The Supremes: A Saga of Motown Dreams, Success, and Betrayal (35 page)

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classic Gordy fashion, there was no special order of billing; seeking, as ever, to foment competition as motivation for inspired performances, he made sure the order was determined, in typical Revue style, by each night’s audience reaction. All of Gordy’s “children” were used to the practice, and were primed to pour out their guts on stage. In these glad-iator contests, Ross showed that fame hadn’t mellowed her cut-throat instincts.

The Supremes began the week third from the closing, behind Marvin Gaye and the perennial show-closer, Smokey and the Miracles.

When they missed a couple of shows while in New York, they came back home to find they’d lost even that spot. Looking for an edge, Diana came on using a riff she’d purloined from none other than old flame Smokey Robinson. The irony is that the riff—in which Smokey fell to his knees and called out “A little bit softer now” until the band was playing at a hush, then escalated cries of “A little bit louder now” until it was at full pitch—was itself lifted from the Isley Brothers’ “Shout.”

“She’s doing my whole bit!” he complained to Berry. “You gotta stop her.”

Once, Gordy might have done just that. Now, not even Smokey Robinson stood before her in his line of sight.

“Smokey,” he told him, “you’re the star. You’ll just have to come up with something else. There’s no way I’m gonna stop her.” Smokey, from firsthand experience, knew the score. Laughing, he said, “I didn’t think you would. As fine as she is, I wouldn’t stop her, either.”

Gordy would admit that his fixation with Ross, too, couldn’t be stopped, and had developed into something uncontrollable. “I guess I loved her before I even knew it,” he wrote in his autobiography. Unable to express it directly, he instead did it the only way he knew how, by putting it into a song, “Try It Baby,” which he cut with Marvin Gaye in

’65. In it, the guy broods about losing a girl who’s “moving on up” and

“leaving me behind,” and tells her, “Take away your good looks and all your fancy clothes [and] you’ll see that nobody loves you but me.” Coming from a man who wielded power and wealth like an aphrodisiac, and could have had Ross with the crook of a finger, such self-tortured insecurity was clearly tied to his fear of love and rejection—a fear that never did recede, since the same neediness can be implied from the title of his autobiography,
To Be Loved
, in which he admitted,

“I never told Diana she was the inspiration for that song. I found myself falling for her more and more, but I stayed cool, incredibly cool.” 0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:06 AM Page 187

THE TWO MOTOWNS

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Of course, he was the only one around Motown who didn’t know he was, another reason why not everyone—or more accurately, practically no one but Gordy and his executives—in the company was thrilled by the Supremes’ astonishing breakout. The least thrilled likely being Martha and the Vandellas, who were still smarting from Ross having co-opted their outfits in Washington, D.C. As the next-biggest girl-group, the Vandellas could definitely feel the ground shifting as Gordy turned his priorities toward the Supremes. In fact, they believed, somewhat myopically, that the company “push” was almost totally responsible for creating that winning streak.

ANNETTE BEARD: That’s what it’s all about, promotion. It’s not that we resented them for getting it. It’s that we wanted it, too.

Look at “Dancing in the Street.” That got nothing like the promotion they were putting on the Supremes’ records and it went to No. 2. If they’d pushed it, it would’ve gone to No. 1, easy, no doubt. Because that’s the difference between being No. 2 and No. 1, the promotion. That’s the hardest jump to make on the chart. So we thought we’d earned that push after that, because they said they would give it to us. And we waited and waited.

Our feeling was this: Motown was supposed to be this big, happy family. And we had three different girl-group acts: the Supremes, the Vandellas, and the Marvelettes, and all of us had huge hits. And we were hurt because we felt everybody should have gotten the same attention. But the focus was on the Supremes because Berry had this thing for Diana. He was getting them ready to be out there doing the better shows in the better places. We were told, “As soon as the Supremes open all the doors, you’ll get your chance.” It was like, “Wait in line and your turn will come.” And in show business, if you wait too long, if you go cold, you’re gone. So we thought, “Well, why do we have to wait? Why can’t we all open the doors?” We were as good as the Supremes—better, if you ask me. To be honest, their songs never really knocked me out. When I heard them, I wasn’t excited. I’m not saying they were bad. There are no bad Holland-Dozier-Holland songs, and they did a great job with ’em.

