In the end, Jagger flew to London—just on an airplane—and the song was cut very quickly in a break from Bowie’s album session. According to Jagger, they “banged it out in two takes.” According to some accounts, it was only one take.
The day before, Bowie had called video director David Mallet, who made most of Bowie’s videos. “In those days,” said Mallet, “there was no such thing as a record without a video.” Bowie told Mallet that he was recording “Dancing in the Street” that next day and wanted to shoot a video that night. Mallet said, “I rang all the really good crews and they were there at seven at night.” He and his team of sixty donated services free to the charity, shooting at the London Docklands. “It was a wasteland of smelly old warehouses,” said Mallet. The site was later rebuilt for the 2012 Olympics.
Jagger and Bowie showed up in the costumes they had chosen, Bowie in an oversized yellow raincoat and leopardish jumpsuit and Jagger in yellow sneakers and a flouncy electric-green blouse. They began the video by shouting out places around the world such as Japan and South America in order to internationalize the song, and then sang in duet with a backup from the day’s session that attempted, not entirely successfully, to stay close to the original Paul Riser arrangement. Filming at night, they staved off daybreak by lining up their cars and flashing headlights until they were done.
Mallet said that in those days “a lot of videos were just go and do it,” and this one certainly was. It is hard to understand what is going on in this video of these two men dancing and hopping around each other. Bowie had been losing his following, and the previous year had been his worst commercially since he started in the 1960s. At the time, the Rolling Stones were in disarray, so Jagger, too, was struggling not to be on his way down. The two appear to be jockeying for position. If so, then Jagger clearly comes out as the more aggressive one. The video in which the two flounce around each other and sometimes sing with only centimeters between their mouths also encouraged speculation that has continued to this day that the two were lovers.
None of this had anything to do with Mallet’s vision of the video he directed. “My only thought was I was trying to get a really great performance. What was really important was to see them together in performance. Two really big stars, and people wanted to see them together. Choreographed on the spot. We can go down this alley. We can use this warehouse.”
The two performed the song together live only once at another charity, in London on June 20, 1986, at the Prince’s Trust, Prince Charles’s charity to help youth, this time dressed for the royals in suits. As the years have passed, Mallet has grown increasingly pleased with both his video and the recording, which he judges to be “the best cover ever made of ‘Dancing in the Street.’” Some agree, though many musicians and music critics are highly critical of it. British music critic Barney Hoskyns, writing in the Independent in 2002, said, “The nadir for any true Bowie fan was the grotesque Live Aid duet with Mick Jagger on ‘Dancing in the Street.’”
But the public liked it. The record rose to number 1 on the UK chart and number 7 in the United States, making it the second most successful recording ever done of the song. It was Bowie’s last number 1 UK hit, which saddens some Bowie fans, since to many, “Absolute Beginners” was better work. All proceeds from the Jagger-Bowie recording, millions of dollars, were donated to feeding the hungry people of Africa, giving yet another meaning to “Dancing in the Street.”
It would be difficult to say exactly what the Jagger-Bowie cover means to the millions of British fans who continue to love it, but it seems to be more about celebration than rebellion. In 2011 PRS for Music, a wing of the British Performing Rights Society, which manages royalties for songwriters, conducted a poll of three thousand people across the UK, asking them what music they would play if they held a street party to celebrate the wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton. The overwhelming favorite choice was the Jagger-Bowie “Dancing in the Street,” now a song for celebrating royalty.
The song continues. In 1993 the Red Army Ensemble, the celebrated deep-voiced official chorus and band of the army of the dissolved Soviet Union, recorded “Dancing in the Street” with the Leningrad Cowboys, a Finnish rock group in exaggerated pompadours who delighted in outrageous covers of pop classics. Kim Weston finally recorded a reputable version in 1997. Carole King, Mary J. Blige, and Fergie performed it in Japan in 2007. They used the song to energize the crowd, asking them if they were ready for dancing. It was an effective setup for the finale, King’s hit “(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman.” Chaka Khan, “the Queen of Funk” in the 1970s, with the funk band Rufus, in the late 1990s turned to R&B classics and sang “Dancing in the Street.” Even Barry McGuire of “Eve of Destruction” fame was singing it in Europe in 2011.
There have been more than thirty-five covers recorded of the song, with more recordings expected.
Asked about the proliferation of covers of “her” song, Martha Reeves said grandly, “It is the highest form of flattery.” But does she really enjoy this type of flattery? When asked which versions she liked best, she said, “I don’t think I have any of their CDs.”
• • •
Nothing is more revealing of the cultural standing of “Dancing in the Street” than its cinematographic history.
