The Lost Supreme: The Life of Dreamgirl Florence Ballard (7 page)

Before either “I Want a Guy” or “Buttered Popcorn” was pressed and released, Motown execs decided that “Primettes” wouldn’t cut it as the group’s name—

it was too 1950s. The young women themselves were asked to choose a new 27

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one from among the many ideas typed out on a sheet of paper, including “The Darleens,” “The Sweet Ps,” “The Melodees,” “The Royaltones,” and “The Jew-elettes.” Part of the urgency for changing the name was that Gordy now wanted the girls to sign contracts with Motown, and he wanted a group that would keep its moniker, rather than change its name after signing, thereby consigning thousands of dollars of publicity to the ash heap.

The four were given an hour to choose the group’s new name. Flo chose

“The Supremes” and insisted on it despite opposition from Diane. “I gave us the name ‘Supremes,’” Flo said proudly. She saw it as a link with the name

“Primettes,” which means pretty much the same thing. “Diane said ‘No, it sounds like a man’s group.’ But I bet she’s glad to this day that the group was named the Supremes,” Flo said.

Actually, two groups had previously used the name “Supremes.” One was a male quartet from Columbus, Ohio, which so enjoyed a bottle of Bourbon Supreme that they named themselves after it. They went on to record the song

“Just for You and I” as a single on Ace Records. Ruby and the Romantics, who recorded “Our Day Will Come,” also had originally called themselves the Supremes. But both groups were out of action, at least under their original names, when Flo chose the name for her group.

Names, as it turned out, were important at Motown, since Gordy managed to keep his hands on many of his groups’ names and copyright them.

That way, the “groups” could continue to perform for Motown after the individual members had left the company. As a result, many former Motowners would look back mournfully at names that originally had been theirs, watching other singers parade around the country and the world with “hijacked”

names while millions cheered.

Once the name issue was settled, Gordy signed Flo, Mary, Diane, and Barbara to their first Motown contract. Because they were minors, their mothers signed for all four of them, on January 15, 1961. None of the mothers or daughters had legal counsel. They all believed Gordy when he said that he and Motown would do only what was best for the young women and that 28

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they should allow Motown to completely manage their careers and their money.

In reality, the contract was, as Mary Wilson would put it in 2007, “atrocious.” All the money Motown spent on the Supremes would be subtracted from their royalties. In other words, if successful, they would pay for themselves. Although they had formed their own group before Motown existed, if one of them left the group, Motown, not the singers, would select the new group member. The group’s records would earn each of them three-fourths of a percent of 90 percent of the suggested retail price for each record, less all taxes and packaging costs. Each would thus receive half a cent from each seventy-five-cent single sold, but all expenses would be taken out first. Under this formula, for each record that sold a million copies, each Supreme would end up receiving five thousand dollars
minus
her share of the cost of all preceding unreleased records by the group as well as her share of all the costs of the record for which she was receiving royalties. While the contract allowed Motown to charge all the expenses of making a Supremes record to the Supremes, it did not require Motown to release any of the group’s recordings at all. And Motown became the young women’s booking agent, manager, accountant, financial adviser, and lawyer. Each year was divided into two audit periods, and performers were allowed to audit only one of those periods for each year.

Author J. Randy Taraborrelli has argued that despite Motown’s boasts, and despite the numerous #1 hits achieved by the Supremes, only two of their records—“Where Did Our Love Go?” and “You Can’t Hurry Love”—were instant million-selling records, although the company claimed that the group put out eight million-sellers from 1964 through 1968. Most, perhaps all, of these records later sold a million or more copies in some format, but if you were legally separated from the group, as Flo later was, you would never receive royalties from the sales of any song that occurred after your separation, even if you had participated in recording it and in promoting it through concerts, interviews, and appearances.

