The Supremes: A Saga of Motown Dreams, Success, and Betrayal (29 page)

Having been told by Eddie that she’d front the song, which would have been her first real lead, Mary was crushed. But she’d have been 0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:06 AM Page 151

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more so had she, and Diane and Flo, not agreed that this odd song would go nowhere. Rather than hearing any adult skew, they found it adolescent and silly—“a teenybopper song,” as Wilson put it, with “a limited melody and no drive.” There were rumors even then that the Marvelettes had turned it down before it came to the Supremes, which infuriated Ross.

Her cynical reaction: “So they want
us
to do this lousy song?” At the session, on April 8, cutting the rhythm track went smoothly, uncomplicated as it was. As arranged by Brian, it came out with what Alan Slutsky perceived as a “swing feel,” flavored by a two-bar piano line by Johnny Griffiths, Benny Benjamin’s shuffle drum beat, and the mandatory (on all Motown songs, it seemed) Mike Terry sax solo. The real task was the make-or-break vocal tracks. Eddie had a hard slog with Ross, who was used to singing as her spirit moved her, according to the rhythm, not with every word and inflection tightly pre-ordered.

EDDIE HOLLAND: The thing is, an HDH song is unusual for any singer; it wasn’t just Diane. There had to be a certain type of tone and sync to it. There were a lot of different beats, sharps, flats. The coloration was always more important than the note.

The singers would come in and they were accustomed to singing to the beat, but in our songs they’d have to trail the beat, singing off of the beat in a sharp or flat key.

When I was teaching Diane “Where Did Our Love Go,” the first time I sang it for her I was using some, shall we say, vocal gymnastics, overdoing it so she could feel the sound. And she said, “I want to sing it just like that.” I told her, “No, no, no, no. It has to be sweet and sexy, and it won’t be unless you do exactly what I say.” And she did. She learned. It took a lot of time and work, but she did it. Remember, she was singing in a key she never had before. She had to take baby steps. She’d re-vert and start singing in the high register. I’d say, “Lower, Diane, bring it down.” She’d say, “But it sounds more exciting higher.” My retort would be, “I don’t care if you’re excited. You gotta make
me
excited.”

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I heard the first mixes of the tracks, I’d always say, “That vocal is too goddamn high. Slow down the tape!” There’d always be a tussle.

So finally we got Diana into the vocal booth, and she still hated the fact that she had to do this song. She was not in a good mood [laughs], and when Diana wasn’t in a good mood it meant one thing—she was gonna call Berry [hearty laughter].

She said, “Where’s the phone?” and everyone, you know, rolled their eyes. I said, “Diana, listen, you can go ahead and call Berry. But if he comes down here, me and my brother and Lamont ain’t comin’ back in here for you girls, ever.” That stopped her in her tracks, but she just more or less wanted to get it over with, and it came out really dry, not a lot of emotion. The engineer turned around and looked at me, like, “You wanna go on with this?” And I just said, “Leave it alone, man, just let her go.” Because it was the damndest thing.

What she was doing was perfect. She may have been thinking the hell with this, but her voice had this natural quality that’s very hard to coax—very soft and beautiful, yet not pushing it on you.

At the end she said, “Is this what you want?” She didn’t even know herself how good she was. I told her, “Thank you, that’s
exactly
what I want.” I knew what we had.

Dozier, too, had his hands full with Mary and Flo’s background vocals, later calling that tutorial “a trying experience.” The original backing track was intricate, but the pair couldn’t get down the call-and-response pattern and so it was stripped back to only two parts—a revolving chain of “Baby, baby” and the title phrase. To the girls, it seemed like the most ridiculous song they’d ever heard. Wilson would describe the lyrics as “childish and repetitive.” And it might have remained so if Diane hadn’t stepped before the microphone and made something incredible happen. She not only nailed it, she epoxied every single element of HDH’s vision for the song into a two-minute-plus trance. Her soft, sighing, almost diaphanous purring turned repetition into emotion. The opening line made the sale: “
Baby, baby, don’t leave
me, oooooh, please don’t leave me.
” It was the
oooooh
that really did it. As HDH would discover, just such an ephemeral, sexy-sad sonance, seemingly emanating from the loins, could make the hair stand up on their arms—and thus stand as 0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:06 AM Page 153

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the defining point of the song. And when she bled the line about having a “burning, burning, yearning feeling inside me,” God only knows what went through Brian’s mind.

