would also be wrecked, or vice versa. It just wasn't efficient. So, taking advantage of the ability to multitrack, Stevenson had started doing things differently. Now backing tracks would be recorded by the Funk Brothers in the studio whenever a writer-producer had something for them to record, and then the singer would come in later and overdub their vocals when it was convenient to do that. That also had other advantages -- if a singer turned out not to be right for the song, they could record another singer doing it instead, and they could reuse backing tracks, so if a song was a hit for, say, the Miracles, the Marvelettes could then use the same backing track for a cover version of it to fill out an album. But there was a problem with this system, and that problem was the Musicians' Union. The union had a rule that if musicians were cutting a track that was intended to have a vocal, the vocalist *must* be present at the session -- like a lot of historical union rules, this seems faintly ridiculous today, but no doubt there were good reasons for it at the time. Motown, like most labels, were perfectly happy to break the union rules on occasion, but there was always the possibility of a surprise union inspection, and one turned up while Mickey Stevenson was cutting "I'll Have to Let Him Go". Mary Wells wasn't there, and knowing that his secretary could sing, Stevenson grabbed her and got her to go into the studio and sing the song while the musicians played. Martha decided to give the song everything she had, and Stevenson was impressed enough that he decided to give the song to her, rather than Wells, and at the same session that the Vandellas recorded the songs with Gloria on lead, they recorded new vocals to the backing track that Stevenson had recorded that day: [Excerpt: Martha and the Vandellas, "I'll Have to Let Him Go"] That was released under the Martha and the Vandellas name, and around this point Gloria left the group. Some have suggested that this was because she didn't like Martha becoming the leader, while others have said that it's just that she had a good job working for the city, and didn't want to put that at risk by becoming a full-time singer. Either way, a week after the Vandellas record came out, Motown released "You’ll Never Cherish A Love So True (‘Til You Lose It)" under the name The Vells. Neither single had any chart success, but that wouldn't be true for the next one, which wouldn't be released for another five months. But when it was finally released, it would be regarded as the beginning of the "Motown Sound". Before that record, Motown had released many extraordinary records, and we've looked at some of them. But after it, it began a domination of the American charts that would last the rest of the decade; a domination caused in large part by the team of Holland, Dozier, and Holland. We've heard a little from the Holland brothers and Lamont Dozier, separately, in previous episodes looking at Motown, but this is the point at which they go from being minor players within the Motown organisation to being the single most important team for the label's future commercial success, so we should take a proper look at them now. Eddie Holland started working with Berry Gordy years before the start of Motown -- he was a singer who was known for having a similar sounding voice to that of Jackie Wilson, and Gordy had taken him on first as a soundalike demo singer, recording songs written for Wilson so Wilson could hear how they would sound in his voice, and later trying to mould him into a Wilson clone, starting with Holland's first single, "You": [Excerpt: Eddie Holland, "You"] Holland quickly found that he didn't enjoy performing on stage -- he loved singing, but he didn't like the actual experience of being on stage. However, he continued doing it, in the belief that one should not just quit a job until a better opportunity comes along. Before becoming a professional singer, Holland had sung in street-corner doo-wop groups with his younger brother Brian. Brian, unlike Eddie, didn't have a particularly great voice, but what he did have was a great musical mind -- he could instantly figure out all the harmony parts for the whole group, and had a massive talent for arrangement. Eddie spent much of his early time working with Gordy trying to get Gordy to take his little brother seriously -- at the time, Brian Holland was still in his early teens, and Gordy refused to believe he could be as talented as Eddie said. Eventually, though, Gordy listened to Brian and took him under his wing, pairing him with Janie Bradford to add music to Bradford's lyrics, and also teaching him to engineer. One of Brian Holland's first engineering jobs was for a song recorded by Eddie, written as a jingle for a wine company but released as a single under the name "Briant Holland" -- meaning it has often over the years been assumed to be Brian singing lead: [Excerpt: Briant Holland, "(Where's the Joy) in Nature Boy?"] When Motown started up, Brian had become a staffer -- indeed, he has later claimed that he was the very first person employed by Motown as a permanent staff member. While Eddie was out on the road performing, Brian was writing, producing, and singing backing vocals on many, many records. We've already heard how he was the co-writer and producer on "Please Mr. Postman" by the Marvelettes: [Excerpt: The Marvelettes, "Please Mr. Postman"] That had obviously been a massive hit, and Motown's first number one, but Brian was still definitely just one of the Motown team, and not as important a part of it as Berry Gordy, Smokey Robinson, or Mickey Stevenson. Meanwhile, Eddie finally had a minor hit of his own, with "Jamie", a song co-written by Barrett Strong and Mickey Stevenson, and originally recorded by Strong -- when Strong left the label, they took the backing track intended for him and had Holland record new vocals over it. [Excerpt: Eddie Holland, "Jamie"] That made the top thirty, which must have been galling at the time for Strong, who'd quit in part because he couldn't get a hit. But the crucial thing that lifted the Holland brothers from being just parts of the Motown machine to being the most important creative forces in the company was when Brian Holland became friendly with Anne Dozier, who worked at Motown packing records, and whose husband Lamont was a singer. Lamont Dozier had been around musical people all his life -- at Hutchins Junior High School, he was a couple of years below Marv Johnson, the first Motown star, he knew Freda Payne, and one of his classmates was Otis Williams, later of the Temptations. But it was another junior high classmate who, as he puts it, "lit a fire under me to take some steps to get my own music heard by the world", when one of his friends asked him if he felt like coming along to church to hear another classmate sing. Dozier had no idea this classmate sang, but he went along, and as it happens, we have some recordings of that classmate singing and playing piano around that time: [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "There Is a Fountain Filled With Blood"] That's fourteen-year-old Aretha Franklin, and as you can imagine, being classmates with someone who could perform like that caused Lamont Dozier to radically revise his ideas of what it was possible for him to do. He'd formed a doo-wop group called the Romeos, and they released their first single, with both sides written by Lamont, by the time he was sixteen: [Excerpt: The Romeos, "Gone Gone Get Away"] The Romeos' third single, "Fine Fine Fine", was picked up by Atlantic for distribution, and did well enough that Atlantic decided they wanted a follow-up, and wrote to them asking them to come into the studio. But Lamont Dozier, at sixteen, thought that he had some kind of negotiating power, and wrote back saying they weren't interested in just doing a single, they wanted to do an album. Jerry Wexler wrote back saying "fair enough, you're released from your contract", and the Romeos' brief career was over before it began. He joined the Voice Masters, the first group signed to Anna Records, and sang on records of theirs like "Hope and Pray", the very first record ever put out by a Gordy family label: [Excerpt: The Voice Masters, "Hope and Pray"] And he'd continued to sing with them, as well as working for Anna Records doing odd jobs like cleaning the floors. His first solo record on Anna, released under the name Lamont Anthony, featured Robert White on guitar, James Jamerson on bass, Harvey Fuqua on piano, and Marvin Gaye on drums, and was based on the comic character "Popeye": [Excerpt: Lamont Anthony, "Popeye the Sailor Man"] Unfortunately, just as that record was starting to take off, King Features Syndicate, the owners of Popeye, sent a cease and desist order. Dozier went back into the studio and recut the vocal, this time singing about Benny the Skinny Man, instead of Popeye the Sailor Man: [Excerpt: Lamont Anthony, "Benny the Skinny Man"] But without the hook of it being about Popeye, the song flopped. Dozier joined Motown when that became the dominant part of the Gordy family operation, and signed up as a songwriter and producer. Robert Batemen had just stopped working with Brian Holland as a production team, and when Anne Dozier suggested that Holland go and meet her husband who was just starting at Motown, Holland walked in to find Dozier working at the piano, writing a song but stuck for a middle section. Holland told him he had an idea, sat next to him at the piano, and came up with the bridge. The two instantly clicked musically -- they discovered that they almost had a musical telepathy, and Holland got Freddie Gorman, his lyricist partner at the time, to finish up the lyrics for the song while he and Dozier came up with more ideas. That song became a Marvelettes album track, "Forever", which a few years later would be put out as a B-side, and make the top thirty in its own right: [Excerpt: The Marvelettes, "Forever"] Holland and Dozier quickly became a strong musical team -- Dozier had a great aptitude for coming up with riffs and hooks, both lyrical and musical, and rhythmic ideas, while Brian Holland could come up with great melodies and interesting chord changes, though both could do both. In the studio Brian would work with the drummers, while Lamont would work with the keyboard players and discuss the bass parts with James Jamerson. Their only shortfall was lyrically. They could both write lyrics -- and Lamont would often come up with a good title or hook phrase -- but they were slow at doing it. For the lyrics, they mostly worked with Freddie Gorman, and sometimes got Janie Bradford in. These teams came up with some great records, like "Contract on Love", which sounds very like a Four Seasons pastiche but also points the way to Holland and Dozier's later sound: [Excerpt: Little Stevie Wonder, "Contract on Love"] Both Little Stevie Wonder and the backing vocalists on that, the Temptations, would do better things later, but that's still a solid record. Meanwhile, Eddie Holland had had a realisation that would change the course of Motown. "Jamie" had been a hit, but he received no royalties -- he'd had a run of flop singles, so he hadn't yet earned out the production costs on his records. His first royalty statement after his hit showed him still owing Motown money. He asked his brother, who got a royalty statement at the same time, if he was in the same boat, and Brian showed him the statement for several thousand dollars that he'd made from the songs he'd written. Eddie decided that he was in the wrong job. He didn't like performing anyway, and his brother was making serious money while he was working away earning nothing. He took nine months off from doing anything other than the bare contractual minimum, -- where before he would spend every moment at Hitsville, now he only turned up for his own sessions -- and spent that time teaching himself songwriting. He studied Smokey Robinson's writing, and he developed his own ideas about what needed to be in a lyric -- he didn't want any meaningless filler words, he wanted every word to matter. He also wanted to make sure that even if people misheard a line or two, they would be able to get the idea of the song from the other lines, so he came up with a technique he referred to as "repeat-fomation", where he would give the same piece of information two or three times, paraphrasing it. When the next Marvelettes album, The Marvellous Marvelettes, was being finished up by Mickey Stevenson, Motown got nervous about the album, thinking it didn't have a strong enough single on it, and so Brian Holland and Dozier were asked to come up with a new Marvelettes single in a hurry. Freddie Gorman had more or less stopped songwriting by this point, as he was spending most of his time working as a postman, and so, in need of another writing partner, they called on Eddie, who had been writing with various people. The three of them wrote and produced "Locking Up My Heart", the first single to be released with the writing credit "Holland-Dozier-Holland": [Excerpt: The Marvelettes, "Locking Up My Heart"] That was a comparative flop for the Marvelettes, and the beginning of the downward slump we talked about for them in the episode on "Please Mr. Postman", but the second Holland-Dozier-Holland single, recorded ten days later, was a very different matter. That one was for Martha and the Vandellas, and became widely regarded as the start of Motown's true Golden Age -- so much so that Brian and Eddie Holland's autobiography is named after this, rather than after any of the bigger and more obvious hits they would later co-write. The introduction to "Come and Get These Memories" isn't particularly auspicious -- the Vandellas singing the chorus: [Excerpt: Martha and the Vandellas, "Come and Get These Memories"] Hearing all three of the Vandellas, all of whom have such strong, distinctive voices, sing together is if anything a bit much -- the Vandellas aren't a great harmony group in the way that some of the other Motown groups are, and they work best when everyone's singing an individual line rather than block harmonies. But then we're instantly into the sound that Holland, Dozier, and Holland -- really Brian Holland and Lamont Dozier, who took charge of the musical side of things, with Eddie concentrating on the lyrics -- would make their own. There's a lightly swung rhythm, but with a strong backbeat with handclaps and tambourine emphasising the two and four-- the same rhythmic combination that made so many of the very early rock and roll records we looked at in the first year of the podcast, but this time taken at a more sedate pace, a casual stroll rather than a sprint. There's the simple, chorded piano and guitar parts, both instruments often playing in unison and again just emphasising the rhythm rather than doing anything more complex. And there's James Jamerson's wonderful, loping bass part, doing the exact opposite of what the piano and guitar are doing. [Excerpt: Martha and the Vandellas, “Come and Get These Memories”] In almost every record in the rock and roll, soul, and R&B genres up to this point -- I say "almost every" because, as I've said many times before, there are always exceptions and there is never a first of anything -- the bass does one of two things: it either plods along just playing the root notes, or it plays a simple, repeated, ostinato figure throughout, acting as a backbone while the other instruments do more interesting things. James Jamerson is the first bass player outside the jazz and classical fields to prominently, repeatedly, do something very different -- he's got the guitars and piano holding down the rhythm so steadily that he doesn't need to. He plays melodies, largely improvised, that are jumping around and going somewhere different from where you'd expect. "Come and Get These Memories" was largely written before Eddie's involvement, and the bulk of the lyric was Lamont Dozier's. He's said that in this instance he was inspired by country singers like Loretta Lynn, and the song's lyrical style, taking physical objects and using them as a metaphor for emotional states, certainly seems very country: [Excerpt: Martha and the Vandellas, "Come and Get These Memories"] "Come and Get These Memories" made number twenty-nine on the pop charts and number six on the R&B charts. Martha and the Vandellas were finally stars. As was the normal practice at Motown, when an artist had a hit, the writing and production team were given the chance to make the follow-up with them, and so the followup was another Holland/Dozier/Holland song, again from an idea by Lamont Dozier, as most of their collaborations with the Vandellas would be. "Heat Wave" is another leap forward, and is quite possibly the most exciting record that Motown had put out to this point. Where "Come and Get These Memories" established the Motown sound, this one establishes the Martha and the Vandellas sound, specifically, and the style that Holland, Dozier, and Holland would apply to many of their more uptempo productions for other artists. This is the subgenre of Motown that, when it was picked up by fans in the North of England, became known as Northern Soul -- the branch of Motown music that led directly to Disco, to Hi-NRG, to electropop, to the Stock-Aitken-Waterman hit factory of the eighties, to huge chunks of gay culture, and to almost all music made for dancing in whatever genre after this point. Where "Come and Get These Memories" is mid-tempo, "Heat Wave" races along. Where "Come and Get These Memories" swings, "Heat Wave" stomps. "Come and Get These Memories" has the drums swinging and the percussion accenting the backbeat, here the drums are accenting the backbeat while the tambourine is hitting every beat dead on, four/four. It's a rhythm which has something in common with some of the Four Seasons' contemporary hits, but it's less militaristic than those. While "Pistol" Allen's drumming starts out absolutely hard on the beat, he swings it more and more as the record goes on, trusting to the listener once that hard rhythm has been established, allowing him to lay back behind the beat just a little. This is where my background as a white English man, who has never played music for dancing -- when I tried to be a musician myself, it was jangly guitar pop I was playing -- limits me. I have a vocabulary for chords and for melodies, but when it comes to rhythms, at a certain point my vocabulary goes away, and all I can do is say "just... *listen*" It's music that makes you need to dance, and you can either hear that or you can't -- but of course, you can: [Excerpt: Martha and the Vandellas, "Heat Wave"] And Martha Reeves' voice is perfect for the song. Most female Motown singers were pop singers first and foremost -- some of them, many of them, *great* pop singers, but all with voices fundamentally suited to gentleness. Reeves was a belter. She has far more blues and gospel influence in her voice than many of the other Motown women, and she's showing it here. "Heat Wave" made the top ten, as did the follow-up, a "Heat Wave" soundalike called "Quicksand". But the two records after that, both still Holland/Dozier/Holland records, didn't even make the top forty, and Annette left, being replaced by Betty Kelly. The new lineup of the group were passed over to Mickey Stevenson, for a record that would become the one for which they are best remembered to this day. It wasn't as important a record in the development of the Motown sound as "Come and Get These Memories" or "Heat Wave", but "Dancing in the Street" was a masterpiece. Written by Stevenson, Marvin Gaye, and Ivy Joe Hunter, it features Gaye on drums, but the most prominent percussive sound is Hunter, who, depending on which account you read was either thrashing a steel chain against something until his hands bled, or hitting a tire iron. And Martha's vocal is astonishing -- and has an edge to it. Apparently this was the second take, and she sounds a little annoyed because she absolutely nailed the vocal on the first take only to find that there'd been a problem recording it. [Excerpt: Martha Reeves and the Vandellas, "Dancing in the Street"] That went to number two in the charts, and would be the group's cultural and commercial high point. The song also gained some notoriety two years later when, in the wake of civil rights protests that were interpreted as rioting, the song was interpreted as being a call to riot -- it was assumed that instead of being about dancing it was actually about rioting, something the Rolling Stones would pick up on later when they released "Street Fighting Man", a song that owes more than a little to the Vandellas classic. The record after that, "Wild One", was so much of a "Dancing in the Streets" soundalike that I've seen claims that the backing track is an alternate take of the earlier song. It isn't, but it sounds like it could be. But the record after that saw them reunited with Holland/Dozier/Holland, who provided them with yet another great track, "Nowhere to Run": [Excerpt: Martha Reeves and the Vandellas, "Nowhere to Run"] For the next few years the group would release a string of classic hits, like "Jimmy Mack" and "Honey Chile", but the rise of the Supremes, who we'll talk about in a month, meant that like the Marvelettes before them the Vandellas became less important to Motown. When Motown moved from Detroit to LA in the early seventies, Martha was one of those who decided not to make the move with the label, and the group split up, though the original lineup occasionally reunited for big events, and made some recordings for Ian Levine's Motorcity label. Currently, there are two touring Vandellas groups. One, Martha Reeves and the Vandellas, consists of Martha and two of her sisters -- including Lois, who was a late-period member of the group before they split, replacing Betty in 1967. Meanwhile "The Original Vandellas" consist of Rosalind and Annette. Gloria died in 2000, but Martha and the Vandellas are one of the very few sixties hitmaking groups where all the members of their classic lineup are still alive and performing. Martha, Rosalind, Betty, Annette, and Lois were all also inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1995, becoming only the second all-female group to be inducted. The Vandellas were one of the greatest of the Motown acts, and one of the greatest of the girl groups, and their biggest hits stand up against anything that any of the other Motown acts were doing at the time. When you hear them now, even almost sixty years later, you're still hearing the sound they were in at the birth of, the sound of young America.