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Taraborrelli’s claim is challenged by those who argue that he may be counting only domestic sales of the records and that Motown’s overseas sales were large. The situation is further clouded by the fact that Motown did not join the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), which verifies record company sales figures, until 1980. This produces the following conundrum: Did Motown close its books because its “million-selling” singles were not, in fact, selling a million? Or because they were selling a million but they didn’t want to pay out a million records’ worth of royalties? Or for some other reason?

When you do the math, as the Supremes should have but didn’t (although even if they had wanted to, they wouldn’t have been able to get a complete picture with the scant information that was released to them), you have to multiply a number that was probably less than one million by the low amounts per record—always less than a cent—awarded the Supremes in their contracts, then subtract their tremendous expenses, and so forth. This doesn’t mean that the Supremes who lived long enough and continued to have access to royalties from the following forty-plus years of use of Supreme tunes by private corporations, commercials, Hollywood, Muzak, and so on, didn’t eventually become well-off, if not exactly rich.

At the time, however, as far as Motown was concerned, once a Motown song was recorded and earned its first round of income, although it stayed in the company’s catalog and was available for sale, it was forgotten. (This attitude extended to photographs of Motown artists, as well. When Motown later left Detroit for Los Angeles, in 1972, it left behind thousands of these photographs.

Motown executives believed that the janitors or the new tenants would eventually throw them out, but many of these pictures were liberated by “thieves,”

“vandals,” “collectors,” “scholars,” “preservationists,” “businesspeople,” or “dedicated musicologists,” depending on your point of view.) The major problem with the contract the Supremes signed (and with many other record contracts) is that the artists were being charged for expenses over which they had little or no control. Gordy often insisted on very long 30

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in-studio recording sessions to get the sound of a Supremes record just right.

To be sure, he probably improved the quality of the record by doing so, and that likely improved sales of the record; but all the expenses, including the fee for the studio musicians, were charged to the artists, not to Gordy or Motown.

In defending these contracts, Berry Gordy has put forward several argu-ments that hold some water: No other record companies developed its artists through an in-house training program to the extent that Motown did. Few record companies kept their artists under contract if they didn’t make hits year after year. And few if any other record companies would have kept producing records for a group, like the Supremes, that didn’t hit pay dirt until their umpteenth record. Gordy’s supporters have also argued that Motown’s contracts were no worse than those of many other record companies, at least in the beginning.

While Gordy may have been right about all of the above, the real stingers in the contract were the provisions giving Motown sole control over its artists’

money and careers. Motown was unique in not only producing its singers’

records but in acting as their lawyer and their agent as well. Everyone worked for Motown, including the attorneys and agents who were supposed to represent the interests of the artists, as opposed to the interests of the record company. Other recording firms allowed artists to hire their own agents and lawyers. Motown did not, at least not in its first few years of operation.

Motown was also, by all accounts, absolutely tenacious in its efforts to keep as much of its artists’ money as it possibly could, whether it was entitled to that money or not. Katherine Anderson Schaffner of the Marvelettes said that from the time her group left Motown in 1970, until eighteen years later, in 1988, Motown paid them no royalties whatsoever. When the group sued the company, “They paid us a minimal amount,” she said, “and then we had to sue them again” because Motown still was not giving the hit-making Marvelettes everything they were entitled to, even under Motown’s stingy contracts.

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Whatever the advantages and disadvantages, Motown and the Supremes were now committed partners. And as if by prearrangement, the second record issued under the group’s new name began to get some airplay. But only the side on which Flo sang the lead, “Buttered Popcorn,” received substantial attention. Flo was still living at home when they played “Buttered Popcorn”

on the radio in 1962. “All that day,” she said, “I was turning on the radio, turning to different stations, trying to pick it up. It was just a fantastic feeling to hear myself singing. Family members would be calling up and saying,

‘I heard you on the radio!’ ‘I heard you on the radio!’ The phone would be jumping off the hook.”

