The Supremes: A Saga of Motown Dreams, Success, and Betrayal (2 page)

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There is a remarkably mordant scene in Martin Scorsese’s dark-hearted 1983 comedy
King of Comedy
in which a perfectly demented Sandra Bernhard, as Masha the obsessed fan, has helped Rupert Pupkin kidnap Jerry Lewis’s late-night TV host character, Jerry Langford. Meticulously mummifying Langford in a chair with masking tape, Masha, with a swelling sense of domination and horniness, coos, “Let’s do something crazy tonight. Just get insane. I want to be crazy. I want to be nuts. I want some fun. I want to be black—I want to be a Supreme!” Then, violently tearing off a last piece of tape to seal Langford’s mouth, she half-sneers, “I’ve never had this much fun before . . . good, old-fashioned, All-American fun.”

The choice of the Supremes as the counterpoint of Masha’s madness could not have been more inspired: For a white female baby boomer and ’60s refugee, no image other than the divine Motown girl-group could better cross-breed the soul of a black woman and the fables of All-American innocence. Such is the abiding legacy that after more than forty years it still alloys Diana Ross, Mary Wilson, and Florence Ballard (whose bristled participation in and enforced heave-ho from the group at the height of its success pumps that legacy full of dramatic tension). When an act lives in the subconscious mind as the model of all that is righteous in a complicated and cruel world, we can safely call that act mythologic.

Two more things that can safely be said of the Supremes: They are the most important modern American music act after Elvis Presley, and this may well be the first real biography of them—that is, one written from the perspective of an outsider, with no personal investment in how events are told (unlike, for example, Mary Wilson’s couplet of memoirs). One suspects the lack of serious literary attention has had something to do with the geology of female acts and gender-based assumptions of what is a “serious” subject matter. The female rockers who have been adjudged as such are few and far between—Janis Joplin, Tina Turner, Grace Slick, Patti Smith, Deborah Harry, then pretty much xiii

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nobody—and have been dispensed with fleetingly. Meanwhile, books about Elvis, John Lennon (with and without the Beatles), Bob Dylan, Jim Morrison, and Jimi Hendrix proliferate year after year; what’s more, Joplin, Turner, and Slick are hardly made of puppy dog’s tails, all having renounced any claim of gender-based immunity in their work, codified by Joplin in “Piece of My Heart”—“I’m gonna show you, baby, that a woman can be tough.”

So what of the Supremes, who peddled seemingly little-girl dreams with an image as wispy as gossamer? If it seems that we cannot possibly elevate them onto the same contextual historical stage as the other women, look a little more closely. In actuality, they were not that far from the Joplin model of defiant but breakable toughness: They wished they didn’t have to be tough, and longed to be forever loyal, provided that guys didn’t mess with their hearts. The themes of their songs—

written, as only they could have been back then, by men—likewise spoke of their innards being broken into pieces. Love, Ross sang in one, was “like an itchin’ in my heart, tearin’ it all apart, and, baby, I can’t scratch it.” Joplin could have killed with a natural blues line like that.

In another, having been kept hangin’ on, she laid down just the right touch of sarcasm: “Set me free, why don’t you babe. Get out of my life, why don’t you babe.” That was such a cool and universal flip-off line that the song it came from would eventually be covered by, among others, a female pop singer (Kim Wilde), a male hard-rock band (Vanilla Fudge), and a babehound (Rod Stewart).

The notion that a girl-group may not meet the level of importance necessary for a “serious” biography is, as with most sexist notions, plainly absurd. Forget about any hedge that the Supremes, who were nominated for three, didn’t ever win a Grammy; you seemingly had to be Herb Alpert & the Tijuana Brass to win one of those in the ’60s, while people like Phil Spector, Cream, and Sly Stone not only went without but were never even nominated. The latter-day make-good for being stiffed in the ’60s—entry into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame—

came the Supremes’ way in 1988, as the first girl-group to get in (to be followed by their old Motown stablemates Martha and the Vandellas in 1995, the Shirelles in 1996, and the Ronettes in 2007). Still, the old canards linger. When
Rolling Stone
compiled a “100 Greatest Artists of All-Time” list in 2004, the Supremes came in at a stinging No. 97, a diss that simply cannot be reconciled with their Hall of Fame status or with the fact that a similar list by the Hall’s brahmins placed “Stop! In the Name of Love” and “You Can’t Hurry Love” among the “Top 500

Songs That Shaped Rock.”

