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Acudimos a nuestra cita mensual con el Billboard de hace 60 años. Selección de singles que alcanzaron su puesto más alto en listas de pop estadounidense en abril de 1965.(Foto del podcast; Freddie and The Dreamers)Playlist;(sintonía) MONGO SANTAMARIA “El Pussy Cat” (top 97)FREDDIE and THE DREAMERS “I’m telling you now” (top 1)WAYNE FONTANA and THE MINDBENDERS “Game of love” (top 1)THE KINKS “Tired of waiting for you” (top 6)THE ANIMALS “Don’t let me be misunderstood” (top 15)THE SEARCHERS “Bumble bee” (top 21)THE WHO “I can’t explain” (top 93)JR. WALKER and THE ALL STARS “Shotgun” (top 4)MARTHA and THE VANDELLAS “Nowhere to run” (top 8)BRENDA HOLLOWAY “When I’m gone” (top 25)CANNIBAL and THE HEADHUNTERS “Land of 1000 dances” (top 30)SHIRLEY ELLIS “The Clapping Song (Clap Pat Clap Slap)” (top 8)THE IKETTES “Peaches n’ cream” (top 36)OTIS REDDING “Mr Pitiful” (top 41)JAN and DEAN “(Here they come) From all over the world” (top 56)THEE BEACH BOYS “Do you wanna dance’” (top 12)CHUCK BERRY “Dear dad” (top 95)THE UNIQUES feat JOE STAMPLEY “Not too long ago” (top 66)THE MOODY BLUES “Go now” (top 10)BILLY VAUGHN and HIS ORCHESTRA “Mexican pearls” (top 94)FRANK SINATRA “Anytime at all” (top 46)Escuchar audio
durée : 00:59:29 - Restez un peu - par : Nathalie Piolé -
The Jam reprend "Heatwave" de Martha & the Vandellas
A companion piece to Radio Rewind, join Dustin as he spins some 45s of songs from the Billboard Hot 100 this week in 1965 & 1975. One hour of hits from the 60s & 70s to enjoy before the gang returns on Friday with your normal dose of Radio Rewind hits. This week we enjoy some singles from The Eagles, Martha & the Vandellas, Al Green, Beach Boys, Michael Jackson, and more.
Label: Gordy 7056Year: 1966Condition: MPrice: $32.00This beautiful copy has pristine audio... awesome to hear this classic in its original pounding clarity. This is a first pressing with the "It's in the grooves" Gordy label. There were many label variations on this release. This copy has the title and artist at the bottom of the label, with no quotes. Note: This beautiful copy has Mint labels with a drillhole. The vinyl looks untouched, and the audio is pristine Mint. (This scan is a representative image from our archives.)
We're celebrating our 10th anniversary all year by digging in the vaults to re-present classic episodes with fresh commentary. Today, we're revisiting our milestone 100th episode with the legendary Lamont Dozier! ABOUT LAMONT DOZIERLamont Dozier, along with brothers Eddie and Brian Holland, wrote and produced more than 20 consecutive singles recorded by the Supremes, including ten #1 pop hits: “Where Did Our Love Go,” “Baby Love,” “Come See About Me,” “Stop! In the Name of Love,” “Back in My Arms Again,” “I Hear a Symphony,” “You Can't Hurry Love,” “You Keep Me Hangin' On,” “Love is Here and Now You're Gone,” and “The Happening.” Other Top 5 singles they wrote for the Supremes include “My World is Empty Without You” and “Reflections.” In addition to their hits with the Supremes, Holland, Dozier, and Holland helped further define the Motown sound by writing major pop and R&B hits such as “Heat Wave,” “Nowhere to Run,” and “Jimmy Mack” for Martha and the Vandellas, “Mickey's Monkey” for the Miracles, “Can I Get a Witness” and “You're a Wonderful One” for Marvin Gaye, and “(I'm A) Road Runner” for Junior Walker and the All Stars. The trio found particular success with The Four Tops, who scored hits with their songs “Baby I Need Your Loving,” “I Can't Help Myself (Sugar Pie Honey Bunch),” “It's the Same Old Song,” “Reach Out I'll Be There,” “Standing in the Shadows of Love,” and “Bernadette.” Additional hits include “Crumbs Off the Table” for Glass House, “Give Me Just a Little More Time” for Chairmen of the Board, “Band of Gold” for Freda Payne, and Dozier's own recording of “Why Can't We Be Lovers.” Hit cover versions of his songs by rock artists include “Don't Do It” by the Band, “Take Me in Your Arms (Rock Me a Little While)” by the Doobie Brothers, “How Sweet It Is (To Be Loved By You)” by James Taylor, and “This Old Heart of Mine” by Rod Stewart. With hits spanning multiple decades, Dozier also co-wrote “Two Hearts” with Phil Collins, earning a #1 pop hit, a Grammy award, a Golden Globe, and an Oscar nomination. Dozier is in the Songwriters Hall of Fame and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. He is the recipient of the prestigious Johnny Mercer Award for songwriting, as well as the BMI Icon award. Lamont Dozier was additionally named among Rolling Stone magazine's 100 Greatest Songwriters of All Time.
Hoy en La Gran Travesía viajamos hasta el año 1965, hace justo 60 años, y donde podréis escuchar a Bob Dylan, The Supremes, Otis Redding, Rolling Stones, Them, Beatles, Who, Donovan, Martha and the Vandellas, The Byrds, Animals, Beach Boys, Yardbirds…entre muchos otros. También recordaros que ya podéis comprar La gran travesía del rock, un libro interactivo que además contará con 15 programas de radio complementarios, a modo de ficción sonora... con muchas sorpresas y voces conocidas... https://www.ivoox.com/gran-travesia-del-rock-capitulos-del-libro_bk_list_10998115_1.html Jimi y Janis, dos periodistas musicales, vienen de 2027, un mundo distópico y delirante donde el reguetón tiene (casi) todo el poder... pero ellos dos, deciden alistarse al GLP para viajar en el tiempo, salvar el rock, rescatar sus archivos ocultos y combatir la dictadura troyana del FPR. ✨ El libro ya está en diversas webs, en todostuslibros.com por ejemplo https://www.mdemagica.es/libro/gran-travesia-del-rock-la_53628 ▶️ Y ya sabéis, si os gusta el programa y os apetece, podéis apoyarnos y colaborar con nosotros por el simple precio de una cerveza al mes, desde el botón azul de iVoox, y así, además podéis acceder a todo el archivo histórico exclusivo. Muchas gracias también a todos los mecenas y patrocinadores por vuestro apoyo: Gezkurra, Tete García, Jose Angel Tremiño, Marco Landeta Vacas, Oscar García Muñoz, Raquel Parrondo, Javier Gonzar, Eva Arenas, Poncho C, Nacho, Javito, Alberto, Tei, Pilar Escudero, Utxi 73, Blas, Moy, Juan Antonio, Dani Pérez, Santi Oliva, Vicente DC,, Leticia, JBSabe, Huini Juarez, Flor, Melomanic, Noni, Arturo Soriano, Gemma Codina, Raquel Jiménez, Francisco Quintana, Pedro, SGD, Raul Andres, Tomás Pérez, Pablo Pineda, Quim Goday, Enfermerator, María Arán, Joaquín, Horns Up, Victor Bravo, Fonune, Eulogiko, Francisco González, Marcos Paris, Vlado 74, Daniel A, Redneckman, Elliott SF, Guillermo Gutierrez, Sementalex, Jesús Miguel, Miguel Angel Torres, Suibne, Javifer, Matías Ruiz Molina, Noyatan, Estefanía, Iván Menéndez, Niksisley y a los mecenas anónimos.
THE PODCAST AMLooking back onSolid Gold Soul, I came across some radio memories from WJMO AM Cleveland dating back to 1995 on YouTube. The show featured Solid Gold Soul with David Jackson, which was also broadcasted on WELS-FM in Kinston, NC. I used to listen to Solid Gold Soul frequently and still recall the catchy jingle celebrating classic soul hits from the 60s and 70s. They showcased incredible tracks like Martha Reeves & the Vandellas' “Honey Chile, Third Finger, Left Hand,” which I mistakenly believed was called "Wedding Band." They also played Aretha Franklin's “The House That Jack Built” and Tina Charles' “I'll Go Where Your Music Takes Me.” It puzzles me why radio stations that play such great hits eventually change formats. They often transition to genres like Gospel or Country. I think a station like that could easily incorporate Gospel on Sundays and Country on Saturdays, while still showcasing the beloved soul hits throughout the week. I really miss Solid Gold Soul.I'm Gail Nobles. You're listening to the Podcast AM. A show about the AM Stories on the Cat Bear.
Viajamos 60 años atrás en el tiempo en busca de singles que alcanzaron su puesto más alto en el Billboard Hot 100 en enero de 1965.(Foto del podcast por R. McPhedran; Petula Clark con el disco de oro por “Downtown”, 1965)Playlist;(sintonía) LEE MORGAN “The sidewinder part 1” (top 81)PETULA CLARK “Downtown” (top 1)SHIRLEY ELLIS “The name game” (top 3)MARTHA and THE VANDELLAS “Wild one” (top 3)THE MARVELETTES “Too many fish in the sea” (top 25)MARVIN GAYE “How sweet it is to be loved by you” (top 6)MARY WELLS “Use your head” (top 34)THE LARKS “The jerk” (top 7)THE CONTOURS “Can you jerk like me” (top 47)JAMES BROWN and THE FAMOUS FLAMES “Have mercy baby” (top 92)BROOK BENTON “Do it right” (top 67)JOE TEX “Hold what you got” (top 5)THE IMPRESSIONS “Amen” (top 7)RAY CHARLES “Makin’ whoope” (top 46)WILLIE MITCHELL “Percolatin’” (top 85)CANDY and THE KISSES “The 81” (top 51)THE EXCITERS “I want you to be my boy” (top 98)CHAD and JEREMY “Willow weep for me” (top 15)Escuchar audio
Hoy recordamos en La Gran Travesía uno de los sellos más importantes del soul-pop de la década de los 60. El sello Motown nacía en primavera de 1958, y pronto se asentaría como uno de las compañías discográficas más importantes con músicos como Stevie Wonder, Marvin Gaye, The Supremes, Martha and The Vandellas, Smokey Robinson and The Miracles, The Four Tops, The Temptations, The Marvelettes, Barrett Strong... También recordaros que ya podéis comprar La gran travesía del rock, un libro interactivo que además contará con 15 programas de radio complementarios, a modo de ficción sonora... con muchas sorpresas y voces conocidas... https://www.ivoox.com/gran-travesia-del-rock-capitulos-del-libro_bk_list_10998115_1.html Jimi y Janis, dos periodistas musicales, vienen de 2027, un mundo distópico y delirante donde el reguetón tiene (casi) todo el poder... pero ellos dos, deciden alistarse al GLP para viajar en el tiempo, salvar el rock, rescatar sus archivos ocultos y combatir la dictadura troyana del FPR. ✨ El libro ya está en diversas webs https://npqeditores.com/producto/la-gran-travesia-del-rock/ ▶️ Y ya sabéis, si os gusta el programa y os apetece, podéis apoyarnos y colaborar con nosotros por el simple precio de una cerveza al mes, desde el botón azul de iVoox, y así, además podéis acceder a todo el archivo histórico exclusivo. Muchas gracias también a todos los mecenas y patrocinadores por vuestro apoyo: Jose Angel Tremiño, Marco Landeta Vacas, Oscar García Muñoz, Raquel Parrondo, Javier Gonzar, Eva Arenas, Poncho C, Nacho, Javito, Alberto, Tei, Pilar Escudero, Utxi 73, Blas, Moy, Juan Antonio, Dani Pérez, Santi Oliva, Vicente DC,, Leticia, JBSabe, Huini Juarez, Flor, Melomanic, Noni, Arturo Soriano, Gemma Codina, Raquel Jiménez, Francisco Quintana, Pedro, SGD, Raul Andres, Tomás Pérez, Pablo Pineda, Quim Goday, Enfermerator, María Arán, Joaquín, Horns Up, Victor Bravo, Fonune, Eulogiko, Francisco González, Marcos Paris, Vlado 74, Daniel A, Redneckman, Elliott SF, Guillermo Gutierrez, Sementalex, Jesús Miguel, Miguel Angel Torres, Suibne, Javifer, Matías Ruiz Molina, Noyatan, Estefanía, Iván Menéndez, Niksisley y a los mecenas anónimos.
