Ready For a Brand New Beat

by Mark Kurlansky

  But for black people the custom of decoding songs came from a very old tradition that was sometimes referred to as “masking”—the black man hiding his true face by the wearing of a mask. This secretive way of sending messages was so embedded in African American culture that, as Amiri Baraka put it in Blues People, “In language, the African tradition aims at circumlocution rather than an exact definition. The direct statement is considered crude and unimaginative; the veiling of all contents in ever-changing paraphrases is considered the criterion of intelligence and personality.”

  This masking became even more of a necessity in slave times. Slave spirituals were often about escape and rebellion, though seemingly about the biblical lessons they had been taught to be de-Africanized—stories of Moses and the Promised Land, the crumbling walls of Jericho. Many songs such as “Steal Away,” “Run to Jesus,” “Wade in the Water,” and the dangerously obvious “Gospel Train” were about the escape route of the so-called Underground Railroad. “Follow the Drinking Gourd” was a reference to the Big Dipper constellation. Following it would lead a traveler north.

  Chuck Berry was a great masker; his songs almost always refer to something else. “Johnny B. Goode” was about the possibility of black success even in the South now with the new civil rights movement. So was Sam Cooke’s 1960 “Wonderful World,” which with his sweet voice seemed at face value to be a high school student saying that he was a poor student, but if his girl would love him, the world would be wonderful. But another interpretation was that if you didn’t know biology and you didn’t know history—in other words, if you forgot about race and forgot about all that had happened in race history—we could love each other and the world could be wonderful. Cooke did not confirm this meaning. The 1963 hit by the Jaynetts, “Sally, Go ’Round the Roses,” for those who looked for masked meanings, was about closeted lesbian love. This interpretation persists, as does another one that it is religious, and yet another that it was about a mental breakdown. The Jaynetts said the song’s ambiguous wording was simply a black street rhyme of a kind young girls invented for skipping rope.

  Nor was “Dancing in the Street” the only Motown song adopted by the black nationalist movement. When Black Panther Fred Hampton spoke, the crowd would sing back the Supremes’ song “Someday We’ll Be Together.” A number of other Martha and the Vandellas songs seemed to have some radical chic to their driving beats, especially “Heat Wave.” Amiri Baraka said of Martha and the Vandellas’ hits, “All those songs have reference to explosiveness. Coming out of passiveness. Heat wave. You have the context of the time to give the song its meaning.”

  But none had the revolutionary standing of “Dancing in the Street.” Baraka said it was an anthem “for people hoping for a revolution. We played it all the time.” And of course, they were not interested in white covers, it had to be Martha and the Vandellas.

  Some white people caught on as well. For white radicals, attempting to decipher the dense lyrics of Bob Dylan was their introduction to the decoding of songs. Dylan’s lyrics, while not as indecipherable as “Louie Louie,” but far more cryptic, always lent themselves to interpretation. And Bob Dylan, in the best tradition of black masking, adamantly refused to explain his meaning. Radicals from Columbia University’s branch of SDS (Students for a Democratic Society), the group nicknamed the “action faction” because they increasingly believed in confrontation as a political tool, found meaning in songs. In 1969 they formed a violent cell called “the Weathermen,” a name they took from a line in Bob Dylan’s “Subterranean Homesick Blues.” The line was “You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.” Dylan, who never expressed interest in political organizing, probably did not intend this, but it was their interpretation.

  Conservatives, too, were forever worrying about the uncertain “real meaning” of Dylan’s songs. In 1963, when Peter, Paul, and Mary were hitting the British charts with Dylan songs—“Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right” and “Blowin’ in the Wind”—the right-wing tabloid press was suggesting that these songs hid subliminal messages from the Soviet Union to brainwash young people.

  Motown lyrics on the other hand were always crystal clear, but the Weathermen, having caught on to the idea of masking, did not miss the hidden meaning of “Dancing in the Street.” To David Gilbert, it spoke to world revolution, country by country. Mark Rudd, one of the original Weathermen, said, “We thought ‘Dancing in the Street’ was coding for rioting, which at the time we thought of as an act of liberation.” And these white revolutionaries, too, insisted on the original recording. “It was definitely Martha and the Vandellas,” said Rudd. “We were Motown purists.”

