The Supremes: A Saga of Motown Dreams, Success, and Betrayal (31 page)

Session sheets allegedly derived from in-house ledgers and such for latter-day album compilations are also unreliable, having been based mainly on guesswork, as Gordy and the producers generally did not preserve such minutiae. Thus on the Supremes’s box-set, producer Harry Weinger, faced with the impossible task of adumbrating exact recording dates, ran with some problematic documentation, one result of which was that the liner notes insist that “Baby Love” and “Come See About Me” were cut at different sessions: August 13 and July 13, respectively. The problem being that the Supremes were on the Dick Clark tour on those days.)

The two new entries on the
Where
album were there because Gordy and Ales had chosen them as the follow-ups to “Where Did Our Love Go,” and their inclusion would bring them to the public before they were issued as singles. And they’d need that sort of boost, having the unenviable mission of perpetuating the Supremes’ newfound dynamism without merely replicating it, and milking the formula, before it—and the group—ran dry.

“Basically what we were trying to do was to keep them in the same ballpark,” Eddie Holland puts it. “It stands to reason that you keep the same elements that worked before. You’d be stupid to divert from what 0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:06 AM Page 164

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worked so well; that’s just part of marketing. That’s what people like.

But anybody’s crazy who says that ‘Baby Love’ is a copycat song.” HDH would surely hear that critique enough through the years, given that elements such as the beat, the “Baby, baby” refrains, and the percussive effects right down to the quarter-note board-stomping on the intro were skimmed from “Where Did Our Love Go.” But they were hardly identical. HDH could be ingenious in their variations on a theme. The song began with a round of brilliant triplets by veteran piano man Earl Van Dyke, another jazz master Gordy and Stevenson had imported from the Paradise Valley clubs. His riffs swirled brightly through the spatial image of the song, beginning with an interplay of piano, hand-clapping, and a bass-cymbal figure throb and then coming to a dead stop accentuated by a hard bang of the drum, preceding the entry of the board-stomping and Ross’s newest vocal melodrama of burning and yearning—“Baby love, oh baby love, I need you, oh how I need you,” she began, in the next instant complaining that “all you do is treat me bad, break my heart and leave me sad.” While the chord structure aped “Where,” HDH got considerably looser and funkier with the rhythm. Van Dyke’s riffs quickened as the second chorus swelled with horns and guitars, and James Jamerson’s delirious bass licks thumped and pumped in a private concerto with Jack Ashford’s bell-clear vibes. Riding above the tide, Ross again spread the gossamer, totally believable as the heart-cleaved inamorata, and Wilson and Ballard blended tightly but dreamily, echoing their mainly two-word iteration into the deep, dewy background.

Still, as with “Where Did Our Love Go,” the first mix Gordy heard was lacking. As Gordy recalled, “I liked it but told Eddie it didn’t have enough life and the opening wasn’t catchy enough.” The first problem was resolved by simply speeding up the tape a notch.

The second was trickier. Having been floored by Diane’s way of weaving that knee-buckling “
oooooh
” in “Where Did Our Love Go,” HDH

called her in to record an even sexier rendering of that syllable as the first verbal sound in “Baby Love,” one that she deftly drew out to a pre–Donna Summer, pseudo-orgasmic moan, three beats in duration—“
oooooh-oooooh-oooooh.
” It surely moved Gordy. “Brilliance,” he said of the remix.

“Baby Love” and, in turn, “Come See About Me” had something

“Where Did Our Love Go” did not—a fast track to run on. By the 0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:06 AM Page 165

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time “Baby Love” was rushed out on September 17, backed with the HDH song “Ask Any Girl,” “Where Did Our Love Go” was still being hummed far and wide. The album bearing that title, containing “Baby Love,” had gone to No. 2 on the pop album chart and No. 1 on the R&B album list; by far Motown’s best-selling album up to that time, it stayed on the charts for over a year and by some accounts sold nearly 1 million copies.