Hoy en La Gran Travesía os dejamos la segunda parte del especial dedicado al año 1964, donde podréis escuchar a Martha Reeves and The Vandellas, The Kinks, The Supremes, Bob Dylan, Four Seasons, Beach Boys, The Beatles, High Numbers, Roy Orbison, Marianne Faithfull, James Brown, Rolling Stones, Davie Jones, Dixie Cups...y muchos más. También recordaros que ya podéis comprar La gran travesía del rock, un libro interactivo que además contará con 15 programas de radio complementarios, a modo de ficción sonora... con muchas sorpresas y voces conocidas... https://www.ivoox.com/gran-travesia-del-rock-capitulos-del-libro_bk_list_10998115_1.html Jimi y Janis, dos periodistas musicales, vienen de 2027, un mundo distópico y delirante donde el reguetón tiene (casi) todo el poder... pero ellos dos, deciden alistarse al GLP para viajar en el tiempo, salvar el rock, rescatar sus archivos ocultos y combatir la dictadura troyana del FPR. ✨ El libro ya está en diversas webs https://npqeditores.com/producto/la-gran-travesia-del-rock/ ▶️ Y ya sabéis, si os gusta el programa y os apetece, podéis apoyarnos y colaborar con nosotros por el simple precio de una cerveza al mes, desde el botón azul de iVoox, y así, además podéis acceder a todo el archivo histórico exclusivo. Muchas gracias también a todos los mecenas y patrocinadores por vuestro apoyo: Jose Angel Tremiño, Marco Landeta Vacas, Oscar García Muñoz, Raquel Parrondo, Javier Gonzar, Eva Arenas, Poncho C, Nacho, Javito, Alberto, Tei, Pilar Escudero, Utxi 73, Blas, Moy, Juan Antonio, Dani Pérez, Santi Oliva, Vicente DC,, Leticia, JBSabe, Huini Juarez, Flor, Melomanic, Noni, Arturo Soriano, Gemma Codina, Raquel Jiménez, Francisco Quintana, Pedro, SGD, Raul Andres, Tomás Pérez, Pablo Pineda, Quim Goday, Enfermerator, María Arán, Joaquín, Horns Up, Victor Bravo, Fonune, Eulogiko, Francisco González, Marcos Paris, Vlado 74, Daniel A, Redneckman, Elliott SF, Guillermo Gutierrez, Sementalex, Jesús Miguel, Miguel Angel Torres, Suibne, Javifer, Matías Ruiz Molina, Noyatan, Estefanía, Iván Menéndez, Niksisley y a los mecenas anónimos.
John Lennon Talks about Canada Connect the Dots Before They Were Famous - Neil Diamond Tribute to Cissy Houston This Week in Music History Andy Kim talks about dreaming of being a musician as a child The Five Second Quiz Ed Sullivan talks about Beatlemania Behind the Hits - Martha and the Vandellas
This week, hosts Jim DeRogatis and Greg Kot celebrate the spooky season by revisiting their favorite songs about witches and ghosts.Join our Facebook Group: https://bit.ly/3sivr9TBecome a member on Patreon: https://bit.ly/3slWZvcSign up for our newsletter: https://bit.ly/3eEvRnGMake a donation via PayPal: https://bit.ly/3dmt9lUSend us a Voice Memo: Desktop: bit.ly/2RyD5Ah Mobile: sayhi.chat/soundops Featured Songs:The Head and the Heart, "Ghosts," The Head and the Heart, Sub Pop, 2011The Beatles, "With a Little Help from My Friends," Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, Parlophone, 1967The Kinks, "Wicked Annabella ," The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society, Pye, 1968Donovan, "Season of the Witch," Sunshine Superman, Epic, 1966Jethro Tull, "The Witch's Promise," The Witch's Promise (Single), Chrysalis, 1970Martha and the Vandellas, "Mobile Lil The Dancing Witch," Dance Party, Motown, 1965Monster Magnet, "19 Witches," Powertrip, A&M, 1998Radiohead, "Burn the Witch," A Moon Shaped Pool, XL, 2016Bettye LaVatte, "Witch Craft in the Air," Witch Craft in the Air (Single), LuPine, 1963Florence + the Machine, "Which Witch (Demo) [Bonus Track]," How Big, How Blue, How Beautiful, Island, 2015Roky Erickson and the Aliens, "If You Have Ghosts," The Evil One, 415, 1981Joy Division, "Dead Souls," Still, Factory, 1981Psychedelic Furs, "The Ghost in You," Mirror Moves, Columbia, 1984Suicide, "Ghost Rider," Suicide, Red Star, 1977Johnny Cash, "(Ghost) Riders in The Sky," Silver, Columbia, 1979Caroline Herring, "Long Black Veil," Golden Apples of the Sun, Signature Sounds, 2009Daniel Johnston, "Casper the Friendly Ghost," Yip/Jump Music, (Self-Released), 1983Robyn Hitchcock & The Egyptians, "My Wife and My Dead Wife," Gotta Let This Hen Out!, Midnight Music, 1985The Raveonettes, "Apparitions," Raven in the Grave, The Raveonettes, 2011Mekons, "Ghosts of American Astronauts," So Good It Hurts, Twin/Tone, 1988Ladytron, "Ghosts," Velocifero, Nettwerk Productions, 2008The Goldstars, "Stroll In Hell," Stroll In Hell (Single), The Goldstars, 2021Black Sabbath, "Black Sabbath," Black Sabbath, Vertigo, 1970Umphrey's McGee, "The Floor," Death By Stereo, ATO, 2011See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
Seleccionamos canciones que alcanzaron su puesto más alto en el Billboard Hot 100 en octubre de 1964. En este mes de hace 60 años los ingleses Manfred Mann consiguen un número 1. Pero es la escudería Motown la que saca pecho frente la invasión británica y coloca un buen puñado de bandas en la zona alta de las listas, con mención especial para The Supremes que comenzaban a consolidar su reinado de éxitos.(Foto del podcast; The Temptations)Playlist;(sintonía) BILLY STRANGE “The James Bond heme” (top 58)MANFRED MANN “Do wah diddy diddy” (top 1)THE SUPREMES “Baby love” (top 1)MARTHA and THE VANDELLAS “Dancing in the street” (top 2)FOUR TOPS “Baby I need your lovin” (top 11)THE TEMPTATIONS “Girl (why you wanna make me blue)” (top 26)SANDY NELSON “Teen beat 65” (top 44)THE BEACH BOYS “When I grow up to be a man” (top 9)THE HONDELLS “Little Honda” (top 9)JAN and DEAN “Ride the wild surf” (top 16)WILLIE MITCHELL “20-75” (top 31)THE BLENDELLS “La la la la la” (top 62)CHAD and JEREMY “A summer song” (top 7)THE BEATLES “Matchbox” (top 17)BILLYJ KRAMER and THE DAKOTAS “From a window” (top 23)DON COVAY and THE GOODTIMERS “Mercy mercy” (top 35)THE IMPRESSIONS “You must belive me” (top 15)THE KINGSMEN “Death of an angel” (top 42)DEL SHANNON “Do you want to dance” (top 43)THE JELLY BEANS “Baby be mine” (top 51)Escuchar audio
Welcome to Episode 62 of Sounds Like Radio as we get to dancin' at the hop. Marjorie wants to dance and so does Georgia Gibbs, Fred Astaire, Bing Crosby, Little Eva, Madeleine Peyroux, Frankie & Martha Reeves and her Vandellas. It's all happening in today's show which features the Great Gildersleeve 5/18/49 episode as we dance before and after with Your Humble Host toe tappin' all the way. AND NEXT WEEK ALL NEW SOUNDS LIKE RADIO shows RETURN!!!
National Sour candy day. Entertainment from 2005. Great fire of Rome, Wrong Way Corrigan ends up in Ireland, Ted Kennedy crashes at chappaquiddick & kills Mary Jo Kopechne. Todays birthdays - Unsinkable Molly Brown, Hume Cronyn, John Glenn, Screamin Jay Hawkins, Dion, James Brolin, Martha Reeves, Ricky Skaggs, Vin Diesel, Kristin Bell. Jane Austen died.Intro - Pour some sugar on me - Def Leppard https://defleppard.com/tour/Sour candy - Lady Gaga and BlackpinkWe belong together - Mariah CareyAs good as I once was - Toby KeithMy happiness - Elvis PresleyIt's raining tacos - Perry GrippI put a spell on you - Screamin Jay HawkinsWanderer - DionDancing in the streets - Martha & the VandellasCountry boy - Ricky SkaggsFollow Jeff Stampka on Facebook and cooolmedia.com
The sun has finally been shining in France and so Andy kicks off with a few to take on that summer heat with The Isley Brothers, Jackie Wilson, Martha and The Vandellas and The Lovin' Spoonful. The three Northern Soul Stonkers are chosen by fellow Face Radio DJ Brendan Farrell, there's a new one from Thee Sacred Souls and we reach the end of the alphabet of songs with women's names as Andy played you Y and Z.For more info and tracklisting, visit :https://thefaceradio.com/groovy-soulTune into new broadcasts of Groovy Soul, LIVE, Sundays 12 - 2 PM EST / 5 - 7 PM GMT.https://thefaceradio.com/archives/groovy-soul//Dig this show? Please consider supporting The Face Radio: http://support.thefaceradio.com Support The Face Radio with PatreonSupport this show http://supporter.acast.com/thefaceradio. Join the family at https://plus.acast.com/s/thefaceradio. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
This week on the Music Halls of Fame Podcast, we discuss the year in music for 1995, along with Rock and Roll Hall of Fame class of 1995 inductees Martha & The Vandellas. We also look at the case for putting Sonic Youth into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Plus, our spotlight Hall of Fame is the ARIA Hall of Fame in Melbourne, Australia & inductees INXS. Music Podcast Playlist - youtube.com/playlist?list=PLSMDYrumQfYSM-vspc6F2gPmq2JRmquTY For more music history, subscribe to my Spotify Channel or subscribe to the audio version of my music history podcasts, wherever you get your podcasts from ALL MUSIC HISTORY TODAY PODCAST NETWORK LINKS - https://allmylinks.com/musichistorytoday Rock and Roll Hall of Fame - RockHall.com ARIA Hall of Fame - artscentremelbourne.com.au --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/musichistorytodaypodcast/message Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/musichistorytodaypodcast/support
Leo Schumaker's Bluesland music podcast from June 20, 2024. Here is music for your summertime. Rick Estrin and The Nightcats, Martha and The Vandellas, Jeff Beck, B.B. King, Little Feat, Howlin' Wolf and more. Check out the live show Thursday's 7-9 PM. Thanks for listening and supporting KMRE 88.3 FM.
