Yeah Yeah Yeah

by Bob Stanley

  If they’d had the looks the Turtles would be remembered as one of the best groups of the decade. As it was, they looked like three Pillsbury dough boys, one in a bushy black fright wig, and their one potential pin-up was hidden behind the drum kit. As the Crossfires they had cut one of the densest, most frenetic surf records, ‘Out of Control’, but moved on when the British beat came to town. Singer Howard Kaylan: ‘We used to go to bowling alleys and order tea with plenty of milk and tell them we were Gerry and the Pacemakers.’

  Within months they had switched to folk. ‘We were so young and so green – anything Dylan did was God.’ They covered ‘It Ain’t Me Babe’ à la Byrds, considered calling themselves the Tyrtles and settled on Turtles. It reached the US Top 10 and they were set. Only they switched, again, this time to euphoric harmony pop on ‘You Baby’ in ’66, then tough garage punk for ‘Outside Chance’, and then doomy jazz raga for ‘Grim Reaper of Love’, one of the outright weirdest 45s of the sixties. Faltering commercially, they pulled out a plum with ‘Happy Together’, a love song so joyous that it’s hard to avoid throwing your arms around the nearest human being every time it comes on the radio. Endless use in adverts cannot diminish its beauty. It reached number one in the summer of ’67, and Tricia Nixon loved it so much she convinced her dad to let them play the White House. Even Elvis himself had to ask nicely before they’d let him in – the Turtles just sniggered their way past security. They were probably stoned. What a gas!

  Some may see more worth in the catalogues of the Doors or the Grateful Dead, but the Turtles encompassed the American sixties – hip, square and freak – and they split, on cue, in 1969 with a baroque ballad called ‘Lady-O’, written by their one-time groupie Judee Sill. In their own grown-up fanboy way, they were as perfect as the Beatles. Their photos just needed a little more touching up.

  1 Eric Burdon refused to wear make-up on TV to cover his pimples, figuring that teenage viewers would be empathetic.

  2 P. F. Sloan’s ‘Eve of Destruction’ was recorded by Barry McGuire, another former New Christy Minstrel who had sung ‘Three Wheels on My Wagon’, a favourite on BBC radio show Junior Choice. The shy Sloan later wrote hits for the Turtles (‘You Baby’, US no. 20 ’66), Herman’s Hermits (‘A Must to Avoid’, US no. 8, UK no. 6 ’66) and the Grass Roots’ ‘Let’s Live for Today’ (US no. 8 ’67). He was immortalised by Jimmy Webb’s touching tribute ‘P. F. Sloan’ on his 1970 album Words and Music.

  3 The marvel of garage punk is that it was barely acknowledged at the time and most bands, unlike? and the Mysterians, never got beyond frat parties. Come the mid-seventies, when energy, zip and two-minute freak-outs were off the mainstream menu, garage punk was curated by Elektra producer and pop archaeologist Lenny Kaye on a double album called Nuggets. It hit a vein, and by the early eighties further digging led to the appearance of rare singles on compilations with names like Pebbles, Psychedelic Unknowns and Back from the Grave. Much of it was too basic, its obscurity warranted, but when it worked – the Litter’s ‘Action Woman’, the Chob’s ‘We’re Pretty Quick’, the Jelly Bean Bandits’ ‘Generation’ – it made all the years of scratching in the dirt worthwhile.

  18

  UP THE LADDER TO THE ROOF: TAMLA MOTOWN

  Detroit’s Tamla Motown label gives us an insight into how the world might have been had the Beatles never happened in America.

  Motown’s writing and production set-up echoed and amplified the Brill Building model. Just as they praised their New York heroes, the Beatles never failed to mention the likes of Motown acts Smokey Robinson and Mary Wells in their early interviews, and covered songs by the Miracles (‘You Really Got a Hold on Me’) and the Marvelettes (‘Please Mr Postman’) on their second album. Motown spoke to the Beatles in a way that other American soul labels like Atlantic didn’t – like the Brill Building’s output, it cut across barriers. Motown was clean, bristling, highly dramatic, and had melodies that sat neatly between the Beatles and the Beach Boys on your radio: the sound of young America. Its roster was obscenely rich in talent, and lurking unseen in the backroom was a rhythm section that was just about the best pop has ever seen; even now, while Stax and Atlantic may get aficionados on their feet, the Motown sound’s whipcrack snare and liquid bass will always guarantee a jam-packed dancefloor whether it’s heard in Los Angeles, London, Lisbon or Lvov.

