1965: The Most Revolutionary Year in Music (7 page)

The key was a relentless, pounding beat. A songwriter-pianist from the rival label Stax named Isaac Hayes said, “Now it was a standard joke with blacks, that whites could
not
, cannot clap on a backbeat. What Motown did was very smart. They beat kids over the head with it. That wasn’t soulful to us down at Stax, but baby it sold.”
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In February’s “Nowhere to Run” by Martha and the Vandellas, the Funk Brothers accentuated the drums and tambourine by hitting snow chains. Written and produced by the team of Holland-Dozier-Holland, the song is a variation on the storyline that ran through many of the producers’ hits: the singer knows she’s in a bad relationship but is unable to forget her lover and move on. But its foreboding groove turned it into a theme song for both Vietnam soldiers and inner-city rioters in the second half of the year.

Lamont Dozier and Brian Holland wrote the music and produced the sessions, while Brian’s brother Eddie wrote the lyrics and arranged the vocals. Dozier recalled, “We would listen to John (Lennon) and Paul (McCartney) and Brian Wilson and see what everybody was doing. They probably inspired us to be better than we even felt we could be. When they got hot, we tried to get hotter. When they did something spectacular, we tried to be even more spectacular. In that regard I think we were doing the same thing for them. When I talked with John Lennon, he said, ‘You guys inspired us to do things.’ I said, ‘That’s funny, you guys did the same thing for us.’”
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Except for the Beatles, no one sold more records through the decade than Holland-Dozier-Holland, or HDH, and the Supremes: Diana Ross, Mary Wilson, and Florence Ballard. They had scored three No. 1’s in 1964, and would score three more this year. “Come See about Me” was No. 1 in December, and then interrupted by the Beatles’ “I Feel Fine,” but it returned to the top spot on January 16. Ross’s sexy come-hither groove was so catchy in “Come See about Me” that even garage rockers Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels covered the song.

In March, Gordy shepherded a number of his biggest acts across the Atlantic for a European tour. On March 18, Britain’s blue-eyed soul diva Dusty Springfield taped
The Sounds of Motown
TV special, hosting the Supremes, the Miracles, the Temptations, Martha and the Vandellas, Marvin Gaye, Little Stevie Wonder, and the Earl Van Dyke Sextet. (Van Dyke was the bandleader of the Funk Brothers.) The Supremes didn’t have any choreography for their new single “Stop! In the Name of Love,” so Melvin Franklin and Paul Williams of the Temptations led them into the men’s room and brainstormed the famous traffic officer hand signal move. The song hit No. 1 that month.

In the track, Ross begs her man not to have an affair with another woman. But in real life, Ross became the “other woman,” to the married Gordy. During the British tour, Ballard and Wilson believed Gordy was imposing a curfew on the Supremes because he was obsessed with Ross. Gordy later recalled that it was in Paris that he realized he loved her, the night they fought over Dean Martin’s “You’re Nobody Till Somebody Loves You.”
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Martin’s song was currently No. 1 on the easy listening chart, and that was the audience Gordy wanted the Supremes to cross over to. The big money was in the supper clubs, nightclubs where dinner was served while people watched performers, places such as New York’s Copacabana and Howard Hughes’s Sands nightclub in Vegas, where Frank Sinatra’s Rat Pack held its summits. Nat King Cole had integrated the Sands just a decade earlier. Gordy wanted Motown to become the soundtrack not only to blacks but also to whites, and not just white kids but also white adults. It was about the numbers—the black population made up about 11 percent of the United States; the white population, about 80 percent.

So Gordy wanted Ross to do Martin’s hit, but Ross felt she couldn’t sing it properly. A bad argument erupted, and he stormed out, assuming she was going to defy him. But when he returned to watch the Supremes’ performance later that evening, he was surprised to hear Ross sing Martin’s song onstage. In her dressing room, he asked her why, and she said she’d done it for him.

They spent the night together for the first time in Paris—or rather, tried to. To his chagrin, Gordy was impotent. “I was so engrossed in her. It was something I’d wanted, and I was in love with her long before she was in love with me, so when she fell in love with me in Paris, I couldn’t believe it. Of course, nothing happened on my part, and it was so embarrassing. I wanted to smother myself. Then Diana said, ‘It’s not that bad. Look at it this way, at least you have power over everything else.’”
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The problem was rectified soon enough; they had a love child at the end of the decade. But he never told her he loved her. Gordy said later that they both vowed not to let their personal life interfere with her quest for stardom.