The Richard Syrett Show, June 19th, 2024 Fact-free debate sees Yonge-Dundas Square renamed https://torontosun.com/opinion/columnists/fact-free-debate-sees-yonge-dundas-square-renamed Brian Lilley – Columnist with Post Media THE CULT OF CLIMATE CHANGE Climate change and urban violence https://www.sipri.org/commentary/blog/2024/climate-change-and-urban-violence-critical-knowledge-gap Is Climate Change Driving Home Insurance Higher? https://slate.com/business/2024/06/floods-storms-inflation-florida-texas-home-insurance-climate-change-economy.html Tony Heller – Geologist, Weather Historian, and the Founder of Real Climate Science dot com Dr. Fauci's new book “On Call” comes out this week, what should we expect? https://apnews.com/article/anthony-fauci-memoir-june-on-call-c1a5ffac822ab31e791a63f69ccfd61d https://www.yahoo.com/news/5-takeaways-from-dr-anthony-faucis-new-memoir-173444297.html RFK Jr. is on track to miss the CNN debate amid race to get on state ballots https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2024-election/rfk-jr-miss-cnn-debate-race-get-state-ballots-rcna157290 Tony Lyons, Co-Founder of American Values 2024, the RJK Jr., SuperPac, Attorney, and President of Skyhorse Publishing Big win on the pride propaganda front! Molson's Toronto brewery decides NOT to replace its huge Canadian flag with a rainbow flag https://www.rebelnews.com/big_win_on_the_pride_propaganda_front_molson_s_toronto_brewery_decides_not_to_replace_its_huge_canadian_flag_with_a_rainbow_flag David Menzies – Rebel News Mission Specialist THIS DAY IN ROCK HISTORY Dancing in the Streets – Martha and The Vandellas I Feel the Earth Move – Carole King Frankenstein – Edgar Winter Key West – Bob Dylan 1964 - Martha and the Vandellas Martha and the Vandellas recored one of Motown's signature songs 'Dancing in the Street' at Hitsville U.S.A. in Detroit, Michigan. Written by Marvin Gaye, William "Mickey" Stevenson and Ivy Jo Hunter the song reached No.2 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart and No.4 in the UK. Many artists have covered the song including, the Mamas & the Papas, David Bowie and Mick Jagger, The Kinks, Grateful Dead and Little Richard. 1971 - Carole King Carole King started a five week run at No.1 on the US singles chart with 'It's Too Late / I Feel The Earth Move'. Both songs were from her million selling Tapestry album. 1973 - Edgar Winter Edgar Winter's US No.1 hit 'Frankenstein' was awarded a Gold record. Winter named the song because of how many cuts and patches were contained in the original studio tape. 2020 - Bob Dylan Bob Dylan released his 39th studio album Rough and Rowdy Ways. It became Dylan's highest-charting album on the Billboard 200 in more than a decade and it marked his seventh consecutive decade of charting top 40 albums, making him the only artist to date to accomplish this feat. Jeremiah Tittle – Co-Host of “The 500 with Josh Adam Myers” Podcast. CEO/Founder of Next Chapter Podcasts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Here's two more packed hours of 1960s dance music from Slim Harpo, Chris Clark, Martha & The Vandellas, Barbara Lewis, Big Maybelle, The Dells, Bobby Bland, Timi Yuro and many more! Originally broadcast June 9, 2024 Willie Mitchell / That Driving BeatSlim Harpo / Shake Your HipsBilly Watkins / Go Billy GoChris Clark / Love's Gone BadThe Fantastic Four / Ain't Love WonderfulThe Capitols / Zig - ZaggingMartha & The Vandellas / I'm Ready for LoveOtis Brown & Band / Will You WaitThe Coasters / (When She Wants Good Lovin') My Baby Comes to MeP.J. Proby / You Can't Come Home Again (If You Leave Me Now)Jackie Ross / Haste Makes WasteClarence Murray / Don't Talk Like ThatThe Drifters / Baby What I MeanJames & Bobby Purify / Wish You Didn't Have To GoBarbara Lewis / I Remember the FeelingBig Maybelle / Eleanor RigbyBud Spudd And The Sprouts / The MashBobby Bland / Getting Used To The BluesJames Brown / James Brown's Boo-Ga-LooBrenda & The Tabulations / Hey BoyGabriel & The Angels / Don't Wanna Twist No MoreFrankie Valli / (You're Gonna) Hurt YourselfThe Swingin' Medallions / Don't Cry No MoreChris Clark / Put Yourself In My PlaceWillie Tee / I Want Somebody (To Show Me the Way Back Home)The Dells / There IsBarbara George / If You ThinkHowlin' Wolf / Pop It to MeThe Diplomats / Hey, Mr Taxi DriverSonny Hines / Nothing Like Your LoveBobby Harris / More of the JerkTimi Yuro / I Ain't Gonna Cry No MoreThe Shirelles / Are You Still My BabyThe O'Jays / I'll Never Let You GoThe Drifters / He's Just a PlayboyJackie Wilson / I'm So LonelyFats Domino / Something You Got BabyJewel Akens / Little Bitty Pretty OneBarbara Lewis / My Heart Went Do Dat DaDusty Springfield / A Brand New Me Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Remembering Bill Walton: Basketball Star and Grateful Dead SuperfanIn this episode of the Deadhead Cannabis Show, Larry Mishkin covers various topics, including a historic Grateful Dead show, personal concert experiences, and music news. Larry starts with a deep dive into the Grateful Dead's June 3, 1976, concert at the Paramount Theater in Portland, Oregon. This show marked the band's return after a year-long hiatus, featuring five new songs and a revived tune from a four-year break. He highlights the opening track, written by Jerry Garcia and Robert Hunter, which nostalgically reflects on the band's Festival Express tour, a legendary 1970 train journey across Canada with prominent rock bands.Larry then discusses the song "Lazy Lightning," introduced at the same 1976 concert. Written by Bobby and John Perry Barlow, it became a fan favorite for its melody and message of living in the moment, though it was retired from the Grateful Dead's repertoire by 1984. He transitions into music news by honoring Doug Ingle of Iron Butterfly, who recently passed away. Larry reminisces about the band's iconic 1968 track "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida" and its influence on the late 60s music scene.The podcast also pays tribute to Bill Walton, the legendary basketball player and devoted Deadhead who passed away at 71. Larry shares stories of Walton's deep connection with the Grateful Dead, including his record of attending 869 concerts, significantly more than his total basketball games played. Larry recounts Walton's influence on fellow athletes and his unique presence at Dead shows.Finally, Larry describes his recent experience at a Dead & Company concert at the Sphere in Las Vegas. He marvels at the venue's immersive visual technology, which enhanced the concert experience, likening it to a planetarium. Despite the advanced visuals sometimes overshadowing the music, Larry enjoyed the performance and the unique atmosphere. He also mentions a mini-exhibition featuring Dave Lemieux's tape collection and the significance of tape trading in Grateful Dead fandom.In summary, this episode covers a blend of Grateful Dead history, personal concert experiences, tributes to influential music figures, and the latest in concert technology, providing a rich narrative for Deadheads and music enthusiasts alike. Grateful DeadJune 3, 1976 (48 Years Ago)Paramount TheaterPortland, ORGrateful Dead Live at Paramount Theatre on 1976-06-03 : Free Borrow & Streaming : Internet Archive First show back after 1975 year offPrior show: Sept. 28, 1975 – last of the four shows in 1975, this show is 9 months later. Long wait for Deadheads. Dead did not disappoint with five new songs and a breakout after a 4 year hiatus. INTRO: Might As Well Track #1 1:15 – 2:50 “Take that ride again” Might as Well” is a song written by Jerry Garcia with lyrics penned by Robert Hunter. Released on Garcia's 3d solo album, Reflections, in February, 1976. It's one of the tracks from Garcia's solo career, showcasing his musical versatility and unique ability to transform personal experiences into joyful music. The song takes a nostalgic look back at the Grateful Dead's time on the Festival Express Tour, a memorable rail trip that brought together prominent artists of the '60s for a raucous, whisky-fueled journey across America. Festival Express is the 1970 train tour of the same name across Canada taken by some of North America's most popular rock bands, including Grateful Dead, Janis Joplin, The Band, Buddy Guy, Flying Burrito Bros, Ian & Sylvia's Great Speckled Bird, Mountain and Delaney & Bonnie & Friends. Later made into a movie Festival Express was staged in three Canadian cities: Toronto, Winnipeg, and Calgary (Montreal and Vancouver were also originally scheduled but both dropped) during the summer of 1970. Rather than flying into each city, the musicians traveled by chartered Canadian National Railwaystrain, in a total of 14 cars (two engines, one diner, five sleepers, two lounge cars, two flat cars, one baggage car, and one staff car).[5] The train journey between cities ultimately became a combination of non-stop jam sessions and partying fueled by alcohol. One highlight of the documentary is a drunken jam session featuring The Band's Rick Danko, the Grateful Dead's Jerry Garcia and Bob Weir, New Riders of the Purple Sage's John Dawson, as well as Janis Joplin. Here, it is played as the show opener. Ultimately, became more of a first set closer, a popular one along with Deal, another Garcia solo tune. Played 111 times First: June 3, 1976 at Paramount Theatre, Portland, OR, USA THIS SHOW 19 times that year Last: March 23, 1994 at Nassau Veterans Memorial Coliseum, Uniondale, NY, USA – only time played that year, 6 times in ‘91 SHOW No. 1: Lazy Lightning Track #6 0:00 – 1:46 Written by Bobby and John Perry Barlow, paired with Supplication in concert and released with Supplication as the opening tracks on the album, Kingfish, released in March, 1976. Lazy Lightning is often interpreted as a metaphorical representation of the pursuit of a carefree and leisurely lifestyle amidst the chaos and hardships of reality. The lyrics depict a whimsical scenario where the protagonist encounters a bolt of lightning that transforms into a woman, symbolizing the allure and transitory nature of fleeting pleasures. The song encourages listeners to embrace the present moment and let go of the rigid expectations and responsibilities that burden their lives. It is a celebration of spontaneity, freedom, and the pursuit of personal bliss. Lazy Lightning became a fan favorite due to its infectious melody, poetic lyrics, and the sense of liberation it evoked. Grateful Dead fans often resonated with the song's message of embracing the present moment and shedding societal expectations. It became a rallying cry for those seeking to live life on their own terms, igniting a sense of camaraderie and freedom among concert-goers. Usually, a late first set number. Unfortunately, dropped from the repertoire in 1984. I got to hear it three or four times. A fun number. Played: also played 111 timesFirst: June 3, 1976 at Paramount Theatre, Portland, OR, USA THIS SHOW!!Last: October 31, 1984 at Berkeley Community Theatre, Berkeley, CA, USA MUSIC NEWS – Intro music: In A Gadda Da Vida: IRON BUTTERFLY - IN A GADDA DA VIDA - 1968 (ORIGINAL FULL VERSION) CD SOUND & 3D VIDEO (youtube.com)Start - :45 is a song recorded by Iron Butterfly, written by band member Doug Ingle and released on their 1968 album of the same name.At slightly