The Supremes: A Saga of Motown Dreams, Success, and Betrayal (36 page)

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“Dr. Licks” Slutsky explains, the added instruments played “in the rhyth-mic holes left by the first,” resulting in “a propulsive power groove”—

the quality he says “drove teenagers to the dance floor all over the world.” By 1965, Gordy was seeing to it that the epochal Motown house band would be on call at all hours. The top cat, Jamerson—who was rumored to be earning something like a $100,000 a year from round-the-clock sessions and Gordy’s largesse—was the constant from the beginning, his influence heard on virtually every Motown record through the early ’70s. The other constants in the mid-’60s were Chank Willis, Robert White, and Joe Messina on guitar; Bongo Brown; Johnny Griffiths and Van Dyke on keyboards; Jack Ashford on tambourine/vibes; Jack Brokensha on vibes/marimba; Mike Terry and Hank Cosby on sax; Paul Riser and George Bohanon on trumpet; and Benny Benjamin and Pistol Allen on drums—the last coming on as a safety valve when Benjamin was too stoned or liquored up to play on or even make a date. Soon, when Benjamin couldn’t make any dates, Van Dyke brought in the drummer from his outside jazz band, Uriel Jones.

“Actually, most everybody was high on something,” recalls Jack Ashford, one of the few survivors of that tight knot of players in 2007.

“There were no Boy Scouts in there, man. And Benny wouldn’t know where he was, but he’d nail that beat like clockwork. His body just gave out on him.” Benjamin died of a stroke at age 43 in 1969.

It was the endearingly garrulous, sometimes incoherent Benjamin—

nicknamed “Papa Zita” after he babbled something like that while jostled out of a drunken stupor—who dropped the “Funk Brothers” moniker on the group as a whole, bellowing after a take, “You guys are the funk brothers!” “And that,” says Ashford, “was the last time we ever heard that name until, like, twenty years later, when we were ‘discovered.’” In fact, the Motown house band, unlike Spector’s “Wrecking Crew,” was basically no-names to all but the most arcane industry types. The closest thing they had to a collective identity was the Soul Brothers, the name under which they recorded a 1965 instrumental album called
The Sound of Motown
; at other times, when some of them would go out on the road with Motown tours—an arrangement kept to a minimum by Gordy, who couldn’t spare them from their studio work—they’d be billed as the Earl Van Dyke Trio or Sextet. That they normally labored in the shadows in real time was, Ashford insists, no accident: “In my mind, we didn’t get honored like [Stax-Volt house band] Booker T. and the MGs because we were being held back. They did not want us to get the recognition, because they didn’t want us to 0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:06 AM Page 193

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get offers to leave. But they wouldn’t pay us, either. I don’t know about Jamerson; those rumors might have been bullshit. I know I was making ten bucks a song at the start, and I never made much more than that the whole time I was there.”

Ashford jovially admits he had something to do with a good deal of Motown B.S., serving as the prime font of Funk Brothers lore upon their renaissance. One of the most-told tales that began to circulate was that the Brothers used to take refuge between sessions in the funeral parlor next door on West Grand Boulevard, getting loaded on booze the undertaker kept for them on a table next to bottles of formalde-hyde. Another was that James Jamerson played the bass while flat on his back on Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On,” too drunk to even sit up straight. Ashford laughs: “Those were mine. Not bad, huh?” One should not take his kvetching about the money too seriously; union scale not only grew to $61 a session by 1964, it paled next to the salary they were on and the alms Gordy gave them.

What was true was that the musicians felt like second-class citizens at Motown. “We were just sidemen, we weren’t the writers and producers,” Ashford goes on. “They couldn’t do a damn thing without us, yet no one knew who we were. And here Holland-Dozier-Holland were better known than the president of the United States! They just figured, hey, these guys are happy just to get work, don’t build ’em up. Then they’d come after us if we did sessions on the side around town. I remember we did [the Capitols’] ‘Cool Jerk’ at Golden World Studios, which Berry later bought out ’cause he couldn’t stand having competition. It was supposed to be a secret but who else could have played like that? Mickey Stevenson would follow us. If he caught us in another studio, he’d dock us fifty bucks!