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Episode one hundred and three of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Hitch-Hike” by Marvin Gaye, and the early career of one of Motown’s defining artists. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on “Any Other Way” by Jackie Shane. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt’s irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ —-more—- Erratum I say that Smokey Robinson was the only person allowed to be both a writer/producer and performer at Motown. That was Marvin Gaye’s later statement, but at this point Eddie Holland was also still doing all those things. Resources As usual, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. For Motown-related information in this and other Motown episodes, I’ve used the following resources: Where Did Our Love Go? The Rise and Fall of the Motown Sound by Nelson George is an excellent popular history of the various companies that became Motown. To Be Loved by Berry Gordy is Gordy’s own, understandably one-sided, but relatively well-written, autobiography. Women of Motown: An Oral History by Susan Whitall is a collection of interviews with women involved in Motown. I Hear a Symphony: Motown and Crossover R&B by J. Andrew Flory is an academic look at Motown. The Motown Encyclopaedia by Graham Betts is an exhaustive look at the people and records involved in Motown’s thirty-year history. And Motown Junkies is an infrequently-updated blog looking at (so far) the first 693 tracks released on Motown singles. There is a Complete Motown Singles 1959-62 box available from Hip-O-Select with comprehensive liner notes, but if you just want the music, I recommend instead this much cheaper bare-bones box from Real Gone Music. For information on Gaye specifically, I relied on Divided Soul: The Life of Marvin Gaye by David Ritz. The best collection of Gaye’s music is The Master, a four-disc box covering his recordings from “Stubborn Kind of Fellow” to the very last recordings of his life. Transcript A brief note — this week’s episode contains some minor mentions of parental and domestic abuse, and some discussions of homophobia. I don’t think those mentions will be upsetting for anyone, but if you’re unsure you might want to check the transcript before listening. Today we’re going to look at the start of one of the great careers in soul music, and one of the great artists to come out of the Motown hit factory. We’re going to look at the continued growth of the Motown company, and at the personal relationships that would drive it in the 1960s, but would also eventually lead to its downfall. We’re going to look at “Hitch-Hike”, and the early career of Marvin Gaye: [Excerpt: Marvin Gaye, “Hitch-Hike”] One thing we’ve not talked about much in the podcast so far is the way that the entertainment industry, until relatively recently, acted as a safety valve for society, a place where people who didn’t fit in anywhere could build themselves a life and earn a living without playing along with the normal social conventions. And by instinct, temperament, and upbringing, Marvin Gaye was one of those people. He was always someone who rubbed up against authority. He spent his youth fighting with his abusive father, and eventually left home to join the Air Force just to get away from his father. But he didn’t stay long in the Air Force either — he was discharged due to mental problems, which he later claimed he’d faked, with his honourable discharge stating “Marvin Gay cannot adjust to regimentation and authority”. Back in Washington DC, where he’d grown up, and feeling like a failure, he formed a doo-wop group called the Marquees — in later years, Gaye would state that he’d come up with the name as a reference to the Marquis de Sade, but in fact Gaye hadn’t heard of de Sade at the time. The Marquees were like a million doo-wop groups of the time, and leaned towards the sweeter end of doo-wop, particularly modelling themselves on the Moonglows. The group performed around Washington, and came to the attention of Bo Diddley, who was living in the area and friends with a neighbour of the group. Diddley took them under his wing and wrote and produced both sides of their first single, which had another member, Reese Palmer, singing lead — Palmer also claimed that he wrote both songs, but Diddley is credited and they certainly sound like Diddley’s work to me. The tracks were originally backed by Diddley’s band, but Okeh, the record label for whom they were recording, asked that one of the two sides, “Wyatt Earp”, be rerecorded with session musicians like Panama Francis who played on almost every R&B record made on the East Coast at the time. Oddly, listening to both versions, the version with the session musicians sounds rather more raw and Bo-Diddleyesque than the one with Diddley’s band. The result had a lot of the sound of the records the Coasters were making around the same time: [Excerpt: The Marquees, “Wyatt Earp”] At the same initial session, the Marquees also sang backing vocals on a record by Billy Stewart. We’ve encountered Stewart briefly before — his first single, “Billy’s Blues”, was the first appearance of the guitar figure that later became the basis for “Love is Strange”, and he played piano in Diddley’s band. With Diddley’s band and the Marquees he recorded “Billy’s Heartache”: [Excerpt: Billy Stewart, “Billy’s Heartache”] However, the Marquees’ first record did nothing, and the group were dropped by the label and went back to just playing clubs around Washington DC. It looked like their dreams of stardom were over. But one of the group’s members, Chester Simmons, took a job as Bo Diddley’s driver, and that was to lead to the group’s second big break. Diddley was on a tour with the Moonglows, who as well as being fellow Chess artists had also backed Diddley on records like “Diddley Daddy”: [Excerpt: Bo Diddley, “Diddley Daddy”] Harvey Fuqua, the group’s leader, was complaining to Diddley about the rest of the group, and in particular about Bobby Lester, the group’s tenor singer. He was thinking of dropping the entire group and getting a new, better, set of Moonglows to work with. Simmons heard Fuqua talking with Diddley about this, and suggested that the Marquees might be suitable for the job. When the tour hit DC, Fuqua auditioned the Marquees, and started working with them to get them up to the standard he needed, even while he was still continuing to tour with the original Moonglows. Fuqua trained the Marquees in things like breath control. In particular, he had a technique he called “blow harmony”, getting the group to sing with gentle, breathy, “whoo” sounds rather than the harder-edged “doo” sounds that most doo-wop groups used — Fuqua was contemptuous of most doo-wop groups, calling them “gang groups”. He taught the Marquees how to shape their mouths, how to use the muscles in their throats, and all the other techniques that most singers have to pick up intuitively or never learn at all. The breathy sound that Fuqua taught them was to become one of the most important techniques that Gaye would use as a vocalist throughout his career. Fuqua took the group back with him to Chicago, and they added a sixth singer, Chuck Barkside, who doubled Simmons on the bass. There were attempts at expanding the group still further, as well — David Ruffin, later the lead singer of the Temptations, auditioned for the group, but was turned down by Fuqua. The group, now renamed Harvey and the Moonglows, cut a few tracks for Chess, but most were never released, but they did better as backing vocalists. Along with Etta James, they sang the backing vocals on two hits by Chuck Berry, “Almost Grown” and “Back in the USA”: [Excerpt: Chuck Berry, “Back in the USA”] At the time, Etta and Harvey were in a relationship, and Marvin took note — being in a relationship with someone else in the industry could be good for your career. Marvin was starting to discover some other things, as well — like that he really didn’t enjoy being on stage, even though he loved singing, and that the strain of touring could be eased with the use of cannabis. Marvin didn’t want to be on the stage at all — he wanted to be making records. The studio was where he was comfortable. The new Moonglows did release some recordings of their own, one of which, “Mama Loochie”, had Marvin on lead vocals, and was cowritten by Marvin and Harvey: [Excerpt: Harvey and the Moonglows, “Mama Loochie”] Another record that featured Marvin, though not as lead vocalist, was “Twelve Months of the Year”, an attempt to recapture the success of the original Moonglows’ “Ten Commandments of Love”. On that one, Marvin does the spoken recitation at the beginning and end, as well as singing backing vocals: [Excerpt: Harvey and the Moonglows, “Twelve Months of the Year”] But the Moonglows were coming to the end of their career — and Harvey was also coming to the end of his relationship with Etta James. Anna Records, one of the labels owned by members of the Gordy family, had made a distribution agreement with Chess Records, and Leonard Chess suggested to Harvey that he move to Detroit and work with Anna as a Chess liaison. Soon Harvey Fuqua was fully part of the Gordy family, and he split up with Etta James and got into a relationship with Gwen Gordy. Gwen had split up with her own partner to be with Harvey — and then Gwen and her ex, Roquel Davis, co-wrote a song about the split, which Etta James sang: [Excerpt: Etta James, “All I Could Do Was Cry”] Marvin had come with Harvey — he’d signed with him as a solo artist, and Harvey thought that Marvin could become a Black Frank Sinatra, or better. Marvin was signed to Harvey Records, Harvey’s label, but after Harvey and Gwen got together romantically, their various labels all got rolled up in the Motown family. At first, Marvin wasn’t sure whether he would be recording at all once Harvey Records was shut down, but he made an impression on Berry Gordy by gatecrashing the Motown Christmas party in 1960 and performing “Mr. Sandman” at the piano. Soon he found that Berry Gordy had bought out his recording contract, as well as a fifty percent share of his management, and he was now signed with Tamla. Marvin was depressed by this to an extent — he saw Fuqua as a father figure — but he soon came to respect Gordy. He also found that Gordy’s sister Anna was very interested in him, and while she was seventeen years older than him, he didn’t see that as something that should stand in the way of his getting together with the boss’ sister. There was a real love between the twenty year old Marvin Gaye and the thirty-seven-year-old Anna Gordy, but Gaye also definitely realised that there was an advantage to becoming part of the family — and Berry Gordy, in turn, thought that having his artists be part of his family would be an advantage in controlling them. But right from the start, Marvin and Berry had different ideas about where Marvin’s career should go. Marvin saw himself becoming a singer in the same style as Nat “King” Cole or Jesse Belvin, while Gordy wanted him to be an R&B singer like everyone else at Motown. While Marvin liked singers like Sam Cooke, he was also an admirer of people like Dean Martin and Perry Como — he would later say that the sweaters he wore in many photos in the sixties were inspired by Como, and that “I always felt like my personality and Perry’s had a lot in common”. They eventually compromised — Marvin would record an album of old standards, but there would be an R&B single on it, one side written by Berry, and the other written by Harvey and Anna. The Soulful Moods of Marvin Gaye was only the second album released by Motown, which otherwise concentrated on singles, but neither it nor the single Berry wrote, “Let Your Conscience Be Your Guide”, had any commercial success: [Excerpt: Marvin Gaye, “Let Your Conscience Be Your Guide”] As well as singing on the album, Marvin also played drums and piano, and while his singing career wasn’t doing wonderfully at this point, he was becoming known around Motown for turning his hand to whatever was needed, from drumming on a session to sweeping the floor. The most notable thing about the album, though, was that he changed the spelling of his surname, from Gay spelled G-a-y to G-a-y-e. He gave three different reasons for this, at least two of which were connected. The first one was that he was inspired by Sam Cooke, whose career he wanted to emulate. Cooke had added an “e” to his surname, and so Marvin was doing the same. The second reason, though, was that by this time the word “gay” was already being used to refer to sexuality, and there were rumours floating around about Marvin’s sexuality which he didn’t want to encourage. He did like to wear women’s clothing in private, and he said some things about his experience of gender which might suggest that he wasn’t entirely cis, but he was only interested in women sexually, and was (like many people at the time) at least mildly homophobic. And like many people he confused sexuality and gender, and he desperately didn’t want to be thought of as anything other than heterosexual. But there was another aspect to this as well. His father was also someone who wore women’s clothing, and tied in with Marvin’s wish not to be thought of as gay was a wish not to be thought of as like his father, who was physically and emotionally abusive of him throughout his life. And his father was Marvin Gay senior. By adding the “e”, as well as trying to avoid being thought of as gay, he was also trying to avoid being thought of as like his father. While Marvin’s first album was not a success, he was doing everything he could to get more involved with the label as a whole. He played drums on records, despite never having played the instrument before, simply because he wanted to be around the studio — he played on a record we’ve already looked at, “Please Mr. Postman” by the Marvelettes: [Excerpt: The Marvelettes, “Please Mr. Postman”] He played with the Miracles on occasion, and he also played on “I Call It Pretty Music, But the Old People Call it the Blues” by Little Stevie Wonder: [Excerpt, Little Stevie Wonder, “I Call It Pretty Music, But the Old People Call it the Blues”] And on “That’s What Girls are Made For”by the Spinners (the group known in the UK as the Detroit Spinners): [Excerpt: The Spinners, “That’s What Girls are Made For”] And he both co-wrote and played drums on “Beechwood 4-5789” by the Marvelettes, which made the top twenty: [Excerpt: The Marvelettes, “Beechwood 4-5789”] But this kind of thing ended up with Gaye being pushed by Berry Gordy in the direction of writing, which was not something he wanted to do. At that time in Motown, there was a strict demarcation, and the only person who was allowed to write *and* perform *and* produce was Smokey Robinson — everyone else was either a writer/producer or a singer, and Marvin knew he wanted to be a singer first and foremost. But Marvin’s own records were flopping, and it was only because of Anna Gordy’s encouragement that he was able to continue releasing records at all — if he hadn’t given up himself, he would almost certainly have been dropped by the label. And indirectly, his first hit was inspired by Anna. Marvin’s attitude to authority was coming out again in his attitude towards Motown and Berry Gordy. By this point, Motown had set up its famous charm school — a department of the label that taught its singers things like elocution, posture, how to dress and how to dance. Marvin absolutely refused to do any of that, although he later said he regretted it. Anna told him all the time that he was stubborn, and he started thinking about this, and jamming with Mickey Stevenson, the Motown staff songwriter and producer with whom he worked most closely, and who had started out as a singer with Lionel Hampton. The two of them came up with what Marvin later described as a “basic jazz feeling”, and then Berry Gordy suggested a few extra chords they could stick in, and the result was “Stubborn Kind of Fellow”: [Excerpt: Marvin Gaye, “Stubborn Kind of Fellow”] You can hear what he meant about that starting out with a jazz feel, most notably with Beans Bowles’ flute part, but the finished product was very much an R&B record — Marvin sounds more like Ray Charles than Sinatra or Como, and the backing vocals by Martha and the Vandellas are certainly not anything that you would have got behind a crooner. The record went right up the R&B chart, making the R&B top ten, but it didn’t cross over to the pop audience that Gaye was after. He was disappointed, because what he wanted more than anything else was to get a white audience, because he knew that was where the money was, but after getting an R&B hit, he knew he would have to do as so many other Black entertainers had, and play to Black audiences for a long time before he crossed over. And that also meant going out on tour, something he hated. At the end of 1962 he was put on the bill of the Motortown Revue, along with the Contours, the Supremes, the Marvelettes, Little Stevie Wonder, Mary Wells, and the Miracles. On the live album from that tour, recorded at the Apollo, you can hear Gaye still trying to find a balance between his desire to be a Sinatra-type crooner appealing to a white audience, and his realisation that he was going to have to appeal to a Black audience. The result has him singing “What Kind of Fool Am I?”, the Anthony Newley show tune, but sticking in interpolations inspired by Ray Charles: [Excerpt: Marvin Gaye, “What Kind of Fool Am I?”] This was a real concern for him. He would later say “Commercially, though, I learned quickly that it was primarily my people who were going to support me. I vowed always to take care of them, give ’em the funk they wanted. It wasn’t my first choice, but there’s integrity in the idea of pleasing your own people. Secretly, I yearned to sing for rich Republicans in tuxes and tails at the Copacabana. No matter.” He hated that tour, but some of the musicians on the tour thought it was what made him into a star — specifically, they knew that Gaye had stage fright, hated being on stage, and would not put his all into a live performance. Unless they put Little Stevie Wonder on before him. Wonder’s performances were so exciting that Gaye had to give the audience everything he had or he’d get booed off the stage, and Gaye started to rise to the challenge. He would still get stage fright, and try to get out of performing live at all, but when he turned up and went on stage he became a captivating performer. And that was something that was very evident on the first recording he made after coming off the tour. The Apollo recording we just heard was from the last week of the tour, and two days after it concluded, on December 19th 1962, Marvin Gaye was back in the studio, where he felt most comfortable, writing a song with Mickey Stevenson and Clarence Paul. While there were three writers of the song, the bulk of it was written by Gaye, who came up with the basic groove before the other writers got involved, and who played both piano and drums on the record: [Excerpt: Marvin Gaye, “Hitch-Hike”] “Hitch-Hike” became Gaye’s first real crossover hit — it made number twelve on the R&B chart, but also made the top forty on the pop chart, largely because of his appearances on American Bandstand, where he demonstrated a new dance he’d made up, involving sticking your thumb out like a hitch-hiker, which became a minor craze among Bandstand’s audiences — we’re still in the period where a novelty dance was the most important thing in having a hit. The song also became the first Marvin Gaye song to get covered on a regular basis. The first cover version of it was by the Vandellas, who sang backing vocals on Marvin’s version, and who used the same backing track for their own recording — this was something that happened often with Motown, and if you listen to albums by Motown artists in the sixties, you’ll frequently hear a hit single with different vocals on it: [Excerpt: Martha and the Vandellas, “Hitch-Hike”] But while Martha and the Vandellas were the first to cover “Hitch-Hike”, they were far from the only ones — it became a favourite for white rock groups like the Sonics or the Rolling Stones to cover, and it would be the inspiration for many more rock records by people who wanted to show they could play soul. By June 1963, Marvin Gaye was a bona fide star, and married to Anna Gordy. He was even able to buy his mother a house. But while everything seemed to be going swimmingly as far as the public were concerned, there were already problems — at their wedding reception, Gaye and Anna got into a huge row which ended up with Anna hitting Gaye on the head with her shoe heel. And while he’d bought the house for his mother, his father was still living with her, and still as toxic as he had ever been. But for the moment, those things didn’t matter. Marvin Gaye was on top of the world, and had started a run of singles that would come to define the Motown sound, and he was also becoming a successful songwriter — and the next time we look at him, it’ll be for a classic song he wrote for someone else.

