DISCOGRAPHY SOURCES PLAYLISTS PART ONE PART TWO
Prologue: Who Are They To Judge Us?
In June 1969, the Four Tops have a three-week residency in the Venetian Room at the Fairmont Hotel in San Francisco. The Examiner reviews opening night. “There is a bit of the usual Motown monotony in the arrangements but the Tops change the pace effectively and have everything going their own way by the hour’s midpoint.” The Tops are said to be “more relaxed and less affected” than their (unnamed) “compatriots.”
The Venetian Room had opened a few months before. It has twenty-four-feet-high ceilings, murals commissioned from Italy, fourteen wall chandeliers, gold moldings. The sort of space in which Cornelius Vanderbilt would have felt at home. Jack Jones (“Wives and Lovers”) was the inaugural performer; Phyllis Diller is booked after the Four Tops’ run.
Each night in the Venetian Room, Obie Benson sings harmonies on “Climb Every Mountain” and “Baby I Need Your Loving” and “If I Were a Carpenter,” then goes back to his hotel. He turns on the television to watch San Francisco under siege. Upon the People’s Park uprising in mid-May, Gov. Ronald Reagan has mandated a curfew and now occupies Berkeley. Thousands of National Guard troop through the streets, breaking up any gatherings of hippie undesirables, piling into bars and cafes to make arrests.
“I saw all the kids up there with long hair and everything,” Benson recalls to Ben Edmonds decades later. “The police was beating on them but they weren’t bothering anybody. I saw this, and I started wondering what the fuck was going on.”
Benson goes home to Detroit and starts working on a song with Motown staff writer Al Cleveland. The Tops don’t want it. We don’t do protest, his groupmates say, honoring the credo of their label’s founder. “I said no, man, it’s a love song about love and understanding,” Benson argues. “I’m not protesting, I want to know what’s going on. But they never really understood what was happening.” Benson offers it to Joan Baez, playing an early version of the song on her guitar in a dressing room. She seemed into it, he says, but he never sees her again.
Then he takes it to Marvin Gaye. Gaye is at sea at the turn of the Seventies—not touring or recording, often stoned, devoting his time to quixotic plans like trying out for the Detroit Lions at age thirty. Benson plays the song at Gaye’s house, where Duke Fakir recalls Gaye working out a melody on piano while Benson riffs on phrases. “Obie could be very adamant about things, very passionate in his convictions…he kept repeating the same thing over and over, talking about how he felt, and Marvin kept putting music to it.”
(This doesn’t quite jibe with Benson’s take on the song’s creation, which is that he and Cleveland wrote much of it, that Gaye added a few lines and “some spice to the melody,” and that he gave Gaye a co-composer slot as an incentive to sing it—Gaye had wanted to give it to The Originals.)
In early June 1970, Benson sits in the control room of Motown’s Studio B with his acoustic guitar while Gaye cuts a vocal. Gaye has called him in because he wants Benson to play along while he sings, hoping that hearing Benson’s slap-bass-style chords will carry his mind back to when he first heard Benson playing in his living room. Benson uses voicings on his guitar that Gaye had showed him, “so it was like his own voice playing along with him, understand?”
“What’s Going On” is released early in the next year, hits #2 and sells over two million copies, as does the album it titles, which has three Benson co-writes (he and Cleveland also wrote “Save the Children” and “Wholy Holy,” as well as other tracks that didn’t make the cut, including “Solidarity” and “Product of Society”). It’s a herald of Seventies Motown: a label at last growing up, or at least opening a window.
A transformational masterpiece composed by a Top that could have been a Four Tops single, which Levi Stubbs could have sung. But “we were cocooned and isolated from what was going on in the streets,” Fakir says.
The Fall of the House of Holland and Dozier
When you find that you’ve left the future behind
The Supremes, “The Happening” (1967, H-D-H).
In 1967, Berry Gordy bought a property at 918 West Boston Boulevard, in Detroit’s Boston-Edison district. He paid a quarter of a million dollars for it: a three-story Italianate manor, built by a Dutch lumber baron. Complete with Olympic-sized swimming pool, pseudo-English pub, cinema, and bowling alley, it stood a few blocks from Henry Ford’s first mansion.
Gordy Manor would be a mix of the White House and the Playboy mansion—Gordy’s receiving rooms and seat of power. He had a portrait commissioned of himself as Napoleon, which he hung in the main hall. Even the ruthless Joe Jackson was taken aback when he and his children first saw the place. “Jesus. Black people actually live like this?”
Yet Gordy was spending more of his days in Los Angeles, working in the penthouse suite of Motown’s office on Sunset Boulevard. The Motown LA branch was once an outpost: a site for West Coast distributor meetings and a more efficient means to book local studios for TV performances. Now it was the future.
In October 1967, Atlantic Records was bought by Warner Bros.-Seven Arts. For two decades, Atlantic had been the premier R&B indie label, the distributor of Motown’s great rival Stax. Now it was part of a movie studio conglomerate. To keep Motown independent, to avoid becoming a cog in some transnational enterprise whose origins lay in manufacturing washing machines, Gordy determined that selling pop singles to teenagers could no longer be his primary source of income.
The obvious moves were into television: in the late Sixties, Gordy would produce a run of Motown variety specials; The Supremes alone appeared on network TV twenty-five times in two years. And, ultimately, film. He envisioned a Motown movie studio, whose features would star the label’s top acts, particularly Diana Ross (and potentially Levi Stubbs).
He still needed hits, obviously. But he had the formula down. The Supremes or the Four Tops or Martha & the Vandellas or Marvin Gaye would cut the latest Holland-Dozier-Holland song with the studio band. The track would be mixed, handed over to the sales force and the radio promoters, and there: another smash.
There was one problem. For some time now, without telling anyone, H-D-H had gone on strike.
Even in the 2010s, Holland-Dozier-Holland were cagey about what had gone down half a century before. While in his memoir, the late Lamont Dozier admitted that “we agreed we’d essentially go on strike,” the Holland brothers, in their memoir, are more circumspect, keeping to vague summaries of events. Given that the Hollands and Motown battled in courtrooms well into the Nineties, this restraint suggests a counsel-bred wariness of listing details or assigning blame.
From available evidence, Eddie Holland was the prime instigator. The elder of the Holland brothers, the most successful as a solo artist and as a collaborator with songwriters beyond his team, Eddie had long kept an eye on how the vast wealth of Motown was being distributed (Gordy once said that Eddie “was more money-minded” than his partners). While the Gordys had become the Borgias of mid-Sixties Detroit, Eddie still had to hit up Gordy for compensation. In his memoir, Gordy wrote that “Eddie’s constant requests for added incentives” had culminated in a demand for a large “personal, interest-free loan. I had said no. I felt this so-called strike might have something to do with that.”
Gordy believed that he’d been generous, in his paternal manner, to his producers, songwriters, and musicians. Earl Van Dyke was making a million dollars a year, James Jamerson was able to buy a house with a few paychecks, and Gordy had gone out of his way, he claimed, to reward H-D-H. He named Eddie as head of A&R for Motown and installed Brian as head of Quality Control, thus giving the Hollands power over who the label signed and which singles got released (with limits, naturally—e.g., Eddie couldn’t change a word in any Smokey Robinson lyric).
Now the Hollands wanted to be made partners in Motown: to own a piece of the label, to keep their publishing, and to simply know how much money their songs were actually making. Because Gordy wouldn’t disclose sales figures to the RIAA, let alone his artists.
Motown was a Gordy property and would remain one. While Gordy had known Brian and Eddie Holland since they were teenagers, they weren’t family—they would always be hired hands. Marvin Gaye had married into the Gordys and they still kept him outside.
H-D-H’s work slowdown was a gradual improvisation. Dozier, for one, was feeling lost—he was drinking too much and, after a disastrous reunion with friends from his childhood neighborhood, who called him “Mr. Big Shit” and nearly beat the hell out of him, he felt like a fraud, a sellout in his mansion in a ritzy, mostly-white neighborhood, cut off from everything. The songs began drying up.
In 1966, H-D-H had produced ninety recording sessions at Motown, thirty of which had resulted in charting hits. In the first half of 1967, however, they ran only twenty-two sessions, only five of which produced hits, including their last masterwork for The Supremes, the oscillator-haunted “Reflections.” (Their last Four Tops songs had equally prophetic titles: “You Keep Running Away” and “I’m in a Different World.”) Junior Walker’s remake of “Come See About Me,” finished on 21 July 1967, would be the last complete H-D-H production for Motown.
By November 1967, around the time that H-D-H ran their final Four Tops session at Motown (tracking for “Different World”), Eddie had convinced his partners to retain the services of one of Detroit’s most ambitious lawyers, Edward F. Bell. What had been a shifting unhappiness with Gordy was now inked into a set of demands.