If “Buttered Popcorn,” a cheery, catchy song with a light and fluffy name, had been promoted into a heavyweight hit, Flo, who sang the lead on the song, might have been locked into that role as the group rose to stardom, with dramatic effect on her career and on those of the other three. Barney Ales wanted to put Motown’s publicity machine behind “Buttered Popcorn,” but Gordy, who was impressed with Diane’s energy and beginning to focus on her rather than on Flo as the potential superstar of the group, wouldn’t let Ales promote it. In terms of Florence Ballard’s subsequent career, “Buttered Popcorn” may represent the tune not taken, the career that never was.

Although relatively unknown these days, except to collectors of rare pop discs, this song is a milestone in the history of Flo Ballard and the Supremes. Later, Gordy also chose not to release another Supremes tune that highlighted Flo’s skill as a lead singer, “Save Me a Star.”

Mainly owing to a lack of promotion by Motown, “Buttered Popcorn” /

“Who’s Loving You” didn’t do much better than “I Want a Guy.” Some of the blame fell justly on producer Smokey Robinson. Robinson had written major hits for other Motown acts, but his genius as a producer was somehow never able to connect with the budding artistic talents of the young Primettes or Supremes. The group’s hit tunes, written and produced mostly by others, are easily distinguishable from tunes written and produced by Robinson.

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The early demise of “I Want a Guy” and “Buttered Popcorn” signaled the transformation of the Supremes from a quartet into a trio in 1962. Barbara Martin had married and become pregnant, and “Diane thought that was bad for the image,” Flo said. “So Barbara left the group because Diane didn’t want her in the group.” Clearly Diane’s power among the Supremes was beginning to manifest itself.

Of course the quartet’s downsizing into a trio would turn out not to make a difference. Despite the immense impact of the “Fab Four,” many famous groups of the time were in fact trios, including the Andrews Sisters, a group with which the early Supremes were often compared. In any case, what really paved the road to success for the Supremes was the beginning of the “girl group” phenomenon on January 31, 1961, when the Shirelles, a New Jersey quartet, put “Will You Love Me Tomorrow?” at the top of the pop charts, becoming the first all-female pop group of the rock era to do so.

But the three remaining members of the Supremes had other problems.

Their continued failure to move forward killed whatever interest Gordy had in them. “The Marvelettes were knocking on the door, and the Vandellas were knocking on the door,” Flo said, “and the Marvelettes came right in [one month after the release of “Buttered Popcorn”] and got a smash hit, ‘Please Mr. Postman,’” Motown’s first #1 Pop hit.

The group’s continuing failure to become famous so upset Flo that she temporarily left the Supremes. Rather than stay on the sidelines, she joined the Marvelettes, who were much more successful at the time. Officially, Flo was filling in for Wanda Young, who was pregnant and unable to finish her tour with the Marvelettes in 1962. Flo stayed with the Marvelettes for several months. Mary and Diane were so depressed at the group’s lack of popularity and the temporary departure of their leader that they didn’t even rehearse, much less perform, while Flo was away.

“Flo fit the bill” for her new venture, former Marvelette Katherine Anderson Schaffner said. “She had the voice we needed.” She pointed out, however, that unlike the Primettes or the Supremes, “The Marvelettes liked to 33

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dance on stage. We did our own routines.” This was hard on Flo: “We laughed because she had a hard time doing the steps. They were foreign to her,” Anderson said, “but we told her it was OK. After a while, she did the steps her own way, and we lightened up the steps” to allow Flo to do them more easily.

When Flo finally returned to the Supremes in May 1962, the group went back to performing all around Detroit and also touring sporadically outside the Motor City.

Meanwhile, Hitsville was living up to the hopes Gordy had so fervently invested in it. The big beat in most Motown hits was one reason. Even if Gordy hadn’t been intent on producing a big sound, he might have found the development hard to avoid. Motown’s first recording studio, a converted room in one of the West Grand Boulevard houses, gave any instrument played in it a big, booming sound. For a while, Gordy thought that this “boom-boom” sound would actually prevent Motown from making good records. But it did just the opposite, appealing to listeners and making Motown’s records hard to copy.