united states love women history black chicago uk washington fall washington dc dc detroit strange blues republicans miracles fellow rolling stones air force east coast apollo ten commandments simmons frank sinatra chess temptations sandman motown marvin gaye sade secretly heartache cooke tilt marquis ray charles mixcloud chuck berry sam cooke rock music postman supremes dean martin smokey robinson etta james copacabana gordy sonics wyatt earp spinners coasters bo diddley berry gordy contours commercially perry como american bandstand fuqua lionel hampton bandstand vandellas twelve months hitchhike moonglow david ruffin mary wells chess records tamla beechwood marvelettes anthony newley nelson george jackie shane motown sound david ritz okeh marvin gay little stevie wonder diddley where did our love go billy stewart any other way made for leonard chess jesse belvin mickey stevenson tilt araiza

Episode 103: "Hitch-Hike" by Marvin Gaye

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 5, 2020 29:43

Episode one hundred and three of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at "Hitch-Hike" by Marvin Gaye, and the early career of one of Motown's defining artists. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on "Any Other Way" by Jackie Shane. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ ----more---- Erratum I say that Smokey Robinson was the only person allowed to be both a writer/producer and performer at Motown. That was Marvin Gaye's later statement, but at this point Eddie Holland was also still doing all those things. Resources As usual, I've created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. For Motown-related information in this and other Motown episodes, I've used the following resources: Where Did Our Love Go? The Rise and Fall of the Motown Sound by Nelson George is an excellent popular history of the various companies that became Motown. To Be Loved by Berry Gordy is Gordy's own, understandably one-sided, but relatively well-written, autobiography. Women of Motown: An Oral History by Susan Whitall is a collection of interviews with women involved in Motown. I Hear a Symphony: Motown and Crossover R&B by J. Andrew Flory is an academic look at Motown. The Motown Encyclopaedia by Graham Betts is an exhaustive look at the people and records involved in Motown's thirty-year history. And Motown Junkies is an infrequently-updated blog looking at (so far) the first 693 tracks released on Motown singles. There is a Complete Motown Singles 1959-62 box available from Hip-O-Select with comprehensive liner notes, but if you just want the music, I recommend instead this much cheaper bare-bones box from Real Gone Music. For information on Gaye specifically, I relied on Divided Soul: The Life of Marvin Gaye by David Ritz. The best collection of Gaye's music is The Master, a four-disc box covering his recordings from "Stubborn Kind of Fellow" to the very last recordings of his life. Transcript A brief note -- this week's episode contains some minor mentions of parental and domestic abuse, and some discussions of homophobia. I don't think those mentions will be upsetting for anyone, but if you're unsure you might want to check the transcript before listening. Today we're going to look at the start of one of the great careers in soul music, and one of the great artists to come out of the Motown hit factory. We're going to look at the continued growth of the Motown company, and at the personal relationships that would drive it in the 1960s, but would also eventually lead to its downfall. We're going to look at "Hitch-Hike", and the early career of Marvin Gaye: [Excerpt: Marvin Gaye, "Hitch-Hike"] One thing we've not talked about much in the podcast so far is the way that the entertainment industry, until relatively recently, acted as a safety valve for society, a place where people who didn't fit in anywhere could build themselves a life and earn a living without playing along with the normal social conventions. And by instinct, temperament, and upbringing, Marvin Gaye was one of those people. He was always someone who rubbed up against authority. He spent his youth fighting with his abusive father, and eventually left home to join the Air Force just to get away from his father. But he didn't stay long in the Air Force either -- he was discharged due to mental problems, which he later claimed he'd faked, with his honourable discharge stating "Marvin Gay cannot adjust to regimentation and authority". Back in Washington DC, where he'd grown up, and feeling like a failure, he formed a doo-wop group called the Marquees -- in later years, Gaye would state that he'd come up with the name as a reference to the Marquis de Sade, but in fact Gaye hadn't heard of de Sade at the time. The Marquees were like a million doo-wop groups of the time, and leaned towards the sweeter end of doo-wop, particularly modelling themselves on the Moonglows. The group performed around Washington, and came to the attention of Bo Diddley, who was living in the area and friends with a neighbour of the group. Diddley took them under his wing and wrote and produced both sides of their first single, which had another member, Reese Palmer, singing lead -- Palmer also claimed that he wrote both songs, but Diddley is credited and they certainly sound like Diddley's work to me. The tracks were originally backed by Diddley's band, but Okeh, the record label for whom they were recording, asked that one of the two sides, "Wyatt Earp", be rerecorded with session musicians like Panama Francis who played on almost every R&B record made on the East Coast at the time. Oddly, listening to both versions, the version with the session musicians sounds rather more raw and Bo-Diddleyesque than the one with Diddley's band. The result had a lot of the sound of the records the Coasters were making around the same time: [Excerpt: The Marquees, "Wyatt Earp"] At the same initial session, the Marquees also sang backing vocals on a record by Billy Stewart. We've encountered Stewart briefly before -- his first single, "Billy's Blues", was the first appearance of the guitar figure that later became the basis for "Love is Strange", and he played piano in Diddley's band. With Diddley's band and the Marquees he recorded "Billy's Heartache": [Excerpt: Billy Stewart, "Billy's Heartache"] However, the Marquees' first record did nothing, and the group were dropped by the label and went back to just playing clubs around Washington DC. It looked like their dreams of stardom were over. But one of the group's members, Chester Simmons, took a job as Bo Diddley's driver, and that was to lead to the group's second big break. Diddley was on a tour with the Moonglows, who as well as being fellow Chess artists had also backed Diddley on records like "Diddley Daddy": [Excerpt: Bo Diddley, "Diddley Daddy"] Harvey Fuqua, the group's leader, was complaining to Diddley about the rest of the group, and in particular about Bobby Lester, the group's tenor singer. He was thinking of dropping the entire group and getting a new, better, set of Moonglows to work with. Simmons heard Fuqua talking with Diddley about this, and suggested that the Marquees might be suitable for the job. When the tour hit DC, Fuqua auditioned the Marquees, and started working with them to get them up to the standard he needed, even while he was still continuing to tour with the original Moonglows. Fuqua trained the Marquees in things like breath control. In particular, he had a technique he called "blow harmony", getting the group to sing with gentle, breathy, "whoo" sounds rather than the harder-edged "doo" sounds that most doo-wop groups used -- Fuqua was contemptuous of most doo-wop groups, calling them "gang groups". He taught the Marquees how to shape their mouths, how to use the muscles in their throats, and all the other techniques that most singers have to pick up intuitively or never learn at all. The breathy sound that Fuqua taught them was to become one of the most important techniques that Gaye would use as a vocalist throughout his career. Fuqua took the group back with him to Chicago, and they added a sixth singer, Chuck Barkside, who doubled Simmons on the bass. There were attempts at expanding the group still further, as well -- David Ruffin, later the lead singer of the Temptations, auditioned for the group, but was turned down by Fuqua. The group, now renamed Harvey and the Moonglows, cut a few tracks for Chess, but most were never released, but they did better as backing vocalists. Along with Etta James, they sang the backing vocals on two hits by Chuck Berry, "Almost Grown" and "Back in the USA": [Excerpt: Chuck Berry, "Back in the USA"] At the time, Etta and Harvey were in a relationship, and Marvin took note -- being in a relationship with someone else in the industry could be good for your career. Marvin was starting to discover some other things, as well -- like that he really didn't enjoy being on stage, even though he loved singing, and that the strain of touring could be eased with the use of cannabis. Marvin didn't want to be on the stage at all -- he wanted to be making records. The studio was where he was comfortable. The new Moonglows did release some recordings of their own, one of which, "Mama Loochie", had Marvin on lead vocals, and was cowritten by Marvin and Harvey: [Excerpt: Harvey and the Moonglows, "Mama Loochie"] Another record that featured Marvin, though not as lead vocalist, was "Twelve Months of the Year", an attempt to recapture the success of the original Moonglows' "Ten Commandments of Love". On that one, Marvin does the spoken recitation at the beginning and end, as well as singing backing vocals: [Excerpt: Harvey and the Moonglows, "Twelve Months of the Year"] But the Moonglows were coming to the end of their career -- and Harvey was also coming to the end of his relationship with Etta James. Anna Records, one of the labels owned by members of the Gordy family, had made a distribution agreement with Chess Records, and Leonard Chess suggested to Harvey that he move to Detroit and work with Anna as a Chess liaison. Soon Harvey Fuqua was fully part of the Gordy family, and he split up with Etta James and got into a relationship with Gwen Gordy. Gwen had split up with her own partner to be with Harvey -- and then Gwen and her ex, Roquel Davis, co-wrote a song about the split, which Etta James sang: [Excerpt: Etta James, "All I Could Do Was Cry"] Marvin had come with Harvey -- he'd signed with him as a solo artist, and Harvey thought that Marvin could become a Black Frank Sinatra, or better. Marvin was signed to Harvey Records, Harvey's label, but after Harvey and Gwen got together romantically, their various labels all got rolled up in the Motown family. At first, Marvin wasn't sure whether he would be recording at all once Harvey Records was shut down, but he made an impression on Berry Gordy by gatecrashing the Motown Christmas party in 1960 and performing "Mr. Sandman" at the piano. Soon he found that Berry Gordy had bought out his recording contract, as well as a fifty percent share of his management, and he was now signed with Tamla. Marvin was depressed by this to an extent -- he saw Fuqua as a father figure -- but he soon came to respect Gordy. He also found that Gordy's sister Anna was very interested in him, and while she was seventeen years older than him, he didn't see that as something that should stand in the way of his getting together with the boss' sister. There was a real love between the twenty year old Marvin Gaye and the thirty-seven-year-old Anna Gordy, but Gaye also definitely realised that there was an advantage to becoming part of the family -- and Berry Gordy, in turn, thought that having his artists be part of his family would be an advantage in controlling them. But right from the start, Marvin and Berry had different ideas about where Marvin's career should go. Marvin saw himself becoming a singer in the same style as Nat "King" Cole or Jesse Belvin, while Gordy wanted him to be an R&B singer like everyone else at Motown. While Marvin liked singers like Sam Cooke, he was also an admirer of people like Dean Martin and Perry Como -- he would later say that the sweaters he wore in many photos in the sixties were inspired by Como, and that "I always felt like my personality and Perry's had a lot in common". They eventually compromised -- Marvin would record an album of old standards, but there would be an R&B single on it, one side written by Berry, and the other written by Harvey and Anna. The Soulful Moods of Marvin Gaye was only the second album released by Motown, which otherwise concentrated on singles, but neither it nor the single Berry wrote, "Let Your Conscience Be Your Guide", had any commercial success: [Excerpt: Marvin Gaye, "Let Your Conscience Be Your Guide"] As well as singing on the album, Marvin also played drums and piano, and while his singing career wasn't doing wonderfully at this point, he was becoming known around Motown for turning his hand to whatever was needed, from drumming on a session to sweeping the floor. The most notable thing about the album, though, was that he changed the spelling of his surname, from Gay spelled G-a-y to G-a-y-e. He gave three different reasons for this, at least two of which were connected. The first one was that he was inspired by Sam Cooke, whose career he wanted to emulate. Cooke had added an "e" to his surname, and so Marvin was doing the same. The second reason, though, was that by this time the word "gay" was already being used to refer to sexuality, and there were rumours floating around about Marvin's sexuality which he didn't want to encourage. He did like to wear women's clothing in private, and he said some things about his experience of gender which might suggest that he wasn't entirely cis, but he was only interested in women sexually, and was (like many people at the time) at least mildly homophobic. And like many people he confused sexuality and gender, and he desperately didn't want to be thought of as anything other than heterosexual. But there was another aspect to this as well. His father was also someone who wore women's clothing, and tied in with Marvin's wish not to be thought of as gay was a wish not to be thought of as like his father, who was physically and emotionally abusive of him throughout his life. And his father was Marvin Gay senior. By adding the "e", as well as trying to avoid being thought of as gay, he was also trying to avoid being thought of as like his father. While Marvin's first album was not a success, he was doing everything he could to get more involved with the label as a whole. He played drums on records, despite never having played the instrument before, simply because he wanted to be around the studio -- he played on a record we've already looked at, "Please Mr. Postman" by the Marvelettes: [Excerpt: The Marvelettes, "Please Mr. Postman"] He played with the Miracles on occasion, and he also played on "I Call It Pretty Music, But the Old People Call it the Blues" by Little Stevie Wonder: [Excerpt, Little Stevie Wonder, "I Call It Pretty Music, But the Old People Call it the Blues"] And on "That's What Girls are Made For”by the Spinners (the group known in the UK as the Detroit Spinners): [Excerpt: The Spinners, "That's What Girls are Made For"] And he both co-wrote and played drums on "Beechwood 4-5789" by the Marvelettes, which made the top twenty: [Excerpt: The Marvelettes, "Beechwood 4-5789"] But this kind of thing ended up with Gaye being pushed by Berry Gordy in the direction of writing, which was not something he wanted to do. At that time in Motown, there was a strict demarcation, and the only person who was allowed to write *and* perform *and* produce was Smokey Robinson -- everyone else was either a writer/producer or a singer, and Marvin knew he wanted to be a singer first and foremost. But Marvin's own records were flopping, and it was only because of Anna Gordy's encouragement that he was able to continue releasing records at all -- if he hadn't given up himself, he would almost certainly have been dropped by the label. And indirectly, his first hit was inspired by Anna. Marvin's attitude to authority was coming out again in his attitude towards Motown and Berry Gordy. By this point, Motown had set up its famous charm school -- a department of the label that taught its singers things like elocution, posture, how to dress and how to dance. Marvin absolutely refused to do any of that, although he later said he regretted it. Anna told him all the time that he was stubborn, and he started thinking about this, and jamming with Mickey Stevenson, the Motown staff songwriter and producer with whom he worked most closely, and who had started out as a singer with Lionel Hampton. The two of them came up with what Marvin later described as a "basic jazz feeling", and then Berry Gordy suggested a few extra chords they could stick in, and the result was "Stubborn Kind of Fellow": [Excerpt: Marvin Gaye, "Stubborn Kind of Fellow"] You can hear what he meant about that starting out with a jazz feel, most notably with Beans Bowles' flute part, but the finished product was very much an R&B record -- Marvin sounds more like Ray Charles than Sinatra or Como, and the backing vocals by Martha and the Vandellas are certainly not anything that you would have got behind a crooner. The record went right up the R&B chart, making the R&B top ten, but it didn't cross over to the pop audience that Gaye was after. He was disappointed, because what he wanted more than anything else was to get a white audience, because he knew that was where the money was, but after getting an R&B hit, he knew he would have to do as so many other Black entertainers had, and play to Black audiences for a long time before he crossed over. And that also meant going out on tour, something he hated. At the end of 1962 he was put on the bill of the Motortown Revue, along with the Contours, the Supremes, the Marvelettes, Little Stevie Wonder, Mary Wells, and the Miracles. On the live album from that tour, recorded at the Apollo, you can hear Gaye still trying to find a balance between his desire to be a Sinatra-type crooner appealing to a white audience, and his realisation that he was going to have to appeal to a Black audience. The result has him singing "What Kind of Fool Am I?", the Anthony Newley show tune, but sticking in interpolations inspired by Ray Charles: [Excerpt: Marvin Gaye, "What Kind of Fool Am I?"] This was a real concern for him. He would later say "Commercially, though, I learned quickly that it was primarily my people who were going to support me. I vowed always to take care of them, give 'em the funk they wanted. It wasn't my first choice, but there's integrity in the idea of pleasing your own people. Secretly, I yearned to sing for rich Republicans in tuxes and tails at the Copacabana. No matter." He hated that tour, but some of the musicians on the tour thought it was what made him into a star -- specifically, they knew that Gaye had stage fright, hated being on stage, and would not put his all into a live performance. Unless they put Little Stevie Wonder on before him. Wonder's performances were so exciting that Gaye had to give the audience everything he had or he'd get booed off the stage, and Gaye started to rise to the challenge. He would still get stage fright, and try to get out of performing live at all, but when he turned up and went on stage he became a captivating performer. And that was something that was very evident on the first recording he made after coming off the tour. The Apollo recording we just heard was from the last week of the tour, and two days after it concluded, on December 19th 1962, Marvin Gaye was back in the studio, where he felt most comfortable, writing a song with Mickey Stevenson and Clarence Paul. While there were three writers of the song, the bulk of it was written by Gaye, who came up with the basic groove before the other writers got involved, and who played both piano and drums on the record: [Excerpt: Marvin Gaye, "Hitch-Hike"] "Hitch-Hike" became Gaye's first real crossover hit -- it made number twelve on the R&B chart, but also made the top forty on the pop chart, largely because of his appearances on American Bandstand, where he demonstrated a new dance he'd made up, involving sticking your thumb out like a hitch-hiker, which became a minor craze among Bandstand's audiences -- we're still in the period where a novelty dance was the most important thing in having a hit. The song also became the first Marvin Gaye song to get covered on a regular basis. The first cover version of it was by the Vandellas, who sang backing vocals on Marvin's version, and who used the same backing track for their own recording -- this was something that happened often with Motown, and if you listen to albums by Motown artists in the sixties, you'll frequently hear a hit single with different vocals on it: [Excerpt: Martha and the Vandellas, "Hitch-Hike"] But while Martha and the Vandellas were the first to cover "Hitch-Hike", they were far from the only ones -- it became a favourite for white rock groups like the Sonics or the Rolling Stones to cover, and it would be the inspiration for many more rock records by people who wanted to show they could play soul. By June 1963, Marvin Gaye was a bona fide star, and married to Anna Gordy. He was even able to buy his mother a house. But while everything seemed to be going swimmingly as far as the public were concerned, there were already problems -- at their wedding reception, Gaye and Anna got into a huge row which ended up with Anna hitting Gaye on the head with her shoe heel. And while he'd bought the house for his mother, his father was still living with her, and still as toxic as he had ever been. But for the moment, those things didn't matter. Marvin Gaye was on top of the world, and had started a run of singles that would come to define the Motown sound, and he was also becoming a successful songwriter -- and the next time we look at him, it'll be for a classic song he wrote for someone else.