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In their time the Supremes rolled off twelve No. 1 singles on the Billboard Hot 100 chart, more than any other act in history except Elvis (thirty-eight), the Beatles (twenty), and Mariah Carey (also twenty). Ross-Wilson-Ballard had ten more that landed in the Top Ten, all of which have been jammed into endlessly repackaged Motown albums and have sold an estimated 20 million copies of recordings formatted in vinyl, 8-track and cassette tape, compact disc, DVD, and MP3—bringing in something like $100 million to the Motown bottom line.
A cautionary note:
These figures may or may not be reliable. Perhaps only Berry Gordy and a few of his most trusted accountants know what they truly are. And they aren’t saying, not after fifty years of silence vows that explain why Motown was never granted an

“official” gold or platinum record sanctioned by the Recording Industry Association of America (an outcome requiring that the RIAA have access to a record company’s books) until Gordy finally relented in 1977—although the RIAA did sporadically send Gordy gold or platinum disks back in the day as a promotional sop. Not that Gordy gave a whit; he simply issued ersatz gold and platinum records for his acts.

But if these estimates are right, the Supremes, who likely would have racked up four gold and two platinum records, can be considered the third most profitable act in pop music history in terms of album sales—again, save for the Beatles and Elvis, but ahead of even the Rolling Stones.

Those recordings are a musical lodestone—“Where Did Our Love Go,” “Baby Love,” “Come See About Me,” “Stop! In the Name of Love,” “You Can’t Hurry Love,” “Back in My Arms Again,” “I Hear a Symphony,” “My World Is Empty Without You,” “Love Is Like an Itching in My Heart,” “You Keep Me Hangin’ On,” “Love Is Here and Now You’re Gone,” “In and Out of Love,” “Love Child,” “I’m Gonna Make You Love Me,” to name just a few—and the chain of those smash hits never got tiresome. Even the songs with similar themes, lyrics, backbeats, and hooks provided a fresh gift to the ears. Eventually, set against a more socially conscious subset, they plumbed inner-city indi-gence (“Love Child,” “I’m Livin’ in Shame”), making it possible for Diana Ross, all covered in chiffon and sequins, to wail convincingly about wearing a worn, torn dress that somebody threw out, being always second best, but vowing redemption.

The Supremes’ tart three-minute melodramas, which from 1963

through 1967 blushed with Holland-Dozier-Holland’s roiling arrangements and fetchingly clever lyrics, worked on the counterpoint of not being overly girly. The adolescent “yearning, burning” motif was 0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:05 AM Page xvi xvi

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burnished by a sweaty hybrid pop and R&B that was left to the instincts and devices of jazz cats whom Berry Gordy culled from the

“black and tan” clubs along Hastings Avenue—the nuclear core of which was the rhythm section of pianist Earl Van Dyke’s jazz band and grew to include James Jamerson on bass; Johnny Griffiths on piano; Benny Benjamin and Richard “Pistol” Allen on drums; Robert White, Eddie Willis, and Joe Messina on guitar; Eddie “Bongo” Brown on percussion; and Jack Ashford on vibe and tambourine. Pledging loyalty to Berry Gordy, they were paid well and noticed little by the outside world until four decades later when they were “discovered” and dubbed the

“Funk Brothers” (taken from a long-ago inside joke by Benny Benjamin); their own legacy is Motown’s very spinal cord, putting the lie to facile criticism that Gordy always shouldered for compromising soul appeal for sales appeal. (For confirmation of the rhythm-and-blues root of the Supremes’ songs, take a listen to Lamont Dozier’s slowed-down and grittified renditions of several of them on his 2004 CD
Reflections
Of
on the Lightyear label.)

The Supremes’ songs were buttressed by horns and at times strings, but the hub of it all was that peerless rhythm section, which both geographically and sonically fell between the more stately R&B strain coming out of Leiber and Stoller’s studio sessions in New York and Phil Spector’s distilled “Wall of Sound” R&B in L.A. Unfurled in Motown’s cramped basement Studio A, the songs congealed into a winning formula. Across the spatial image of each song, the rhythm rocked and rumbled and the horns blew the top off while the vibes, bongo, and tambourine provided the accents. The
chink-a-chink
of a sharp, jabbing guitar lick kept in time with a pounding snare drum and a twitchy bass line. Sneaking through this great tide of rhythm, Diana Ross’s little-girl trill took flight, never rushed, and was surprisingly versatile across the scale, yet always on the precipice of an emotional crack. Behind her, Wilson’s sugary alto and Ballard’s forceful tenor meshed in tandem, filling in the lower end of the scale. We recognize this casserole now as a magical formula; but back then, for hordes of teenage girls in particular, some probably very much like Sandra Bernhard’s Masha, all anyone knew was that the songs poured like batter out of transistor radios. We couldn’t wait for the newest pouring. It never took long.