Brian and Lamont had completed the session with no added intro; Diane came right in on bar one. Realizing afterward that they needed a buffer to prep the vocal, they wouldn’t wait until the musicians were back for another date. Instead, improvising, they scrounged around for some makeshift sound that could fill space. Finding some wooden planks in a corner—part of the endless construction on the studio—

they bundled two together, suspended them from the ceiling with piano wire to within a foot of the wooden floor. Then, Eddie and teenage studio hand Mike Valvano stomped on them with the heels of their shoes in a rough 1-2-3-4, 1-2-3-4 cadence. Fattened up with echo and overdubbed hand-clapping, the effect of a small army marching across a tin roof was just odd enough to accentuate the hard-to-soft contrast, and provided balance at the end, when it was reprised.

The rudimentary nature of the stomping aside, sheen-smooth grooves of the finished record spilled the very air of polished sophistication that Gordy had dreamed of for the Supremes. Upon hearing the final mix, he cautiously ventured that he had a potential Top Ten hit in his hands. HDH knew they’d done well when they played the tape for Barney Ales’s salespeople. “They’d go, ‘Man, that Diane Ross!’ and then, like, smack their lips,” says Eddie Holland. “It was like everybody wanted her because of how she sounded on that song.” From that sam-pling (unscientific though it was), it was apparent that if the record was given proper play, not only the Motown teenage target audience would be broadened to more worldly ears but adult men, too, might be rather intrigued.

Ales himself had no doubt, and was even prepared to go out on a limb, using the Supremes in an attempt to blunt the potentially crippling loss of arguably Motown’s biggest star. That crisis had arisen when Mary Wells, dissatisfied over Gordy’s penury—and her ego swollen in the early spring of ’64 by “My Guy,” the massive No. 1 hit penned and produced by Smokey Robinson—walked out on her contract, claiming that since she’d been underage when she signed, she could do as she wished now that she was 21. With three years left on the contract, she signed with Twentieth Century Fox.

For Gordy, stung by this latest defection, it was small consolation that after he sued for breach of contract Motown was awarded part of Wells’s royalties (of which there were few) for the next three years.

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Needing to ease the distributors’ jitters about Motown’s stability, Ales told the big trade paper
Billboard
in July that while Gordy was “surprised and hurt” by Wells’s walkout, it was actually Motown’s “intensive” promotional campaigns that had made Wells a star (he left the issue of royalty compensation untouched) and a campaign just like that now awaited another deserving act. The article read: Ales, stating that he is aware that many offers are proffered to an artist who has had a top record, added that he would like to alert the industry to a group of young ladies called the Supremes, “who will have the next No. 1 record in the U.S.” Ales couldn’t have gone out on a shakier limb than that; now, anything short of “Where Did Our Love Go” going high and mighty would be an enormous embarrassment, undercutting Motown’s credibility and ability to seamlessly adapt to change. And if the Supremes wouldn’t cut it, where then to turn? It wasn’t as if they had a deep bench. One could feel Gordy’s pain in the early summer of ’64. As things stood,

“My Guy” was the first Motown chart-topper since Stevie Wonder’s fluke, live-concert version of “Fingertips (Part 2)” the previous summer.

The Miracles’ three releases that year stalled at Nos. 35, 27, and 35.

Stevie Wonder’s first two after “Fingertips (Part 2)” peaked at 33 and 29. The Marvelettes were in a slump. The Vandellas were waiting for a follow-up to “Quicksand.” And Marvin Gaye was still waiting to crack the Top Ten.

Gordy was doing well enough financially, but the novelty and excitations of 1962 and ’63 were receding into the past. The Wells exodus brought to a head Gordy’s angst that he would now be seen as vulnerable—at about this time, Smokey Robinson was offered a million-dollar advance to jump to Scepter Records in New York by label president Florence Greenberg; and while his filial loyalty to Berry made the offer a no-go, it showed that the sharks were circling.