But some, you know, had to grow on me. Because here we were doing “Dancing in the Street” and “Nowhere to Run.” Tell me, can you compare “Where Did Our Love Go” and “Baby Love” to those? I mean, the Supremes’ songs were good but, come on.

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Beard is right that the Supremes didn’t, and could not hope to, amass the brute sonic power of the Vandellas’ two signature pieces. But neither did those songs, for whatever reasons, reach the top of the charts. Nor have the Vandellas lingered in popular music memory anywhere near as long or fertilely as the Supremes. That wasn’t merely a function of which distributors were being pushed to sell more records; indeed, as great as Martha Reeves was, she didn’t, and couldn’t hope to, wear as well as Diana Ross.

Wilson, trying to put her finger on the Supremes’ appeal vis à vis their closest Motown rival, told author Gerri Hirshey, “We weren’t as—

well, masculine is the wrong word. Maybe tough. The Vandellas were a bit more soulful than us, let’s put it that way. More R&B than us, they’d move more, with different kinds of gyrations.” She didn’t need to make the point: The Supremes didn’t gyrate. And no one, but no one, could ever call them
masculine
.

Dysfunctional as it was, while Motown was still a family affair, Gordy rolled the dice on his most ambitious idea: sending the Motortown Revue to conquer a second continent. The success of the Mary Wells and Supremes tours of England, coupled with the launch in early ’65 of the Tamla-Motown international label, made a company tour seem a worthwhile endeavor. Gordy also added branch tours to France, Germany, and The Netherlands. The troupe would essentially be the same as before, with one major exception—the Supremes would be the un-questioned headliner.

They, more than anyone, had made such an undertaking possible, and thus there’d be no intramural competition over billing and stage order. Ross, Wilson, and Ballard would get the top spot on the marquees and billboards, in larger fonts, and would close the shows, sending Smokey and his Miracles into a supporting role.

And, this time, Berry would be there from the start, and clear on through to the end. There was no way he could pass up the chance to see his flock merging with the grandeur of the European Continent. He excitedly arranged to take along his children and Mom and Pops Gordy. What most excited him, however, was that these romantic locales might provide him with a shot of courage, at least enough to be able to say, “Try it, baby” to a certain lead singer who both consumed and terrified him.

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thirteen

“ECSTASY

TO THE

TENTH POWER”

Motown’s invasion of Europe was scheduled for March 1965, leaving ample time for the Supremes to continue their nearly nonstop pilgrimage across the pop culture landscape. However, the first order of business was the now-preponderant matter of following up three straight No. 1 records (a feat only Elvis had accomplished, twice, in the ’50s en route to five No. 1’s in a row, which the Supremes and the Beatles were concurrently working their way toward). For HDH, this was a tricky maneuver; if they stayed “in the ballpark,” would the act run the risk of going stale? At the same time, going wide—more R&B, too much of a ballad, too sharp an edge—was just as risky. Realizing they could not change the park, only its dimensions, they went farther down the road of recycling the winning beat, while extending the newer elements they’d added in

“Come See About Me.”

Picking up on Ross’s punchier but still imploring attitude on

“Come See About Me,” the three maestros wove a sequel of continued, angrier frustration out of another ember of Lamont Dozier’s troubled love life. This time, he’d been caught cheating, and during what he described as a “tremendous argument,” out of his mouth spilled the words

“Baby, please stop, in the name of love, before you break my heart.” The line was so sappy that both he and the girl erupted into laughter, but he had a final bit of sap in him when she spurned him. “Think it over” was his final plea. “Think it over.”

Brilliant songwriters have an automatic retention for love-is-hell dialogue like that, and Dozier took it at once to the piano, initiating the 189

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talismanic teamwork with Brian and Eddie Holland. A session was eventually set for early February to cut the next Supremes tune—which by then had the title “Stop! In the Name of Love.” Eddie’s lyric, with its mandatory “Baby, baby” iterations, was kneaded into a dark, mocking stalk—“Baby, baby, I’m aware of where you go, each time you leave my door. I watch you walk down the street, knowing the other love you meet.” The title hook was a clear threat.