As per Stuart Cosgrove, whose Detroit 67 is the most comprehensive account of the H-D-H/Motown split, Eddie and Bell “freeze-framed a week in November 1967 and counted up the new releases, the reissues and the greatest hits.” The Supremes, for example, were touring the West Coast at the time with a setlist that was “over ninety percent written and produced by Holland-Dozier-Holland.” Bell and Eddie “listed all the times [H-D-H] songs had been used in ad jingles, on movie soundtracks and in television…they tried to estimate the number of times the Supremes [&] the Four Tops had appeared on network shows.” Their findings: Motown, to a great extent, was Holland-Dozier-Holland.
No more. H-D-H would stop writing and producing at Motown until they were rightfully compensated. Rumors flew that the trio were in talks with Capitol Records. On 4 December 1967, Eddie resigned as Motown’s A&R head. Later that month, Diana Ross cut her lead vocal for the final H-D-H Supremes single, “Forever Came Today” (true to H-D-H form, it was a rewrite of “Reflections.”)
Gordy’s removal to LA had made things worse. A man who had micro-managed singles mixes was now so absent from Motown operations that he didn’t know for months that his top songwriting team had quit working; he was finally clued in by a label executive. Gordy’s strategy, after informal talks with the Hollands went nowhere, was to call H-D-H’s bluff: on 29 August 1968, he sued them for breach of contract, seeking $4 million. He figured this would shock the group enough that they’d stop stonewalling and get back to work.
As a hedge, he scrabbled for a way to replace them. In 1968, the post H-D-H Four Tops were issuing stale covers as singles while Ross & the Supremes were in a chart slump.
Right as he filed his lawsuit, Gordy assembled a group of house composers that he dubbed The Clan, put them up in a hotel and demanded they write a fresh hit for The Supremes, with Gordy kicking things off by playing Holland-Dozier-Holland-style chords on piano. The result was “Love Child,” a number one single that sold half a million copies in a week, and a song, Gordy was delighted to learn, that everyone assumed H-D-H had written. He’d exulted in his memoir that “we’d done it without them…we would survive.”
On 14 November 1968, H-D-H countersued Motown for $22 million. They claimed acts of conspiracy, fraud, deceit, and breach of fiduciary relationships, and wanted Motown put in receivership. H-D-H, in their suit, claimed they’d never been offered a contract or legal agreement which they could independently review with outside counsel. That “Gordy had repeatedly promised to transfer ownership of Motown stock to Brian Holland and had made a promise to give Holland $1 million or the equivalent in Motown stock as remuneration”—and had reneged. That the trio had regarded Gordy “as their true friend and in effect their father,” a father who had, in turn, cheated them of royalties and “fraudulently attempted to, and did, deprive the plaintiffs of proper accounting and legal advice.” The suit further claimed that Motown had assets of over $11.5 million and its publisher Jobete assets of over $2 million, “virtually all of which were accumulated as the direct result of the efforts and creative abilities of the team Holland-Dozier-Holland.”
A dazzling offensive maneuver, it proved to be a grave mistake. Gordy was enraged by the claims of conspiracy and fraud, worried that this would play into scurrilous rumors that Motown was Mafia-owned: he vowed that he would never settle. And H-D-H’s lawyers ultimately couldn’t evade the fact that the trio had signed legal documents with Motown, agreements of which they were now in violation.
The atmosphere in Motown Detroit, already well on edge after the violence of summer 1967 (see below), grew ugly. Dozier, stopping by Studio B to catch up with musicians like James Jamerson, was told to get lost by Smokey Robinson (Robinson was so devoted a Gordy partisan that he mailed reporters a statement that “I know Motown pays. I’ve even forgotten some of my royalty checks and been called two days after royalty date and asked to please come and pick up the check”). The optics of the legal battle—three Black songwriters and their Black lead counsel versus the (apart from Gordy) white top executives of Motown—added another strain of tension.
Litigation dragged on for more than three years. Gordy could offset his legal expenses by charging them to his company, thus drawing from his artists’ pile of earnings (including H-D-H’s) to fund his battle with H-D-H in court. Whereas H-D-H had to pay their expenses out of pocket while being unable to publish new songs under their own names until the case was resolved.
A newspaper profile of H-D-H in March 1969 found them in limbo, with Brian racing horses (“my songs are not out there because I’ve stopped writing”), Eddie spending “all his time consulting with lawyers,” and Dozier sitting in his home in Palmer Woods, reading and painting. By the end of the year, the Hollands and Dozier had started two new labels, Hot Wax and Invictus. Due to the Motown suit, they couldn’t write songs (at least publicly—the mysterious “Edythe Wayne” is listed as co-writer on very H-D-H-esque Invictus singles): thus the irony of some of the greatest songwriters of the Sixties having to use outside composers or employ aliases on their own label.
H-D-H’s new labels came out strong. The Chairmen of the Board were their new Four Tops, with the formidable General Johnson on lead vocal (“Give Me Just a Little More Time,” “Men Are Getting Scarce”). Honey Cone (“Want Ads”) were their new Supremes, Freda Payne (“Band of Gold,” “Bring the Boys Home”) their new Martha Reeves.
The first H-D-H/Motown war at last ended in January 1972, when H-D-H settled, paying their former label $200,000. Between truce periods, during which H-D-H would sometimes work for Motown again, there were more and more court cases, the suits between H-D-H and Motown elongating and extending, Jarndyce v. Jarndyce-style, for the rest of the century.
“Think in terms of a family member that you have a disagreement with,” Eddie later recalled. “It was a molehill turning into a mountain. [Gordy’s] a fighter, I’m a fighter, and so, through the lawyers, we fought for many, many years, and he wouldn’t bend and I wouldn’t bend. That’s what happens when you get two bulls locking horns.”
Motown stumbled without H-D-H—while some slack was taken up by Norman Whitfield and Barrett Strong’s Temptations and the work of Nickolas Ashford and Valerie Simpson (whom Eddie Holland had signed) for Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell, the assembly-line production of peak Motown began to break down. The hits which Gordy’s songwriting group, reconstituted as The Corporation, wrote in 1969 for the Jackson 5 would be the last great rollout. Nor would H-D-H, despite early triumphs on Invictus and Hot Wax, ever again reach their mid-Sixties heights.
Those who suffered most, though, were those whose glories had been interwoven with those of H-D-H: Martha & the Vandellas, The Supremes (soon to be abandoned by Ross), and the Four Tops. “By spring 1968, the damage was done,” Mary Wilson wrote in her memoir. “The sound H-D-H created for us set our records apart. The songs were made for us and after this, we bounced from producer to producer.”
Duke Fakir agreed. “We never felt we recaptured the magic with other writers…We couldn’t buy a hit.” After the split, the Tops were left “musically heartbroken,” Fakir said. H-D-H “were the finest friends we’ve ever met. The reason they were able to write so many good songs for us was that they wrote about us, and the things we did.” Now the Tops were alone.
What Is a Man? Tops Adrift
We were on top until Holland and Dozier split and this is the reason it can happen like that. There shouldn’t be a situation where artists have to suffer for six months to a year to find other producers when you have a company as big as that. But they had your hands so tied until everyone who wrote tunes for you wrote in the same bag that the original producers were in. They tried to write like H-D-H and there was something missing. We had to search around to find a good producer for us.
Duke Fakir, to Sepia, March 1974.
There is only so far you can go with a groove.
Lawrence Payton, to Sepia, March 1974.
Holland-Dozier-Holland’s break with Motown left the Four Tops dangling. Their hits, the fundament of their sound, were greatly the work of H-D-H. And Berry Gordy’s priority was to save The Supremes, at least until Diana Ross could properly leave them.
The Tops, who had a deep stage repertoire, could tour for much of the year, and who were growing popular in Britain thanks to the late Brian Epstein’s promotion, would have to make do with what could be spared.
A first expedient was to mine their back catalog for singles, with Motown issuing Tops versions of the Left Banke’s “Walk Away Renee” (January 1968; R&B #15, Pop #14) and Tim Hardin’s “If I Were a Carpenter” (April 1968; R&B #17, Pop #20). Produced by H-D-H two years earlier, both tracks had already appeared on the Tops’ Reach Out LP in 1967.
For “Renee,” Gordy believed the Tops could beat the original (a #5) on the charts, and bet them that they would—while the Tops stalled outside the Top 10, he allegedly paid up anyway. Majestically sung, the track lacks the seaswept teenage longing of the Left Banke original (Michael Brown, who wrote “Renee” about his bassist’s girlfriend, once called its sentiment as being “mythologically in love…without having evidence in fact or in deed”). The Tops were always fated to be the adults.
Tim Hardin’s recording of “If I Were a Carpenter” hadn’t been issued when the Tops cut their take: their template was Bobby Darin’s 1966 single, on which Darin cast off his earlier Rat Pack sound. It was a premonition of his late Sixties, when he lived in a trailer in Big Sur, grew his hair, spent much of his time fishing, and called himself Bob Darin (Neil Young: “I used to be pissed off at Bobby Darin because he changed styles so much. Now I look at him and think he was a genius”).