  But for black people, the decoding of songs was not new or “counterculture,” it was the normal response to hearing a new song. For most of history, with a few exceptions, such as motion pictures during the Joseph McCarthy Senate anti-Communism investigations, white artists had little need for masking, while for blacks it was a necessity. Simply compare what anti-rock forces did to Chuck Berry as opposed to Elvis Presley.

  Country Joe McDonald, a white musician who wrote unmasked protest music, especially his dark-humored satire of the Vietnam War, “I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-to-Die Rag,” had little experience with masking. “I grew up with Woody Guthrie,” he said. “You just stated the meaning.” But he recognized that it was different for black artists. “They could get their asses whipped more easily than us.”

  White audiences with a different experience tend to look less often for hidden meanings in music. This meant that black songwriters could write a song with a different meaning for whites and blacks. Mickey Stevenson, for one, accepted the idea that a crossover song could change meanings in the crossover. That was why he believed it was important to let people interpret songs the way they wanted. Simply because white people might see it differently, “because they don’t come from the place the song comes from.”

  In the case of “Dancing in the Street,” the Weathermen were a white exception because they were deeply interested in the concept of rioting as an insurrection, which fit their ideology of “liberation struggles.” Most white people saw a different meaning to “Dancing in the Street” than did black people. Joe McDonald liked “Dancing in the Street,” but did not search it for its meaning, even though street was a meaningful word. “To me it was just another nice Motown song. Even today when I think of it. It is a very powerful image, dancing in the street. It’s working class. The upper class doesn’t do anything in the street. They do ‘Dancing in the Club.’”

  Cousin Brucie, a leading deejay for white radio, said when he first heard “Dancing in the Street”:

  I thought it was a great party song. Wow, I thought. Motown is really developing and it’s sending people out dancing in the street. It was a time of block parties. Block parties were really popular in Brooklyn. This was a call to a block party. Did anybody have the idea that it was a call to action? I doubt it. But then it was reinterpreted. It got a new meaning, but it also still had the old meaning.

  For Sarah Dash, a black musician who sang with Patti LaBelle and Laura Nyro in a famous 1971 cover of “Dancing in the Street,” it was very different. “I was always looking for the meaning in songs. I had a journal when I was young. I wrote about what songs meant.” So in 1964, when she first heard “Dancing in the Street,” it was full of meanings. “I loved ‘Dancing in the Street,’” she said. “It was during the civil rights movement. I thought we will be dancing for freedom, for the right to vote, no more prejudice. It was a time when you could actually see black and white dancing together. Calling out, Are you ready for a brand new beat? Now, looking back, it had much more meaning than we knew. A new beat, are you ready to rerecord it in the seventies? It was about freedom for women. For Laura and three black women, it had a lot of meaning.”

  Dash felt that most people who heard “Dancing in the Street” “were not aware of the subliminal message, the p
ower of vibration. It meant so much to our society consciously and unconsciously.”

  Most musicians are resigned to being interpreted in ways with which they don’t necessarily agree. McDonald said, “Songs have a life of their own and you can’t control it.” And blacks and whites interpreted differently. The famous conclusion of the Kerner Report was: “Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal.”

  • • •

  If there is a hidden political meaning to “Dancing in the Street,” then whose idea was it? Of course it is in the nature of masking that the hidden meaning is always denied, so it is not surprising that everyone involved in creating the song absolutely denies intending any other meaning. Martha Reeves is easiest to believe, because unlike the others, she is a genuinely apolitical person, which may be one of the reasons why her more recent stint on the Detroit City Council for one term proved so uncomfortable for her. “I just want to be responsible for being a good singer,” she said. As for the politics of the 1960s—civil rights and black power and the war in Vietnam, where her brother had fought, she simply said, “I wasn’t involved.”