There was a lot of passion flowing backstage at Motown. Before Gordy, Ross had gone out with Smokey Robinson, and then Eddie Kendricks of the Temptations;
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then she began a flirtation with Brian Holland—until his wife stormed over to Detroit’s 20 Grand club and had to be restrained from attacking Ross.
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Mary Wilson also reportedly dated Eddie Kendricks, and later Abdul “Duke” Fakir of the Four Tops. Meanwhile, Florence Ballard saw the Temps’ Otis Williams.

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In terms of writing
and producing hits, HDH’s greatest rival inside Motown was Smokey Robinson. Robinson, Warren “Pete” Moore, and Ronald White had sung doo-wop together since they were eleven, and eventually coalesced into the Miracles. Both Moore and White cowrote many of the hits with Robinson. Moore, the bass vocalist, also arranged the background harmonies, drawing on his gospel influence. Robinson’s wife, Claudette, was in the group as well. Guitarist Marv Tarplin was the Miracles’ “secret weapon,” writing the riffs to many of their greatest hits.

Robinson was Gordy’s first breakout artist in his effort to have his singers cross over beyond R&B and become the “Sound of Young (read: White) America.” Robinson was a suave front man à la Sam Cooke, but his beautiful falsetto made him particularly nonthreatening to white audiences; it led rock journalist Nik Cohn to call him “pop’s first female impersonator.”
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Robinson’s great-grandmother was Caucasian, and when he was born, the segregated hospital put him in the whites-only section of the nursery. It was because he was light-skinned that his uncle gave him the nickname Smokey, as a joke.

As a songwriter, Robinson was one of Lennon’s biggest influences, and for years just about every piece written on Robinson mentioned that Dylan had dubbed him the “greatest living poet.” (Though Motown’s head of PR, Al Abrams, admitted in his memoir that journalist Al Aronowitz had advised him to make that up, since Dylan would never remember whether he’d said it.
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In fact, Dylan had included Robinson when a reporter asked him on December 3 in San Francisco, “What poets do you dig?”) Robinson was a Don Juan who wrote candidly about it. “I felt that because of my love and respect for women, I could maintain relationships with more than one,” he says in his memoir.
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(In the Miracles’ March release “Ooo Baby Baby,” he tearfully begs his woman to forgive him for cheating and reminds her that she’s made mistakes, too.) No doubt the fact that he was married to someone in his band while dealing with the temptations of being a heartthrob exacerbated these tensions. Claudette looked the other way, but she warned him not to have a child with another woman (and when he did, she divorced him, in 1986).

Gordy had taught Robinson about writing and producing, and Robinson now handled the duties not only for his own band but also for many other Motown acts. With the Temptations, he initially wrote many of the hits for their singer Eddie Kendricks, whose falsetto made it sound almost as if Robinson were singing. But Robinson sensed that background vocalist David Ruffin was “this sleeping giant in this group because he had this—it’s sort of like a mellow gruff-sounding voice. And all I needed was the right song for his voice and I felt like I would have a smash hit record. So I sat down at the piano to write a song for David Ruffin’s voice. So I wanted to make it something that he could belt out, but yet make it melodic and sweet.”
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Robinson hit the jackpot when he flipped the gender of his previous No. 1 hit, Mary Wells’s “My Guy,” with the help of Miracle Ronald White.

The pumping bass, finger snaps, and halcyon guitar perfectly evoke the lyrics “sunshine on a cloudy day.” On TV appearances, the Temps twirled their arms, lunged, and spun while the strings of the Detroit Symphony Orchestra swelled in the song’s bridge. Ruffin, tall and lanky enough to make thick black-framed glasses cutting-edge cool, raised his open hand to testify that all he needed was his woman’s love. Gordy gave Robinson a thousand-dollar bonus because he knew “My Girl” was going straight to No. 1—which it did on March 6.

Like Ruffin, Marvin Gaye was a moody prima donna, but he had the artistic genius and productivity to back it up. He also had understandable cause for his bad behavior, in the person of father Marvin Sr., a Hebrew Pentecostal minister who regularly beat Gaye in his youth, became jealous of his son’s phenomenal success, and eventually shot him to death—the Oedipus tragedy in reverse.

