The Supremes: A Saga of Motown Dreams, Success, and Betrayal (25 page)

THE “OTHERS”

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That was their act. The problem with that, though, is that you need a good, strong song to go with it, and at that point they didn’t have that.

But they always had a great work ethic and great style. I admired them for that.”

Pause. “But I thought we were better in what we did.” Mary Wilson’s postdated (by twenty years) review of the epochal gig was an irksomely skimpy passage in her autobiography to the effect that “the Apollo was a tough venue” and that “[w]e won the crowd over from the first minute . . . and came off the stage thrilled to death—We had played the Apollo.”

Gordy, meanwhile, would write in his own memoir about the Apollo conquest in the light of the only person he could think of who mattered.

“I was big,” he said. “I had made it in New York.” But Gordy did arrive at an important conclusion about the Supremes after the first Motortown Revue finished up with a show in Pittsburgh and, mercifully, came home in time for Christmas. He, too, had seen the rise of a dynamic he had not planned for Ross, Wilson, and Ballard: They did not, and could not, fit the Motown mold.

Whether they would rise or fall, it would be by playing against Motown type, as a Motown anomaly. They were not quite R&B, not quite pop, not quite
Motown
.

The “sophistication” angle was to be the new watchword for the group. If played right, it could add another dimension to his crossover dreams. If they couldn’t possibly do the same kind of songs that Mary Wells, the Marvelettes, and the Vandellas did, their voices and the Motown rhythm section would move them to where the others could not go. To Broadway, that is—and, only incidentally, to Harlem.

Now, if only Gordy could find that vexatiously elusive song to move
this
vehicle down the road.

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With Gordy wasting no time to get them back in the studio, the Supremes were barely able to decompress after the mon-strously rigorous and profitable Motortown Revue tour of 1962 (all of the Apollo Theater box office records were broken during their eleven days there). Christmas was spent learning and rehearsing songs Gordy had cherry-picked from different writers and recording them under the aegis of different producers. This was, of course, a marker of Gordy’s supreme problem: How to mold the Supremes’ cosmopolitan brand while at the same time keeping them innocent and soulful enough for the girl-group and R&B markets.

Too soon a break from the Motown prescript—or too much of one—might have been counterproductive, given that the Supremes had actually become a favorite of the black deejays around Detroit, and Gordy needed them to keep playing the group’s records. What’s more, the Supremes factored into the entire Motown radio station strategy.

When the radio stations sponsored sock hops and the bigger Motown acts were out on the road, the jocks and the promoters usually had no problem taking the Supremes in their stead. This was important for Gordy, who needed to keep all the local station managers happy, since the first, essential, stage in the national rise of any Motown record was lighting a fire for it locally. By assuring them that he still valued the local guys, and not looking beyond them, he kept them panting for Motown product.

Getting the Supremes, whose records were invariably Top Ten hits in Detroit, was a big deal. “I know I played all their records, and always 128

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got a good reaction, lots of requests,” says Robin Seymour. “I always wondered during the first few years why those records weren’t bigger national hits, and Berry did too. It really bothered him. He considered it a personal defeat. It just goes to show you the industry isn’t a mono-lith. You gotta please a lot of people. And let’s face it, a national hit can’t be a record that sucks, they gotta be really good, and the truth was those early Supremes records weren’t near as good as the Marvelettes’ or Martha and the Vandellas’ records.”

“But again,” he added, “in Detroit, Berry never had to beg me to play the Supremes.”

Of course, that reality wasn’t anywhere near good enough for Berry or the girls; but as long as they served as a useful tool in the local strategy, he was reluctant to change their M.O. After all, the Supremes needed as much promotional buzz as they could get. And when out-of-town radio guys needed to be convinced to take a second-string Motown act, the Supremes got the first call. As longtime Motown promotion director Jack Gibson explained, “Let’s say a jock had sock hops on Friday and Saturday nights. He wants Mary Wells but he’s told she’s working the Apollo, but we got this girl-group the Supremes with this hot record.

Just play it three, four times an hour and let everybody know they’re coming.”