The Tops’ version has one of the finest late H-D-H arrangements. Take the intro, where interlocking harpsichord and guitar arpeggios build a tension further heightened by a flourish of low strings and a few establishing bass notes, which in turn set a stage for high harmonies to soar over. Stubbs sings Hardin’s lyric as a riddle—would you miss your colorbox?—while the Funk Brothers dance around James Jamerson’s bassline, enlivening the tempo of Darin’s version. (That said, Darin’s performance of the song with Stevie Wonder in 1969 is sublime.)
Motown chose these tracks for the first post-H-D-H singles because they had no other choice: little in the Tops backlog wasn’t a cover (the final H-D-H original single, “In a Different World,” was released later in 1968). Stockpiling compositions rather than giving them to Motown, H-D-H, in their last year of working with the Tops, had the group sing contemporary pop hits, a practice that would continue for the rest of the decade.
So the Tops covered The Beatles (see below) and The Monkees (“Last Train to Clarksville,” which should have been credited to the Andantes; “I’m a Believer,” as sung by a gruff heretic; “Daydream Believer,” which sounds recorded under duress). They sang The Association (“Cherish” and “Never My Love”), Bobby Hebb (“Sunny”), The Doors (“Light My Fire,” sexual in a less Promethean way—“sizzle sizzle SIZZLE me baby light my fire!”), even Gary Puckett (a mercifully-shelved “Woman Woman” in which Stubbs is reduced to worrying vowels).
They interpreted Jimmy Webb (“MacArthur Park,” which Stubbs orates like Moses and Fakir goes to the moon; “Do What You Gotta Do”), Bobby Russell (“Honey,” a kidney stone of a song, here given pathos; “Little Green Apples”) and Bacharach-David (“The Look of Love,” “This Guy’s in Love With You,” “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head”) mostly in four-part harmonies, with a mid-afternoon casino ballroom haze pervading most tracks. On “This Guy,” an orchestra attempts to bludgeon the Tops to death; on “Raindrops,” Stubbs makes a rare interpretative blunder, over-singing to the point of becoming unbearable.
These tracks were mostly intended as album fillers but collectively they marked a retreat for the group as the Sixties ebbed. Not long before, the Tops had held their own, aesthetically and commercially, with the likes of The Beatles and Bob Dylan. Now they were reactive, sifting through what they heard on the radio, translating it into a more polished language.
The Contenders
Securing the Four Tops was a lucrative prize, as there were fewer opportunities for a producer to make their name at Motown in the late Sixties. The Jackson 5, the label’s hottest new prospect, were a Motown “Corporation” property. The Temptations and Edwin Starr were Norman Whitfield’s, Stevie Wonder was still linked with Henry Crosby, Smokey Robinson ran his own shop.
The Tops were considered no-fuss pros in the studio and could deliver on stage (they headlined at the Copacabana in the 1967 Christmas season) and television: they could sing anything, and often did. All they needed was new, commercially-viable material. From 1968 through mid-1969, there was a war for the Tops in Motown involving many of the label’s roster of producers, with few victories.
Deke Richards, a member of Motown’s “Corporation,” tried his luck with in early 1968 with “Sweet Was the Love” and “I’m So Afraid of Losing You,” both of which got rejected. “Send Her to Me,” an outtake from summer 1968, was stronger, with its rumble of a piano/bass/bongo hook and swells of organ. (Stubbs is the only vocal, so it’s possible the track wasn’t completed or perhaps was considered as a solo single.)
R. Dean Taylor, an H-D-H protege, produced the Tops’ “Daydream Believer” and their take on Jimmy Webb’s “By the Time I Get to Phoenix,” which lacks the melancholy of Glen Campbell’s hit version and is a pencil sketch compared to Isaac Hayes’ sermon-melodrama from 1969. Stubbs has the existential caddishness that the song requires, but the rest of the Tops grasp for ways to contribute (“gotta get to PHOE-nix!”).
Nickolas Ashford and Valerie Simpson mostly wrote for Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell and would be central to Diana Ross’ solo career. Their offerings for the Tops included “Can’t Seem to Get You Out of My Mind,” one of the first post-H-D-H Tops tracks to alter their mid-Sixties sound, with a more relaxed groove, giving Stubbs room to roam, building to a break which sets the Tops and Jamerson against the world. “Don’t You Think You Owe Me Something,” a 1969 outtake, is a spot of calm and ease, if its yearning melody seems better suited for Stevie Wonder.
Norman Whitfield and Barrett Strong’s “Don’t Let Him Take Your Love from Me” was a song that half of Motown took a crack at: Gladys Knight, Jimmy Ruffin, The Temptations. But the Tops’ take, issued as a single in late 1969 (R&B #25, Pop #45), is the best. Stubbs is on fire, drawing from the power of the drums, which play counter-fills to the guitar riffs—the track becomes a calculus of rhythm. Fakir and Payton plead on Stubbs’ behalf; he gives some last howls of delight at the fade.
Johnny Bristol became a producer with Motown in 1964 and was one of the label’s most reliable songwriters of the decade (“What Does It Take,” “Yester-you Yester-me Yester-day,” “25 Miles,” “Your Precious Love”), but his bid for the Tops foundered with the 1969 single “What Is a Man” (Pop #53) which tries to emulate the “Western” sound of “Reach Out I’ll Be There” to middling results. Lyrically, it previews the Tops’ Seventies, with its stuffy concerns on masculinity and its obligations.
Raynard Miner had recently joined Motown from Chess Records, where he’d co-written Fontella Bass’ “Rescue Me.” His try-outs for the Tops were “Clip My Wings,” built on a swaying spine of piano, guitar and bongos, and the repellent “I Can’t Hold Back,” whose lines include “I feel like grabbing you/next time I know that I will/ Instead of being a perfect gentleman/ I’m gonna act the way I feel.” He had better luck with “The Key,” lead-off track on Four Tops Now! It’s a well-worn arrangement, looking to recapture the H-D-H sound: a Stubbs lead, querying Tops-Andantes harmonies that anticipate and echo his lines, horns as punctuation.
His triumph was “My Past Just Crossed My Future,” which Miner wrote with Janie Bradford. Over a drum loop (likely Uriel Jones) that could power a dynamo, Stubbs bobs and weaves, using his phrasings as lines of attack. There’s little to differentiate verse or chorus—a song as patterns of force. The Tops are a spectral harmony, working with and against a sitar line.
It was a tremendous track, one that might have arrested the group’s slide on the charts; Miner considered it to be his best work at Motown. “I had stayed up two days and two nights–with Librium, I guess–remixing that with engineer Ken Sands before the Quality Control meeting that Friday,” he told Adam White in 2019. “It blew their minds, and I’ll never forget that on Tuesday the following week, Janie told me, ‘Raynard, Raynard, guess what? They just started putting labels on ‘My Past…’ Then some politics jumped in, and I don’t really know what happened after that.”
The “politics”: Johnny Bristol was married to Iris Gordy, Berry’s niece, and she was pushing for Bristol’s “What Is a Man” to be the next Tops single (see above). Miner noted that Bristol’s single “did a nosedive. I’m not criticizing, but mine just got pushed onto the album” [Four Tops Now!].
One of Miner’s last attempts was “Which Way Is the Sky,” from 1970, another Bradford co-write. An apocalypse with tornadoes, whirlpools, hurricane winds, inverted horizons (“suddenly it came to me/ the sky is where the sea should be!”), and Stubbs suffering like a medieval saint, his heart dropping from his chest to expire on the ground (“turning pale and grey in its complexion!”). The ominous massing of strings in the outro sounds inspired by Scott Walker’s “It’s Raining Today.” The track was shelved.
Ivy Jo Hunter, who’d worked with the Tops for years (“Ask the Lonely,” “Loving You Is Sweeter Than Ever”), seemed the most logical candidate. He opened his bid with “Your Love Is Wonderful,” the B-side to “Walk Away Renee”; “Remember When,” with fuzz guitar, and “We’ve Got a Strong Love (On Our Side),” with its grand intro for strings, essentially a track-length drum fill, and Stubbs musing over a bongo break.
What darkened his prospects was producing the everyone-pitches-in composition “Yesterday’s Dreams,” a maudlin song that was meant to restore the Tops’ chart fortunes when it was released in July 1968. Instead, it was the worst-performing single that the Tops had yet released on Motown, a performance that helped tank the LP which the song titled. Hunter’s momentum never quite recovered, though the Tops’ take on his “I Can’t Escape Your Memory,” a song released by Edwin Starr in 1970, was one of their best late Motown recordings.
I Believe You, Mr. Wilson
The Four Tops’ last great collaborator at Motown, it turned out, had already worked with them. Frank Wilson had produced Four Tops on Broadway in 1966 and found, while making that record, what H-D-H had also discovered—that while Levi Stubbs was the public face of the Tops, Lawrence Payton made them work in the studio.