Logically, Cooley High would be the best chance for a historic and meaningful film role for “Dancing in the Street.” First, because it was released in 1975, while the 1960s were still a recent memory, and second, because it was about black people with a screenplay by a black writer, Eric Monte, who specialized in scripts about African Americans. The film is a slice of life about black kids in a vocational high school in Chicago in 1964. This is the kind of realism that holds that dialogue is uneventful and real plotlines are tediously meandering. Anything more scripted would be false. The film also suffers from a lot of Michael Schultz’s self-consciously artsy directing. But it shows some of the lesser-known realities of music in northern black ghettos in 1964, such as kids harmonizing on the street, which is at the heart of the Motown story, and it shows a rent party, which is also at the heart of Motown. The characters sometimes seem like stereotypes, and among those stereotypes is the sound track. Black people, it seems, listen nonstop to Motown even though many of these songs had not yet come out in the school year of 1964. The songs fit into the plotline through literal readings of the lyrics, which of course is the white, not the black reading. So “Dancing in the Street” is played at a dance. A few kids are trying to distract the kid at the door so that they can get into the rent party without paying. Inside they are dancing to “Dancing in the Street,” which actually won’t be released until July, when the school year is over. Here it is a party song, an invitation to dance; the music says that there is a great party inside and they have to be there.
The 1983 film The Big Chill, written and directed by Lawrence Kasdan, was a depressing expression of 1980s depression. Musically and politically, the 1980s began with a strong sense that “It’s over.” In 1980, Mick Jagger in an interview with Rolling Stone said, “Basically rock ’n’ roll isn’t protest. It never was. It’s not political. It promotes interfamilial tension—or it used to. Now it can’t even do that, because fathers don’t ever get outraged with the music. So rock ’n’ roll’s gone, that’s all gone.”
In 1980, Ronald Reagan, an ex-actor who as governor of California in the 1960s had been a great proponent of violence against demonstrators, launched his presidential campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi, the symbol of violent racism. He had long been viewed as a second Barry Goldwater, a frightening candidate so extreme and so incapable that he was not likely ever to get elected. But he did. That 27 million who had voted for Goldwater in 1964, the losing end of a landslide, was a base that could be built on. And soon after taking office, Reagan began dismantling the social programs for urban ghettos that had been created following the summer uprisings of the 1960s. Soon public schools were bei
ng stripped of their funding, and music and art programs were first to go, so that today high school students in Detroit and elsewhere do not graduate with the music skills of a James Jamerson or a Martha Reeves. The result can be heard in twenty-first-century R&B, which has none of the musical sophistication of Motown tracks.
And so The Big Chill is the story of seven depressed and aging leftovers from the 1960s. This is a movie about people who seem empty and unhappy about it, which they probably should be. They keep saying that back when they were in college they used to be radicals and have beliefs. This is hard to believe, but they do keep telling us. All that’s left is that they still get stoned on marijuana and they still play their old R&B records. The music is also all that remains of black people, another bygone frivolity of their youth. They make a passing mention of Black Panthers Huey (Newton) and Bobby (Seale)—another thing they remember from their past. The music may once have had meaning for them but is now just nostalgia. They clear the dishes to Marvin Gaye and get stoned to Smokey Robinson and the Miracles and bob their heads to “Dancing in the Street.” This movie could have been titled The Death of R&B.
Jabari Asim is the editor in chief of the NAACP magazine The Crisis, founded by W. E. B. Du Bois. Asim, a black man barely old enough to remember the 1960s—born in 1962—was saddened by The Big Chill because he still found the old Motown songs full of meaning, not nostalgia. In 2008, when Barack Obama was elected the first black president, Asim wrote an editorial titled “The Age of Purpose” in which he paraphrased “Dancing in the Street”—he described the response to the election as “dancing in the streets of New York, Washington, DC, Chicago.” Asim said in 2011, “It was a conscious reference to ‘Dancing in the Street’—an inherited idea because I have read so much about that song being a call to action. I am forty-nine but it has always had that reference in the cultural conversation. That song has always been mentioned in connection with urban rebellion. You could trace a line from that to overt Motown music in the ’70s. Norman Whitfield. Edwin Starr’s ‘War’ to Stevie Wonder ‘You Haven’t Done Nothin’.’ In the community I grew up in the ’70s, R&B, especially Stevie Wonder, was an articulator of concerns and sentiments in the Afro American community, a real conduit of African American communication, political or otherwise. When I saw The Big Chill, I first started thinking about how the meaning of R&B was changing. Motown was the track but white people singing along and I thought the meaning of the songs was different, altered somehow.”
But it also is possible that once again the black and white points of view had diverged, and The Big Chill was the white point of view. It is also possible that the fictitious characters in the film may have never grasped another meaning to these songs. Or the fault may lie with the filmmakers.
In 1966 Amiri Baraka wrote:
But R&B now, with the same help from white America in its exploitation of energy for profit, the same as if it was a goldmine, strings that music out along a similar weakening line. Beginning with their own vacuous understanding of what Black music is, or how it acts upon you, they believe, from the Beatles on down, that it is about white life.