For the gigs in other cities, Gibson would have the girls take a Greyhound, to Chicago, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, wherever. He’d put on his credit card the cost of bus fare and two hotel rooms—one for him, one for the three of them (except when Ross would talk him out of his room and let her sleep there, and he’d spend the night on a lobby chair)—and then he’d fly in, telling the promoters they needed only to pay the group’s bus fare back home. Gibson would pocket the profits from the show and bring the money to Gordy when he got back.

For Gordy, this supplemental way of treating his artists like chattel—

there were times when the Supremes would have to play nine shows
a
day
on these impromptu treks—was doubly rewarding, as the appearances would garner record play and sales for their records. In fact, that the first half-dozen Supremes singles made the charts at all was likely due to this “underground railroad” of quid pro quo appearances.

For the time being, then, Gordy did not disrupt the basic flavor of the Supremes; they would still be mocha soul. The tune he chose as their next single was a blues ballad called “My Heart Can’t Take It No More.” Written and produced by two Motown heavy hitters, Clarence Paul and chief recording engineer Lawrence Horn, it had Ross singing 0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:06 AM Page 130

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the lead torch-song style, her slow and sensuous cadence and strained highs swathed by a deeply echoed backing track reminiscent of the Chantels’ classic “Maybe.”

For another Supremes single, Gordy lifted the unspoken injunction his “number-one son” had imposed against working with Ross. The stickiness of rejoining her and Smokey Robinson in close quarters was, he figured, made necessary by his need to find them a hit, though it was clear that failure would mean a permanent severance. And the song did seem to justify making Claudette Robinson’s skin crawl for a few days.

Hung with the longest title of any Motown song (and likely
any
song),

“A Breath Taking, First Sight Soul Shaking, One Night Love Making, Next Day Heart Breaking Guy,” was an extreme outgrowth of the cunning punning of Smokey’s songwriting mien. It was also a naked call for attention.

And it was damn good, too. Smokey cut it in the now-comfortable samba beat of his Mary Wells records, and an increasingly confident Ross had an easy handle on the complexities of Smokey’s lyrical flip-pancies, while Wilson and Ballard were each given fragments of the song’s interminable title to sing solo—perhaps the best pure examples one can hear of Mary’s sinewy alto and Flo’s arching soprano on record.

Hopeful that with these sides he could at least flirt with the Top Forty, Gordy was again stymied. The first kick he took was when “My Heart Can’t Take It No More,” released on February 2, 1963, promptly tanked, getting stuck at No. 129. Not waiting for the verdict, he had rushed out the follow-up, with another Gordy trifling called “Rock and Roll Banjo Man” on the flip, only one week after “My Heart”; but with jocks giving little attention to the first release he feared the prolix title would further turn them off. Disrupting the roll-out of the record, he recalled the first pressings and reissued it simply as “A Breath Taking Guy,” but the hiccup kept it from rising higher than No. 75 on the pop charts. Still, considering the snafu and the early death of “My Heart,” Gordy was satisfied the group was on track and went ahead with a Supremes album he’d had in the works. The album, a compilation of their previous middling hits filled out with B-sides and unreleased studio detritus, was released in December.

The title of the album was telling:
Meet the Supremes
. After two years at Motown, Gordy was still pleading with the record-buying public to get to know “the girls.”

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In 1963, nobody in America with a radio or a Victrola had to be begged to meet Motown. The company profile was ascending as fast as the latest records by Mary Wells, the Miracles, the Marvelettes, and Marvin Gaye climbed the charts. Gross sales for the year were $4.5 million and the coffers were being fed by the double-dip of royalties from Motown song covers. In 1964, for instance, the Beatles’ second album in America alone bore
three
covers: “Money,” “Please Mr. Postman,” and the Miracles’ “You’ve Really Got a Hold on Me.” This was serious business now. Gordy, far less patient with nonstarters in the “family,” cut adrift deadwood, no matter if they were personal cronies such as Mable John, Sammy Ward, Shorty Long, even his brother Robert Kayli.