“The funny thing is, we didn’t think Berry was discouraging us. We were always cool with Berry. We’d play cards and roll dice with him.

But Mickey Stevenson, he was the henchman. Mickey Stevenson was an asshole. I told him he was, too.”

Of course, Ashford’s contention that the Motown creative hierarchy would have been lost without those brilliant, savvy musicians is just the sort of thing that has been eating at Brian and Eddie Holland ever since the Funk Brothers’ renaissance. And Ashford is only too willing to make the case for his old cronies:

How it worked was like this. The producers would come in with their song and they and Paul Riser or somebody would make 0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:06 AM Page 194

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up a sheet, a very simple sheet of chord changes. No intros, no turnarounds, bridges, anything. Those things would be done on the spot, and usually all emanated from the rhythm section.

The producers would really just lay the sheets down and then get out of the way while we played it. Sometimes a producer would come in and say, “Hey, guys, make me a hit,” because they didn’t know what to do. Not Brian, he could read music; he called out chords. Brian’s a gifted guy. I don’t want to take anything away from him. If the wrong chord was played, he was on top of us. But the truth is, every session the process was the same. It would start with Earl on piano. Earl would work it all out from the chords, he and James and Benny, and Brian didn’t get involved with those conversations.

Earl would count it out, set the tempo, give us the key, and we’d play and get a feel for what the song would be. When I was on tambourine, I didn’t have a part laid out. It was all up to me, what I felt. I’d be in the drum booth with Benny and I’d watch his foot moving on the beat. Benny was the greatest pocket player in the history of music. He’d hit that groove, man, and I’d follow him. And I’d hear Jamerson do his thing and play off his flourishes.

Let me tell you something. James was worth a lot more than a hundred grand. Those bass parts made those songs.
Nobody
could do what he did on the bass. You
can’t
, because it ain’t the way you’re supposed to do it. He would play and his foot would be stomping to some other beat altogether. It was an instinct. Sometimes he’d take the sheets and throw ’em on the floor and start playing. He was just that good. But he didn’t even know it. He just did what he knew was right. We all did that, just not as good.

Tellingly, the Holland brothers have little patience for such discussions. Although Brian and Eddie appear briefly in
Standing in the
Shadows of Motown
waxing poetic about the Funk Brothers—“They were holding their children hostage,” Ashord jives—when this author suggests, with caution, that they “relied” on the musicians, their reactions are such that they’d surely have wound up on the cutting-room floor.

BRIAN: Oh, bullcrap! They didn’t come up with those songs.

It’s more than just chords. Those things have
melody
. They 0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:06 AM Page 195

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didn’t create melodies. They were created by the songwriters and producers. That’s a fact.

So, no, they didn’t just do what they felt. Not for HDH, they didn’t. Those bass lines, all of ’em we’d done on the piano first. We told them what to do. And if they didn’t do it right, I’d stop that shit and say, “No, no, no. Play it this way.” If I didn’t want it, they didn’t play it.

EDDIE: You been listening to the Funk Brothers too much.

First of all, my brother is brilliant. The biggest arguments we had—which he always won—was because of what he heard only in his head, not what I heard or what the musicians heard.

I’d say, “Brian, this part here is too dead, make it more lively.” And he’d say, “You’re crazy. Can’t you
hear
it? I’d say, “No, I can’t hear a damn thing.” ’Cause I couldn’t hear what he did.

He’d lay out all these melodies, he and Lamont. Not the Funk Brothers. They didn’t hear the melody he wanted, not until it was in the air.

It wasn’t just chord sheets. If they were so good, why didn’t they ever produce a record? What songs did they ever write? I will say this, to give them all due credit: They had the ability to
interpret
, and do what Brian wanted them to do. But it was tightly controlled.

BRIAN: For them, it was. When they played for HDH, they were.

Ashford, unmoved by the rebuttal, turns part of it back on the Hollands, particularly the producer:

He’s on crack! Tell Brian I said he’s on crack. You would have to have heard Jamerson to know. I heard him play on inside keys, outside keys, no keys. It was all in
James’s
head. I’m surprised Brian said what he did. I can’t believe it. And if
he
was that great, why the hell didn’t they [HDH] stay hot after they left Motown? Why couldn’t they do the same thing consistently with another bass player? Listen, for Brian to have in his head everything that Jamerson played, he would have to have been a master. If he even
thinks
he did, he’s on crack.

