The Supremes: A Saga of Motown Dreams, Success, and Betrayal (57 page)

And yet at the cutting edge, “Reflections” was conceived in a narrow frame, almost as a private matter between HDH and Gordy, as it was composed early in 1967 just as a rupture was severing the relationship.

Such a rift had been inevitable given that the Motown
über
-structure was unchanged from 1961—Gordy at the top, mostly everyone else at the bottom. While Eddie Holland had renounced a singing career because he wanted to be cut in on the kind of bread his brother Brian was making, when the HDH triumvirate exploded into space the trio were 295

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chagrined to find that they were being kept at a distance from the real money.

Even now, as arguably the world’s best writing-producing team, they were still not permitted to own the copyrights to their own songs.

They were still paid on a salaried basis, and not a half-bad one, now up to around three grand a week apiece, landing the Holland brothers in luxurious digs in the exclusive Palmer Woods section of town. But when
The Supremes Sing Holland Dozier Holland
brought in several hundred thousand dollars in sales, they’d have been able to see the writers’ royalties only by looking in Gordy’s bank vault, since Jobete Music owned all the rights, sales, publishing, and writing.

Gordy, who reveled in the role of benevolent dictator, swore to himself he was being generous to a fault with his writers, with spontaneous raises, bonuses, and gifts. In
To Be Loved,
he posited that all this would have been more than enough, if not for Eddie’s avarice. Early on, he recalled, Eddie had come to him saying he would be representing HDH.

“For what?” Gordy asked.

“Business. I’ll negotiate for all three of us.” Gordy asked what he could conceivably want to negotiate. “Oh, I don’t know,” he said Eddie told him. “Brian and Lamont aren’t money-minded. I have to keep them motivated.” When Gordy then went to Brian to confirm this, he was told, “I hope you understand and have no hard feelings. But that’s my brother and you know how it is.” Gordy noted “Eddie’s constant requests for added incentives through the years,” adding, “They were great as a team and I knew I had to pay an additional cost to keep them happy. It was part of doing business.” This included, he said, “serious readjustments” to the trio’s compensation package. While the Hollands won’t revisit such details, the sour look on their faces and their acrid laughter speak for them. What Gordy forgot to mention, they know well, was that his payouts, as with any other advance, had to be earned back or else deducted from future earnings—and, furthermore, that he docked them for unspecified “expenses” on sessions at which they cut tracks that never were given to any act to record and sat on the shelf.

There was also the thorny issue of stock options in Motown Recording Corporation, which grew—with no small thanks to HDH—to an enormous value. Gordy shared those only with Gwen and Anna and to a lesser degree with his children. Not even that most loyal adjutant Smokey Robinson was given more than token equity in the company 0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:06 AM Page 297

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he had gotten off the ground and served as vice-president for until Gordy sold it in the ’80s.

Operating in the ether of his Supremes idyll, Gordy either didn’t know about or pretended not to be aware of a growing unease among those in his steerage class. By early ’67, HDH were only one of the rising headaches. Another restless native was Mickey Stevenson, his go-to guy in A&R who ironically had kept the acts contented in the feudal system. But Stevenson himself was quite unhappy over the fact that Gordy wasn’t giving him writers’ credits he believed he deserved for ideas that saved more than a few records that had hit a snag in the studio, and that his salary hadn’t kept pace with the company’s growth.

The last rip was when Gordy refused to do more with Kim Weston, whom Stevenson married in 1967.

Weston, whose gritty R&B style had fallen out of favor at Motown, hadn’t had a single released since early ’65, despite her mild hit with HDH’s “Take Me in Your Arms,” and a larger one when paired with Marvin Gaye on “It Takes Two” in early ’67. Behind Gordy’s back, Stevenson brokered a deal for Weston in L.A. with MGM, which also offered him a production deal with equity. He went to Gordy looking for the same and when he was offered only a raise, he walked with Wes -

ton midway through 1967, though not to any great future success at MGM.