love women history black chicago uk washington fall washington dc dc detroit strange blues republicans miracles fellow rolling stones air force east coast apollo ten commandments simmons frank sinatra chess temptations sandman motown marvin gaye sade secretly cooke tilt marquis ray charles mixcloud chuck berry sam cooke rock music postman supremes dean martin smokey robinson nat king cole etta james copacabana gordy sonics wyatt earp spinners coasters bo diddley berry gordy contours commercially perry como american bandstand fuqua lionel hampton bandstand vandellas twelve months hitchhike moonglow david ruffin mary wells chess records tamla beechwood marvelettes anthony newley nelson george jackie shane motown sound david ritz okeh marvin gay little stevie wonder diddley where did our love go billy stewart any other way made for leonard chess jesse belvin mickey stevenson tilt araiza

Episode 93: “Please Mr. Postman” by the Marvelettes

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 10, 2020

Episode ninety-three of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Please Mr. Postman” by the Marvelettes, and the career of the first group to have a number one on a Motown label. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on “Take Good Care of My Baby” by Bobby Vee. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt’s irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ —-more—- Erratum After recording this, I happened to discover that in 2017 Katherine actually came out of retirement and formed a new “Marvelettes”, who recorded in the UK in 2017 with someone called “Hitsville Chalky”. Resources This week’s Mixcloud playlist is split into two parts, because of the number of Marvelettes songs. Part one, and part two. The Original Marvelettes: Motown’s Mystery Girl Group by Marc Taylor is the only biography of the group. Sadly it currently goes for silly money. Where Did Our Love Go? The Rise and Fall of the Motown Sound by Nelson George is an excellent popular history of the various companies that became Motown. To Be Loved by Berry Gordy is Gordy’s own, understandably one-sided, but relatively well-written, autobiography. Women of Motown: An Oral History by Susan Whitall is a collection of interviews with women involved in Motown, including Katherine Anderson Schaffner. I Hear a Symphony: Motown and Crossover R&B by J. Andrew Flory is an academic look at Motown. The Motown Encyclopaedia by Graham Betts is an exhaustive look at the people and records involved in Motown’s thirty-year history. And Motown Junkies is an infrequently-updated blog looking at (so far) the first 693 tracks released on Motown singles. There is a Complete Motown Singles 1959-62 box available from Hip-O-Select with comprehensive liner notes, but if you just want the music, I recommend instead this much cheaper bare-bones box from Real Gone Music. And this three-CD set contains the group’s complete discography up to mid-1966 — the Gladys Horton years. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript When we left the Tamla Motown family of labels, a couple of months back, they’d finally had their first big hit with Barrett Strong’s “Money”, and the label was starting to pull together the full creative team that would be responsible for its later successes. But while “Money” is a great record, it’s not a record with what would later become known as the “Motown Sound” — it sounds far more like a Ray Charles record than the records that would later make Motown’s name. So today, we’re going to look at the first number one to come out of Motown — a record that definitely did have the Motown sound, and which established the label as the sound of young America. Today, we’re going to look at “Please Mr. Postman”: [Excerpt: The Marvelettes, “Please Mr. Postman”] The story of the Marvelettes starts with Gladys Horton, who lived in the small town of Inkster in Michigan. When Horton was only fourteen, she had formed a group called the Del-Rhythmettes, who made one single, “Chic-A-Boomer”: [Excerpt: The Del-Rhythmettes, “Chic-A-Boomer”] That had got a little bit of airplay on local radio, but had otherwise been unsuccessful, and the Del-Rhythmettes had split up. But Gladys still wanted to make music, and she started looking around for other people to sing with. One who caught her eye was a young girl who would appear in the High School talent contests, named Georgia Dobbins. By the time Gladys got to high school herself, Georgia had graduated, but Gladys persuaded her to join a group she put together for her own talent contest entry. The group she formed originally jokingly named themselves the Casinyettes — because they “can’t sing yet” — and that was the name under which they performed at the talent contest. There was a reason that Gladys wanted Georgia for this talent contest — this one had, as its first prize, the chance of an audition at Motown. Motown was still a small label, but it had started to have hits, and everyone in Michigan with an interest in music knew about Berry Gordy. In particular, Motown had just released “Shop Around” by the Miracles. Smokey Robinson had written that song, and it had been released to no real effect. The record had been pulled, and another version released. THAT had had no success either, and then at three o’clock in the morning Berry Gordy had suddenly realised that the record needed a new, faster, arrangement. He’d phoned up Smokey and told him to get the group together and into the studio, before he lost the inspiration, even though it was the middle of the night. They did, and the second version of “Shop Around” was pulled and replaced with the new third version, which went to number two on the pop charts and sold a million copies: [Excerpt: The Miracles, “Shop Around”] So Motown were now in the big leagues, and the chance of recording for them was an exciting one, and one that the girls, and Gladys in particular, wanted. The Casinyettes at this point consisted of Gladys, Georgia, Georgeanna Tillman, Katherine Anderson, and Juanita Cowart — I’ve also seen Juanita’s name reported as Wyanetta, and can’t find anything which definitively says which it was. At the talent show, they sang “Maybe” by the Chantels: [Excerpt: The Chantels, “Maybe”] The group came fourth — but one of their teachers, Shirley Sharpley, knew the person from Motown who was arranging the auditions, and persuaded them to offer auditions to the top five, rather than just to the winners. The Cansinyettes went to their audition, and Motown were interested, but told them they had to come up with something original before they’d be signed. They went back to Inkster and got to work. A friend of Georgia, William Garrett, had started a blues song about a postman, and Georgia worked on his idea, writing most of the lyrics and recasting it as something less bluesy. But then Georgia had to quit the group. Her father hadn’t known she was singing until she brought the record contract home for him to countersign — as she was under twenty-one, she needed a parent to sign it, and her mother was too ill. Her father believed the entertainment industry to be sinful, and wouldn’t sign. She was so depressed that she gave up singing altogether, and by her own account didn’t sing a note until 1978. By the time they came back to Motown with the beginnings of a song, Georgia had been replaced by Wanda Young, though the remaining group members were still singing her song. The song was decent, but it needed work. The group were assigned to Brian Holland, who had a listen to the song and had a brainwave. Holland and his brother Eddie were both on Motown staff at the time, but before joining Motown Holland had been in a group called the Fidelitones. The Fidelitones had recorded some tracks for Aladdin, produced by Gordy, in the late fifties but they’d never been released: [Excerpt: The Fidelitones, “Is It Too Late?”] Holland had stayed in touch with Freddie Gorman, another member of the group. Gorman still had musical ambitions, and he would pop into Motown every day after he finished work — as a postman. So when Gorman popped in that day, Holland asked him to chip in ideas for the song and use his experience to make it more realistic — though there’s nothing much in the finished song that would seem to require expertise. Gorman became one of five credited writers on the song, along with Holland, Georgia Dobbins, William Garrett, and Holland’s normal songwriting partner Robert Bateman, who worked with Holland as a songwriting and production team called “Brianbert”. Before moving into production, Bateman had been a member of the Satintones, who had made several unsuccessful records for Motown, including this one that was a knock-off of “There Goes My Baby”: [Excerpt: The Satintones, “My Beloved”] The Casinyettes weren’t the first girl group to be signed to the label — Motown had already signed one girl group, a group called the Primettes, who had been renamed and who had so far released two singles: [Excerpt: The Supremes, “I Want a Guy”] But the Supremes, as they were renamed, wouldn’t become successful for several years, and were generally regarded as a joke among the Motown staff, who thought — not entirely without reason — that they had been signed more because Berry Gordy was attracted to Diane Ross, one of the members of the group, than because of any talent they had. One of the girls, though, Florence Ballard, was very popular at Motown, and was generally regarded as being helpful and friendly. She worked with Gladys on her lead vocal part, and helped her craft her performance. The production that Brian Holland crafted for the song was very heavy on the percussion — along with piano player Popcorn Wylie, guitarist Eddie Willis, and bass player James Jamerson, the backing musicians included a percussion player, Eddie “Bongo” Brown, and two drummers — the normal session drummer on most of the Motown recordings, Benny Benjamin, and a young man who had been a member of the last lineup of the Moonglows before Harvey Fuqua had moved over to working for the Gordy family labels, and who was now doing whatever he could around the studio, named Marvin Gaye. There was one final change that needed to be made — The Casinyettes was obviously a joke name, and they needed a better one. The name they were eventually given supposedly came after Berry Gordy heard them sing and said “those girls are marvels”. The Marvelettes were born, and their first single was the catchiest thing Motown had put out to that point: [Excerpt: The Marvelettes, “Please Mr. Postman”] “Please Mr. Postman” became the second million seller from Motown, and its first number one on the pop charts. It only stayed there for one week, but that one week was all that was needed — Motown was now a label that everyone in the industry had to notice. And “Please Mr. Postman” was the record that saved Motown. I’ve talked before about how a hit record could put a small label out of business — they had to pay for the records to be pressed up and distributed, but it would be many months before the distributors would actually pay them the money they were owed. And many distributors would not pay at all — they reasoned that a small label wasn’t going to be able to do anything about it if they didn’t pay, so why bother? The only leverage a small label with a big hit had was a second big hit. If they had another record the distributors wanted from them, then they could tell the distributors they wouldn’t get it until they paid up. And after “Shop Around” sold a million copies, Motown’s follow-ups had all sold poorly. They were running out of money, and they needed another hit quickly before they went bankrupt altogether. Berry Gordy had, early on, given the label a slogan — Create, Make, and Sell — because he wanted to make great records and then have them sell a lot of copies — but around this time he realised that there was no point in selling the records if they didn’t get paid for them. So reasoning that “create” and “make” were near-synonyms, he changed that slogan to Create, Sell, and Collect. By being a second million-seller for Motown, “Please Mr. Postman” ensured that they got paid for the first one. If it hadn’t come along, it’s possible that Motown would just be a footnote in histories of Chess Records — “Chess also distributed a handful of records from a small Detroit label owned by Harvey Fuqua’s brother-in-law, who co-wrote several hits for Jackie Wilson, before that label went bankrupt.” But as it is, the Marvelettes were now big stars. For the followup, Berry Gordy wanted to do something that was as close to the hit as possible . This would be the policy from this point on with Motown — if someone had a hit, the same producers and songwriters would be assigned to come up with something that sounded like the hit, and the artist would only go in a different direction once they stopped having hits with their original formula. In this case, the Marvelettes’ second single was designed not only to capitalise on their original hit, but on the popularity of the Twist craze, and so they released “Twistin’ Postman”: [Excerpt: The Marvelettes, “Twistin’ Postman”] “Twistin’ Postman” went top forty, but it didn’t do anything like as well as “Please Mr. Postman”. But just as with their first single, one of the group brought in a new song which brought them back to the top ten, if not number one. This time it was Gladys, who came up with a song called “Playboy”, which Brian Holland, Robert Bateman, and Mickey Stevenson rewrote, and which made number seven on the pop charts and number four on the R&B charts. [Excerpt: The Marvelettes, “Playboy”] Meanwhile, Freddie Gorman had continued working with Brian Holland as well, and had put out a single under his own name, “The Day Will Come”: [Excerpt: Freddie Gorman, “The Day Will Come”] Unfortunately, that wasn’t a success, and Freddie had to continue on his post rounds. That also meant that his songwriting partnership with Holland came to an end — Freddie kept finding that when he came round to Hitsville after work, if Brian Holland had had an idea for a song, he’d already finished it — usually with the help of his brother Eddie and their new writing partner Lamont Dozier. And there were problems brewing for the Marvelettes, too. They’d felt all along that they were looked down on a bit by the people from Detroit, who thought of them as hicks from the sticks because they came from Inkster. They were so self-conscious about this that it led to the first member leaving the group. They appeared on American Bandstand, and Juanita said that Detroit was a suburb of Inkster, when she’d meant to say that Inkster was a suburb of Detroit. She felt so bad about this slipup and the way she was mocked for it that she had a breakdown, and ended up leaving the group. That didn’t bother Motown too much — when “Please Mr. Postman” had been a hit but the girls had been at school, it had been suggested that they could just send any five girls out on the road as the Marvelettes, until the girls put their foot down about that. Not only that, but at one point when Wanda had been pregnant, Motown had replaced her on the road with Florence Ballard from the Supremes — the contracts for that tour had specified five Marvelettes, the Supremes were the least successful group on Motown at the time, and the girls got on well with Florence. If Motown were willing to do that, they were definitely willing to have the group just carry on with one member gone, and just make sure the contracts said there would be four Marvelettes. They carried on as a four-piece group, and had a few more records, mostly written and produced by Smokey Robinson but with others like Mickey Stevenson and Marvin Gaye sometimes contributing, but while those records did okay on the R&B charts, they didn’t have much success on the pop charts, mostly getting to around number fifty. At one point, Motown started to wonder if they needed to change things up a little — they put out a single by the group with Gladys and Wanda singing a dual lead, and with the group joined by Motown’s in-house backing vocal group The Andantes. The record was put out under the name The Darnells, but was unsuccessful: [Excerpt: The Darnells, “Too Hurt Too Cry, Too Much In Love To Say Goodbye”] Unfortunately for them, they missed the chance at a really big hit. Holland, Dozier, and Holland had written a song for them, but Gladys didn’t like it, she thought it was too simplistic, and so they took it to the group who were still known within Motown as the no-hit Supremes. We’ll be looking at “Where Did Our Love Go?” in more detail next year. Eddie Holland did cowrite a hit for them with Norman Whitfield, though — though it wasn’t a monster hit like “Where Did Our Love Go?”, it did give all the girls a chance to have a solo spot, a rarity for them: [Excerpt: The Marvelettes, “Too Many Fish in the Sea”] That took them back into the top thirty, and made the top five on the R&B chart. It would be the last hit that they would have with Georgeanna in the group, though — she’d been diagnosed with sickle-cell anaemia as a child, and the constant strain of touring made her more ill. The tours had been a shock for all of them, to be honest. Their first major national tour was the first Motor Town Revue in 1962 — a tour with a lineup that seems preposterously good these days. All of Motown’s major acts, and several acts that weren’t yet major but soon would be, were on the same bill — the Miracles, Mary Wells, the Marvelettes, the Temptations, Marv Johnson, Stevie Wonder, the Contours, Marvin Gaye, Martha and the Vandellas, the Supremes, and Singing Sammy Ward. The girls had grown up in Michigan, and while they had an intellectual understanding that the South was different, they were unprepared for the realities of segregation, of not being able to use public toilets or eat in the same restaurants that white people did. That was awful enough, but there was also the fact that all those acts were on the same bus. And starting the year before, there had been the phenomenon of Freedom Riders — black people from the North who had been coming down to the south to sit in whites-only seats on Greyhound buses, to protest segregation. In several places in the South, the sight of a lot of black people on a bus brought the Freedom Riders to mind, and people actually took pot-shots at the bus. A couple of years living like that took an immense toll on Georgeanna’s health, and she started suffering from unexplained fatigue. Eventually it was realised that she had lupus, an autoimmune disease which is now largely treatable if not curable, but at the time was often a death sentence. She retired from music, going to work for Motown as a secretary instead. She died in 1980, aged only thirty-six. The remaining three carried on as a trio, and they were about to have a second commercial wind. After a couple of flop follow-ups to “Too Many Fish in the Sea”, Smokey Robinson took over their production, and decided to start using Wanda as the lead vocalist, rather than Gladys, who had sung lead on their hits up to that point. “Don’t Mess With Bill”, their first single of 1966, became their first top ten pop hit since “Playboy” in early 1962: [Excerpt: The Marvelettes, “Don’t Mess With Bill”] Robinson also wrote the marvellous “The Hunter Gets Captured by the Game” for the group: [Excerpt: The Marvelettes, “The Hunter Gets Captured by the Game”] Or, at least, he wrote it for Wanda. By this point, while the records were getting released as by “the Marvelettes”, Robinson was only using Wanda for lead vocals, and having the Andantes sing all the backing vocals. The explanation for this was generally that the group were on tour all the time, and it was easier to make the records without them and then get Wanda just to sing the lead, and the other members reluctantly accepted that, but it rankled. There were other problems, too. Juanita and Georgeanna had been the glue holding the group together — they’d been the ones who had been friends with all the others. Katherine, Gladys, and Wanda, hadn’t known each other before forming the group, and they started to discover that they weren’t hugely fond of each other now. At first, they still worked well together, each having their assigned area of responsibility — Gladys was a combination musical director and choreographer, working out the group’s setlists and dance moves, Katherine was the spokesperson in interviews, and looked after the group’s money, and Wanda was the lead singer. This worked for a while, but as Katherine would later put it, when there had been five of them, they’d been friends. Now they were somewhere between acquaintances and co-workers. And then in 1967, Gladys decided to leave the group. This made the group an even lower priority for Motown — while Wanda was by now the undisputed lead singer, within Motown they were thought of as Gladys’ group, as she’d been the leader in the beginning. Motown did decide to get someone else in to replace her. They could cope with the group going from five members to four, and from four to three — three women, after all, was still a girl group. But once they’d got down to two members, they needed a third. Harvey Fuqua suggested Ann Bogan, who he’d discovered a while before and recorded a few duets with: [Excerpt: Harvey and Ann, “What Can You Do Now?”] Ann was a sort of general utility singer around Motown — she’d sung with the Andantes and the Challengers Three, and she’d also gone out on the road with Marvin Gaye, subbing for his duet partner Tammi Terrell, when the latter had become sick with the brain tumour that eventually killed her. Ann replaced Gladys, and the group made two further albums, and Ann was at least allowed to sing on album tracks. The group continued having R&B hits, but while they kept releasing great records like “Destination: Anywhere”, they were by now barely scraping the hot one hundred on the pop charts: [Excerpt: The Marvelettes, “Destination: Anywhere”] And Wanda was having problems. She’d been doing too much cocaine and drinking too much, and was starting to act strangely. Then in 1969 her younger sister was shot dead, by her other sister’s estranged husband (who seems to have thought he was shooting the other sister), and to compound matters while the group were on tour in Europe someone spiked Wanda’s drink. She was never the same again, and has had mental health problems for the last fifty years. The group split up, though nothing was announced — they just didn’t get booked on any more tours, and went their separate ways. Bogan went on to join a group called Love, Peace, and Happiness, who had a minor hit with a song that had been, coincidentally, co-written by Katherine, who wrote it for Gladys Knight: [Excerpt: Love, Peace, and Happiness, “I Don’t Want to Do Wrong”] That group then joined with Harvey Fuqua in a seventeen-piece funk band called New Birth, with Bogan singing on their hit “I Can Understand It”: [Excerpt: New Birth, “I Can Understand It”] Motown decided to give the Marvelettes one more try, and in 1970 they got Wanda in to record an album titled The Return of the Marvelettes. This was essentially a solo album, produced by Smokey Robinson, but they did try to get Katherine to appear on the cover photograph. She told the label that if she wasn’t good enough to sing on the record, she wasn’t good enough to appear on the cover, either, and so the cover, like the record, only featured Wanda of the original Marvelettes. Over the next few decades, various groups toured under the Marvelettes name, none featuring any of the original members — Motown, rather than the women, had owned the group name, and had sold it off. Gladys, Katherine, and Juanita were busy being homemakers, and Wanda and Georgeanna were too ill to consider a music career. Then in the late 1980s, Ian Levine entered the picture. Levine is a British DJ who at the time owned and ran Motor City Records, which put out new recordings by people who had released records on Motown in the sixties. He got over a hundred former Motown artists to record for him, and one album he put out was a Marvelettes reunion of sorts — he managed to persuade Gladys and Wanda out of retirement to make a new Marvelettes album with two new backing vocalists, Echo Johnson and Jean Maclean. The new record was a mixture of remakes of their old hits and new songs by Levine, like “Secret Love Affair”: [Excerpt: The Marvelettes, “Secret Love Affair”] Wanda was still too ill to perform regularly, but Gladys went out on tour on the oldies circuit, singing her old hits as “Gladys Horton of the Marvelettes”, as none of the group owned the original name. She and Katherine were in the process of suing to regain the name under the Truth in Music Act, when she died of a stroke in 2011. Of the other Marvelettes, Katherine and Juanita are retired, though Katherine still gives regular interviews about her time with the group, and Wanda’s mental health has apparently improved enough in the last few years that she can perform again. They’re all apparently happy with their situations now, and don’t miss the old life. They do miss the recognition, though. For the twenty-fifth, fortieth, fiftieth, and sixtieth anniversary celebrations of Motown, TV specials were produced featuring many of the label’s acts, and honouring the label’s history. None of the members of the first group to hit number one on the label were invited to be part of any of them.

america tv love women history money game europe uk peace fall truth happiness michigan south detroit north high school sea miracles cd robinson holland twist aladdin playboy chess temptations stevie wonder collect motown levine marvin gaye smokey greyhound tilt ray charles new birth gorman mixcloud bateman rock music postman supremes smokey robinson bongo gordy dozier bogan berry gordy contours freedom riders my baby shop around jackie wilson american bandstand vandellas moonglow lamont dozier mary wells chess records bobby vee take good care tammi terrell marvelettes inkster my beloved british djs brian holland twistin barrett strong nelson george james jamerson is it too late motown sound norman whitfield hitsville where did our love go tamla motown robert bateman ian levine mickey stevenson william garrett tilt araiza