Wilson made Payton his confidant, his man on the studio floor, having Payton come up with most vocal arrangements while Wilson worked up the instrumental backing. By Soul Spin, the last Tops album issued in the Sixties, Payton was his uncredited co-producer. “Frank was an experimental cat,” Payton recalled to Goldmine in 1995. “H-D-H was more structured; it was like bam-bam-bam-bam. Frank Wilson, he was just free, he just let it flow…when we would work with him anything was fair. He’d say, Lawrence, just do what you want to do.”
Wilson was born in Houston in 1940. When he was twenty, he lost an athletic scholarship to Southern University in Baton Rouge after he’d taken part in a civil rights sit-in. “I thought I had sacrificed my big chance to escape an ordinary existence,” he recalled in 2009. But he was given a one-way bus ticket to Los Angeles by the Congress of Racial Equality, hoping that he’d have better luck outside the South.
In LA, Wilson, a gospel music fan, joined a local group called the Angelaires. But seeing Motown’s Brenda Holloway perform secularized him, making him want to write songs for her. He said it was Holloway’s voice, although Holloway being a stunning woman who wore gold jumpsuits on stage might have also aided in Wilson’s conversion.
When Gordy decided to open a West Coast Motown office, he asked his producers Hal Davis and Marc Gordon to run it. They recommended that he hire Wilson, who was now a prolific composer. Like Carole King, Wilson was known for the quality of his demo singing. “(I) often became the vocal vehicle for my own material,” Wilson said, while Holloway praised his voice: “I loved his delivery, his phrasing and everything… I loved recording all of his songs.”
In 1965, Gordy offered Wilson a choice as the two stood backstage at the Fox Theater watching a Motown Revue performance—try his luck at being a recording artist at Motown, or become a full-time producer and move to Detroit. Wilson decided to stay on the producer’s side of the studio window, and was soon writing for The Miracles.
His relationship with the Tops was built gradually—from 1967 through 1969, he was one of many producers who worked on the group’s cover recordings. But even in those sessions he and Payton broadened the Tops’ arrangements. They favored a greater use of the group’s four-part harmonies rather than the Stubbs Plus the Rest H-D-H formula. Payton took more solo parts. There was a greater emphasis on vocal texture and interplay, with the Tops’ baritones set against the tenors, set in turn against the Andantes’ soprano Louvain Demps and her partners’ altos.
A good early example is the Tops’ version of the Mamas & Papas’ “California Dreamin’,” cut in November 1968 and released as an LP cut the following year. Aided by Wade Marcus, an arranger who would help craft Motown’s Seventies sound, Wilson and Payton, after a canonical intro, reduce the four-part Mamas & Papas harmonies to a spry, musing solo Payton vocal, with the other Tops only heard as gloss on one refrain.
And “Eleanor Rigby,” cut in January 1969. Black artists had taken up “Rigby” soon after its release, sharpening the song’s awareness of the “invisible” Others who work, live, and die around you (as AS Byatt said, Eleanor’s face is kept in a jar by the door because she “is faceless, is nothing” at home). Aretha Franklin cast herself as the title character while the Tops made it swing, offering a swaying “El-eh-nor, EL-eh-nor RIG-Bee” hook as a supplemental bassline, while Stubbs becomes a Pentecostal Father McKenzie, taking the measure of a lonely, atomized world: mourning it, and cursing it.
By the summer of 1969, Wilson and the Tops were a working unit. Wilson now determined that if the group was no longer a reliable on the singles charts, they should aim to become an LP act. The Motown album sequencing logic of “last two singles plus other stuff we cut recently” wouldn’t cut it in the age of Abbey Road—a change was needed. So Wilson and the Tops would make a concept album, one whose sound would map where Marvin Gaye would soon go.
Still Waters
On the sleeves of the Four Tops albums of the late Sixties—Yesterday’s Dreams, Four Tops Now!, Soul Spin—the group wear tuxedos. Portraiture for lobby cards. The Tops, smiling or brooding, signifying class and professional entertainment.
Now, for their first album of the Seventies, the group are in street clothes, photographed standing on a dock in a wavering amber blear. The Tops as seen by someone drowning. The back cover is a reverse shot: the group with the water behind them, the monochrome image greatly shadow. There’s an acrostic poem: P…for the privilege of being loved…E…for the ease it gives to the soul & the mind…
This all could have gone very wrong; the Tops wouldn’t have been the first to make a panicked swerve upon meeting the counterculture. But the strength of Still Waters Run Deep, the last essential Tops Motown work, lies in the subtlety of its transformations, its alteration of the Tops’ sound by minute degrees, as if filtering sunlight. While structurally the same as other Tops albums of its period (a few singles packaged with covers & house compositions), it differs in feel: it’s the collective sustaining of an elaborated mood.
“The concept was that the album would feel like one piece of music,” Frank Wilson said. “The Funk Brothers thought I was mad. They hated to see me coming.”
Still Waters is in the tradition of Sinatra’s Fifties albums, Miles Davis’ Sketches of Spain and Ellington’s Far East Suite more than any rock “concept” album of the period. In turn, it inspired Marvin Gaye’s soon-to-follow What’s Going On, which draws upon Still Waters‘ segues, its instrumentation and arrangements, its innovative mixing, and uses many of its performers (including Obie Benson, one of its co-composers).
The change is in Levi Stubbs’ voice, in his phrasing, in how he surveys and seizes melodic terrain. In the more diverse vocal cast: the Tops, with each member of the quartet taking the lead at times, and The Andantes, and the singers Billie Rae Calvin and Brenda Joyce Evans, fresh Motown recruits who would soon join the Undisputed Truth. Its pointillist arrangements, filled with oscillator whirs and harmonica, organ, bongos and harp, violins that move like starling clusters, disco horns, James Jamerson’s ever-conversing basslines. Every few bars something fresh appears, something else winks away. An accumulative record, one whose “revelations [are] reached slowly and thoughtfully instead of in a clattering crash,” as Ann Powers wrote of the late Roberta Flack’s work.
Produced by Wilson and an uncredited Lawrence Payton, its tracks framed by the Motown arrangers Jerry Long, Jimmy Roach and David Van DePitte, the album was made in the turnstile of two decades: tracking and vocals in the last months of 1969, overdubs finished in the first days of 1970. It completes the Tops’ post-Holland-Dozier-Holland shift. After the cosmic passion of the great Tops singles of the Sixties, there comes a settling, a calm, wary acceptance. When the tempest is spent, there are still waters at last—though these may submerge the ruins of one’s former life.
The title song, variations of which (“Love” and “Peace”) open and close the album (it was recorded as one piece of music, then severed to make LP bookends and the sides of a single (R&B #4, Pop #11)), was written by Wilson and Smokey Robinson, arranged by Long and Roach. Tracked at the end of October 1969, with horns, strings, and its cavalcade of vocals added in the next two months, it opens with a voice ringing out from the Old Testament. “Walk with me,” Stubbs echoes across the stereo spectrum. “Take my hand.”
A sixteen-bar intro—Marv Tarplin, ruminative on electric guitar; Jamerson on bass (content to lay a floor for the chords, growing restless on each turnaround bar); cowbell on 2 & 4 (soon supplanted by colossal-sounding fingersnaps); hi-hat on 1 & 3. The singers ease into the song—the Tops’ wistful ooooh-ooh-oooh-ooohs—until Calvin and Evans, buoyed by a blast of organ, yell STILL WATER!, which The Tops lobby back in delight. Hey-hey-hey!s meet Aaah Aaah Aaahs. Faint breaths of strings. The first appearance of the track’s best hook: a horn figure in which the players do the hustle. Doo-do-do, d’do-do-do, do-do. And then Stubbs.
For his first phrase, cresting into the verse, he holds a note for a bar: Never you MIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIND if. I. A long grasp on “MIND,” punctuated with the descending quarter notes of If I. He does variations on this phrasing for the rest of the verse: straaaaangers pass-ing-by. A quick repetition of “If I don’t brag.” His dredging of looove and ruuuuns and truu-uue, making great canals of sound.
But what he pledges is absence. He won’t talk about her, isn’t going to boast, won’t say anything to anyone. Because, although their love is rare and true, yes, it’s also unvoiced, silent, and possibly one-sided, a phantom. And yet it’s so, Stubbs sings, backed by a pocket choir.
In the refrain, the Tops offer that still waters run deep, but no other verse follows, and the song soon drifts into an interlude that wanes into a lengthy outro, with no care to elaborate the drama, no desire to answer any question, but merely content to exist, to float, to ripple, to form and reform, all as a four-chord sequence repeats, a journey from E-flat major to its dominant chord, Bb, via the sweet chill of two minor chords (Cm and Fmadd6). It’s a burgeoning: the hustling horn figure, dances of organ and strings, the various shouted and crooned “still waters!” and “take my hands!” and Stubbs’ last joyous hey-hey-hey-HEY!, swirling about until faded into:
Reflections was Diana Ross’ early farewell to the Supremes, H-D-H’s early goodbye to Motown, and ultimately, via its use in China Beach et al, one of many Sixties valedictories. The brilliance of the Tops and Wilson’s interpretation is in how contemporary it feels, full of roil (the guitar riffs, Jamerson’s bassline) and punch (the aah-ah-ah-ah-ah-ah-AAAAHs that sweep through the latter half of the track). Stubbs sings it as an angel of desolation.