over 17 minutes, it occupies the entire second side of the album. The lyrics, a love song from the biblical Adam to his mate Eve, are simple and are heard only at the beginning and the end. The middle of the song features a two-and-a-half-minute Ron Bushy drum solo. Famously featured on a Simpson's episode when Bart switches the organist's regular music for this tune and hands out the words to the congregation who sing along. The older organ player plays the entire organ solo (although they only feature a part of it) and then at the end promptly slumps over at the keyboard. Featured today as a tribute to Doug Ingle, songwriter, keyboard player and vocalist for the song, who passed away on May 24th at the age of 78. He was the last surviving member of the original band lineup.Bill Walton passed away on last Monday, May 27th at the all too young age of 71. Couldn't miss him at the shows, 7 foot redhead dancing away or else up on stage.Dead & Co. at the Sphere, saw the June 1st show. SHOW No. 2: Supplication Track #7 2:00 – 3:30 Written by Bobby and John Perry Barlow, paired with Lazy Lightning in concert and released with Lazy Lightning as the opening tracks on the album, Kingfish, released in March, 1976. The song delves into the universal theme of the human experience, specifically emphasizing the concept of surrender and humility. It explores the idea of surrendering oneself to a higher power, relinquishing control, and embracing the unknown. The lyrics touch upon the vulnerability and humility required to let go and trust in something beyond our comprehension. Supplication encourages listeners to reflect upon their own lives, urging them to question their beliefs, values, and the significance of surrendering to a greater force. Played: 111 times (a good number for the lottery, keeps coming up), always paired with Lazy LightningFirst: June 3, 1976 at Paramount Theatre, Portland, OR, USA THIS SHOW!!Last: October 31, 1984 at Berkeley Community Theatre, Berkeley, CA, USA SHOW No. 3: Dancin In the Streets Track #11 0:00 – 1:42 "Dancing in the Street" is a song written by Marvin Gaye, William Stevenson, and Ivy Jo Hunter. It first became popular in 1964 when recorded by Martha and the Vandellas whose version was released on July 31, 1964 and reached No. 2 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart for two weeks, behind "Do Wah Diddy Diddy" by Manfred Mann and it also peaked at No. 4 on the UK Singles Chart. It is one of Motown's signature songs and is the group's premier signature song.A 1966 cover by the Mamas & the Papas was a minor hit on the Hot 100 reaching No. 73. In 1982, the rock group Van Halen took their cover of "Dancing in the Street" to No. 38 on the Hot 100 chart and No. 15 in Canada on the RPM chart. A 1985 duet cover by David Bowie and Mick Jagger charted at No. 1 in the UK and reached No. 7 in the US. The song has been covered by many other artists, including The Kinks, Tages, Black Oak Arkansas, Grateful Dead, Little Richard, Myra and Karen Carpenter. I saw it as the first night show opener on June 14, 1985 at the Greek Theater as part of the band's 20 Anniversary celebration. A really fun concert tune. The 1970's versions always had strong Donna support backing up Bobby's lead vocals. This show was the first time the band had played the song since Dec. 31, 1971 (203 shows) Played: 131 timesFirst: July 3, 1966 at Fillmore Auditorium, San Francisco, CA, USALast: April 6, 1987 at Brendan Byrne Arena, East Rutherford, NJ, USA MJ NEWS Blake Schneider passed away May 27th at 69. Legendary cultivator who created the best strain of marijuana I ever smoked. We just called it Blake weed and put it up against any other strain, anywhere, any time. Folks would say they had the best weed until I let them smoke some of the Blake weed. They never failed to concede. Eccentric, temperamental, hospitable, mentor and good friend. And self titled “best joint roller in the worlds.” Was one of my Bulls season ticket partners during the Jordan era. Every home game began with a pregame at Blake's loop residences including great wines, gourmet appetizers and snacks, top shelf liquor (on the way out the door we always did our “Go Bulls” shots) and more marijuana than anyone should ever smoke. With four of us in the room, he would have 3 joints circulating at all times. With his ever present life partner, Jeanne, an evening at Blakes was as much fun as the actual game itself. Ran into a problem with the Green County Sheriff, but gave them the finger when the feds took the case over and Blake only had to serve 11 months at a fed minimum risk prison instead of the 20 years that Green County said was a done deal given the number of plants he was growing at his farm house in Argyle, WI. They were not happy campers when the feds moved in to take over the case due to the value of the property they could sieve and force Blake to buy back from them. Blake was a true party legend and will be sorely missed by those of us that knew him, loved him and tolerated him. 2. Marijuana Terpenes Are ‘As Effective As Morphine' For Pain Relief And Have Fewer Side Effects, New Study Finds 3. CBD Is Effective In Treating Anxiety, Depression And Poor Sleep, Study Finds4. Marijuana And Hemp Businesses At Odds Over Consumable Cannabinoid Ban In House Farm Bill SHOW No. 4: Samson and Delilah Track #12 0:00 – 1:45 "Samson and Delilah" is a traditional song based on the Biblical tale of Samson and his betrayal by Delilah. Its best known performer is perhaps the Grateful Dead, who first performed the song live in 1976, with Bobby singing lead vocals and in the ‘70's with Donna joining in. It was frequently played on Sundays due to the biblical reference. Released by the band in 1977 on their album Terrapin Station. Although Weir learned the song from Reverend Gary Davis, several earlier versions had been recorded under various titles, including "If I Had My Way I'd Tear the Building Down"/"Oh Lord If I Had My Way" by Blind Willie Johnson in 1927.[1] The song has since been performed by a wide variety of artists ranging from Dave van Ronk, Bob Dylan, Charlie Parr, The Staple Singers, Ike and Tina Turner, Clara Ward, Dorothy Love Coates & The Gospel Harmonettes, to Peter, Paul and Mary, The Washington Squares, The Blasters, Willie Watson, Elizabeth Cook, Robert Randolph and the Family Band, and Bruce Springsteen and the Seeger Sessions Band (in Verona, Italy 2006). Guest star Simon Oakland sings the song with the drovers around a campfire in the Rawhide episode "Incident of the Travellin' Man", aired in season six on October 17, 1963. A long time favorite tune with a distinctive drummers intro that tipped off the song and got the crowd fired up. Settled into a set opener, more frequently a second set opener and often played on Sundays due to its biblical reference with Bobby's “This being Sunday . .” Played: 365 timesFirst: June 3, 1976 at Paramount Theatre, Portland, OR, USA THIS SHOWLast: July 9, 1995 at Soldier Field OUTRO: The Wheel Track #22 2:48 – 4:30 One of their most beloved songs, “The Wheel,” holds a special place in the hearts of fans worldwide. Written by Jerry Garcia, Robert Hunter, and Bill Kreutzmann, this folk-rock anthem has captivated listeners with its enigmatic lyrics and catchy melody. The song's meaning has been widely debated among enthusiasts, and its cryptic nature has allowed for multiple interpretations. “The Wheel” reflects the transient nature of life, offering a philosophical perspective on the cycles we all experience. The lyrics suggest that life is like a wheel, constantly turning and repeating itself. The song evokes a sense of impermanence and reminds us of the cyclical patterns we encounter throughout our existence. This theme resonates strongly with the band's philosophy and their connection to the spiritual and psychedelic culture of the late 1960s and early 1970s. “The Wheel” was released on the Grateful Dead's album “Garcia” in 1972. “The Wheel” is characterized by its infectious melody and intricate guitar work. The song showcases the Grateful Dead's ability to seamlessly blend folk, rock, and improvisational elements into a cohesive piece of music. Normally, a second set tune, into or out of drums/space although it moved around a bit in the second set. Here it is the encore which is more of a rarity. Played 259 times First: June 3, 1976 at Paramount Theatre, Portland, OR, USA THIS SHOW Last: May 25, 1995 at Memorial Stadium, Seattle, WA .Produced by PodConx Deadhead Cannabis Show - https://podconx.com/podcasts/deadhead-cannabis-showLarry Mishkin - https://podconx.com/guests/larry-mishkinRob Hunt - https://podconx.com/guests/rob-huntJay Blakesberg - https://podconx.com/guests/jay-blakesbergSound Designed by Jamie Humiston - https://www.linkedin.com/in/jamie-humiston-91718b1b3/Recorded on Squadcast
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…
Como cada comienzo de mes te ofrecemos nuevo capítulo de esta serie dedicada a recordar singles que alcanzaron su puesto más alto en el Billboard Hot 100 hace 60 años. Viajamos a mayo de 1964, el mes en donde, tras tres meses con The Beatles en el top1 de las listas, por fin dos artistas estadounidenses vuelven a alcanzar la cima, Louis Armstrong y Mary Wells. La factoría Motown sigue afianzándose como el gran baluarte de resistencia a los invasores británicos, el soul sigue creciendo como nueva tendencia musical, Chuck Berry reaparece tras su estancia carcelaria y Henry Mancini mantiene en lo alto la música instrumental.Playlist;(sintonía) HENRY MANCINI “The Pink panther theme” (top 31)SAMMY KAYE “Charade” (top 36)LOUIS ARMSTRONG “Hello Dolly!” (top 1)MARY WELLS “My guy” (top 1)THE BEATLES “Love me do” (top 1)THE DAVE CLARK FIVE “Bits and pieces” (top 4)DUSTY SPRINGFIELD “Stay awhile” (top 38)THE REFLECTIONS “(Just like) Romeo and Juliet” (top 6)THE RONETTES “(The best part of) Breakin’ up” (top 39)JAN and DEAN “Dead man’s curve” (top 8)CHUCK BERRY “Nadine (is it you?)” (top 23)THE VIBRATIONS “My girl Sloopy” (top 26)THE KINGSMEN “Money (that’s what I want)” (top 16)THE WAILERS “Tall cool one” (top 38)MARTHA and THE VANDELLAS “In my lonely room” (top 44)IRMA THOMAS “Wish someone would care” (top 17)OTIS REDDING “Come to me” (top 69)THE COASTERS “T’ain’t nothin’ to me” (top 64)KING CURTIS “Soul serenade” (top 51)Escuchar audio
Aujourd'hui on se penche sur "Hitch-Hike" de Marvin Gaye et sur les débuts de l'un des artistes phares de la Motown. PLAYLIST Marvin Gaye The Marquees, "Wyatt Earp" Billy Stewart, "Billy's Heartache" Bo Diddley, "Diddley Daddy" Chuck Berry, "Back in the USA" Harvey and the Moonglows, "Mama Loochie" Harvey and the Moonglows, "Twelve Months of the Year" Etta James, "All I Could Do Was Cry" Marvin Gaye, "Let Your Conscience Be Your Guide" The Marvelettes, "Please Mr. Postman" Little Stevie Wonder, "I Call It Pretty Music, But the Old People Call it the Blues". The Spinners, "That's What Girls are Made For" The Marvelettes, "Beechwood 4-5789" Marvin Gaye, "Stubborn Kind of Fellow" Marvin Gaye, "What Kind of Fool Am I ?" Marvin Gaye, "Hitch-Hike" Martha and the Vandellas, "Hitch-Hike"