Episode 93: "Please Mr. Postman" by the Marvelettes

70's Soul, Funk & Disco with Ady Crampton

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 10, 2020 33:51

Episode ninety-three of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at "Please Mr. Postman" by the Marvelettes, and the career of the first group to have a number one on a Motown label. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on "Take Good Care of My Baby" by Bobby Vee. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ ----more---- Erratum After recording this, I happened to discover that in 2017 Katherine actually came out of retirement and formed a new “Marvelettes”, who recorded in the UK in 2017 with someone called “Hitsville Chalky”. Resources This week's Mixcloud playlist is split into two parts, because of the number of Marvelettes songs. Part one, and part two. The Original Marvelettes: Motown's Mystery Girl Group by Marc Taylor is the only biography of the group. Sadly it currently goes for silly money. Where Did Our Love Go? The Rise and Fall of the Motown Sound by Nelson George is an excellent popular history of the various companies that became Motown. To Be Loved by Berry Gordy is Gordy's own, understandably one-sided, but relatively well-written, autobiography. Women of Motown: An Oral History by Susan Whitall is a collection of interviews with women involved in Motown, including Katherine Anderson Schaffner. I Hear a Symphony: Motown and Crossover R&B by J. Andrew Flory is an academic look at Motown. The Motown Encyclopaedia by Graham Betts is an exhaustive look at the people and records involved in Motown's thirty-year history. And Motown Junkies is an infrequently-updated blog looking at (so far) the first 693 tracks released on Motown singles. There is a Complete Motown Singles 1959-62 box available from Hip-O-Select with comprehensive liner notes, but if you just want the music, I recommend instead this much cheaper bare-bones box from Real Gone Music. And this three-CD set contains the group's complete discography up to mid-1966 -- the Gladys Horton years. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript When we left the Tamla Motown family of labels, a couple of months back, they'd finally had their first big hit with Barrett Strong's "Money", and the label was starting to pull together the full creative team that would be responsible for its later successes. But while "Money" is a great record, it's not a record with what would later become known as the "Motown Sound" -- it sounds far more like a Ray Charles record than the records that would later make Motown's name. So today, we're going to look at the first number one to come out of Motown -- a record that definitely did have the Motown sound, and which established the label as the sound of young America. Today, we're going to look at "Please Mr. Postman": [Excerpt: The Marvelettes, "Please Mr. Postman"] The story of the Marvelettes starts with Gladys Horton, who lived in the small town of Inkster in Michigan. When Horton was only fourteen, she had formed a group called the Del-Rhythmettes, who made one single, "Chic-A-Boomer": [Excerpt: The Del-Rhythmettes, "Chic-A-Boomer"] That had got a little bit of airplay on local radio, but had otherwise been unsuccessful, and the Del-Rhythmettes had split up. But Gladys still wanted to make music, and she started looking around for other people to sing with. One who caught her eye was a young girl who would appear in the High School talent contests, named Georgia Dobbins. By the time Gladys got to high school herself, Georgia had graduated, but Gladys persuaded her to join a group she put together for her own talent contest entry. The group she formed originally jokingly named themselves the Casinyettes -- because they "can't sing yet" -- and that was the name under which they performed at the talent contest. There was a reason that Gladys wanted Georgia for this talent contest -- this one had, as its first prize, the chance of an audition at Motown. Motown was still a small label, but it had started to have hits, and everyone in Michigan with an interest in music knew about Berry Gordy. In particular, Motown had just released "Shop Around" by the Miracles. Smokey Robinson had written that song, and it had been released to no real effect. The record had been pulled, and another version released. THAT had had no success either, and then at three o'clock in the morning Berry Gordy had suddenly realised that the record needed a new, faster, arrangement. He'd phoned up Smokey and told him to get the group together and into the studio, before he lost the inspiration, even though it was the middle of the night. They did, and the second version of "Shop Around" was pulled and replaced with the new third version, which went to number two on the pop charts and sold a million copies: [Excerpt: The Miracles, "Shop Around"] So Motown were now in the big leagues, and the chance of recording for them was an exciting one, and one that the girls, and Gladys in particular, wanted. The Casinyettes at this point consisted of Gladys, Georgia, Georgeanna Tillman, Katherine Anderson, and Juanita Cowart -- I've also seen Juanita's name reported as Wyanetta, and can't find anything which definitively says which it was. At the talent show, they sang "Maybe" by the Chantels: [Excerpt: The Chantels, "Maybe"] The group came fourth -- but one of their teachers, Shirley Sharpley, knew the person from Motown who was arranging the auditions, and persuaded them to offer auditions to the top five, rather than just to the winners. The Cansinyettes went to their audition, and Motown were interested, but told them they had to come up with something original before they'd be signed. They went back to Inkster and got to work. A friend of Georgia, William Garrett, had started a blues song about a postman, and Georgia worked on his idea, writing most of the lyrics and recasting it as something less bluesy. But then Georgia had to quit the group. Her father hadn't known she was singing until she brought the record contract home for him to countersign -- as she was under twenty-one, she needed a parent to sign it, and her mother was too ill. Her father believed the entertainment industry to be sinful, and wouldn't sign. She was so depressed that she gave up singing altogether, and by her own account didn't sing a note until 1978. By the time they came back to Motown with the beginnings of a song, Georgia had been replaced by Wanda Young, though the remaining group members were still singing her song. The song was decent, but it needed work. The group were assigned to Brian Holland, who had a listen to the song and had a brainwave. Holland and his brother Eddie were both on Motown staff at the time, but before joining Motown Holland had been in a group called the Fidelitones. The Fidelitones had recorded some tracks for Aladdin, produced by Gordy, in the late fifties but they'd never been released: [Excerpt: The Fidelitones, "Is It Too Late?"] Holland had stayed in touch with Freddie Gorman, another member of the group. Gorman still had musical ambitions, and he would pop into Motown every day after he finished work -- as a postman. So when Gorman popped in that day, Holland asked him to chip in ideas for the song and use his experience to make it more realistic -- though there's nothing much in the finished song that would seem to require expertise. Gorman became one of five credited writers on the song, along with Holland, Georgia Dobbins, William Garrett, and Holland's normal songwriting partner Robert Bateman, who worked with Holland as a songwriting and production team called "Brianbert". Before moving into production, Bateman had been a member of the Satintones, who had made several unsuccessful records for Motown, including this one that was a knock-off of "There Goes My Baby": [Excerpt: The Satintones, "My Beloved"] The Casinyettes weren't the first girl group to be signed to the label -- Motown had already signed one girl group, a group called the Primettes, who had been renamed and who had so far released two singles: [Excerpt: The Supremes, "I Want a Guy"] But the Supremes, as they were renamed, wouldn't become successful for several years, and were generally regarded as a joke among the Motown staff, who thought -- not entirely without reason -- that they had been signed more because Berry Gordy was attracted to Diane Ross, one of the members of the group, than because of any talent they had. One of the girls, though, Florence Ballard, was very popular at Motown, and was generally regarded as being helpful and friendly. She worked with Gladys on her lead vocal part, and helped her craft her performance. The production that Brian Holland crafted for the song was very heavy on the percussion -- along with piano player Popcorn Wylie, guitarist Eddie Willis, and bass player James Jamerson, the backing musicians included a percussion player, Eddie "Bongo" Brown, and two drummers -- the normal session drummer on most of the Motown recordings, Benny Benjamin, and a young man who had been a member of the last lineup of the Moonglows before Harvey Fuqua had moved over to working for the Gordy family labels, and who was now doing whatever he could around the studio, named Marvin Gaye. There was one final change that needed to be made -- The Casinyettes was obviously a joke name, and they needed a better one. The name they were eventually given supposedly came after Berry Gordy heard them sing and said "those girls are marvels". The Marvelettes were born, and their first single was the catchiest thing Motown had put out to that point: [Excerpt: The Marvelettes, "Please Mr. Postman"] "Please Mr. Postman" became the second million seller from Motown, and its first number one on the pop charts. It only stayed there for one week, but that one week was all that was needed -- Motown was now a label that everyone in the industry had to notice. And "Please Mr. Postman" was the record that saved Motown. I've talked before about how a hit record could put a small label out of business -- they had to pay for the records to be pressed up and distributed, but it would be many months before the distributors would actually pay them the money they were owed. And many distributors would not pay at all -- they reasoned that a small label wasn't going to be able to do anything about it if they didn't pay, so why bother? The only leverage a small label with a big hit had was a second big hit. If they had another record the distributors wanted from them, then they could tell the distributors they wouldn't get it until they paid up. And after "Shop Around" sold a million copies, Motown's follow-ups had all sold poorly. They were running out of money, and they needed another hit quickly before they went bankrupt altogether. Berry Gordy had, early on, given the label a slogan -- Create, Make, and Sell -- because he wanted to make great records and then have them sell a lot of copies -- but around this time he realised that there was no point in selling the records if they didn't get paid for them. So reasoning that "create" and "make" were near-synonyms, he changed that slogan to Create, Sell, and Collect. By being a second million-seller for Motown, "Please Mr. Postman" ensured that they got paid for the first one. If it hadn't come along, it's possible that Motown would just be a footnote in histories of Chess Records -- "Chess also distributed a handful of records from a small Detroit label owned by Harvey Fuqua's brother-in-law, who co-wrote several hits for Jackie Wilson, before that label went bankrupt." But as it is, the Marvelettes were now big stars. For the followup, Berry Gordy wanted to do something that was as close to the hit as possible . This would be the policy from this point on with Motown -- if someone had a hit, the same producers and songwriters would be assigned to come up with something that sounded like the hit, and the artist would only go in a different direction once they stopped having hits with their original formula. In this case, the Marvelettes' second single was designed not only to capitalise on their original hit, but on the popularity of the Twist craze, and so they released "Twistin' Postman": [Excerpt: The Marvelettes, "Twistin' Postman"] "Twistin' Postman" went top