It’s All in the Game, issued as Still Waters‘ first single (R&B #6, Pop #24), is a time-hybrid: its melody was composed in 1911 by Charles Dawes, future vice president of Calvin Coolidge, while its lyric hails from forty years later. The song was best known via Tommy Edwards’ 1958 single, an R&B-tinged remake of Edwards’ earlier, more trad pop take, but another influence on the Tops may have been their former employer Billy Eckstine, who cut “It’s All in the Game” for Motown in 1967 (though the track wasn’t issued at the time).
While Dawes’ melody, which he wrote for violin, remains undeniable, “It’s All in the Game” is fusty in its sentiments, a primer for young women as to why their boyfriends let them down: “many a tear has to fall…once in a while he won’t call.” Edwards had gamboled through it, romping in his phrasings—heartache is part of the “wonderful game,” and he sings it as such.
Wilson and Payton slow the tempo, cooling the song, letting Jamerson set the pace, giving the woman who’s been left at home some space for herself. And the Tops divide their lines. Payton opens, his voice a mellow rumination. Stubbs is the lonelyheart’s confidant, working on her behalf: these things, your heart can RISE…rise above, he counsels. Duke Fakir is brief yearning hope and Obie Benson the resolution, his voice low, raspy, somewhat comic, blighting the “sweet bouquet” that the boyfriend eventually shows up with.
The Tops’ take on Fred Neil’s Everybody’s Talkin’ opens with guitars—dry acoustic, muted electric—playing in staggered formation, a humming engine. Harry Nilsson had sung “Talkin'” as Neil’s liberated spirit, soaring where Neil‘s voice couldn’t go; Stubbs has more weight and regret in his presence. He’s heading into exile, hoping that it’s warmer there at least, where Nilsson is skipping away.
(This should be how the side closes—instead, in the LP’s one sequencing blunder, the side ends with “Love (Is the Answer),” an uptempo track whose blitheness is jarring, its title declaration a bright falsehood. Better suited as a single B-side, its inclusion seems mandated by someone who feared things were getting too gloomy in Topsland.)
The second side has I Wish I Were Your Mirror, which has longing harmonies for a desperate, near-masochistic lyric (“I wish I were your sweater….your pillow…your water, girl, you take your shower in”); it peaks with Stubbs wishing he was a bar of Camay soap, as then his scent would be on her. The album’s flip side is where he crams his grubbier feelings.
On Elusive Butterfly, a loopy piece of Sixties pop-folk (Bob Lind’s original had hit #5 in 1966) that Aretha Franklin had transformed on Soul ’69, Stubbs starts off incredulous, though he soon labors to match Franklin in intensity, singing DON’T BE CON-CERNED! as if watching his house burn while shooing away his neighbors. The joys here are instrumental: the opening organ melody, the canyon-dips of strings, the wrenching synth blurt in the second verse, which sounds like an airlock opening in outer space.
L.A. (My Town), sunny propaganda for Motown’s West Coast operations (as sung by four eternal Detroiters) has some of the wildest vocal harmonies on the album—listen to the near-canonical outro, where Stubbs, in his only solo moment on the track, tries to make a point but gets crushed in the din.
Bring Me Together: sequenced in the traditional LP dead zone, midway through the second side, it’s in truth the heart of the record, centering its overall feeling of dislocated heartbreak. The singer’s former lover is riddled through his bones, buried under his skin (“she got too deep in”), walking along the edge of his mind, there when he opens his eyes. A man in a recovery ward, speaking to anyone who can hear him. Bring me together. I cannot find myself, all by myself.
All that can be done is return, back to the beginning, moving slower now, drifting off and away again, skipping across the water. One can find peace by accepting that everything is lost.
Still Waters Run Deep, Motown 704. Released: March 1970 (R&B #3, Pop #21).
INTERMISSION: GO LISTEN TO THE JACKSON FIVE.
After the Fires
Make my tomorrows unlike today
Four Tops, “Sing a Song of Yesterday”
It’s impossible to say when, precisely, Berry Gordy decided that Motown would leave Detroit. But it may have been when a front window of Hitsville U.S.A. got cracked by a shell that a National Guard tank fired as it rolled along West Grand Boulevard.
The late July 1967 riots, aka The Detroit Rebellion, began when the police raided an after-hours bar on Twelfth Street, breaking up a party to celebrate the return of two Black soldiers from Vietnam. They arrested everyone in the place. It was a hot night, and people were out on the street. Someone cursed, someone threw a bottle, someone broke a police car window: it began. A civil war in miniature, the violence rose and ebbed over five days. Governor Romney called in the National Guard; Lyndon Johnson sent paratroopers. It was the most cataclysmic urban destruction since the New York City riots of 1863. Forty-three dead (mostly Black, mostly killed by police), 1300 buildings burned, 2700 businesses ransacked.
“In the wake of the rebellion, Detroit [was] really up for grabs,” said Heather Thompson, author of Whose Detroit? “Are the police going to get more power and the black community less? Is this going to be a city that can finally, finally, bring about more harmonious relationships between black and white Detroiters? Or is this, frankly, going to be a city of more black control, because whites will leave it?”
As anyone who has a passing familiarity with the United States might guess, the latter happened. White Detroiters already had been moving out at an average of 22,000 per year in the mid-Sixties—that number doubled in 1967, then spiked higher in 1968. About 310,000 whites left in the Seventies. The public schools, which had produced Levi Stubbs and Duke Fakir and Diana Ross and Smokey Robinson, re-segregated, losing three quarters of white students in a decade.
Thomas Sugrue, writing of Detroit, noted that after the riots “whiteness and, by implication, blackness assumed a material dimension. It was imposed upon the geography of the city.” The city that the white suburbs surrounded became, to the suburbanites, the abandoned sector, the house of the left-behind, “the impoverished city we never visited,” as per the narrators of Jeffrey Eugenides’ The Virgin Suicides, set in the Grosse Pointe of the Seventies.
Once there was Detroit, the Motor City, spinning wheel of American industry. Now there was the city of David Bowie’s “Panic in Detroit,” inspired by the riot summer tales of Ann Arbor’s Iggy Pop. “The police had warned of repercussions,” Bowie sang. “They followed none too soon.”
What was broken would, in many instances, never be mended. Detroit was fated to be known for what once had thrived there; its present was shattered absence. As Stuart Cosgrove wrote, “the nightclubs, the bars and the independent studios that had been the foundations of Detroit’s soul scene had been burned to the ground, ransacked, or destroyed—one way or another put out of commission. The generation that had shaped one of the greatest periods in the history of popular music had seen its city devastated.”
The Motown single released on the day after the uprising began was “Reflections,” the first single credited to Diana Ross & The Supremes, one of the last Holland-Dozier-Holland productions for the label, and the second-to-last Florence Ballard vocal on a Supremes single. Recording went on at Motown throughout the violence. You could cut a vocal, walk out onto West Grand, look towards Twelfth Street, and watch the city burn.
Joe Von Battle sold records at 8434 Twelfth Street, half a mile north of Motown. He’d started out on Hastings Street in the Forties: he sold jazz and R&B sides, set up a small studio in the back and recorded John Lee Hooker and scads of others. In 1960, as most of Hastings was being leveled for the Chrysler Freeway, Von Battle moved his shop to Twelfth Street. Gordy was a regular, as was James Jamerson. In late July 1967, Joe’s Records, like many Twelfth Street businesses, was sacked and burned.
Von Battle and his daughter Marsha walked through the shell of his store. She recalled heaps of melted records and “fire-hose-soaked reel-to-reel tapes, unwound and slithering like water snakes. Thousands of songs, sounds and voices of an era—most never pressed onto records—were gone forever.” Her father went home “and proceeded to drink himself to death,” she said. “Though Joe Von Battle was not pronounced dead and buried until 1973, he died on that day in 1967.”
Joe’s Records was gone. So was the Chit Chat Club, where the Funk Brothers had been the house band. So was Edward Vaughn’s bookstore on Dexter Avenue, the first Black-owned bookstore in the city—it was firebombed by the police, who claimed that guns were being stored inside.
“It actually felt more like a social upheaval than a riot,” Duke Fakir wrote in his memoir. “[But] philosophically, my head just wasn’t there at the time. Probably it should have been, but it wasn’t…I’d sit on my porch drinking wine or champagne, and just shake my head. I was busy thinking what we had to do in the studio. Where our next tour was going. All of that.”
Fakir was eating a half-stick of butter before leaving his house, so that his stomach could better tolerate his drinking, which at times ranged “from ten in the morning until two o’clock the next morning.”
Let white America know that the name of the game is tit-for-tat, an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, and a life for a life. Motown: if you don’t come around, we are going to burn you down!