  Mickey Stevenson said that he was political “in that I saw so many unjust things go down.” But he insisted his only political message in the song was that all kinds of people could get along together. “Kids have no color,” he said, “they would play out there as if they were all brothers and sisters of every creed. So the song comes from that idea. . . . I think that’s why the song has outlasted most songs, because it means just that. In Chicago, Philadelphia, Detroit, London—it don’t matter—kids all over the world, they don’t have this problem. Joining hands, the love train you see, they be laughing with each other and loving each other. Soon they get home and get into the separate bull because they are separate.”

  Yes, Mickey Stevenson was a very political man, and this was his interpretation. Ivy Jo Hunter also denied any message about rioting. The other person who needed to be asked, the third writer, was the late Marvin Gaye.

  Marvin Gaye, who talked about kicking ass with the brothers in Watts, had political passions and was sympathetic to the street uprisings. But like many, he had predicted the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. “Maybe that’s why I stayed away from the area of direct involvement. I wasn’t ready to sacrifice my life for a cause.” But he might have been ready to slip a well-masked statement into a party song. After the 1965 Malcolm X killing, he certainly pushed Gordy for more politically engaged songs.

  Cousin Brucie, who interviewed Marvin Gaye a number of times, said, “When you talked to Marvin Gaye, you knew you were talking to someone political. He was a poet who had an agenda. He realized the only way to spread that agenda was to be light. He was always a gentleman and soft, but you knew the agenda was there.”

  Gaye later said in his autobiography:

  Funny but of all the acts back then, I thought Martha and the Vandellas came closest to really saying something. It wasn’t a conscious thing, but when they sang numbers like “Quicksand” or “Wild One” or “Nowhere to Run” or “Dancing in the Street,” they captured a spirit that felt political to me. I liked that. I wondered to myself, with the world exploding around me, how am I supposed to keep singing love songs?

  This was a profound level of African cultural understanding, the idea that a political message could come simply from the nature of the sound. And it was Gaye who very much wanted Martha Reeves to have the song. Gaye continued to argue for more politically relevant songs at Motown. Soon others joined in, and Gordy began to recognize that the times called for a different kind of music. In 1967 Gordy hired Junius Griffin to be director of publicity. This was a highly significant move because Griffin not only had been a distinguished journalist covering the civil rights movement for The New York Times and the Associated Press, but from 1965 until Gordy hired him, he had been working as a speechwriter for Martin Luther King. Gordy said, “Junius was our link to the black community and theirs to us. He kept us in touch with our roots.” Though still reserved about political engagement, Gordy recognized that he could not afford the Motown bubble.

  Socially conscious, unabashedly political R&B was selling. First there was Curtis Mayfield and the Impressions, whose “Keep On Pushing” was the surprise hit of 1964. As the rest of the music world shifted his way, he became hugely influential, even to Motown artists, especially Marvin Gaye. Like Smokey Robinson, Mayfield sang in falsetto, but he had an unusual guitar sound because he tuned his guitar so that the open strings were sharps rather than naturals. He also played bass, piano, saxophone, and drums. In 1965 Mayfield had a hit with “People Get Ready,” and in 1968 with “We’re a Winner.” He made hit after hit with messages of civil rights and black pride. There was nothing masked about Curtis Mayfield.

  By 1968 the hottest black artist was probably James Brown, and he wasn’t Motown either. He came out of a southern gospel tradition, and like Motown, had a jazz foundation to his large backup band. He was becoming a huge influence on other artists, including many at Motown such as David Ruffin, Michael Jackson, and Edwin Starr. In 1964 he appeared in a concert film, T.A.M.I. Show (Teenage Awards Music International), which used new technology that is considered the forerunner of high-definition television invented by the producer, an amateur electronics expert, Bill Sargent. The other thing this film is famous for is the way Brown upstaged everybody, including Chuck Berry, the Beach Boys, Marvin Gaye, the Supremes, and especially the Rolling Stones, who were supposed to be the stellar closing act but suffered from directly following Brown. Years later, Keith Richards said the biggest mistake of his career was agreeing to follow Brown. Artists from Mick Jagger to Trinidadian calypso star the Mighty Sparrow were imitating not the careful choreography of Cholly Atkins but the wild gyrations of master showman James Brown. In 1966, despite all of Motown’s success with crossover music, it was James Brown who was singled out by Time magazine, after his second million-selling record, saying, “His rise in the mass market gives a sign that ‘race music’ is at last becoming interracial.”