The arrangement by HDH and the Motown arranger Paul Riser drove the
noir
-ish undertone, the usual bells and whistles of a Supremes song now sounding harder, meaner. Again, it would take a believably mercurial Ross to pull it off—to be this rough and still vulnerable enough to sing, “Each time we are together, I’m so afraid of losing you forever.” And she was right on the money—though, in a twist, hers isn’t the first voice heard on the song. The intro was an arching Hammond-organ glissando by Earl Van Dyke and a sudden concussion of sound with Wilson and Ballard throatily singing the title phrase backed by a thick vibraphone, chugging bass, and snare drum hammering on each beat. Fabulous eighth-note saxophone runs came out of the mist preceding the background choruses. The
chink
of an electric guitar meshed with the drum on the back beat, a ’50s riff used on the Falcons’ “You’re So Fine.”

Then came Diana, interchanging vinegar and custard. When the tracks were mixed—over a speaker sized to that of a car or transistor radio, which is how it would be heard by most—all the Motown Brahmins thought it faultless (save for an errant drumstick falling during the organ intro, inaudible on anything but a hi-fi system). In fact, after a year of trying, it seemed as if it all had become almost
too
easy.

Certainly, by 1965, all the conditions and personnel at 2648 West Grand Boulevard were geared toward optimally creating and channeling onto Ampax tape the now-consistent “Motown Sound.” Gordy even took to calling his shop “Detroit’s other world-famous assembly line” in promotional copy, though another metaphor—“black bubblegum”—

was also catching on, much to his unliking. In ’64, of the sixty releases put out on his four prime labels—Motown (including the Supremes and the Four Tops), Tamla (Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder, the Miracles, the Marvelettes, Brenda Holloway), Gordy (the Temptations, the Vandellas), and Soul (Junior Walker and the All Stars)—a full forty-two of 0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:06 AM Page 191

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them made the charts; and, amazingly, Gordy was putting out only about a tenth of the product he had in the can. Good enough, considering that of the twenty-five No. 1 hits on the
Billboard
pop chart in

’65, five came from Motown—three by the Supremes and one each by the Temptations and the Four Tops.

The belt of the assembly line, of course, was Studio A, the room dank and constantly in disrepair. Several fires had broken out over the years when various tubes, wires, and speakers overheated and blew, usually on hot summer days in the un-air-conditioned studio and control booth, which operated twenty-two hours a day, seven days a week. (Sessions ran so continuously that the musicians now rarely knew what act each given track was intended for, since vocals were dubbed at later dates.)

But while Gordy kept the snake-pit atmospherics as they were, to retain the old R&B raunchiness, he also dropped a fortune on upgrad-ing the equipment. He hired a small battalion of sound engineers to oversee state-of-the-art recorders, mixing boards, equalizers, and speakers. The chief engineer, Mike McLean, built a four-track stereo recorder in 1964, a tricky contraption he wouldn’t allow anyone—

Gordy included—to touch without passing an extensive tutorial on how to use it to, for example, “ping-pong,” the process by which dozens of tracks were merged into one fat track for the finished mix, by bouncing them back and forth between two reel-to-reel machines. Those recorders could now hold 2,500 feet of tape.

A new echo chamber was installed, too, using a new German technology, as well as discrete vocal booths. On the studio floor, musicians were isolated by baffles and miked individually; instead of blending into a massive sonic fog, each instrument was heard over separate amps in the booth. In the mixes, the sound grew tighter, sharper, better balanced. On the early records, for example, the tambourine was too loud, because it was recorded on the same microphone as the drum, and reducing one meant reducing both. Now, each had its own mike, and was placed on different tracks.

The result of this progress could be gleaned on the Supremes’ skein of hits. For “Stop! In the Name of Love,” HDH were able to bulk up the rhythm, Phil Spector “Wall of Sound”–style, without muddling the mix, by adding instruments. One, a second bass, was played conven-tionally on the lower end of the scale, contrasting and buffeting James Jamerson’s impromptu riffing on the higher end. An extra rhythm guitar doubled the back beat. In time, they’d use two drummers. As Alan 0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:06 AM Page 192