H. Rap Brown, July 1967.
Motown had escaped the fires; in the eyes of many in Detroit, it had obligations. An apocryphal quote by Berry Gordy circled through town—that if “black DJs never played another Motown record, I wouldn’t give a damn”; it sounded true enough.
Two months after Fortune profiled the label as a “model” success story, in a December 1967 editorial in Detroit’s Inner City Voice (“How U Sound Motown”), John Cosby Jr. demanded that “some of the better than $15 million per annum” that Motown generated had to be invested in Detroit’s Black community. “The Motown sound originated from the ghettos in this town…Talk of [Motown] being a source of pride, to the serious-minded, is nonsense. For a black exploiter is no less diseased than any other.”
There were assurances. Esther Gordy told Ebony that “Berry is crazy about [Detroit].” Gordy pledged money, public service efforts, summer jobs, scholarships. He announced a new imprint, Black Forum, to release spoken-word records on topical issues (the handful that came out included Imamu Amiri Baraka’s It’s Nation Time and Ossie Davis & Bill Cosby Address The Congressional Black Caucus). Motown issued municipal booster singles, like savings bonds: Smokey Robinson & the Miracles’ “I Care About Detroit” and Detroit Tigers star Willie Horton’s “Detroit Is Happening” (“man, if you’re living in Detroit, you’re livin’ in the most uptight, out-of-sight swinging city in the whole country”).
Gordy’s biggest move was to relocate downtown, purchasing the ten-story Donovan Building at 2457 Woodward Avenue. This was, as per Motown’s PR, the label going “deeper into the inner city.”
The new Motown Center would house 300 employees, while Hitsville U.S.A. on West Grand would revert to its original state: a small studio built in a garage. Motown Studio A was becoming secondary—productions were increasingly done uptown in Studio B, the former Golden World Studios that Gordy had bought, while a growing number of Motown tracks were cut in LA. (In fall 1968, Gordy bought his first home in California, in the Hollywood Hills; by 1971, he owned a studio, MoWest, off of Santa Monica Boulevard.)
Otis Williams of the Temptations wrote that “Hitsville ended in the late Sixties when part of the daily operations [moved] to a regular cold ugly office building near the Fisher Freeway and the recording began taking place in other studios.” Gordy’s ex-wife Raynoma noted a distinct uptown/downtown divide between Motown executives and the studios, with the label CEO out to sea (in the rare weeks when he was in Detroit, Gordy held his meetings at the Pontchartrain Hotel, as if he still needed to be at a remove from operations). The label was being run by “people who had little or no experience in making music and with little or no respect for those who knew how,” Raynoma Gordy said.
A Houseful of Discontent
In March 1969, Gordy gave an interview to the Detroit Free Press. He considered himself an LA resident now, but said he would visit Detroit at least once a year. “Detroit has what we consider natural resources. We have never been able to get the sound anywhere in the world that we get here…the chemical contents of the people. Generally when artists leave Detroit they get different perspectives or something. Detroit is basically a sincere area and somehow it affects the ingredients of the things we’re doing.”
Considering Detroit as a source of raw materials to be refined elsewhere was a blunt thing to say; worse, the metaphor was a lie.
Motown was no longer a place where a talented local teenager could walk in the door and, after a few recording sessions and some stage training, get a Top Forty single. Artist development was withering. The Jackson 5, with their four consecutive Number Ones, was the last successful model to roll off Gordy’s assembly line.
The Jacksons ruled 1970, the last great Motown chart year: sixteen Top Forty hits, eleven Top 10 hits, six Number Ones. This was owed to a handful of artists and producers, mostly the Jacksons, Stevie Wonder (“Signed Sealed Delivered,” “Heaven Help Us All,” The Spinners “It’s a Shame,” which he produced and co-wrote with Syreeta Wright) and Norman Whitfield (The Temptations’ “Ball of Confusion,” Edwin Starr’s “War”). It was also the high tide of Motown’s white acts, R. Dean Taylor (the fantastic “Indiana Wants Me”) and Rare Earth, who sounded as if the MC5, dosed with Mandrax, had been conscripted to do leaden boogie songs as a form of community service.
The core Motown lineup, the men and women who had built the label, were aging, restless, bitter about compensation, and their records weren’t selling. They could still work the road but had to center their sets around hits from half a decade ago—they were quickly becoming oldies acts. While Gordy had claimed in late 1967 that “happy people work for us and that is the way it will always be, as long as I am head of Motown,” Raynoma Gordy more astutely called Motown in the late Sixties “a houseful of discontent.”
Motown acts were no longer a lock on the charts—even The Supremes and Smokey Robinson struggled (“Tears of a Clown,” the Miracles’ last Number One in 1970, was a three-year-old album cut that had caught fire in the UK as a reissued single), let alone The Marvelettes and Martha Reeves, who was addicted to cocaine and at times had to be hospitalized. “The company was no longer there for me,” Reeves told Gerri Hirshey. “I think I was the first person at Motown to ask where the money was going.”
The Temptations remained relevant, thanks to Whitfield, who crafted their new sound by drawing from Sly & the Family Stone and Parliament (George Clinton recalled Whitfield turning up at Parliament gigs with a tape recorder). “Runaway Child Running Wild” has an intro better than many songs; “Just My Imagination” is a stunning gossamer delusion; “Papa Was a Rollin’ Stone” is rock’s equivalent to The Godfather; a family drama whose cast includes Dennis Edwards (narrator, accuser), Melvin Franklin (disbelief), Damon Harris (indignation), the world’s most insistent handclaps, and Bob Babbitt’s funk minimalist bass. (Babbitt had replaced James Jamerson, who reportedly walked out of the studio after Whitfield told him to play the same four-note riff for twelve minutes.)
But the group was volatile, always about to fray apart. Paul Williams was going through two or three bottles of Courvoisier a day; oxygen tanks were kept backstage for him to recover from a performance. The Temptations had stood at daggers with each other for years. The group got banned from Bermuda after a vicious fight at their hotel between Eddie Kendricks and David Ruffin. The latter had wanted to change the group’s name, as per the new Motown “star” system, to David Ruffin & The Temptations. Instead, the rest of the group fired him. For a while, Ruffin kept showing up at their gigs, sitting in the front row, glaring at his former bandmates, sometimes trying to take the stage. Kendricks abandoned the group in 1971.
The Four Tops, as ever, were stable. Levi, Duke, Lawrence, Obie: same as it always was.
When This Crazy World Is Free
Whatever was going on in Detroit, the Four Tops, at the ebb of the Sixties, were one of Motown’s biggest acts in Britain.
Since 1968, their singles had charted higher on the UK charts than in the US (“Walk Away Renee” hit #3; “If I Were a Carpenter,” #7; “It’s All in the Game,” #5), and they had toured Britain enough to become goodwill ambassadors. On 12 March 1970, they lunched with Lord Brockway, asking him to be honorary president of the International Union for Harmony, “a new racial harmony movement the quartet is promoting” (as per Newsday). Then Levi Stubbs was busted for possession of cocaine and ammunition at the May Fair Hotel on the same afternoon.
John Marshall, Motown’s international director at the time, claimed that Stubbs was set up by the London police, who had made a lucrative habit of busting local musicians and were now branching out internationally. The case was dismissed at trial, as the police declined to share the name of the informant who had claimed Stubbs had coke. “I got to know the police guy who arrested [Stubbs] and he just said, ‘Oh, we gave it a shot’,” Marshall told Adam White. “It was like a game with them—a bit of publicity, they might get promoted. That’s the feeling you got.” (Stubbs did admit that he’d been carrying a few bullets.)
At a London show, the Tops were approached by Tony Clarke. He had a song that he thought suited them—a then-obscure Moody Blues track, “A Simple Game,” the B-side of “Ride My See-Saw,” which Clarke had produced. The Tops, intrigued, cut the song the following day. Or that’s the story they told the press.
In truth, Motown and Clarke reportedly had been in talks for some time about him producing the Tops. Motown agreed to finance the session, taking advantage of the Tops having to be in the UK for Stubbs’ trial. And Clarke had already recorded the backing tracks.
On 5 May 1970, Clarke produced the Tops at Wessex Studios, making them one of the first Motown acts to cut a record overseas. A contemporary NME report lists the backing players as Blue Mink, the London session group with Alan Parker and Herbie Flowers, which would soon work with David Bowie (“Holy Holy“). Yet the Moody Blues’ Justin Hayward has said several times that he played on the session, and another track the Tops cut at Wessex was a Hayward co-composition, “You Stole My Love.”
The Tops and the Moody Blues were an inspired pairing. They shared a heavy earnestness, while the verse of “Still Water (Peace)” could have been recited by Mike “Breathe Deep, the Gathering Gloom” Pinder, composer and singer of “Simple Game.”
On “Simple Game,” Pinder sounds awed and humbled, as if the meaning of life has been disclosed to him while waiting for a train; the harmonies bear him aloft in the refrains, but he soon settles back to earth. The Moodies were a domestic cosmos, summed up in a line that George Harrison sang on “It’s All Too Much”: show me that I’m everywhere, and get me home for tea.