Next it was Harvey Fuqua. Once Gordy’s biggest yes-man, he had saved the day by moving in Tammi Terrell for Weston as Gaye’s duet partner and producing the pair’s hits “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough” and “Your Precious Love.” But friction had been mounting between Gordy and Fuqua as well, perhaps spilling from the latter’s rocky marriage to Gwen Gordy. A year later, when he left Gwen (who kept the Motown inbreeding farm going by taking up with G. C. Cameron of a newer company group, the Spinners), he needed to get away from all the Gordys and wound up taking an executive position at RCA Records in New York. In addition, Clarence Paul was losing
his
patience with Gordy’s penury; within two years, he, too, would walk.

By the end of ’66, even Maxine Powell, with little to do, had left the company.

With his creative braintrust crumbling around him, Gordy filled the A&R gap left by Stevenson’s exit by elevating Eddie Holland to head of the department, and Brian Holland to head of Creative Control when Billie Jean Brown took leave after getting married. These were moves that Gordy would admit he regretted, and almost right 0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:06 AM Page 298

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from the get-go other producers began to grouse to each other that HDH would give priority to their own records and not theirs. The once-tight creative structure at Motown was turning into a malleable mess. And for HDH, the promotions did nothing to address their dissonance about being stiffed, and nothing to pacify the unease that had crept into their work—most dramatically and fatalistically in

“Reflections.”

EDDIE HOLLAND: Let’s just say there were a lot of different emotions running through our heads starting in early ’67, the time when we did that song. Listen, we loved Berry Gordy, we’ll always love Berry. The man is a genius. He’s the reason we achieved what we did. That’s what made it so much more emotional and crazy. You try to separate business from everything else, but things carry over, they get emotional and out of hand.

It’s like you end up hating your own father, who you love dearly, and you hate yourself for hating him. You feel unloved by him.

How do you deal with heavy shit like that, when it’s tearing you up inside? Maybe you try to deal with it by writing a song.

Enter “Reflections,” a tormented-to-the-max, three-penny operetta of mourning, ostensibly about lost love, that contrary to other Su -

premes vinyl lovelorn confessionals did no reaching out burning and yearning for reconciliation; its damning and dooming finality about

“the way life used to be” and “the love you took from me” cut right to the bone from the opening stanza—“Through the mirror of my mind, time after time / I see reflections of you and me”—and only became more lacerating, with visceral elegies of being “all alone now, trapped in a world that’s a distorted reality” where “the happiness you took from me has left me alone with only memories.” Some of these verses may, along with those in “Bernadette,” incorporate some of the most Bard-like rock poetry ever penned—“Through the hollow of my tears,” “I see a dream that’s lost from the hurt that you have caused,” “After all the nights I sat alone and wept, just a handful of promises are all that’s left of loving you.” But the killer was this:
In you I put all my faith and trust

And right before my eyes, my world has turned to dust.

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Normally a man not given to understatement, Eddie Holland says of his work on “Reflections” that “I was getting heavy then,” more so than anyone knew. As Dozier recalled, “When we started at Motown . . .

miracles were realized, love was good, but then it went bad. Disenchantment spoiled the dream and memories were all that was left.” If Gordy ever really
heard
the song, he might have realized that the “distorted reality” Diana was singing about with icy contempt was his own; and the world turned to dust, what he’d left behind for many of the flock. If he ever did hear that in the song, he never let on.

Because of the exposed nerve of the song, Brian and Dozier stripped the arrangement to its essentials. This was now
adult
music; gone were the
chink-a-chink
electric guitar backbeat and the honking sax, leaving a throbbing Jack Ashford tambourine, a dark Wurlitzer electric piano line by Earl Van Dyke, and a subtler drumbeat by Pistol Allen. Jamerson’s nimbly brooding bass filled the bottom; swelling, stabbing strings the top. There were dead stops, long notes echoing into silence. And a whacked-out intro not to be believed to this day.