L'épisode d'aujourd'hui est consacré à "I Can't Help Myself" des Four Tops, et constitue la deuxième partie d'une série de trois épisodes consacrés à la Motown de 1965. PLAYLIST FOUR TOPS The Four Tops, "I Can't Help Myself" The Four Aims, "She Gave Me Love" The Four Tops, "Kiss Me Baby" Ray Charles, "Kissa Me Baby" The Classics, "If Only the Sky Was a Mirror" The Four Tops, "This Can't be Love" The Supremes, "Run Run Run" Martha and the Vandellas, "My Baby Loves Me" The Four Tops, "Baby I Need Your Loving" The Four Tops, "I Can't Help Myself" The Supremes, "Where Did Our Love Go ?" The Four Tops, "I Can't Help Myself" The Four Tops, "I Can't Help Myself" The Four Tops, "It's the Same Old Song" The Four Tops, "Loving You is Sweeter Than Ever" The Supremes, "You Keep Me Hanging On" Vanilla Fudge, "You Keep Me Hanging On" The Four Tops, "Reach Out I'll Be There" The Four Tops, "Reach Out I'll Be There" The Temptations, "Ain't Too Proud to Beg" The Four Tops, "Bernadette" The Four Tops, "Walk Away Renee" The Four Tops, "If I Were a Carpenter" The Four Tops, "When She Was My Girl" The Four Tops, "Loco in Acapulco"
This week, trying (and mostly failing) to have more music and less chat, Glenn joins Matt in the studio for two hours of 60s R&B, soul, garage, ska, and more.Featuring tracks from The Jam, The James Taylor Quartet, Martha & The Vandellas and The Sonics.Tune into new broadcasts of Blow-Up, Sunday from 8 - 10 AM EST / 1 PM - 3 PM GMT, in association with Brisbane's 4ZZZ.For more info visit: https://thefaceradio.com/blow-up///Dig this show? Please consider supporting The Face Radio: http://support.thefaceradio.com Support The Face Radio with PatreonSupport this show http://supporter.acast.com/thefaceradio. Join the family at https://plus.acast.com/s/thefaceradio. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Dancefloor Memories with Patrick Hawkins, 60 Minutes of Classic Soul Podcast. Classic tracks, from, Freda Payne, Martha Reeves and the Vandellas, The Foundations, The Isley brothers, The Trammps, Gill Scot Heron, The Chi -Lites, Jackie Wilson, Wilson Picket, Stevie Wonder, Otis Redding and Curtis Mayfield, Two tracks from the L.A Boppers and FIVE Northern Soul tracks in a row.. Just settle down with a long drink and chill or boogie around your kitchen to tracks others would never dream of playing! Spread the word, give me a like and follow my Podcasts. Much Love Pat
This episode was originally released September 27, 2023.Laura Flam is one of the authors of the book "But Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?"The book serves as an oral history of the girl groups that made up the 1960's music scene. The girl group sound, made famous by acts like The Ronettes, The Shirelles, The Supremes, and The Vandellas, took over the airwaves by capturing the mixture of innocence and rebellion emblematic of America in the Sixties. While many girl group songs rose to the top of the charts and shaped the trajectory of pop music in the process, many of the artists remain all but anonymous to most listeners. In this episode of the podcast, Frank discusses the young women behind some of the country's most popular songs. Flam reveals the challenges many of the artists faced while navigating the music industry at such a young age, and at a time when America was just beginning to reconcile a history fraught with racism. Flam also shares what became of many of the members of girl groups after music tastes changed. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
Nueva entrega del coleccionable dedicado a recordar las canciones que alcanzaron su máximo puesto en las listas del Billboard Hot 100 de este mes hace 60 años. En marzo de 1964 The Beatles se convierten ya en una fuerza arrolladora y sus numerosos singles copan toda la zona alta de las listas de ventas. Aquel mes el surf da sus últimos coletazos, los “veteranos” del rock’n’roll intentan aguantar el envite y el soul o el sonido Motown resisten fuertes al invasor.Playlist;(sintonía) THE PYRAMIDS “Penetration” (top 18)THE BEATLES “She loves you” (top 1)THE BEATLES “Please please me” (top 3)THE BEATLES “I saw her standing there” (top 14)THE BEATLES with TONY SHERIDAN “My Bonnie” (top 26)DUSTY SPRINGFIELD “I only want to be with you” (top 12)ELVIS PRESLEY and THE JORDANAIRES “Kissin’ cousins” (top 12)FREDDY CANNON “Abigail Beecher” (top 16)THE BEACH BOYS “Fun fun fun” (top 5)THE TRASHMEN “Bird dance beat” (top 30)JAMES BROWN and THE FAMOUS FLAMES “Oh baby don’t you weep” (top 23)SAM COOKE “Good news” (top 11)RAY CHARLES and HIS ORCHESTRA “Baby don’t you cry (The new swingova rhythm)” (top 39)TOMMY TUCKER “Hi heel sneakers” (top 11)RUFUS THOMAS “Can your monkey do the dog” (top 48)MARTHA and THE VANDELLAS “Live wire” (top 42)NINO TEMPO and APRIL STEVENS “Stardust” (top 32)THE SAPPHIRES “Who do you love” (top 25)DALE and GRACE “Stop and think it over” (top 8)Escuchar audio
"Birthdays, Breakouts, and Psychedelic Jams: The Legendary Grateful Dead Concert of '77"Today's show comes from February 26, 1977 at the Swing Auditorium. The show not only opens the fabulous '77 campaign and contains the first live versions of two of the truly great Dead tunes – Terrapin Station and Estimated Prophet – but it throws smoke and spits flames. The concert marked the debut of songs like "Terrapin Station" and "Estimated Prophet." Larry Mishkin delves into the significance of these songs in the Dead's repertoire, their musical and lyrical qualities, and the overall atmosphere of the concert. They also provide insights into the venue's history and its importance in rock and roll culture.Additionally, the conversation touches on other topics, such as the Fish concert series in Cancun, Mexico, and the significance of certain Grateful Dead songs like "The Wheel" and "Slipknot." Larry share personal anecdotes related to the music, including experiences at concerts and the culture surrounding marijuana use, inspired by a Commander Cody song. INTRO: Terrapin Station Track # 1 5:51 – 7:27 Garcia and Hunter Probably that point right where Deadheads think they've seen it all. The psychedelic rock, Pig's blues, Americana, Wake of the Flood, Mars Hotel and Blues For Allah. So if you had tickets for this show, you had no idea what you were in for, where the Dead were about to take you, a completely different direction, as close as the Dead would ever come to a rock-opera number. And there was no waiting, lights went out and . . . . . . . . . . . . . TURTLE MUSIC!! Clocking in just shy of 11 minutes, it's not quite the masterpiece it would become, but pretty amazing none the less. Nothing else existed at that time quite like it. But from the opening notes you know it is a winner, destined for greatness in the pantheon of great Dead tunes. One that you could hear every show and never grow tired of or bored with it. The title track from the album released on July 27, 1977, five months after this show. First studio album since they had returned to touring. Terrapin Station is the ninth studio album (fourteenth overall) by the Grateful Dead, It was the first Grateful Dead album on Arista Records The cover artwork was produced by Kelley/Mouse Studios, who had created several previous works for the band. Though a terrapin appears in the lyrics only as a place name, dancing terrapins feature prominently in the artwork and afterward became part of the large iconography associated with the Grateful Dead. The front cover image takes the idea of a "terrapin station" literally. The back cover features a stylized, one-eyed skull with a crossed bone, feathers and roses, in keeping with the imagery that had evolved around the Dead. This clip is the famous and beloved transition form Lady With A Fan into Terrapin Station, the first two parts of the seven part suite clocking in at 16:23. The other five parts are: Terrapin; Terrapin Transit; At A Siding; Terrapin Flyer and Refrain.The Grateful Dead only performed the Lady With A Fan and Terrapin Station. Dead and Co. have played the entire suite. Fun to hear, but not the same as if Jerry was playing it. Too bad he never did. Played 303 times First: This version right here that we just played for you Last: July 8, 1995 SHOW No. 1: Estimated Prophet Track #4 1:54 – 3;26 Bob and John Barlow "Estimated Prophet" was written in septuple time. Bobby's lyrics for the song (finished with writing partner John Barlow) examine a character's delusions of grandeur and California's propensity for false prophets. The song also quotes "Ezekiel Saw the Wheel".[13][14] Drummer Bill Kreutzmann said "It's a great song but when [Weir] brought it to us, something was off. It needed a groove. It was in quick4 but it didn't swing. Yet. For my homework that night, I combined two fast sevens and played half-time over it. The two sevens brought the time around to an even number – the phrasing is in two bars of seven, so technically the time signature is in. But that's getting technical. In layman's terms, 'Estimated Prophet' suddenly grooved." Released on Terrapin Station, this was its debut performance and it was well received. A fan favorite and regular part of the Band's playlist for the rest of their careers. 390 times total First: This is it right here. Last: June 28, 1995 at the Palace of Auburn Hills outside of Detroit SWING AUDITORIUM Built in 1949, the Swing Auditorium had a maximum capacity of around 10,000, but it probably sold out at only around 6000 for this Dead show. The venue's ascent into rock and roll fame began in 1962 when a man named Bob Lewis started promoting concerts there. In the ensuing decades, Lewis brought all the legends into the Swing, including Jimi Hendrix, Elvis Presley, Michael Jackson, and, of course, the Grateful Dead. But what really solidified the Swing's place amongst the hallowed venues was the American debut of the Rolling Stones there in 1964. With a mere ten-song set, the Stones stoked the hall into a fervor. The band had to drop their instruments and run for the exits before the crowd rushed the stage. For their part, the Dead played the Swing only four times before it was razed after a small plane crashed into the building on September 11, 1981. SHOW No. 2: The Wheel Track #9 :30 – 2:09 Released on January 20, 1972 as the final track on side 2 of Jerry's firs solo album, “Garcia”. The psychedelic closer it exhibits Garcia's short-lived infatuation with pedal steel guitar. great to hear in concert, although relatively short in length. Almost always a second set song and, it is high energy and always a great way for the band to transition out of Space. Played 259 times First: June 3, 1976 at the Paramount Theater in Portland Oregon Last: May 25, 1995 at Memorial Stadium in Seattle SHOW No. 3: Slipknot Track #14 11:30 – 13:10 Released on Blues For Allah in 1975 Plays a key role in a key suite and is often overlooked. The bridge between Help On The Way and Franklin's Tower it often gets lost in the jam out of Help and then into Franklin's. But it is almost always there and always a great piece of improvisational music that rarely sounds exactly the same, except for the distinctive intro/outro. Similar to I Am Hydrogen in Phish's Mike's Groove run of songs Played 114 times (Help = 111 times; Franklin's = 222 times) First: October 20, 1974 at Winterland in San Francisco Last: June 22, 1995 at the Knickerbocker Arena in Albany, NY SHOW No. 4: Eyes Of The World Track #17 5:35 – 7:07 Released on Wake of the Flood on October 15, 1973 