The Tops give “Simple Game” a greater feeling of striving, unrest. Lawrence Payton opens with wary advances, offering scenarios (“as…time goes by…you will see“) until Stubbs, arriving with guitars, takes what Payton gives him and ratifies it. “When this crazy world is free,” Payton muses; Stubbs clarifies: “free from doubt.” “We are going to be free,” Payton sings, in a slow, descending phrase, as if he can’t see when that’s ever going to happen; he’s been reduced to hope. Stubbs swells the line into a demand. The full Tops harmonies in the chorus hit like a wave, and the bridge has one of Stubbs’ last epic moments at the mike, a cascading phrasing to rival “Bernadette.”
“A Simple Game” was one of the strongest singles the Tops had cut in years, a restoration of the Holland-Dozier-Holland sound with a contemporary “rock” feel, but Motown put it on ice, releasing the years-old “MacArthur Park” as a single instead. While it was a UK #3, “A Simple Game” wasn’t put out in the US until January 1972, when it was issued as an afterthought (stalling out at #90). By then, Motown was all but done with the Tops.
Union Sundown
In the early Seventies, the Tops were stuck doing company promotional work. In another Marvel Comics parallel, Motown had begun running crossovers, pairing its acts.
It started with The Supremes and The Temptations, which resulted in the #2 hit “I’m Gonna Make You Love Me,” written by Gamble and Huff, produced by Frank Wilson, and the centerpiece of a subsequent LP. This was part of Gordy’s drive to establish Motown as an “all around entertainment” brand, specifically here to promote TCB, Motown Productions’ first TV special, which aired on NBC in December 1968. There was also Diana Ross Presents the Jackson 5 (though the PR story that Ross had “discovered” the Jacksons was tosh) and even a Ross pairing with Bill Cosby (the mercifully-forgotten “Love Story”).
Gordy looks prescient today, an early adopter of intellectual property exploitation. Motown songs would fuel Motown TV specials and cartoons, Motown talent would star in Motown films, perhaps titled after Motown songs, with a Motown soundtrack: a self-perpetuating cycle. So “Motown Team-Up: The Supremes Meet the Four Tops“ was a logical step (Gordy had wanted Stubbs to co-star in Lady Sings the Blues with Ross.)
By May 1970, when the first Supremes/Tops duets were recorded, Ross had gone solo, with Mary Wilson the only original member of the trio remaining. The pairing worked on paper. The Tops were back in the charts with Still Waters Run Deep, the new Supremes lineup needed to be better established in the public eye, and Stubbs and the Supremes’ new lead singer Jean Terrell were a good match, an easier vocal blend than Stubbs and Ross, which would have been like a baritone saxophone paired with a recorder. For Frank Wilson, arranging Four Tops and Three Supremes was a cinch. Set it up like the Tops and the Andantes on Tops records: the Tops as low harmonies, the Supremes arrayed above them.
The Supremes/Tops records share a fundamental lack of imagination: a set of charismatic, gifted singers are united in the service of nothing. In a typical track, Stubbs takes the first verse, Terrell the second, or vice versa; they duet on the refrains with the rest as spectators; sometimes all seven do a mush of a group-sing. You rarely feel that the singers are in the same room (the mixes go out of their way to highlight this, dousing Terrell in reverb while keeping Stubbs’ vocal dry). Nothing surprises; few of their covers come close to the originals. It’s like a football team that runs the same two plays over and over again: sometimes they score, but at what a tedious cost.
The first and best of the lot was The Magnificent 7, released in September 1970, particularly its uptempo numbers: the opener “Knock on My Door,” a disco revision of the Tops’ “Without the One You Love,” a “River Deep Mountain High” (which hit #14) that stands comfortably with Tina Turner’s. It falters in its more contemporary pieces—supper club versions of “Everyday People” and “Stoned Soul Picnic.” While “Ain’t Nothing Like the Real Thing” seems like an ideal piece for the septet, the Tops and Supremes sound tentative, keeping within the lines, coming off as stand-ins for Marvin Gaye and Tami Terrell, brought in for a scratch vocal while the arranger shores up the brass.
The Return of the Magnificent Seven, cut in early 1971, sold worse (R&B #18, Pop #154) and the rot sets in. Much of this record is joylessly cheery music. “You Gotta Have Love in Your Heart,” which sounds like it was done by Up With People, was the single; it didn’t make the R&B Top 40. The ballads are better (“If You Could See Me Now,” “I’m Glad About It”), as at least you can get lost in Terrell and Stubbs’ vocals.
The Tops/Supremes project had enough momentum to keep rolling for another album: the ambitiously-titled Dynamite!, issued and generally ignored at the end of 1971. It sounds like a collection of scraps from earlier sessions, dregs of the dregs (“If,” “Love the One You’re With”).
Destroyed Your Notion of Circular Time
The great crime of The Magnificent 7 is that Motown released it directly against an excellent Tops album, Changing Times. With two new Four Tops albums in the racks in the same month (September 1970), buyers went with the Supremes/Tops combo, which sandbagged the Tops’ record (R&B #20, Pop #109).
It’s a shame, as Changing Times is nearly as strong as Still Waters, with Frank Wilson furthering the segue experiments of the latter, linking the album with clock-ticks and kicking the record off with a sonic fantasia, with fireworks, jet roars, carnival noises (including a brass band playing “Dixie”) and room-full-of-clocks dings, whirrs and clangs (note, three years before Pink Floyd’s “Time”).
Wilson stocks the record full of pleasures and oddities. Take “Right Before My Eyes,” which throws a new sound at you every few bars (vibraphone, a “right! before my very eyes!” Tops hook, fuzz bass, bongos, organ), to fit Stubbs’ tale of being knocked off-balance by seeing his woman with another guy (“who looks just like me!”). The swaggering bass/guitar hook of “Just Seven Numbers,” which Stubbs sinks into, using it to take root in the song; the dialogue of “I Almost Had Her (But She Got Away)“—Stubbs sings the first half of the title as a wistful delusion (“I almost had her!”), the rest of the Tops as the voices of sad reality: but she got awaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay.
Its wildest moment is the last great Tops freak-out song, “Something’s Tearing at the Edges of Time,” a psychedelic number that sways as if it’s seasick, with Stubbs howling that “my world is just a page of the book of ages past!” (the Tops: “never to return!!!“).
Cut in late 1971 and released in April 1972, Nature Planned It is a study of monogamy and its occasional discontents. There’s a feeling of renewal, even in its cover photos—the nattily-dressed Tops planting a flower in a scrubby city backyard in the winter (Record Collector: “nobody looked less ready for horticulture than this lot”). It could have been a foundation for a refreshed Motown and Four Tops partnership; instead, the album was a tombstone.
A mature groove record, its tracks cast the Tops as men who, if for lack of any other options, have finally started listening to the women in their lives. See its constancy pledge of an opener, “I Am Your Man,” an Ashford-Simpson piece that had kicked around Motown for years. Its answer song is “She’s an Understanding Woman,” written by Willie Hutch, one of Motown’s grounding points of the early Seventies, and the label’s blacksploitation ambassador (the soundtracks for The Mack and Foxy Brown).
“If You Let Me” is a hedged proposition by Payton (“if you let me, I know I can/ be a man”); James Jamerson (credited as “bass (personified)”) sounds the depths. The title track is a successor to “Still Waters,” gorgeous and fatalist. As Stubbs notes on “I’ll Never Change,” “time ain’t the healing thing like it’s supposed to be.”
The uptempo tracks also flourish: “Happy (Is a Bumpy Road),” which The Supremes also cut; “You Got to Forget Him Darling” (stays in one gear, but it moves); the goodtime romp “Walk With Me, Talk With Me, Darling,” which runs on its handclaps; the loping groove of “I’ll Never Change.” Best is “I Can’t Quit Your Love,” with its shriek of an intro, Wah-Wah guitar, huge beat, horns as prizefighters, Stubbs singing as if he’s climbing a mountain.
The LP’s centerpiece is a seven-minute medley of “Hey Man,” a vamp drummed up by Payton and Obie Benson (Wilson got a co-credit, perhaps for shaping it into releasable form), and Todd Rundgren’s 1970 hit “We Gotta Get You a Woman.” It’s a neighborhood party with Payton and Benson as masters of ceremonies, busting chops and waving people in, with trumpet, bongos, and some of the funkiest rhythms ever heard on a Tops recording—enough to merit a Soul Train line.
This Is As Far As You Can Go
Gordy’s head was in Hollywood and we were all supposed to follow him like little puppy dogs.
Marvin Gaye
They left the musicians behind when they took it out of Detroit.
Earl Van Dyke
By 1971 and 1972, Motown was getting a good piece of its earnings from records that Berry Gordy hadn’t wanted to release.
Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On, for one (Gordy allegedly called the title track the worst thing he’d ever heard), and Gordy had vetoed issuing Diana Ross’ gospel psychodrama take on “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough” as a single until DJs started playing the LP track; released at last, the single hit #1. (To give Gordy credit, he did push Stevie Wonder to cut “Superstition” himself, not give it away to Jeff Beck.) But as Motown’s Barney Ales said, at this point, Gordy usually didn’t bother to listen to new records.
He was now a movie and television producer (and had taken over directing his second feature film, Mahogany) with a sideline in running a record label. Whatever time he spent on Motown releases was done for Ross’ solo career. This entailed Ales having to cut an instructional record for the label’s distributors, urging them to make “Reach Out and Touch (Somebody’s Hand)” a #1 (it peaked at #20). For Ross’ debut in Las Vegas, Gordy averted the disaster of a near-empty house by running into the street and handing anyone he saw the ripped half of a twenty dollar bill. They’d get the other half if they went to Ross’ concert. (He discovered that matching serial numbers at the door was impossible, so he exchanged torn halves for fresh twenties, then made two Motown employees spend days taping the bill-halves together).
Gordy was living and working in LA, Motown records were increasingly being cut in LA or New York, and the relocation of the label was inevitable. Those at Hitsville could feel the power slipping away, that “Motown” was now elsewhere, incorporate and international, an unmoored brand, and they had been left to tend to its museum. As the Temptations’ Otis Williams said, by the early Seventies “Motown in Detroit had all but ceased to exist. It was only a matter of time until we joined [Gordy].”
By early 1972, the Four Tops felt beaten down, frustrated. Their work with The Supremes had done nothing for their own records—if anything, it had hurt their sales. They hadn’t had a major hit in years, and, in truth, had “been scuffling since H-D-H had left,” Fakir wrote in his memoir. “We noticed that the promotion we were accustomed to wasn’t there.”
Their contract was up for renewal, so the Tops met with Ewart Abner at Motown. Abner, who had run Vee-Jay records, had been hired by Gordy in 1967 to handle artist management, and in 1973 he’d become the label’s president. Some of Motown’s nearly-all-white sales force regarded Abner as a “Black militant,” i.e., a Black man who voiced opinions at meetings and who, as per Suzanne Smith, “was known for his outspoken advocacy for Blacks in the recording industry.” Abner saw his role at Motown as keeping the label grounded in contemporary Black music and culture, an opposing force to Gordy’s mainstreaming.
The Tops opened by demanding a substantial advance on future sales and for Motown to increase promotional expenditures for subsequent releases. Abner countered by telling the Tops that Motown was dumping them.
“‘You guys have had a great run. This is as far as you can go with Motown, that’s it. We really don’t need you guys anymore,'” Fakir recalled Abner saying. “So matter of fact, cold. Like he was throwing out the trash. I was so pissed the ‘street’ in me almost came out. I wanted to hit that motherfucker in his eye.”
There were other tensions between Motown and the Tops. Obie Benson had co-written “What’s Going On,” the biggest Motown hit of its year, but had little to show for it. He wanted more self-penned songs on Tops records, more songs placed with other Motown artists, and promotion of himself and Payton as composers. To Billboard in May 1973, Benson said “the problem with being with Motown is, I did those tunes with Marvin, but the group didn’t benefit from it in any way because they wouldn’t give me credit for it…If I write a hit song for Marvin Gaye and I get the proper publicity, that’s gonna make our records sell. What Motown did is called suffocating you creatively.”
The Tops walked out onto Woodward Avenue without a record deal, unexpectedly free agents again after a decade, and went to drink away their bewilderment and rage. “What the fuck are we gonna do?” Fakir recalled thinking. “We always questioned whether we were as good as we thought we were, or if being under Motown’s umbrella was the thing that helped us succeed and survive.”
Exit Music
14 June 1972: Announcing the retirement of Barney Ales, Motown officially relocates to LA—all of its sales and promotion operation goes West, with only a skeleton crew, under the control of Esther Gordy Edwards, remaining in Detroit. Around two-thirds of Motown’s Detroit staff are laid off. The Funk Brothers recall having no warning: some musicians said they found a note on the door of Studio A stating that recording sessions had stopped (though tracks were still cut at Studio A for another year, and Studio B for two more). No one at Motown bothers to tell Martha Reeves: she reads about it in the newspaper.
“Berry’s one of those cats who must go forth, you know. And so Detroit became too small,” Smokey Robinson, who has split from The Miracles, tells the Los Angeles Times.
August 1972: The Four Tops’ last single on Motown, “(It’s the Way) Nature Planned It” b/w “I’ll Never Change,” is released. It hits #8 on the R&B charts, dies outside the Top 40. Later in the year, Motown issues “Baby I Need Your Loving” and “Ask the Lonely”/”I Can’t Help Myself” as part of its new nostalgia line, the “Yesteryear” series.
5 November 1973: The first Black mayor of Detroit is elected. Coleman Young later says of his rise to power: “My fortune was the direct result of the city’s misfortune…I was taking over the administration of Detroit because the white people didn’t want the damn thing anymore.”
30 June 1975: The Jackson 5 hold a press conference to announce they’re leaving Motown and signing with Epic. “I’ve got nothing against Motown…it’s the largest black company, but I hope black people will understand,” Joe Jackson says. “Berry Gordy travels in big circles, and he’s hard to get to. But when I went around to CBS and RCA, I was able to see the presidents of those companies.”
September 1975: Gordy lures Ales out of retirement, while Ewart Abner becomes a “consultant” and soon leaves the label. “We’re going to try to recapture some of the family-type enthusiasm we had in Detroit,” Ales tells the Detroit Free Press, which notes that Ales “said the company ‘would like to do something about recording in Detroit again’ but that nothing specific has been discussed.” It’s the first year since 1962 that the label doesn’t have a number one hit.
Try to Remember
“Try to Remember” was written for The Fantasticks, a musical which was as much of an NYC staple as Gray’s Papaya and subway rats. It’s the opening number, meant to set the stage: Jerry Orbach sang it in the original production. Harry Belafonte sang it, as did the Kingston Trio, and Frank Wilson produced The Temptations’ version on their 1967 In a Mellow Mood, with Eddie Kendricks on lead. The Four Tops cut the song three years later for Changing Times.
A guitarist plays a few notes, moves off; a drummer keeps time on sidestick. The woodwinds strike up a theme. Lawrence Payton ambles in. From his first notes, Payton is mischievous in tone, delighting in the cool grace of his voice, lingering in his lower register, as if promising to divulge secrets.
He phrases with absolute precision, dazzling words like “mellow” and “pillow.” It’s a softshoe performance, the rest of the Tops in step behind him, and after three immaculate verses, you anticipate a winding down, that Payton and the band will prepare for the fade, like passengers readying to leave a plane. Maybe a resounding tonic chord, a full harmony on the closing line, a final retort by the joker of a trombonist. But the song doesn’t end.
Drums appear, as if a rogue engineer is sliding a fader, looking to shake up things. The languid waltz time tapers off, a steady 4/4 takes its place. A bassist (likely James Jamerson) plays alone for eight bars, doing variations, his fingers dancing from low string to high, as if demonstrating some different ways of climbing a staircase (the last variation is a set of funky shoulder hunches).
Levi Stubbs has been listening to Payton, has watched him hold his smile despite all that’s he’s lost and buried, and Stubbs gets it, he knows why Payton wears the mask, and usually he’s happy to follow Payton’s lead. When Payton and Stubbs share a Tops song, Stubbs is the closer, the embossing. But here Stubbs won’t do it. He starts questioning what he’s heard, overriding it, shuffling through the words that Payton had to sing, all this fusty imagery, all this callow mellow fellow pillow stuff. “It’s nice to remember?” Is it, really?
“I……yeah, do remember,” Stubbs begins. Cymbal fills sink deep in the mix; you can feel them in your stomach.
When life was so tender, that no one wept (oh yeah! the Tops interject) except the WILLOW (the Tops now sing an insistent Try to-re-mem-ber, which keeps building in intensity). Stubbs lays in, excoriating—if you SHOULD remember…hey! that dreams were KEPT beside your PILLOW—moving deeper in, demanding more from the song, as if pushing back at time, as if should he push hard enough, the past is going to have to confess.
OH—THAT LUH-UHVE WAS AN EM-BER AhhAhhhhBOWWWT to BILLOW whooa!!!
I TRY!-TRY!-TRY! TO RE MEM BER—OHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH
He seizes the last note and holds it; he carries it over one bar, two bars, four, and there’s the prospect that he’ll keep on until the song just dies on him, but no, at last, he dismounts. Takes a breath, goes at it again. In the middle of this, someone in the vocal booth yells, a “whooooo!!!!” of delight, and whoops again as the track starts to diminish. As if one of the Tops turns to us, with a great whale of a smile, and says “listen to him sing, listen to him sing.”
Next: Four Tops Part Four, and the end
Hampton plays Oak Knoll Naval Hospital, sometime during the war (US Navy 
64 Quartets 