  In 1968, after Martin Luther King was killed, Berry Gordy said, “I couldn’t contain my anger.” He pointed out that the fallen leader was only one year older than he was. He agreed to put on a Motown benefit concert to raise money for the Poor People’s Campaign that King had planned. Gordy even marched side by side with Sidney Poitier, Mary Wilson, and Sammy Davis Jr.

  Many people were affected by the King murder. Angry protests and fires burned in 110 cities. James Brown went on television and addressed black communities, asking them to “cool it.” The following night, he was scheduled to give a concert in Boston. The new young mayor, Kevin White, appeared onstage with him—White and Brown together, nobody missed that irony. With tears in his eyes, Brown asked for no violence in Boston and argued with passion for a kind of nonviolent black power. There was no violence in Boston that night, one of the few major black communities in the country that didn’t explode.

  James Brown met with H. Rap Brown and told him, “Rap, I know what you are trying to do. I’m trying to do the same thing. But y’all got to find another way to do it. You got to put down the guns, you got to put away the violence.” When H. Rap Brown was arrested for inciting violence in Cambridge, Maryland, James Brown raised money for his defense fund. James Brown had done the seemingly impossible thing; rather than avoiding politics, he had found a way to bridge the space between the two principal camps of black liberation.

  It was not always smooth for him. He supported the presidential bid of Hubert Humphrey, which was not popular with most young blacks, who, if they supported anyone, were for Robert Kennedy. Humphrey, who was deeply involved in the Vietnam War, was seen as the sellout candidate. But that same, volatile year, 1968, Brown released the biggest-selling record by a black artist of the year, “Say It Loud, I’m Black and I’m Proud.” Gordy would have never imagined that a record that so clearly expressed the theme of b
lack empowerment, of black power, could be such a huge hit. Some music critics attacked Brown for his black power stance, but as Gordy always liked to point out, you can’t argue with success. Even today, black people almost unconsciously repeat the title line.

  In 1970, Motown, late in this new game, released several unmasked political songs: Edwin Starr’s “War,” the Temptations’ “Ball of Confusion (That’s What the World Is Today),” and “Heaven Help Us All” by Stevie Wonder, who had been arguing for political engagement for almost as long as Gaye had. “War” and “Ball of Confusion” were both written by Starr in collaboration with Harlem-born Norman Whitfield, who had come out to Detroit at age nineteen and worked his way into Motown when the company was just starting. He wrote and produced for Gaye and for the Temptations, and ten years later was a major force pushing the company toward more socially conscious music. Gordy said of him, “He was quiet and shy—not someone you’d think would turn into the boldly innovative producer he later became. . . . He had a fire deep in his soul and a little would come out each time he produced a record.”

  But despite all these socially conscious hits, Gaye had a political edge that Gordy feared. Marvin had been influenced by his brother Frankie, who was three years younger than Marvin, the pleasant kid who tried to placate their brutal father rather than challenge him, the way Marvin did. He was a talented singer and composer, though without Marvin’s drive, his career never blossomed. He was drafted and sent to Vietnam, where he served as a deejay but when he returned in 1970 he told Marvin stories of what Vietnam was like. According to an interview he gave Rolling Stone magazine, Marvin had also been disturbed by letters Frankie had sent him from Vietnam. Marvin said, “It was time to stop playing games.” He told Rolling Stone, “I realized that I had to put my own fantasies behind me if I wanted to write songs that would reach the souls of people. I wanted them to take a look at what was happening in the world.”