Many a Deadheads “secret” favorite tune. It's that good. Played fast, played slow, almost always in the second set and often times as a companion piece with Estimated Prophet, the coveted “Estimated Eyes” jam. In the first part of the 1980's second sets often opened with Scarlet>Fire Estimated>Eyes OR Help>Slip>Frank Estimated>Eyes Played 382 timesFirst: February 9, 1973 at Maples Pavilion at Stanford in Palo AltoLast: July 6, 1995 at Riverport Amphitheatre in Maryland Heights, MO, just outside of St. Louis OUTRO: Dancin' In The Streets Track #18 7:40 – 9:13 “Dancin' in the Streets" is a cover of Martha & the Vandellas' "Dancing in the Street" from the early days of the band, given a new arrangement that prominently features singer Donna Godchaux. For the studio version, a funk-influenced guitar figure was added to a four-on-the-floor disco beat and polished with a commercial production contemporary to the era. Released by the Dead as the second song on Terrapin Station. Played 131 timesFirst: July 3, 1966 at the Fillmore in San FranciscoLast: April 6, 1987 at Brendan Byrne Arena in New Jersey Dead would play this tune in spurts: 28 times in 1970 27 times in 1976 14 times in 1977 and 1978 A bit of a comeback in 1984 and 1985 – 6 times each year, b Once in 1987 Gone Mishkin Law, LLC500 Skokie Blvd.Suite 325Northbrook, IL 60062Cell: (847) 812-1298Office Direct: (847) 504-1480lmishkin@mishkin.law .Produced by PodConx Deadhead Cannabis Show - https://podconx.com/podcasts/deadhead-cannabis-showLarry Mishkin - https://podconx.com/guests/larry-mishkinRob Hunt - https://podconx.com/guests/rob-huntJay Blakesberg - https://podconx.com/guests/jay-blakesbergSound Designed by Jamie Humiston - https://www.linkedin.com/in/jamie-humiston-91718b1b3/Recorded on Squadcast
Peace Funk Soul Let's Go I look out my window and what do I see ? Neil Armstrong waving to me! All funk all soul on two turntables - Matt steps in Pete and celebrates the Soul Jazz Records series Space Funk - plus classic soul from Martha Reeves & The Vandellas and Smokey Robinson & the Miracles. The hot new Chicano Soul from teenagers Thee Heart Tones. Also features Boiling Point, Fat Larry's Band, The Voice Of Q, Tim Maia, Primal Scream, The Free Association, Mexican Institute Of Sound and loads more. This show was first broadcast on the 16th of February, 2024For more info and tracklisting, visit: https://thefaceradio.com/superfly-funk-and-soul-show/Tune into new broadcasts of the Superfly Funk & Soul Show, LIVE, Friday from 10 AM - 12 PM EST / 3 - 5 PM GMT.Dig this show? Please consider supporting The Face Radio: http://support.thefaceradio.com Support The Face Radio with PatreonSupport this show http://supporter.acast.com/thefaceradio. Join the family at https://plus.acast.com/s/thefaceradio. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Diplo & HUGEL - Stay High - Tall Boys Acap Intro Shawn Mendes - Señorita - Jablonski Pala Pala Edit Fragma - Toca Me - Kide Remix Flo Rida - Right Round - DJ Serg Sniper About You Edit Kylie Minogue - Can't Get You Out Of My Head - Discodena Remix Dua Lipa - Houdini - Ligotti Remix Pitbull - Better On Me (Intro - Clean) Dev - In The Dark - Freejak Remix Far East Movement - Like a G6 - J Bruus Remix Pirates Of The Carribbean - Rumba - J Rythm & Big Syphe Puro Pari VIP Hype Edit Enur - Calabria - J Medina Hype Edit Major Lazer vs Enur - Que Calor vs Calabria - 2DEEP Festival Edit Baby Got Backed Up (Transition) (128-96) (1 Verse) ( Juvenile feat Mannie Fresh and Lil Wayne - Back That Azz Up (Clean) Snoop Dogg ft Pharrell - Drop It Like It's Hot (Clean) Snoop & Ginuwine Are So Anxious Megan Thee Stallion - Body (DJcity Intro - Clean) Travis Porter ft Tyga - Ayy Ladies (Eyecon Epic Intro - Clean - Acapella Out) Bad Bunny & Tainy - Callaita - iRony Club Edit (Clean) Jhay Cortez, J Balvin & Bad Bunny - No Me Conoce Remix - J Medina Club Edit Celia Cruz (Set It Off Fiesta PartyBreak) Clean Las Ketchup - The Ketchup Song (Aserejé) - Shubham, Rahul & Boh Mzk Remix Pitbull - Guantanamera (She's Hot) - Eddie Boy 100-120 Transition N.O.R.E. - Oye Mi Canto - J Rythm Remix (Clean) Daddy Yankee - Rompe (MORVN Remix) (Spanish - Clean)(1) 2 Tyla x Marshmello - Water (Remix) Rema & Selena Gomez - Calm Down - MUKA Remix Kevin Lyttle - Turn Me On - Spryte Mambo Edit Jack Harlow - Lovin On Me (J Bruus & James Jay Remix - Clean) Drake - Rich Baby Daddy - Lincoln Baio Higher Life Edit (Clean) My Boo (Quick Edit) - ghost town djs Lloyd - Get It Shawty Marvin Gaye & Tammi Terrell - Ain't No Mountain High Enough (Birthdayy The Four Tops - I Can't Help Myself (Sugar Pie, Honey Bunch) Smokey Robinson & The Miracles - The Tears Of A Clown 36. Dancing In The Street - Martha Reeves & The Vandellas
L'épisode d'aujourd'hui parle de "Heat Wave" de Martha and the Vandellas, et des débuts du trio de songwriters producteurs Holland-Dozier-Holland. PLAYLIST Martha and the Vandellas, "Heatwave" The Fascinations, "Girls Are Out To Get You" The Del-Phis, "I'll Let You Know" Mike Hanks, "When True Love Comes to Be" Della Reese, "Don't You Know ?" Saundra Mallett and the Vandellas, "Camel Walk" Marvin Gaye, "Stubborn Kind of Fellow" The Vells, "You'll Never Cherish A Love So True ('Til You Lose It)" Martha and the Vandellas, "I'll Have to Let Him Go" Eddie Holland, "You" Briant Holland, "(Where's the Joy) in Nature Boy ?" Les Marvelettes, "Please Mr. Postman" Eddie Holland, "Jamie" Aretha Franklin, "There Is a Fountain Filled With Blood" The Romeos, "Gone Gone Get Away" The Voice Masters, "Hope and Pray" Lamont Anthony, "Popeye the Sailor Man" Lamont Anthony, "Benny the Skinny Man" The Marvelettes, "Forever" Little Stevie Wonder, "Contract on Love" The Marvelettes, "Locking Up My Heart" Martha and the Vandellas, "Come and Get These Memories" Martha and the Vandellas, "Heat Wave" Martha Reeves and the Vandellas, "Dancing in the Street" Martha Reeves and the Vandellas, "Nowhere to Run"
The year 1985 would find the band R.E.M. in transition between college band success and the mainstream powerhouse they were to become in future years. The quartet of Michael Stipe on vocals, Mike Mills on bass and vocals, Peter Buck on guitar, and Bill Berry on percussion and backing vocals were moving towards a greater variety of instrumentation and a bit more experimentation with their third studio album, Fables of the Reconstruction.The album actually has two names, as "Fables of the Reconstruction" was the name if you held the cassette or album with one side up, and if you flipped it over the name appeared as "Reconstruction of the Fables." The suggestion of the name "Reconstruction" came from Michael Stipes' father who was a carpenter. It is also a loaded term in the American South from which the Athens, Georgia band hails — “Reconstruction” is the period of time immediately following the American Civil War when the South was being brought back into the Union. The songs on the album have a darker sound than earlier works, and the lyrics draw from Southern Gothic works. This was the first album recorded outside the U.S., as the band traveled to London to work at Livingston Studios with producer Joe Boyd.While the singles from the album would not be considered hits in the United States, the album reached number 28 on the US Billboard 200 chart, and number 35 on the UK Albums Chart. It would feature two singles, “Driver 8' and“Can't Get There from Here,” which would become well known over time.Rob brings us this transitional album for today's podcastDriver 8The second single released from the album refers to the Southern Crescent train line. It ran under the Southern Railway until 1979 when Amtrak bought them out, and continues as the Amtrak Crescent today. “And the train conductor says take a break, Driver 8.”Green Grow the RushesThis deeper cut was written as a pact between Michael Stipe and Natalie Merchant of 10,000 Maniacs, relating to the poor treatment of indigenous peoples and migrant workers. “Green grow the rushes, go. The compass points the workers home.”Maps and LegendsInspired by preacher and Southern folk artist Howard Finster, this song uses the reading of a map as a metaphor for reading a person. Like the map reveals stories in little symbols on it, people are the accumulation of their experiences and stories.Can't Get There from HereThis song was the lead single from the album and peaked at number 10 on the Bubbling Under Hot 100 Singles chart - meaning it peaked at about 110 in US popularity. It is the first R.E.M. song to have a horn section. You can sense the Soul inspiration in it. The lyrics about “Philomath” refer to an unincorporated community just outside of Athens, Georgia. ENTERTAINMENT TRACK:Weird Science by Oingo Boingo (from the motion picture “Weird Science”)Two geeky high school students create the perfect woman in this sci-fi comedy partly based on Frankenstein, and largely based on the 1951 comic “Made of the Future” by Al Feldstein. STAFF PICKS:Drive by The Cars Lynch brings us a version of the Cars single from the 1985 Live Aid concert. Bassist Benjamin Orr takes on the lead vocal duties for this ballad which was written by frequent front man Ric Ocasek. The studio version appeared on their 1984 album Heartbeat City, and became one of the bands biggest hits.Take On Me by a-haBruce features the first US hit by a Norwegian band. While a-ha released the song twice before without it becoming a hit, the third release with its video combining pencil sketch animation and live performance would propel it to the number 1 slot in the U.S. Its 2 1/2 octave-spanning chorus makes it one of the hardest songs to sing.Summertime Girls by Y & T Wayne's staff pick is a hair band rocker, the first and only hit by Y&T. It went to number 55 on the Billboard Hot 100, but was played frequently on the television series “Baywatch.” The Band Y&T was originally known as "Yesterday & Today," and although they don't have many hits they have sold over 4 million albums worldwide, and were an inspiration for Lars Ulrich of Metallica to become a musician.Dancing in the Street by David Bowie and Mick Jagger Rob closes out the staff picks with a cover originally recorded by Martha and the Vandellas in 1964 (but we all agreed that the Van Halen cover is the best there is).Jagger and Bowie's version made it to number 7 on the US chart and number 1 on the UK chart. This collaboration was their contribution to the Live Aid charity movement. NOVELTY TRACK:Tequila by The ChampsWe close out this week's podcast with the tune that helped Pee Wee Herman avoid catastrophe at the hands of a biker gang in “Pee Wee's Big Adventure.” Thanks for listening to “What the Riff?!?” NOTE: To adjust the loudness of the music or voices, you may adjust the balance on your device. VOICES are stronger in the LEFT channel, and MUSIC is stronger on the RIGHT channel.Please follow us on Facebook https://www.facebook.com/whattheriffpodcast/, and message or email us with what you'd like to hear, what you think of the show, and any rock worthy memes we can share.Of course we'd love for you to rate the show in your podcast platform!**NOTE: What the Riff?!? does not own the rights to any of these songs and we neither sell, nor profit from them. We share them so you can learn about them and purchase them for your own collections.