Then there were two other favorites who had failed to become assets as singers. One was the burly, pug-faced Lamont Dozier, who as Lamont Anthony hadn’t caused a ripple. Early in 1963, Gordy teamed him with Brian Holland on a single under the name of “Holland-Dozier” called “What Goes Up Must Come Down.” And while it stiffed, it was a fortuitous connection. Gordy had always wanted Dozier to do what he did best, writing songs—something he’d done as early as the late ’50s with Mickey Stevenson when they were both teenagers. Now, Gordy had his way, the opening being that Freddie Gorman, Holland’s old writing and producing partner, had followed Robert Bateman out the door, to produce records for Detroit’s Golden World label (such as the Reflections’ hit “Just Like Romeo and Juliet”). Keeping Holland-Dozier intact, but behind the scenes, Gordy was rewarded when they co-wrote with Janie Bradford two serviceable songs; one was “Contract on Love,” which Holland and Dozier produced as Stevie Wonder’s second single. The other, “Time Changes Things,” was used as the B-side of

“My Heart Can’t Take It No More.”

Gordy’s consolidation also saved the other Holland brother, Eddie.

He, of course, was one of Berry’s closest “homeys,” sticking with him through a mostly lean two years after returning to the fold following his United Artists detour. Early in ’63, Gordy wrote and produced a song for Holland, “Jamie,” a big-band-spiked, Jackie Wilson copycat record for which Gordy spared no expense, running his most elaborate session yet. This included a string section on loan from the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, the first appearance of violins and cellos on a Motown record.

The seemingly outdated song hit No. 30 on the pop charts and No.

6 on the R&B charts, but when ensuing releases came nowhere near that level, Gordy was faced with what to do with the “other” Holland.

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He was no doubt relieved when Eddie lost his desire for singing. Part of that decision was said to have been owing to his severe stage fright. In a 1983 book about Motown history,
Where Did Our Love Go
, author Nelson George writes of Holland’s “rough experience” at the Apollo Theater “before the notoriously demanding audience” as the last straw that convinced him he was on the wrong side of the microphone. The other side, he had come to realize, was where the payoff was.

“I was looking at my recording bill and I was like forty thousand dollars in debt,” he was quoted as saying, “and my brother has got a royalty check because he wrote the songs. I just said, ‘I need to start writing songs.’”

That was when Gordy implemented yet another immensely providential shifting of musical chairs: Eddie, with Brian pitching the idea to Berry, was assigned to intern with the Holland-Dozier team.

EDDIE HOLLAND: I wasn’t adverse to making money, but that thing about having stage fright, that’s incorrect. That Apollo Theater story—that guy don’t know what he’s talking about. I enjoyed it at the Apollo very much, and other big theaters. And Motown kept putting out my records like into 1964. But it wasn’t necessarily what I wanted to do for a living. It wasn’t that I was scared. That’s bullshit. I just didn’t like performing live. I was uncomfortable with it.

BRIAN HOLLAND: I wasn’t either. We’re alike that way. I didn’t like performing at all.

EDDIE: But we’re different. Brian’s a producer. That wasn’t really my thing, charts, arrangements, chord changes. I knew words. I’m analytical—that’s my accounting school background. I knew what I wanted to say in music. And I knew what Brian wanted to say but couldn’t.

BRIAN: Well, I
can
write lyrics, but I never could do it as well as Lamont and certainly not as well as Eddie. He has a way of coming up with the perfect lyric for any note progression, any mood. Give him a general theme and a melody and he’ll come back with chapter and verse, with the right lingo, phrasing, vernacular, whatever you call it.

Basically, that’s what Lamont and I did. Eddie did the rest.

Every girl-group song we did sounded like a young girl wrote it.

’Cause Eddie could get inside the mind of a young girl yearning for love, being protected by a guy, that whole mindset.

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EDDIE: My brother is too humble. I could do it because Brian Holland has the best ears in the world. He is a very quiet, sensitive man who picks up feelings, vibes all around him. And he has ears dogs wished they had. Brian heard a word, maybe a title, and a note on a piano and he’d go off by himself and compose a symphony out of it, always fresh and unique in some way. And he would duplicate that complete melody in the studio exactly as he heard it in his head. He knew what he wanted and wouldn’t deviate from it. Lamont would help on both ends. He’d get the first concept, play that first lick, and he’d do the charts with Brian and contribute to the final lyrics. I’d then coach the lead singer on how to do the vocal, exactly like
I
heard it in
my
head, and Lamont would work with the background singers.