Thus cushioned, “Baby Love” needed no extra push to receive a
Billboard
benediction. In the September 26 issue, the front page carried a photo of the Supremes—an honor (again, paid for by the respective record companies) given each week to an act considered to be the most popular of the moment—captioned in the paper’s usual breathless prose, “THE SUPREMES, Motown Records’ sensational singing group, are veterans of many Billboard Hot 100 charts. They are currently riding high with ‘Where Did Our Love Go?’ Their new album (by the same name) and new single, ‘Baby Love,’ will be released this week.”

Inside, on the Spotlights page was a “Baby Love” rave that read: “A smash follow-up to their ‘Where Did Our Love Go’ click. The swinging harmony style keeps it rolling all the way through.” By Halloween, “Baby Love” was sitting at the top of the Hot 100, where it stayed for four weeks.

The autumn of ’64 and winter of ’65 stretched into an endless Supremes blurb. They made, for the first time, the pages of the teen-magazine press, their picture slapped on the cover of the February issue of
Teen Screen
alongside those of the Beach Boys, Righteous Brothers, and Manfred Mann (“Doo Wah Diddy”), intermingled with headlines like “Why the Beatles Can’t Get Married!” and “World’s Largest Color Pinup of Manfred Mann (& His Men)!”

The story on the Supremes cast them as a rare, prudish exception in the emerging rock swarm. Headlined “The Supremes Ask: What’s Happened to Show Business,” it was an inane but valuable PR move, calling them “the hottest female singing group in the nation” and throwing them huzzahs for how they managed to “keep themselves so fresh, neat, and ladylike while performing.” Pronouncing himself as “immediately impressed” with them, the author quoted their prime rule in matters of appearance, “No tight dresses for us,” noting with approval that

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not have to utilize sex as a means of putting across a musical number.

A female performer can look just as alluring when she’s dressed as a young lady.”

“We believe that this is an important part of a performer’s image,” Ross said. “Fans expect their idol to be a symbol. This loss of glamour, and of that certain air of mystery, has resulted in a loss of respect for many recording artists. The public has become blasé after seeing too many of their favorites in sloppy attire.”

A couple of photos ran with the story, of the girls “checking each other’s makeup” and posing with the Crystals during the Clark tour—

the latter with the soon-to-be ironic caption, “‘Big talent, but no big heads’ would seem to be the motto for the Supremes.” Needing to keep the hit streak going, Gordy was riding the tail of

“Baby Love” before it even reached the top of the pop and R&B charts.

Four days before it got there, he put out “Come See About Me,” for which HDH applied a harder, more direct tone heard from the outset with a fierce drum intro and carried by a still needy but defiant lead vocal. Diane, addressing the boy she had given up her friends for, only to see him leave, demanded that he’d better “hurry, hurry” back to her—though she couldn’t help but reassure him that “no matter what you do or say, I’m gonna love you anyway.” Mary and Flo, allowed to breathe a little more, got close to shouting their parts, further extending the amped-up emotion of the tune.

HDH had come to apply their “elements”—the hand-clapping, the resonant vibes, the clanging guitars—with such cohesion that the repetitive hooks of “Come See About Me” pounded out a lush, trance-inducing rhythm made for Ross’s flan-light, chimerical vocals. For her, Eddie Holland was now writing more syntactically challenged lyrics; here, he had her sing of her tears not washing away the fear “that you’re never ever gonna return to ease the fire that within me burns.” Eddie believed then, as he does now, that “Come See About Me” was miles better than “Baby Love,” and he wanted it out as a single first. “There were arguments about that with Berry,” he says. But the only reason it got out as quickly as it did is that a cover of the song by one Nella Dobbs was on the chart and climbing. When the real item came out, with “(You’re Gone but) Always in My Heart” on the flip, it left Nella Dobbs in the dust on the way to landing in the No. 1 spot on the pop and R&B charts just before Christmas. It then fell to No. 2

behind the Beatles’ “I Feel Fine” for three weeks—and moved
back
to No. 1 the week of January 16, 1965.

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Gordy, not waiting for any moss to grow under their high heels, had the Supremes constantly in the public eye. An exhausting round of TV

and stage appearances was planned, allowing almost no idle time. But Gordy would not send them on these long roads without making a few serious changes to ensure that they would come across as princesses, no longer urchins standing onstage in their makeshift dresses sewn by hand on Ernestine Ross’s Singer sewing machine.