Nuevo capítulo de esta colección en donde recordamos canciones que alcanzaron su máximo puesto en listas estadounidenses hace exactamente 60 años. Todo lo que escuches estaba entre lo más vendido de enero de 1964, lo que nos permite ver la variedad de estilos que compartían espacio en la música popular de aquellos días. Playlist;(sintonía) DUANE EDDY “The son of rebel rouser” (top 97)BOBBY VINTON “There! I've said it again” (top 1)THE MURMAIDS “Popsicles and icicles” (top 3)NINO TEMPO and APRIL STEVENS “Whispering” (top 1)BETTY EVERETT “You’re no good” (top 51)THE EXCITERS “Do-Wah-Diddy” (top 78)THE RAINDROPS “That boy John” (top 64)THE ORLONS “Bon doo wah” (top 55)MARTHA and THE VANDELLAS “Quicksand” (top 8)THE SUPREMES “When the lovelight starts shining through his eyes” (top 23)THE MIRACLES “I’ve gotta dance to keep from crying” (top 35)JAN AND DEAN “Drag City” (top 10)THE TRASHMEN “Surfin’ bird” (top 4)SHIRLEY ELLIS “The Nitty Gritty” (top 8)TRINI LOPEZ “Kansas City” (top 10)FATS DOMINO “Who cares” (top 63)BARBARA LEWIS “Snap your fingers” (top 71)BRENDA LEE “As usual” (top 12)RAY CHARLES “That lucky old Sun” (top 20)Escuchar audio
You can't talk about Motown sound without giving respect to the girl groups of the 60s. Hits from Martha and the Vandellas, and The Supremes have resonance, even now. But we might not have hits like “Can't Hurry Love” without some of the earlier acts that ushered in the sound of the girl group — ensembles of very young women, like the Chantels and The Shirelles. "But Will You Love Me Tomorrow?: An Oral History of the '60s Girl Groups" chronicles stories of these early, iconic groups. GUESTS: Emily Sieu Liebowitz, co-author of "But Will You Love Me Tomorrow?: An Oral History of the '60s Girl Groups" Laura Flam, co-author of "But Will You Love Me Tomorrow?: An Oral History of the '60s Girl Groups" ___ Looking for more conversations from Stateside? Right this way. If you like what you hear on the pod, consider supporting our work. Music from Blue Dot Sessions and Audio Network.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
A concert was held at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium on October 28th and 29th, 1964 which would be released as a concert film called the T.A.M.I. Show. Free tickets were provided for local high school students to provide the audience. T.A.M.I. stands for either “Teenage Awards Music International” or “Teen Age Music International,” as both were used by the show's publicity team. The show included many of the top rock and roll and R&B musicians of the time, including the Beach Boys, the Rolling Stones, James Brown, Chuck Berry, and The Miracles. Jan and Dean were the emcees for the event. Motown Records was represented by three of its biggest acts in the Miracles, Marvin Gay, and the Supremes. The Rolling Stones were featured as the grand finale. However, the performance by James Brown and the Famous Flames is perhaps the highlight of the show, as it features his dance moves at the height of his career. Steve Binder and his personnel from The Steve Allen Show shot the film, and the legendary session musicians of The Wrecking Crew provided most of the instrumentation. The go-go dancers in the background were choreographed by David Winters and his assistant, a young Toni Basil.This is a difficult film to locate due to copyright disputes on the show over the years. You'll need to go to YouTube to find the performances.Wayne takes us through this concert footage of the early days of rock and roll. (Here They Come) from All Over the World by Jan and DeanThe film starts with a song from Jan and Dean which is played over the credits. Jan and Dean co-hosted the concert and contributed this anthem written for the show. It has a surfing vibe and is easily confused for The Beach Boys who also participated in the concert.Hey Little Bird by The BarbariansThe Barbarians were a precursor to the Punk movement, and their style was called garage rock in the day. The Barbarians had a one-handed drummer who utilized a drum stick in his left arm with a hook prosthetic. The group sported a pirate look with leather sandals, open necked shirts, and bloused sleeves.Out of Sight by James Brown and the Famous FlamesMany consider the highlight of the show to be James Brown's performance, as it showcases his dance moves. The energy shown by Brown and his backing singers clearly influenced future acts like Michael Jackson and Prince.Around and Around by The Rolling StonesWhile the Rolling Stones were the final act, Keith Richards claims that choosing to follow James Brown on stages was the worst decision of their careers, because no matter how well they performed, they couldn't top him. They performed a cover of Chuck Berry's song - an interesting choice since Berry was also a performer for the concert. ENTERTAINMENT TRACK:Do the Clam by Elvis Presley (from the motion picture “Girl Happy”)Elvis was making movies at the time, and would almost always be expected to sing songs in the picture. STAFF PICKS:Nowhere to Run by Martha & the VandellasBruce leads off the staff picks with a group which would see a name change to Martha Reeves & the Vandellas later on. This Motown hit written by the legendary team called Holland-Dozier-Holland went to number 8 on the US charts. The song is about a woman trapped in a downward spiraling love affair that she just can't give up.Land of 1000 Dances by Cannibal and the HeadhuntersRob features an iteration of a frequently covered song. Chris Kenner originally recorded it in 1962, but it was more successful as a cover by Cannibal & the Headhunters, going to number 30 on the Billboard chart. They also added the "na na na na na" hook to the original when front man Frankie Garcia forgot the lyrics. Sixteen dances are mentioned in the lyrics of the song.Eight Days a Week by The Beatles Lynch brings us an early hit penned by John Lennon and Paul McCartney. It would be the seventh number one single for the Fab Four in the United States, despite Lennon's feeling that it was a failed attempt at writing a single. The title is attributed to a statement Ringo Starr made regarding how busy the Beatles were at the time.Satisfied by Lulu and the LuvversWayne wraps up the staff picks with a high energy party song from a Scottish band. Lulu would go on to a successful solo career that included film songs like "To Sir With Love," and the title song for "The Man with the Golden Gun." Lulu was 17 at the time this song came out. She would go on to marry Maurice Gibb of the Bee Gees. INSTRUMENTAL TRACK:Cast Your Fate to the Wind by Sounds OrchestralThis week's podcast ends with an instrumental song
Laura Flam is one of the authors of the book "But Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?"The book serves as an oral history of the girl groups that made up the 1960's music scene. The girl group sound, made famous by acts like The Ronettes, The Shirelles, The Supremes, and The Vandellas, took over the airwaves by capturing the mixture of innocence and rebellion emblematic of America in the Sixties. While many girl group songs rose to the top of the charts and shaped the trajectory of pop music in the process, many of the artists remain all but anonymous to most listeners. In this episode of the podcast, Frank discusses the young women behind some of the country's most popular songs. Flam reveals the challenges many of the artists faced while navigating the music industry at such a young age, and at a time when America was just beginning to reconcile a history fraught with racism. Flam also shares what became of many of the members of girl groups after music tastes changed.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
Arrancamos una serie de programas mensuales en donde iremos recordando algunas de las canciones más exitosas de las listas del Billboard Hot 100 estadounidense de hace 60 años. Comenzamos en septiembre de 1963, cuando en las listas de éxitos confluían canciones de girl groups, soul, doo wop, surf, novelty o rocknrollPlaylist;(sintonía) LITTLE STEVIE WONDER “Fingertips pt 2”THE ANGELS “My boyfriend’s back”THE JAYNETTS “Sally goes round the roses”MARTHA and THE VANDELLAS “(Love is like a) Heatwave”THE CRYSTALS “Then he kissed me”TRINI LOPEZ “If I had a hammer”INEZ FOXX with CHARLIE FOXX “Mockingbird”MAJOR LANCE “The monkey time”THE SURFARIS “Wipe out”THE BEACH BOYS “Surfer girl”RANDY and THE RAINBOWS “Denise”DION “Donna the prima donna”THE MIRACLES “Mickey’s monkey”SAM COOKE “Frankie and Johnny”WILSON PICKETT “It’s too late”RAY CHARLES “Busted”ALLAN SHERMAN “Hello Muddah, Hello Faddah! (A letter from camp)”KAI WINDING “More” Escuchar audio
Order and disorder, a freeform haze of garbage guitars, shorted electronics, found detritus, collage, linear songs, sounds from strange lands. Contact me at btradio85@gmail.com. All archives at brianturnershow.comSCOTT KING - RV Mix - Roy Castle and the Vandellas (cs, Industrial Coast, 2020)BLÄSSE - Taktlose Klapperschlangen - V/A: Klar! 80 (Bureau B, 2023)FAMOUS MAMMALS - Soul Without Sound - Instant Pop Expressionism Now! (Siltbreeze, 2023)HANSADUTTA SWAMI - Helpless Awe - Nothing To Lose But All To Gain (Hansa Associates, 1978)THE FEELIES - I Can't Stand It (live) - Some Kinda Love (Bar None, 2023)CUTICLES - Sara's Got An I Phone - Afterlife (BC, 2022)FIX & FERTIG - Cube Carrelage Blanc - Wie Der Lichte Tag (cs, NL, 1984)S.C. SHARMA - After the War - V/A: The NID Tapes: Electronic Music from India 1969-1972 (The State51 Conspiracy, 2023)LES RALLIZES DENUDES COVER BAND - The Night Collectors - Live (BC, 2023)OSTSEETRAUM - Wie Ein Übersäuerter See - Wie Ein Übersäuerter See (Adagio 830, 2023)DJ BAD POETRY ft. SELI-MA - Things On My Bed - V/A: (o Pluto Rising o)-+ (Black Holes, 2023)CHESTER WATSON - Eyes Closed - Fish Don't Climb Trees (VMP, 2023)JOE McPHEE / METTE RASMUSSEN / DENNIS TYFUS - Sun Gore - Oblique Strategies (Black Truffle, 2023)MAX MÜLLER - Sie Ist Und Holland - Wir Steh'n Hier Jeden Tag 7" (Die Tödliche Doris Schallplatten, 1989)JLIN - Fourth Perspective - Perspectives (Planet Mu, 2023)MILAD AHMADI - 50DAR100 - Hormoz Noise (Zabte Sote, 2023)SAXO + A.I. - Baba - By Clicking You Agree (BC, 2023)QUITS - Abandoned Myths - Feeling It (Sleeping Giant Glossolalia, 2023)LUGGAGE - Mirror It - Hand Is Bad (Amish, 2023)SONIC YOUTH - Kotton Krown - Live in Brooklyn 2011 (Silver Current, 2023)TETUZI AKIYAMA - Dead Or... - Don't Forget To Boogie (Idea, 2003)BALDI / GERYCZ - Untitled - Ignorants & Stupidos (cs, Industrial Coast, 2021)SLUIK - Back To Burnsley - 7" (1981, re: Minimal Wave, 2019)EARTH JERKS - 3.7.5 - File:#14 (cs, Computer Tapes, 2023)VARIOUS - Tudza (Instrumental With Choir At The End) - Hani Polyphonic Singing in Yunnan China (Sublime Frequencies, 2023)
With the single “I Only Want to Be with You” (1963), Springfield went solo and made her way into the heart of “Swinging London.” Part cartoon, part unresolvable desire, part bruised despair, she peered through heavy mascara and a stack of peroxided hair while singing with breathy sensuality. Bringing a fragile uncertainty to her cover versions of songs by Burt Bacharach and Hal David that had been hits in the United States for Dionne Warwick, Springfield had a string of British hits. The commercial high point of her career, though, was the ballad “You Don't Have to Say You Love Me” (1966), which topped the British singles chart and reached number four in the United States.In the late 1960s Springfield began to take herself seriously as a soul diva. In 1965 she hosted a television special that promoted Motown artists, including the Supremes and Martha and the Vandellas, to British audiences, and she often performed American rhythm-and-blues songs in her own subsequent TV appearances. She signed with Atlantic Records in 1968 and cut her Dusty in Memphis (1969) album in the famed American Sound Studios with producers Jerry Wexler and Arif Mardin. The album brought her critical acclaim and an international hit with “Son of a Preacher Man.”Springfield continued to record into the 1970s, but her career was derailed by poor management and struggles with drugs and alcohol. By the middle of the decade, she was working as a session singer in Los Angeles. Repeated comeback attempts failed until she teamed up with the Pet Shop Boys on the single “What Have I Done to Deserve This?” (1987); after it became a hit, the duo wrote and produced other songs for her that were included on her album Reputation (1990). By the 1990s Springfield had become a camp icon. After she resettled in England, she battled cancer and in 1998 received the OBE (Officer of the Order of the British Empire). She was posthumously inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1999.