forty, but it didn't do anything like as well as "Please Mr. Postman". But just as with their first single, one of the group brought in a new song which brought them back to the top ten, if not number one. This time it was Gladys, who came up with a song called "Playboy", which Brian Holland, Robert Bateman, and Mickey Stevenson rewrote, and which made number seven on the pop charts and number four on the R&B charts. [Excerpt: The Marvelettes, "Playboy"] Meanwhile, Freddie Gorman had continued working with Brian Holland as well, and had put out a single under his own name, "The Day Will Come": [Excerpt: Freddie Gorman, "The Day Will Come"] Unfortunately, that wasn't a success, and Freddie had to continue on his post rounds. That also meant that his songwriting partnership with Holland came to an end -- Freddie kept finding that when he came round to Hitsville after work, if Brian Holland had had an idea for a song, he'd already finished it -- usually with the help of his brother Eddie and their new writing partner Lamont Dozier. And there were problems brewing for the Marvelettes, too. They'd felt all along that they were looked down on a bit by the people from Detroit, who thought of them as hicks from the sticks because they came from Inkster. They were so self-conscious about this that it led to the first member leaving the group. They appeared on American Bandstand, and Juanita said that Detroit was a suburb of Inkster, when she'd meant to say that Inkster was a suburb of Detroit. She felt so bad about this slipup and the way she was mocked for it that she had a breakdown, and ended up leaving the group. That didn't bother Motown too much -- when "Please Mr. Postman" had been a hit but the girls had been at school, it had been suggested that they could just send any five girls out on the road as the Marvelettes, until the girls put their foot down about that. Not only that, but at one point when Wanda had been pregnant, Motown had replaced her on the road with Florence Ballard from the Supremes -- the contracts for that tour had specified five Marvelettes, the Supremes were the least successful group on Motown at the time, and the girls got on well with Florence. If Motown were willing to do that, they were definitely willing to have the group just carry on with one member gone, and just make sure the contracts said there would be four Marvelettes. They carried on as a four-piece group, and had a few more records, mostly written and produced by Smokey Robinson but with others like Mickey Stevenson and Marvin Gaye sometimes contributing, but while those records did okay on the R&B charts, they didn't have much success on the pop charts, mostly getting to around number fifty. At one point, Motown started to wonder if they needed to change things up a little -- they put out a single by the group with Gladys and Wanda singing a dual lead, and with the group joined by Motown's in-house backing vocal group The Andantes. The record was put out under the name The Darnells, but was unsuccessful: [Excerpt: The Darnells, "Too Hurt Too Cry, Too Much In Love To Say Goodbye”] Unfortunately for them, they missed the chance at a really big hit. Holland, Dozier, and Holland had written a song for them, but Gladys didn't like it, she thought it was too simplistic, and so they took it to the group who were still known within Motown as the no-hit Supremes. We'll be looking at "Where Did Our Love Go?" in more detail next year. Eddie Holland did cowrite a hit for them with Norman Whitfield, though -- though it wasn't a monster hit like "Where Did Our Love Go?", it did give all the girls a chance to have a solo spot, a rarity for them: [Excerpt: The Marvelettes, "Too Many Fish in the Sea"] That took them back into the top thirty, and made the top five on the R&B chart. It would be the last hit that they would have with Georgeanna in the group, though -- she'd been diagnosed with sickle-cell anaemia as a child, and the constant strain of touring made her more ill. The tours had been a shock for all of them, to be honest. Their first major national tour was the first Motor Town Revue in 1962 -- a tour with a lineup that seems preposterously good these days. All of Motown's major acts, and several acts that weren't yet major but soon would be, were on the same bill -- the Miracles, Mary Wells, the Marvelettes, the Temptations, Marv Johnson, Stevie Wonder, the Contours, Marvin Gaye, Martha and the Vandellas, the Supremes, and Singing Sammy Ward. The girls had grown up in Michigan, and while they had an intellectual understanding that the South was different, they were unprepared for the realities of segregation, of not being able to use public toilets or eat in the same restaurants that white people did. That was awful enough, but there was also the fact that all those acts were on the same bus. And starting the year before, there had been the phenomenon of Freedom Riders -- black people from the North who had been coming down to the south to sit in whites-only seats on Greyhound buses, to protest segregation. In several places in the South, the sight of a lot of black people on a bus brought the Freedom Riders to mind, and people actually took pot-shots at the bus. A couple of years living like that took an immense toll on Georgeanna's health, and she started suffering from unexplained fatigue. Eventually it was realised that she had lupus, an autoimmune disease which is now largely treatable if not curable, but at the time was often a death sentence. She retired from music, going to work for Motown as a secretary instead. She died in 1980, aged only thirty-six. The remaining three carried on as a trio, and they were about to have a second commercial wind. After a couple of flop follow-ups to "Too Many Fish in the Sea", Smokey Robinson took over their production, and decided to start using Wanda as the lead vocalist, rather than Gladys, who had sung lead on their hits up to that point. "Don't Mess With Bill", their first single of 1966, became their first top ten pop hit since "Playboy" in early 1962: [Excerpt: The Marvelettes, "Don't Mess With Bill"] Robinson also wrote the marvellous "The Hunter Gets Captured by the Game" for the group: [Excerpt: The Marvelettes, "The Hunter Gets Captured by the Game"] Or, at least, he wrote it for Wanda. By this point, while the records were getting released as by "the Marvelettes", Robinson was only using Wanda for lead vocals, and having the Andantes sing all the backing vocals. The explanation for this was generally that the group were on tour all the time, and it was easier to make the records without them and then get Wanda just to sing the lead, and the other members reluctantly accepted that, but it rankled. There were other problems, too. Juanita and Georgeanna had been the glue holding the group together -- they'd been the ones who had been friends with all the others. Katherine, Gladys, and Wanda, hadn't known each other before forming the group, and they started to discover that they weren't hugely fond of each other now. At first, they still worked well together, each having their assigned area of responsibility -- Gladys was a combination musical director and choreographer, working out the group's setlists and dance moves, Katherine was the spokesperson in interviews, and looked after the group's money, and Wanda was the lead singer. This worked for a while, but as Katherine would later put it, when there had been five of them, they'd been friends. Now they were somewhere between acquaintances and co-workers. And then in 1967, Gladys decided to leave the group. This made the group an even lower priority for Motown -- while Wanda was by now the undisputed lead singer, within Motown they were thought of as Gladys' group, as she'd been the leader in the beginning. Motown did decide to get someone else in to replace her. They could cope with the group going from five members to four, and from four to three -- three women, after all, was still a girl group. But once they'd got down to two members, they needed a third. Harvey Fuqua suggested Ann Bogan, who he'd discovered a while before and recorded a few duets with: [Excerpt: Harvey and Ann, "What Can You Do Now?"] Ann was a sort of general utility singer around Motown -- she'd sung with the Andantes and the Challengers Three, and she'd also gone out on the road with Marvin Gaye, subbing for his duet partner Tammi Terrell, when the latter had become sick with the brain tumour that eventually killed her. Ann replaced Gladys, and the group made two further albums, and Ann was at least allowed to sing on album tracks. The group continued having R&B hits, but while they kept releasing great records like "Destination: Anywhere", they were by now barely scraping the hot one hundred on the pop charts: [Excerpt: The Marvelettes, "Destination: Anywhere"] And Wanda was having problems. She'd been doing too much cocaine and drinking too much, and was starting to act strangely. Then in 1969 her younger sister was shot dead, by her other sister's estranged husband (who seems to have thought he was shooting the other sister), and to compound matters while the group were on tour in Europe someone spiked Wanda's drink. She was never the same again, and has had mental health problems for the last fifty years. The group split up, though nothing was announced -- they just didn't get booked on any more tours, and went their separate ways. Bogan went on to join a group called Love, Peace, and Happiness, who had a minor hit with a song that had been, coincidentally, co-written by Katherine, who wrote it for Gladys Knight: [Excerpt: Love, Peace, and Happiness, "I Don't Want to Do Wrong"] That group then joined with Harvey Fuqua in a seventeen-piece funk band called New Birth, with Bogan singing on their hit "I Can Understand It": [Excerpt: New Birth, "I Can Understand It"] Motown decided to give the Marvelettes one more try, and in 1970 they got Wanda in to record an album titled The Return of the Marvelettes. This was essentially a solo album, produced by Smokey Robinson, but they did try to get Katherine to appear on the cover photograph. She told the label that if she wasn't good enough to sing on the record, she wasn't good enough to appear on the cover, either, and so the cover, like the record, only featured Wanda of the original Marvelettes. Over the next few decades, various groups toured under the Marvelettes name, none featuring any of the original members -- Motown, rather than the women, had owned the group name, and had sold it off. Gladys, Katherine, and Juanita were busy being homemakers, and Wanda and Georgeanna were too ill to consider a music career. Then in the late 1980s, Ian Levine entered the picture. Levine is a British DJ who at the time owned and ran Motor City Records, which put out new recordings by people who had released records on Motown in the sixties. He got over a hundred former Motown artists to record for him, and one album he put out was a Marvelettes reunion of sorts -- he managed to persuade Gladys and Wanda out of retirement to make a new Marvelettes album with two new backing vocalists, Echo Johnson and Jean Maclean. The new record was a mixture of remakes of their old hits and new songs by Levine, like "Secret Love Affair": [Excerpt: The Marvelettes, "Secret Love Affair"] Wanda was still too ill to perform regularly, but Gladys went out on tour on the oldies circuit, singing her old hits as "Gladys Horton of the Marvelettes", as none of the group owned the original name. She and Katherine were in the process of suing to regain the name under the Truth in Music Act, when she died of a stroke in 2011. Of the other Marvelettes, Katherine and Juanita are retired, though Katherine still gives regular interviews about her time with the group, and Wanda's mental health has apparently improved enough in the last few years that she can perform again. They're all apparently happy with their situations now, and don't miss the old life. They do miss the recognition, though. For the twenty-fifth, fortieth, fiftieth, and sixtieth anniversary celebrations of Motown, TV specials were produced featuring many of the label's acts, and honouring the label's history. None of the members of the first group to hit number one on the label were invited to be part of any of them.