While the Supremes were more refined than the other wilder, gyrat-ing girl-groups—sometimes to the discontent of audiences at some hard-core venues like the Apollo—their gawky movements and overall rube-like stage presence were a problem for Gordy. Now that they’d be playing some very high-visibility locales, which Gordy was working to extend to ritzy supper clubs and glitzy Las Vegas hotels, a makeover was called for. Just such an upper crusting of all Motown acts had in fact become a pet project of Gwen and Anna Gordy. Both of those very sophisticated ladies were habitués at posh, high-society affairs—for Gwen this was a way of life, having attended a finishing school as a young woman—and they were far more comfortable at a fashion show with a string quartet than at an ear-splitting, hip-grinding concert.

At first, their younger, unrefined brother regarded sending his rip-snorting performers to finishing school as a preposterous idea, antithet-ical to the barely controlled passion required of R&B. But then Berry, as he could afford the finer things in life, turned into a dilettante, lavishing his home with exorbitantly priced paintings by artists he’d never heard of—as well as (to the cringing astonishment of all who saw it) a floor-to-ceiling oil that he commissioned with himself posed in the image of Napoleon Bonaparte, one hand tucked into the lapel of a gilded waistcoat with big brass buttons. Indeed, he now fancied himself an arbiter of all that was tony and well-bred. It was Gordy who had blown his stack seeing a gum-chewing Marvelette on stage, and who bristled about anyone in his employ acting in a less than “high-class” manner (exclusive of his own gambling and philandering)—while the lower class that actually made him his money were charged for every expense, no matter how picayune.

Now that the Supremes had graduated to a rank in a higher order, Gordy needed them to act as such. He committed to the charm school concept—at first, just for his “girls.” But that was inviting trouble.

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How would it look if the Supremes were the only girl-group being given special treatment in grooming and style? Would it mean the rest would assume they were being consigned to the trash heap, good for filling seats in turbid R&B clubs but kept from the white stage? For now, anyway, even if Gordy was contemplating turning Motown into a platform mainly for the Supremes—and, eventually, Diane Ross—he knew that the consequences of such unveiled favoritism might rip the fabled Motown unity to shreds, before he was ready to risk it.

Thus, during the late summer and early fall of ’64, Gordy hired a Chantilly-delicate, black former professional model, Maxine Powell, who as a young woman had attended the Detroit charm school where Gwen Gordy had also matriculated, and put her in charge of the new, corporate-sounding Artists Development division. Clearing space in a Motown-owned house across West Grand Boulevard, Powell began optional classes in etiquette and grooming that at first attracted few takers—until the Supremes were seen flitting in and out almost every day that they weren’t on the road, for six solid months. Soon, the Vandellas, the Marvelettes, Brenda Holloway, and new arrivals like Kim Weston were receiving tutelage in the fine points of acting like a lady.

For the Supremes, who already regarded themselves as polished and fashionable, the classes, with their attendance mandated by Gordy, were laughable—a silly “game,” as Wilson recalled. If, for example, “we were eating chicken and one of us picked up a piece with her fingers, the other two would cackle and say, ‘Remember what Mrs. Powell said.’” Without a pause, the perpetrator would laugh and simply go on eating with her fingers. How could advice like that
not
be risible when Powell would tell them, say, how to handle fine china or how to get in a car like a lady (that is, without rear-end protrusion)—and few except the Gordys and their cronies owned either fine china or a car?

Powell did have a tangible effect on the Supremes’ body language.

Post-’64, they would smile a bit less, hold their nostrils in a pinched manner to look more haughty, and keep their bodies taut, tall, and erect. Diane, who needed the most work, “was taught not to ‘soul,’” Powell once remarked, using a term of the era roughly equivalent to

“styling,” to describe Ross’s tenacious habit of contorting her face and popping her eyeballs. “I told her that in first-class places like the Copa, no one’s gonna pay good money to watch someone make faces.” The choice of the Copa—the oft-used short-form version of “Copacabana,” the famed New York nightclub—as the Supremes’ polar star was no accident. Gordy meant to drum the name into the girls’ con-0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:06 AM Page 169

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