The Supremes’ breakneck ride was relatively brief in real time; in virtual time, it never ended. It began with three teenagers singing as a sister group for the band that would form the basis of The Temptations, 0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:05 AM Page xvii INTRODUCTION

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gelled in fresh-scrubbed girl-group primping, and finally went chic—

and wonderfully campy to anyone tuned into those signals—with the pomp of flouncing gowns, gobs of mascara, and peek-a-boo-curl Sas-soon wigs. Ross herself, of course, was the musky voice and E.T.-like face of the trio: the supreme Supreme, the one with the “star quality,” the lure and slink of the kitten, and the claw of the tigress. She was an illogical and imponderable sex symbol: a quivering, writhing waif who without the wigs and face paint appeared emaciated and vacant. Ah, but then there was her mouth, large and open—“so inviting, so exciting,” as a phrase in one of her songs would have it—and coy bedroom eyes that put the come-hither into a line like “Come see about me.” The Diana Ross few knew outside of the Motown colony was on a fast rise to the top from the first day she got to Motown; not incidentally, that was also the first day she knew who she wanted to sleep with to keep up the momentum. That, of course, turned out to be Berry Gordy, but only after affairs with in-house tunesmiths Smokey Robinson and Brian Holland. In no time, Ross would climb beyond the group onto the A-List as a solo act, record six more No. 1 songs, and earn millions as well as top billing in two movies. She wears her haught—and haute—to this day, more than two decades after
Billboard
proclaimed her “Entertainer of the Century,” with little dissent; in her 60s, she still hangs tough on the A-List, even though her most recent CD, in 2007, rose no higher than No. 32.

Ross in her Supremes’ incarnation may have been devious, quietly twisting the knife in the other Supremes while Gordy moved her up the company ladder. Still, even as a pop diva of epic dimensions, Ross never shook her identity as a Supreme, and has, in a way, been forced to bow before it. Indeed, the power of that brand can be an awesome thing to behold. Heavy as it is with sentimental value and immortal pop hooks, one measure is, inevitably, the bottom line. The fact that the numbers cited above dwarf Ross’s solo sales explains why, after decades of resistance to such a thing, she re-upped as a Supreme for a proposed world reunion tour in 2000, a beyond-lucrative project carrying a top-ticket price of $200. However, in a splendidly ironic role reversal, it was Mary Wilson and Cindy Birdsong who back-stabbed Ross; offered a fraction of the $15 million reserved for Ross, the pair refused to recede into her spotlight for a second time in their lives. Ross then tried to replace them with two nominal Supremes of the ’70s, but Supremes fans were interested only in the original configuration of the group and the tour 0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:05 AM Page xviii xviii

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was called off. Moral of the story: For all of Ross’s glitz and mega-diva status, she wasn’t the Supremes after all.

To be sure, Ross, ever since her inner diva took flight in the late ’60s, has put forth a weird, un-Supreme-like vibe. It’s not only the haught; it’s the Supremes’ sensible glamour turned into an excess of self-parody.

Not for nothing is the protoplast of Diana Ross—bejeweled and be-witching, hair teased to the sky and emaciated loins furbished by the latest neon-lit Bob Mackie or Issey Miyake original—the beau ideal of female impersonators worldwide and of the gay and transgender fans who make up a heavy slice of Ross’s audience. Among Supremes’ fans, that Ross plays the diva role to the point of asking to be called “Miss Ross” or even “The Boss”—even if she does so with a wink—is cringe-worthy. Not that this evolution was unexpected back at Motown; it was evident even as Ross played out the Supremes. Indeed, many among this loyal legion felt as abandoned as Wilson and Birdsong when Ross abandoned
them
, just as they blamed her for Flo Ballard’s banishment, though Ross’s passive role in that drama was no different than Wilson’s, and she later generously footed some of Ballard’s mounting debts; after Ballard’s death in 1976 at age 32, which came after years of indeed