It is surprising which movies show a deeper understanding of “Dancing in the Street.” In the 1993 Sister Act 2, a meaningless sequel to the equally meaningless 1992 comedy Sister Act—comedies with no pretentions toward ideas or reflection—Whoopi Goldberg plays a Las Vegas singer disguised as a nun who wants to raise $2,000 so that a Catholic school can send its glee club to the state finals. She goes out on the street in their San Francisco neighborhood and rallies the community to support them by singing “Dancing in the Street,” a close imitation of Martha but not the track. She is “Calling out” and the community responds with contributions. The movie may have hit on a truth about this song’s longevity. Whatever your agenda—organizing a party, a revolution, or a glee club—this song will rally people to the cause. Whoopi the nun is in reality doing what H. Rap Brown did twenty-five years earlier for a different cause.
Even more surprising is the 2001 Disney animated cartoon Recess: School’s Out, based on a Disney television series. When the last day of school ends and summer vacation begins, “Dancing in the Street” is heard. “Summer’s here and the time is right . . .” The kids celebrate. One teacher says, “Look at those hooligans” to another teacher, who responds, “Actually I think it’s a wonderful expression of freedom and joy.”
• • •
One of the consequences of entering into classic song literature is that snippets of both the music and the lyrics have turned up in other songs. The first famous instance of this was the Rolling Stones’ “Street Fighting Man.” The next most famous instance is Bruce Springsteen’s 1978 “Racing in the Street.” The song is considered one of Springsteen’s best, and as with “Dancing in the Street,” fans love to develop interpretations of its meaning. Though on the surface, it is about racing cars in New Jersey, and Springsteen insists that it recalls such racing near his home in Asbury Park, just as Reeves insists that her song is about street parties in Detroit, surely there are other meanings. It seems to be about freedom, about male freedom but also sometimes the status of women. The title’s similarity to the Motown song is not a coincidence. Springsteen is a fan of the Motown song. In 1999 he opened a concert in Detroit by singing “Dancing in the Street,” though he never recorded it. And “Racing in the Street” does contain the line “summer’s here and the time is right.” But Springsteen, when he talks about his song, is more apt to talk about “Street Fighting Man” than the Motown original.
Jon Landau, Springsteen’s manager, who was intimately involved in the development of “Racing in the Street,” insists that there was no real thinking about the Motown song. According to Landau, “The song is part of the literature, and obviously Bruce referenced it. The lyrical nod is obvious, but I’m just suggesting it not be overemphasized because the music, the arrangement, what it is saying, and how it is being said are all unrelated to ‘Dancing in the Street.’”
It is in the nature of literature that it becomes part of the cultural language in the same way that when Lyndon Johnson called 1964 “the summer of our discontent” he was not intending to bring Shakespeare into the discussion. Springsteen and numerous others, such as Pete Seeger and Joni Mitchell, have used phrases from “Dancing in the Street” without really intending to use the song. Seeger, in his nineties, started singing a song he wrote, “Take It from Dr. King,” about lessons from the civil rights movement, in which he uses the phrase “dancing in the streets.” And the Los Angles hip-hop group People Under the Stairs, in their 2009 recording “Down in LA,” uses a clip of Martha Reeves as background, with just the phrase “as long as you are there” played repeatedly.
The standing of the 1964 song keeps growing. In 2005 the Martha and the Vandellas recording was entered into the National Recording Registry, the Library of Congress’s collection of recordings that “are culturally, historically, or aesthetically important, and/or inform or reflect life in the United States.” In 2011, at a celebration of Motown at the White House, President Barack Obama called “Dancing in the Street” “the sound track of the civil rights era.”
The song turned up in singing competitions for the reality television series American Idol. In 2011 Naima Adedapo, twenty-six, made it to the final ten with “Dancing in the Street.” With a low, strong voice she did a veritable homage to Martha Reeves but with African dancing included, which it is hard to imagine Martha doing. Adedapo said she chose the song because even though Reeves had said it was just “about having a good time, it was also an anthem for the civil rights movement.”
The various interpretations of the song are still alive. A 2005 collection of anarchist writing was titled Dancin’ in the Street, and the book was dedicated to “Martha and the Vandellas, who suggested what we might do once the doors were opened.”
In 2001, after an airplane attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon spre
ad panic in the United States, Clear Channel Communications, the largest radio station owner in the country, issued a list of more than seventy songs that they advised the radio stations to avoid playing. “Dancing in the Street” was on the list.
• • •
Many in the music industry have reflected on the extraordinary durability of “Dancing in the Street” and other Motown songs. Jon Landau said:
One of the distinctive features of Motown, along with a few other records such as the Beatles, is that their music sounds incredibly contemporary today. You listen to “Dancing in the Street” today and there is a modernism there, a contemporary feel. Stax were great. When you compare, Motown was the most forward looking. “Dancing in the Street” when it comes on right from the first second it is so in your face in a very good way. There is such clarity to the sound. On Motown records it’s obvious that all the producers and artists went for very clear diction. You get every word. Martha Reeves is clear as a bell. People did check it out on car radio, but the reality is that the clearest and brightest recording is what will sound the best on anything. They were among the first where the bass on these records was much more legible but also at the upper register the strings and horns. You could read the whole register.
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