  While the sage businessman Ahmet Ertegun wore a Mona Lisa smile and kept an enigmatic air of silence, Motown boss Berry Gordy was a loud-mouthed go-getter of the old school, a scrapper and one-time flyweight champion who wanted to be – and got to be – the biggest black entrepreneur in the world. Atlantic had been set up to service an existing, but small and constrained, market; Gordy wanted to invent a sound and create a market. He did this by constant hustling, trying over and over to get the best records on the market. If something worked, he would put out a subtle variant a few weeks later – following the Four Tops’ ‘I Can’t Help Myself’ (US no. 1 ’65) with the three-per-cent-different sequel ‘It’s the Same Old Song’ (US no. 5 ’65) was Gordy’s tongue-in-cheek acknowledgement of his savvy. He made Motown, but eventually he turned out to be its chief flaw.

  By 1966 Motown was being run from eight houses on opposite sides of Detroit’s West Grand Boulevard, and millionaire Berry Gordy was rumoured to be running with the mafia. But back in the mid-fifties he had been small-time, running a jazz record store and eating at Gladys’s down-home restaurant in Detroit. In his spare time he wrote a few songs. One of these, ‘Reet Petite’, clicked for ex-Billy Ward and the Dominoes’ lead Jackie Wilson, whom Gordy had met on the fight circuit in the late forties: it reached number sixty-two in 1957, going as high as number six in the UK in early ’58, and the same team’s ‘Lonely Teardrops’ was a US number-seven hit a year later. Wilson defined melisma. His ecstatic vocal acrobatics were designed to take on Gordy’s pugilistic musical experiments, shuffling one minute (‘look about, look about, look about …’), jabbing the next (‘ooh! ah! ooh! ah!’). But the writer was fast learning the pitfalls of the music business. His jazz shop closed, a victim of the shift in taste towards modern pop, and he claimed not to have prospered from the Wilson hits: ‘You can go broke with hits if someone else is producing them.’ Within months, out of a small timber-frame house in Detroit, much like the fume-choked ones that line the road from JFK to Manhattan, he would inaugurate the Tamla and Motown labels.

  Early Motown singles, from 1958 through to 1960, sound like they were built of wattle and daub. Straight gospel sat alongside blues and the occasional sax-led rocker. Singers had names like Henry Lumpkin. Searching for satori, Gordy covered a lot of ground early on – proto-surf, novelty songs about purple monsters, answer songs to Brill Building hits. Some were plain daft (‘I Out-Duked the Duke’ by Little Otis, with its confused concept of the English gentry), but there were a bunch of great 45s that tend to get forgotten as they don’t really sound like Motown records: the Supremes’ downright filthy ‘Buttered Popcorn’, Little Iva’s ‘Continental Strut’, which sounds like a coffee percolator in orbit, and Mary Wells’s first hit, the gritty ‘Bye Bye Baby’. It hardly smelt like a flawless hit factory. Yet Gordy built Motown one piece at a time, and it barely cost him a dime.

  The real beauty of Motown was its serendipity. The Jackie Wilson hits may have been the main reason musicians initially beat a path to 2648 West Grand Boulevard – or Hitsville USA, as Gordy boldly renamed the house – but it seemed that everyone who knocked on the door was a conduit to fame and fortune. Eddie Holland was a shy student and Jackie Wilson fan who suffered from stage fright and, after just one minor hit with ‘Jamie’ (US no. 30 ’62), decided to try his hand at songwriting instead: at the time of writing he is the thirteenth most successful songwriter in UK chart history. Marvin Gaye was hired as a session drummer and initially saw his singing career, if he saw one at all, as a Nat King Cole imitator. Freddie Gorman was the local postman and Georgia Dobbins was a schoolgirl who had an idea for a song; together they kno
cked out ‘Please Mr Postman’ in the Motown shack one afternoon in 1961, and created the label’s first US number one.

  In 1960 Motown had been struggling to pay the electricity bill; in 1963 it released ten singles that reached the US Top 10, and another eight that made the Top 20. One of these went all the way to number one, and it was the most anarchic. Cut live at the Regal Theatre in Chicago, Little Stevie Wonder’s ‘Fingertips’ is an instrumental that stops halfway through. Stevie finishes the song, then restarts it as an entirely new line-up of musicians are taking the stage. ‘What key? What key?’ shouts the baffled bassist, as they have all of six seconds to rediscover the groove. It’s a rare exercise in rock ’n’ roll improv and one of the most exciting records ever made. Its trip to the top was aided by Motown’s marketing team, who leaked an unsubstantiated rumour that twelve-year-old Stevie was Ray Charles’s illegitimate son.