Seeking a sci-fi effect to almost literally reproduce disturbing brain waves, something like the theremin Brian Wilson used on “Good Vibrations” the year before but less kitschy, they used an electronic oscil -

lator, a juiced-up version of the common instrument that merely measures sine waves. The amped version gave them a sound—at low power Sputnik-like beeps, at higher power futuristic swirling like something out of
Plan 9 from Outer Space.
That very jump, in a six-second sequence, became the intro. But not before Brian, thinking it might be a tad too cheesy, nearly nixed it.

“I wanted to kill him,” Eddie says. “’Cause it just blew me away. It was perfect!
Through the mirror of my mind . . .
that was the sound! I told him, ‘Don’t you dare take that out!’”

There were also more practical reasons to leave it in, what with the rising commercial niche of songs suggesting a drugged-out feel. “It made that song sound psychedelic. It was like a person on a high, being in a whole other space in their own body.”

“Remember, this was about the time of
Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely
Hearts Club Band
, when all the rules were broken. We wanted to tap into that and we could do what we wanted to do, no matter how crazy, if it made sense to us.”

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The Beatles’ influence in “Reflections” is obvious in other, technical ways—Alan Slutsky speaks of the “Beatle-esque chamber music texture in the low-register strings” and the “shifting meters of the melody.” But it surely was the mild psychedelia—to be taken much further by Norman Whitfield’s brilliant late ’60s and early ’70s Temptations productions like “Cloud Nine” and “Psychedelic Shack”—that bought it and the Supremes a little sanctuary in the “Summer of Love.” This alone was no small feat: that the Supremes of the Copa and the casinos could sound cool to the flower-power crowd as well as to the cigar-chewing carnivores of the clubs. One can add to that list soul devotees and both sides of the Vietnam War divide; in ’67, a
Time
dis-patch from the combat front noted that Supremes songs were heard echoing in the jungle on soldiers’ transistor radios, having had no diffi-culty getting through the Armed Forces Radio censors. Two decades later, “Reflections” was used as the theme song of the retro-Vietnam TV

series
China Beach
.

The Supremes, in the wake of “Reflections,” had become all things to all people—the perfect commercial equation, at least. Not that they could have had a place at the Monterey Pop Festival that summer between Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix, or even the Mamas and the Papas and the Association, or that they could ever have been seen taking hits of Monterey Purple. (The only Motown artists who could have fit in with that scene were Marvin Gaye on style and, on substance, Stevie Wonder, who had dragged Motown into the loam of its own community, using a ghetto street milieu on the cover of his ’66
Down to Earth
LP, which included period-relevant songs like “A Place in the Sun” and a cover of Dylan’s “Mr. Tambourine Man.”)

Yet the widespread reach of “Reflections” was an important hurdle to clear at a time when Motown was, in some circles, approaching ex-cursus. It had begun not to be good enough to some rock critics, and the general record-buying market, that the label “belonged” simply by its black birthright. Indeed, within the soul market, many had written off Motown in favor of the “real deal” of the Atlantic Records’ Stax and Volt labels that mined soul gold from the studios of Memphis and Muscle Shoals. Atlantic seemed to have no interest in going “wide,” not if it meant sending the likes of Sam and Dave, Wilson Pickett, Otis Redding, Solomon Burke, and Aretha Franklin to Vegas casinos and the Copacabana. With much cheek, Stax-Volt pointedly dubbed itself

“Soulsville,” in living-color contrast to the more generic Hitsville, where too many soul acts had gone to die. It had a right to gloat on this 0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:06 AM Page 301

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point; without a single No. 1 record in the decade, save for Aretha’s cover of Redding’s “Respect,” the Atlantic stable was spanking Motown on the “purity” issue.

This was the price Gordy had to pay for its taking crossover appeal to unimaginable, even unseemly heights in the first place. That aim, once admired in the community, had come to be reviled. Washington University professor Gerald Early, author of
One Nation Under a
Groove: Motown & American Culture
, recalling the Motown records of the middle to late ’60s, remarked that “[t]here was a feeling that whites were sort of co-opting this music and there was no longer a sense of pride that whites were playing the music. There was this sense that Gordy was making a mistake by trying to make his music have this integration-assimilation appeal. I remember one kid I knew, he said,