Originally, Gaye was the Miracles’ session drummer, and co-songwriter on his own early singles and on Martha and the Vandellas’ “Dancing in the Streets.” He wanted to be a crooner like Sinatra and Nat King Cole and not have to “shake my ass.”
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He was married to Gordy’s sister Anna, so that gave him some leverage as he struggled to find his voice. But his albums of show tunes and standards didn’t sell, so, reluctantly, Gaye would bang out the next R&B single. He recalled that in the mid-sixties, “When I wouldn’t want to record—just flat out refuse—Berry would get mad, his voice would get real high, he’d lose his cool. I’d feel bad and finally get my ass back in the studio.”
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Gordy had given Anna and Gaye his old house to live in, and producer Clarence Paul would pick up Gaye there and give him some coke in the car on the way to the studio
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—and somehow Gaye amassed a string of classics despite the fact that he’d rather have been singing Cole Porter.

The rugged vocals of David Ruffin and the Four Tops’ Levi Stubbs compelled Gaye to make his own sound grittier. “I heard in their voices a strength my own voice lacked. Listening to these singers every day inspired me to work even harder on my natural midrange—my tough-man voice. I developed a growl. The Temps and Tops made me remember that when a lot of women listen to music, they want to feel the power of a real man.”
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The edge was there in January’s “I’ll Be Doggone,” Gaye’s first million-selling single, cowritten by Robinson, Pete Moore, and guitarist Marv Tarplin. The song was the closest Motown came in the mid-sixties to the riff rock of white bands. Tarplin was influenced by the proto-folk-rock of “Needles and Pins”; the Byrds pinched the same riff for “I’ll Feel a Whole Lot Better.”

Robinson took a page from Gaye’s life for the lyrics for “I’ll Be Doggone.” Gaye insists that a woman should try to be whatever her man wants her to be, especially when all he wants is for her to be true. “You see, Anna and I had a strange sense of when we were being untrue to each other. We always knew,” Gaye recalled. “One night, for example, I found myself getting in the car and driving to a motel, walking up to a certain room and knocking on the door. All by instinct. How could I be so sure that Anna was in there with another man? I had no way of knowing the motel and the room number. Some force led me on. I think that’s the same force that transforms my happiness to misery.” When he confronted his wife and her lover, Gaye said, “I think I laughed. I might have cried. But certainly there was some enjoyment in finding them. It was definitely an adventure.”
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The entire soul music community,
Motown and beyond, was haunted by the killing of founding father Sam Cooke on December 11. It was Cooke and Ray Charles who had created the genre a decade earlier, when they combined gospel and rhythm and blues, a controversial move that enraged many churchgoers, just as Dylan’s going electric would soon enrage folk idealists. Following Cooke’s death, his label released “A Change Is Gonna Come” as a single, and it made it to No. 9 on the R&B chart and No. 31 on the pop charts in February.

The song was inspired by Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind” and by civil rights organizers Cooke had met who were trying to integrate restaurants such as Howard Johnson’s in Durham, North Carolina. The lyrics about life being too hard but death being too frightening echo those in Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein’s “Ol’ Man River,” from
Show Boat
, most famously sung by African American actor and activist Paul Robeson. But the month after Cooke wrote his first draft of the song, the lyrics took on a devastating second meaning when his eighteen-month-old son, Vincent, drowned in the family swimming pool. A few months later, Cooke and his touring party were arrested when they tried to check into a whites-only motel in Louisiana. A French horn echoes Cooke’s weary desolation as he sings line after line describing adversity, including even being backstabbed by his own brother. But by the time he makes it to the song’s close, he thinks that he can carry on, and he knows a change is coming.

Soul singer Solomon Burke went to dinner with Cooke on December 11, but said good night before Cooke took off with a young lady to a motel for a tryst. When the woman disappeared with Cooke’s clothes and money, an enraged Cooke thought the female motel manager was hiding her and attacked her. The manager shot Cooke in self-defense.

Back at his own hotel that night, Burke found a special-delivery letter waiting for him from his wife, saying she wanted a divorce. Then a friend called him to tell him that Cooke had been shot. “I thought he was joking. ‘Sam wasn’t shot, man. I just left him.’ It was no joke. Sam’s death was devastating. He meant so much to me. He meant a lot to all of us. He represented the next level for us. He opened doors that haven’t been stepped through since. He was gonna be the next Nat Cole. He was a dear friend, and now he was gone. I had to get on the train to get on a plane to get back to Sam’s funeral in Chicago. I had no sleep, and I couldn’t get Sam off my mind. There’s the song. I wrote ‘Got to Get You Off My Mind’ to get Sam Cooke off my mind.”
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Recorded in January with the help of Atlantic Records producer Jerry Wexler, the song’s lyrics are about Burke’s wife’s leaving him, but Burke sings it in Cooke’s style.