  ‘Fingertips’ was also the least typical Motown number one. By 1963 Earl Van Dyke had put together a crack studio team modelled on the auto-industry assembly lines that most Detroit musicians would end up on if they didn’t get the breaks. Van Dyke’s team played like Brazil: confident, colourful, joyous, champions of the world. Meanwhile, Berry Gordy had pieced together his most formidable writing team – shy Eddie Holland, his brother Brian and Lamont Dozier. Their earliest Motown hits were church-inspired: the Miracles’ call-and-response, one-chord dancer ‘Mickey’s Monkey’ (US no. 8 ’63); Marvin Gaye’s ‘Can I Get a Witness’ (US no. 22 ’63); the untethered vocals – ‘Go ahead girl!’ – on Martha and the Vandellas’ ‘Heatwave’ (US no. 4 ’63). Their reputation, though, is very pop, and that’s because they wrote every major hit by the Supremes, a trio from the dirt-poor Brewster Projects fronted by Diana Ross, who had the most radio-friendly voice of the whole roster. No matter how muted or quiet the radio may be in a cafe or taxi, Ross’s voice cuts through like a laser. It’s uncanny. It also explains how the Supremes amassed eleven US number ones in the sixties, more than anyone except the Beatles. Ross’s voice aside, it probably helped that she was dating Gordy – writers and producers worked that little bit harder on a Supremes 45, and it paid off for everybody.

  In 1964 Motown became all-conquering. The Supremes had their first hit, ‘Where Did Our Love Go’, which pared the Motown sound down to its axles, nuts and bolts. It was so minimal that the tune barely existed, just a mantra of misery. The Marvelettes were offered it first and hated it; the Supremes did too but, coming off of several flops, weren’t given the option by Berry Gordy. As skeletal as Kraftwerk, ‘Where Did Our Love Go’ was a US number one and UK number three, and nobody whined about not liking it any more.

  Gordy was the factory owner and, with business booming, he was ruthless. He snapped up acts from other Detroit labels Golden World (San Remo Strings) and Ric-Tic (Edwin Starr), putting the rival companies out of business. He wanted no credits for musicians on his artwork; he wanted everything clean and streamlined. It was all about Motown as a stamp of quality – like General Motors. If you bought a new car, Gordy figured, you wouldn’t need to know who fitted the carburettor. The acts worked incredibly hard: in 1966, at Blinstrubb’s nightclub in Boston, an underweight Diana Ross blacked out on stage. Obedience to Motown was expected. The husky Mary Wells had a number one with ‘My Guy’ in ’64, decided she could stay at the top without the label’s help, was signed by 20th Century Records, and her career died a death – Gordy, she suspected, had friends in high places. Mary Wilson knew better – the sexiest Supreme wore a ring to show she was ‘engaged to Motown’.

  One group Gordy had signed to his short-lived Jazz Workshop subsidiary turned out to be the most emotionally charged and floor-friendly of all. The Four Tops weren’t pin-ups, and they were a few years older than their labelmates, but sonically they were the pinnacle of Motown.

  Holland/Dozier/Holland laced their more simplistic lyrics with emotional landmines, lines that could make you catch your breath and twist your heart. The Four Tops’ first hit, ‘Baby I Need Your Loving’ (US no. 11 ’64), is littered with them: Levi Stubbs starts the song with the title, gently, not unlike Sam Cooke, and yes, it’s a sad song, a lonely song, but the catch is that each verse has an unexpected extra line, a ninth bar that sneaks in just as you’re expecting the chorus: ‘’cos I-I-I’m so lonely,’ he coos first time; ‘’cos lately I’ve been losing sleep’, the next time; and by the third verse the song is all dark shadows and empty hallways. Stubbs cries out how the emptiness, the loneliness inside him ‘makes me feel half alive’, and then the wave of building tension, almost unbearable, finally breaks on the chorus, this time without the addition of the ninth bar. From this first hit, the Four Tops projected need and devotion and the pain of love better than almost anyone, and HDH provided them with similarly clever, emotive, beautiful material until 1968: ‘Ask the Lonely’, ‘I Can’t Help Myself’, ‘It’s the Same Old Song’, ‘Reach Out I’ll Be There’, ‘Standing in the Shadows of Love’, ‘Seven Rooms of Gloom’, every one a heartbreaker.