In this episode of Music at a Rational Volume, Nate and Kyle break out the Summer Songs playlist... These are songs about summer, not necessarily summer songs in the sense that they remind you of the summer. It's a hefty beast perfect for whatever shenanigans you might get up to this summer, certainly long enough to get you to the beach and back.This Week's Playlist: Summer SongsBeach Baby - First ClassStuck For The Summer - Two Hours TrafficWaiting on the Summer - VHS CollectionHeat of the Summer - Young The GiantAlways Summertime (feat. Sarah Gregory) - Gregory BrothersGirls in Their Summer Clothes - Bruce SpringsteenSummertime - DJ Jazzy Jeff & the Fresh PrinceSummer Song - Martin ZellarSummertime Girls - Y&TRain in the Summertime - the AlarmVacation - the Go-Go'sDream Vacation - Gear DaddiesAll Summer Long - the Beach BoysBeach Song - the Dead MilkmenThe Summer Looks Good on You - Cheap Trick Summertime Blues – Blue CheerRockaway Beach – Ramones Love Shack – B-52'sHard Rock Summer – Alice CooperGlory Days – Betty WhoSummer Breeze - Seals and CroftsSummer Days - ARIZONASummer Holiday - Chris IsaakSummer Rain - Belinda CarlisleSummer, Highland Falls - Billy JoelSummertime - Barenaked LadiesSunburn - Kip MooreSunshine - Barenaked LadiesIn The Summertime - Shaggy (Mungo Jerry cover)Say Hey (I Love You) (featuring Cherine Anderson) - Michael FrantiShotgun - George EzraSix Days In June - FratellisNarrow Streets - Barenaked Ladies and The PersuasionsHere Comes the Summer - The UndertonesHot Summer - PrinceSummertime Thing - Chuck ProphetSummertime (When I'm With You) - The MavericksPleasant Valley Sunday - MonkeesSummer Nights - Van HalenEndless Summer Nights - James BaySaddest Summer - The DrumsSummer - The VistasPipeline (the Ventures cover) – Anthrax Dancing in the Street (Martha & the Vandellas cover) – Van Halen It's Hot Tonight – Alice Cooper Soak Up the Sun – Sheryl Crow In the Sun – Blondie Summer of ‘69 – Bryan Adams (sorry, couldn't help myself) Summer of Memories - The National ParksSummer Song - Stephen LynchMusicatarationalvolume.com@MARVpodcast on Twittermusicatatrationvolume profile on Spotify for episode playlists based on topics discussed
On this day before American Independence, Matt, your personal musical activist, comes to you from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, home of Fonzie and Happy Days! Lots of early Rock-n-Roll, the great American Invention- SOUL MUSIC, plus a few punk and Americana country for good measure. Featuring Booker T. & The M.G. 's, Funkadelic, Bad Brains, Chuck Berry, R.E.M. Martha Reeves & The Vandellas, Madonna, and loads more. Happy 4th Faces!Tune into new broadcasts of Worldy with Matt and Dom, LIVE, Monday from 10 AM - 12 Noon EST / 3- 5 PM GMT.For more info visit: https://thefaceradio.com/worldy///Dig this show? Please consider supporting The Face Radio: http://support.thefaceradio.com Support The Face Radio with PatreonSupport this show http://supporter.acast.com/thefaceradio. Join the family at https://plus.acast.com/s/thefaceradio. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
We've all been waiting, but it's finally here. No, not John Wick: Chapter 4… our review of course! Listen as we review yet another John Wick movie for the last time (or is it?), and all its twists, turns and yes… stairs. Sit at the table, pat your dog, and prepare to duel as we bring you UNT 148: John Wick: Chapter 4. Hosted by: ‘Captain Boomerang' Greig Tansley (@GreigT13). Featuring: ‘Superjew' Jared Robinovitz (@SuperJew75) & 'The Concierge' Rok (@Roknowledge) from the MatMania Podcast (@MatManiaPodcast). Music by: Martha and the Vandellas, & Marie Laforêt.
We've all been waiting, but it's finally here. No, not John Wick: Chapter 4… our review of course! Listen as we review yet another John Wick movie for the last time (or is it?), and all its twists, turns and yes… stairs. Sit at the table, pat your dog, and prepare to duel as we bring you UNT 148: John Wick: Chapter 4. Hosted by: ‘Captain Boomerang' Greig Tansley (@GreigT13). Featuring: ‘Superjew' Jared Robinovitz (@SuperJew75) & 'The Concierge' Rok (@Roknowledge) from the MatMania Podcast (@MatManiaPodcast). Music by: Martha and the Vandellas, & Marie Laforêt.
Nueva entrega del coleccionable "Aquellos maravillosos años", una serie de episodios esporádicos en donde rescatamos algunas de las grandes canciones que dieron forma a la música popular de la primera mitad de los años 60. Playlist; (sintonía) THE REVELS “Intóxica” THE BEATLES “I feel fine” THE SEARCHERS “Love potion nº 9” TONY JACKSON GROUP “Watch your step” THE SPENCER DAVIS GROUP “I can’t stand it” JACKIE EDWARDS “Keep on runnin’” THEM “Gloria” JOHN D. LOUDERMILK “Road hog” DORIS TROY “Just one look” MARTHA REEVES and THE VANDELLAS “Quicksand” THE EXCITERS “It’s so exciting” BOBBY DARIN “Not for me” ROBERTO CARLOS “Splish Splash” THE VELVETS “Tonight (could be the night)” DICKEY LEE “I saw Linda yesterday” THE JELLY BEANS “I wanna love him so bad” LESLEY GORE “If that’s the way you want it” LITTLE RICHARD “You better stop” SOLOMON BURKE “You can’t love em all” THE JOHN BARRY ORCHESTRA “Time out” Escuchar audio
Zurin Villanueva talks "Murder Mystery 2", playing Tina Turner in "Tina: The Tina Turner Musical", and the time she auditioned in front of Lin Manuel Miranda! About Zurin: On Broadway, television, and film Zurin Villanueva has been performing professionally from the age of 15. Her first professional role was reenacting the narratives of enslaved children for Nickelodeon's program Nick News. At 16, she won Amatuer Night at the Apollo with her tap group, Loud and Clear. She trained in ballet, jazz, tap and modern in New York City but most notably at the Dance Theatre of Harlem. At 17, she was awarded the American Theatre Wing scholarship for most promising students at LaGuardia High School for the Performing Arts as a Drama Major. Zurin debuted on the professional stage at Arena Stage prior to graduating from the now Chadwick Boseman School Of Fine Arts at Howard University earning a BFA in Musical Theatre. Zurin made her Broadway debut amongst the living legends, Audra McDonald, Billy Porter, Brian Stokes Mitchell, choreographer Savion Glover and director George C. Wolfe in Shuffle Along. Zurin's most cherished roles were Charlayne in Ain't Misbehavin', hand picked and directed by Andre DeShields. Whom recently received a Tony and Emmy for his role in the original Broadway Cast. Then went on to star as Josephine Baker in a new self-titled musical, directed and choreographed Maurice Hines, "the" rap dance icon of Hines, Hines and Dad. Since going to Broadway Zurin has continued non-stop. She performed as an original cast member in Mean Girls, The Musical, becoming the first Black Plastic "#blastic" when she debuted as Gretchen Wieners. In her New York principal debut Zurin starred as Dionne Davenport in Clueless The Musical opposite Dove Cameron. Ben Brantley of the New York Times deemed her performance “appealing”. Zurin's tv/film credits include Detroit where she played Martha of the Vandellas. She has guest starred in Insatiable on Netflix, and has a recurring role on Marvelous Mrs. Maisel. Pre pandemic Zurin recently played Nala and Shenzi in The Lion King on Broadway. She also starred in Teenage Dick, a high school adaptation of Richard the Third at Pasadena Playhouse as Lady Anne. The LA Times called her portrayal “searingly honest”. Although Zurin has many talents she will always be an actor first. She is also a writer, having written poems since she was a child. Zurin is currently working on her first feature film. Last but never least she has started a coaching business built to teach actors new to Broadway how to successfully navigate the business without burn out. A native of Brooklyn, Zurin Villanueva calls NYC home when she is not working. Check out "The Case Within" on Seed&Spark: https://seedandspark.com/fund/the-case-within Follow the show on social media! Instagram: https://instagram.com/thanksforcominginpodcast/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/tfci_podcast Facebook: http://facebook.com/thanksforcominginpodcast/ Patreon: patreon.com/thanksforcomingin YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCXj8Rb1bEmhufSBFSCyp4JQ Theme Music by Andrew Skrabutenas Producers: Jillian Clare & Susan Bernhardt Channel: Realm For more information, go to thanksforcominginpodcast.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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.
Lamont Dozier was one third of the Motown songwriting team Holland Dozier Holland. He died Monday at the age of 81. Along with brothers Brian and Eddie Holland, he helped define the Motown sound, writing 10 Number One top hits for The Supremes, The Four Tops, Martha and the Vandellas, and Marvin Gaye — songs like "You Can't Hurry Love," "Baby Love," "Reach Out I'll Be There," "Can't Help Myself," "Heatwave," and "Sugar Pie, Honey Bunch." They spoke with Terry Gross in 2003.Justin Chang reviews The British romantic drama Ali & Ava.
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