Gordy, a gambling man, now had no choice but to bet the store on a group that had never sniffed the Top Twenty and whose last appreciable contribution was singing backup on Marvin Gaye’s “You’re a Wonderful One,” a spring hit. And so he and Ales would go to the mat with

“Where Did Our Love Go.” They’d hit up the distributors, flood the radio stations with copies of the record, lean on the station managers.

But that wasn’t enough. They needed to jumpstart Motown with the white market. And for that, they needed Dick Clark.

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Contrary to Mary Wilson’s Pollyanna-like assertion that “[w]e were flattered to know that Dick Clark . . . wanted the Supremes” for the Caravan, Esther Edwards had to pester Roz Ross for days to get it done.

In nearly all editions of the Motown literature, Clark has been shaded as a hard-ass who finally gave in once Gordy agreed to pick up the group’s expenses, whereupon Clark took them on at $600 a week, half of tour headliner Gene Pitney’s fee.

The truth is exactly the opposite. Clark was actually extraordinarily generous to the Supremes, inasmuch as most performers on his tours, as he wrote in
Rock, Roll and Remember,
“didn’t make more than $500 a week.” What is more, Clark rarely if ever paid for any of the acts’ hotel lodgings; instead, all but the biggest stars had to pay or arrange for their own accommodations. The Supremes, then, were doubly blessed: by two of the industry’s biggest heavyweights. The upshot was that while most of the performers, as Clark noted, “were lucky if they had $20 a week to play with,” the Supremes had $150 a week to do so—and the amount was that low only because Ernestine Ross came along as the girls’

chaperone, meaning the money would be split four ways and not three.

One can forgive Clark for being a mite unctuous in insisting that

“[e]ven then you knew Diana Ross was something special.” Yet there can be no doubt that, other than Gordy, no human being of that high-flown stature ever played a more pivotal role in the group’s success than did Clark.

On June 8, the agreement and the accommodations made, the Supremes were driven by John O’Den to join the Caravan of Stars in progress in Cleveland. Light-headed in wonderment about the weeks ahead, they probably didn’t fully realize that the weight of Berry Gordy’s entire world now rested on the fragile shoulders of three girls from the projects.

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eleven

ONE

By the time the Supremes joined the Dick Clark Caravan of Stars,

“Where Did Our Love Go” had begun to generate a small buzz.

Hurried into release in early June, backed with a song called “He Means the World to Me,” it spread from radio stations in Detroit to make the rounds nationwide. The next crucial step in the hit-making process was getting the song noticed in
Billboard
. According to the rules of that game, a record company was expected to spend liberally on full-page ads in the paper. Though the effect of such ads on record sales was highly debatable, given that mainly industry people ever read the trades, labels took to competing with each other to show whose ads could be bigger and snazzier. Not coincidentally, as well, the panjandrums at
Billboard
might have felt more disposed to return the favor when giving play to those companies’ new records, in its “Hot Pop Spotlights” column, in which the magazine listed predictions for which new records would go Top Twenty or Top Sixty.

Gordy, of course, knew how to play the game. For a guy who never read a book until he was in his 40s, he could be seen most every day with his nose buried in
Billboard,
which had been his personal bible since back in his songwriting days. Dipping deep into the Motown till from the start, he had gained pivotal attention for the Miracles, Mary Wells, and the Marvelettes; now, in the spring of ’64, came a new round of Motown ads, just in time for the big Supremes push.

A few weeks later, in the July 4 issue,
Billboard
finally took notice of the Supremes. In Spotlights, “Where Did Our Love Go” was judged a 156

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ONE

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Top Twenty candidate, with this bit of
Billboard-
ese explaining the selection:

Music to hand-clap and foot-stomp to. Plenty of jump in this one. Beat is unbeatable and lead is in a true rockin’ blues groove.

In the industry, a sentence like that—despite being written in semi-English—was worth a few thousand florid words, not to mention many thousands of advertising dollars. While most of the magazine’s record and album reviews were nearly identical in language, it wasn’t the prose but the mere fact they were
there
that got the records’ distributors moving. Only a week later, in the July 11 issue, “Where Did Our Love Go” had already broken into the Hot 100, at No. 77; on July 18, it was No. 38; on July 25, No. 18; on August 1, No. 5; on August 8