“Stop! In the Name of Love,” as with its three precursors, led a charmed life. Just after the new year, a month prior to its release, 0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:06 AM Page 196

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Billboard
’s January 9 issue put the girl’s back in the VIP cover spot, with the beneficial caption:

THE SUPREMES, Motown Records’ sensational group, are the first female artists to have three No. 1 records in a four-month period. Their smash LP “Where Did Love Go [
sic
]” is currently in the top five on Billboard’s LP chart and contains all three of their No. 1 records.

Released on February 8 backed with “I’m in Love Again,” the single was on the chart within four weeks, and in late March it, too, made it all the way to the top (pop and R&B), displacing the Beatles’ “Eight Days a Week.” There it stayed for two weeks, garnering the Supremes’

second and last Grammy nomination, for Best Contemporary Rock and Roll Group Vocal Performance (“Baby Love” had been nominated for Best Rhythm and Blues Recording the year before) and leaving perhaps the most enduring aftertaste of any Supremes song—witness, for what it’s worth, the nod that
Rolling Stone
gave it in 1988 as the tenth most important single in the rock and roll eon.

As their act took root, so did the schizoid nature of their great leap forward. On the one hand, the Supremes who drove those teenagers to the dance floor gratified that large slice of the market on dance-party TV shows both nationwide (the list now growing to include another
Shindig
on February 24, a Murray the K summer special on CBS called

“It’s What’s Happening, Baby,” and Dick Clark’s new after-school show

“Where the Action Is”) and locally (in replicates of their periodic appearances on Robin Seymour’s “Teen Town” in Detroit). On the other hand, the Supremes whom Gordy wanted to “go wide” alighted on the talk-variety circuit, singing and doing brief sit-downs with Steve Allen, Mike Douglas, Joey Bishop, and Johnny Carson.

And, most portentously, there was the motherlode of the mainstream, Berry Gordy’s longtime dream of playing the Copacabana. After weeks of negotiating with the club’s owner Jules Podell, Gordy finalized a three-week run beginning July 29. The lag time would allow him to gear up a massive marketing campaign culminating in the gig.

More would happen in that interval, however, than he may have imagined, or hoped for. In fact, by the time they got to the Copa, both on an artistic and a personal plane there would be little mystery left as to who and what the Supremes—and certainly Diana Ross—were all about.

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Much of that occurred as a result of the Motortown Revue tour of England. In mid-March the troupe—in this case, the Supremes, Martha and the Vandellas, Stevie Wonder, the Temptations, and Smokey and the Miracles, along with a group of Funk Brothers billed as the Earl Van Dyke Sextet—took off in a private plane bound for London joined by a horde of assorted Gordys and Motown functionaries, lawyers, accountants, promotions people, bodyguards, roadies, and chaperones.

On the ground at Heathrow Airport, the Tamla-Motown Appreciation Society had assembled another welcoming mob to wave banners and scream nice things at the performers as they de-planed. When it was time to head for their quarters, the swanky Cumberland Hotel, it became immediately evident who the headliners of this tour were—and how the others’ noses were going to be rubbed in it.

In truth, there’d been little doubt about this for some time. As the Revue winged across the Atlantic, the March 20
Billboard
carried a two-page ad touting the tour, with “The Tamla-Motown Show Is on the Way” splashed along the top in white letters against a solid black background and bubble insets of each act. Inverting the order of the old Motown ads, the Supremes’ bubble, sitting top left, was the biggest. In England,
The New Musical Express
worked up a cover story headlined

“THE BEATLES’ FAVORITE ARTISTS ARE COMING TO

BRITAIN”—their “favorite” conveniently not Mary Wells anymore but the Supremes.

In London, Gordy’s favoritism was clearly on display, as was the fact that the “Others” on the roster were now everybody else. No longer as concerned with competition among acts as with capitulation to his biggest act, he had the girls ride in his stretch limo and nosh with him on caviar and champagne, accompanied by their personal hair stylists, makeup artists, and valets. Meanwhile, even Esther Edwards and the Gordy brood had to ride in one of two buses, the rest of the troupe in the other bus.