  So why did Motown get a critical cold shoulder? There are several reasons. Firstly, it didn’t operate in a regional bubble, firming up the values of its own local community – adult black consumers – which is how a lot of (usually white) purists, from Alan Lomax to Peter Guralnick, like their black music. Nik Cohn called the Supremes ‘Uncle Tom’. Motown followed pop trends aggressively, and its sidelining of jazz, blues and Atlantic-style soul was a genuine sadness for fans of that sound. ‘When we were in Detroit,’ Eric Burdon told Crawdaddy magazine in ’66, ‘I caused a bit of a disturbance there because I said on the radio I didn’t like Motown, I thought it was whitened Negro music, it had taken the wildness and corralled it … Motown is just too pretty for me. Some of their artists are good, obviously, but I don’t like it.’ Still, on a purely musical level, one listen to Martha and the Vandellas’ metallurgically galvanised cry of pain ‘Nowhere to Run’ (US no. 8 ’65), or the fever of ‘Heatwave’ (‘Sometimes I stare in space, tears all over my face’), should have at least raised the hairs on Burdon’s neck.

  Secondly, Gordy miscalculated by grooming his artists for Vegas, thinking that was where careers and cash would hold up the longest, and here his detractors are on firmer ground. The best aspects of Motown weren’t sustained, they were sacrificed for time and money spent on deportment classes, and its critics were right to be wary. Besides, Gordy’s prediction was wrong – the turn of the seventies marked the end of the Copa crowd, the Rat Pack clearly belonged to a previous generation, and they had no real successors.

  Thirdly, there are the excruciating interviews, as bland and vacant as anything Disney could muster, in which one Supreme will explain that they don’t go steady but ‘sometimes when we’re home in Detroit we double or triple date’. Paul Anka couldn’t have sounded more gormless. It’s notable that Atlantic and Stax stars were rarely interviewed – they knew to keep the mystery caged. Still waters run deep, and Motown was a babbling brook.

  Yet even in the twenty-first century you will hear more of Tamla Motown’s singles on the radio than those of any other record label. Why is this? For a start, it had taken Don Kirshner’s 1650 Broadway model and supercharged it. There were so many competing writers1 and such an abundance of great music produced every week that unissued recordings continue to emerge to this day – entire CDs’ worth of material by the Marvelettes, Vandellas, Marvin Gaye, and astonishing songs by lesser known but equally worthwhile names like Chris Clark (‘I Just Wanna Be Loving You’), Barbara McNair (‘Baby a Go-Go’), Brenda Holloway (‘Lonely Boy’), Kim Weston (‘Absent Minded Lover’). These songs all sound like Top 10 hits, prime Hitsville USA material, and they just sat there gathering dust, waiting for an archivist to dig them out four decades later. It’s safe to say the label’s quality-control operative, Billie Jean Brown, was overstretched: Martha and the Vandellas’ ‘Jimmy Mack’,2 one of Motown’s touchstone singles, was left on the shelf for over two years before Berry Gordy discovered it while riflin
g through unissued tapes in 1966 and, unsurprisingly, blew a gasket.

  So Motown was too productive for its own good. Its hothouse environment is how I think most great pop music emerges. It couldn’t last. We’ll soon discover how some of its key names became disgruntled, tired of clocking in and clocking out, wanting to stretch out beyond two minutes forty and work away from the gaze of time-and-motion man Berry Gordy. Of course, most people don’t think about any of this when they hear ‘You Can’t Hurry Love’. Motown is shorthand for goodtime party music, memories of simpler times when pop was there to make young America dance, not to challenge its audience. In this respect, nobody did it better.

  1 Even the writers on a song as familiar as Jimmy Ruffin’s ‘What Becomes of the Brokenhearted’ – William Weatherspoon, Paul Riser and James Dean – remain obscure as they were surrounded by so many more successful colleagues.

  2 The song was conceived by Eddie Holland after he attended an awards meeting in 1963. Ronnie Mack, who had written the Chiffons’ ‘He’s So Fine’, had died that year, just weeks after the record hit number one. His mother was collecting an award on his behalf, telling the crowd how sad she felt that they would never hear another Ronnie Mack song. Holland was deeply affected, went home, sat at his piano and wrote ‘Ronnie Mack, when are you coming back?’ A few hours later he had a hit song that was partly a tribute to the dead songwriter, but also seemed to tease American soldiers in Vietnam, as their girls back home were ‘trying hard to be true’.

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  1966: THE LONDON LOOK

  I’m terribly pleased to be working-class because it’s the most swinging thing to be now, a tremendous status symbol really. People are always asking, with a sort of envious reverence, ‘Do you really live in a council house?’