america tv love women history money game europe uk peace fall truth happiness michigan south detroit north high school sea miracles cd robinson holland twist aladdin playboy temptations stevie wonder collect motown levine marvin gaye smokey greyhound tilt ray charles new birth gorman mixcloud bateman rock music postman supremes smokey robinson gordy dozier bogan berry gordy contours freedom riders my baby shop around jackie wilson american bandstand vandellas moonglow lamont dozier mary wells bobby vee take good care tammi terrell marvelettes inkster british djs brian holland twistin barrett strong nelson george james jamerson is it too late motown sound norman whitfield hitsville where did our love go tamla motown robert bateman ian levine mickey stevenson william garrett tilt araiza

Bobby Hutton

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 30, 2019 37:20

Harold ‘Bobby’ Hutton began singing at the age of five. His professional career began In Detroit, Michigan after he won a talent show at the 20 Grand club and was invited to Motown by Mickey Stevenson where he was paired as a songwriter with Raynoma Gordy, however things didn’t go to plan and success came from a different city – Chicago

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William 'Mickey' Stevenson

70's Soul, Funk & Disco with Ady Crampton

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 24, 2019 88:40

From Motown's inception to his departure for pastures new in 1967, Mickey Stevenson was responsible for hiring the artistes, songwriters and musicians, pairing them together, placing tracks with artistes, production and arrangements, choreography, distribution and promotion. Here Mickey chats with Ady about those exciting times

music soul hits funk disco charts stevenson oldies seventies ady 70's mickey stevenson

Ep. 113 - MICKEY STEVENSON ("Dancing in the Street")

Songcraft: Spotlight on Songwriters

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 16, 2019 73:49

The Motown legend behind "Dancing in the Street," "Stubborn Kind of Fellow," "It Takes Two," "Devil with a Blue Dress On," and "Beechwood 4-5789" opens up about his life and career. EPISODE DETAILS: PART ONE Scott and Paul talk about Pearl Snap Studios, their new rock star Patreon subscriber, Motown's 60th anniversary, and that lost Marvin Gaye album. PART TWO - 12:43 mark Scott heads over to Mickey’s house to get the lowdown on why he almost stormed out of his first meeting with Berry Gordy; how he assembled Motown’s legendary Funk Brothers; the trick he used to convince Marvin Gaye to ditch jazz and become an R&B singer; why “Dancing in the Street” was a message song -- but not the message many people think; the pep talk he would give to Motown’s artists and songwriters; the reason he’d have to kick a young Stevie Wonder out of the studio; why he’s a champion of songwriting collaborations over writing solo; and the real reason he departed Motown. ABOUT MICKEY STEVENSON William “Mickey” Stevenson was hired as Motown Records’ first A&R Director, signing a variety of artists to the label including The Four Tops and Stevie Wonder. He assembled the legendary Motown studio band known as the Funk Brothers and produced such Motown classics as “What Becomes of the Brokenhearted” and “Uptight (Everything is Alright).” As a songwriter, Stevenson partnered with Marvin Gaye to write The Marvelettes' hit “Beechwood 4-5789,” as well as Gaye’s own hit recordings of “Stubborn Kind of Fellow,” “Hitch Hike,” and “Pride and Joy.” Mickey is perhaps best known as the co-writer of “Dancing in the Street,” a massive hit for his former assistant, Martha Reeves, that was written with Gaye and Ivy Jo Hunter. The song was inducted into the Library of Congress’s National Recording Registry and the Grammy Hall of Fame. Additional hits from the pen of Mickey Stevenson include “Devil with a Blue Dress On” for Mitch Ryder & The Detroit Wheels, “Ask the Lonely” for The Four Tops, “Nothing’s Too Good for My Baby” for Stevie Wonder, “It Take Two” for Marvin Gaye and Kim Weston, and “It Should Have Been Me” for Gladys Knight and the Pips. The long list of artists who’ve recorded Mickey’s songs includes Diana Ross, Otis Redding, Wilson Pickett, Little Richard, The Jackson 5, The Everly Brothers, Bruce Springsteen, Bonnie Raitt, Rod Stewart, Phil Collins, Tina Turner, Dusty Springfield, The Kinks, Van Halen, David Bowie, Mike Jagger, The Rolling Stones, and many others.

Mickey Stevenson Part 1

Hot Topics w/ Ms. Marjon

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 28, 2019 20:10

In-depth interview with Mickey Stevenson...the 1st A&R Executive of Motown Records

motown records mickey stevenson

Mickey Stevenson Part 2

Hot Topics w/ Ms. Marjon

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 28, 2019 18:30

In-depth interview with Mickey Stevenson...the 1st A&R Executive of Motown Records

motown records mickey stevenson

COOL CRITICS - REBROADCAST - WILLIAM "MICKEY" STEVENSON / MOTOWN

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 25, 2017 117:00

Tonight, THE COOL CRITICS are taking a vacation, or are on hiatus. From time to time, THE COOL CRITICS feature different people when they have passed on, like B.B. King, and current people who are alive like the Black guy who won CHOPPED from New York, and Anthony AK King. We've lost quite a few people in our lifetime, and it's not going to stop. This week, while the COOL CRITICS are on vacation, we will rebroadcast the feature I did on William "Mickey" Stevenson, who was an extremely key element in the success of MOTOWN Records, still the greatest record story to this date. Thank you for joining us this week, and don't forget THE COOL CRITICS return live next week.

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FFR show#47 (Mickey Stevenson, Tinashe and Claude McKnight

Film Festival Radio

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 31, 2016 62:00

Guests are author Mickey Stevenson, Take 6's Claude McKnight and pop singer Tinashe.

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allLEGACYaccess with guest: Motown Records first A&R Mickey Stevenson

NexxLegacy Radio

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 3, 2016 179:00

Host: Charles I am branded Madison Guest: Mickey Stevenson Guest Mickey Stevenson has been granted Access to Nexxlegacy to discuss all new things Mickey Stevenson Celebrate what radio has to offer by calling in (713)955-0720 www.nexxlegacy.com

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THE COOL CRITICS / WILLIAM "MICKEY" STEVENSON - "Dancing In The Streets"

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 12, 2015 119:00

It's BEGINNING TO NOT LOOK like it's Christmas. Today, Saturday in the midwestern area - Ohio, it was 69 degrees on average. Not a spec of snow in sight, and looks like Christmas was long ago, about 4 months, OR has about 4 months before it gets here. The temeperature is so off, it's scary! Maybe the DON'T SUPPORT CHRISTMAS SPENDING has reached the justice gods and nature is setting the scene NOT TO BUY this season to end a lot of this chaos and rhetoric minorities have been suffering. It's hard to say, let the media twist their story the way they want to for their ratings - not necessarily the truth. Anyway today, I was talking to Tony Marshall, the B Man about a book he read, he said interested him, by William MICKEY Stevenson from Motown. I remember I did a show on him, and thought it would be to play the show again. This story should be told over and over for people to understand how many ingredients it took to put Motown together, and Jay King - where is MY book I was promised???? The JKN.

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THE COOL CRITICS / MICKEY STEVENSON - DANCING IN THE STREETS

Play Episode Listen Later May 23, 2015 119:00

On the Saturday before MOTHER'S DAY, the cool critics did a show on MOTHERS. A dedication to mothers. A week ago because B.B. King died, the Cool Critics did a show on BB King. Both of the shows are available via BlogTalk to download if you want. THIS WEEK, after having William "Mickey" Stevenson on KINGS IN THE MORNING, I was thoroughly impressed of what that man brought to MOTOWN Records. Mickey Stevenson put Motown Records on the map with his writings, with his producing, with his organization. I saw his name on records, but I never knew how valuable William "MICKEY" Stevenson was the the Motown foundation. With a great foundation like MOTOWN has become, where do you think, the Commodores, Rick James, The Jackson 5, the many many MANY artists that Berry Gordy Jr & the MOTOWN company created, exposed, manufactured and more would have been had there not been a Motown Music Empire? Today, you will hear his words, his works and learn some information on a piece of Motown. Thank you for joining us!

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KINGS IN THE MORNING/NEWS/MOTOWNS MICKEY STEVENSON DISCUSSES NEW BOOK/WILD WED