The Lost Supreme: The Life of Dreamgirl Florence Ballard (9 page)

In Miami Beach, as the Motortown Revue acts were checking into a motel, fifteen police cruisers with dogs pulled up outside and waited as the performers entered the motel. When they left later in the day to perform, the cruisers were still there. Finally, someone went out and explained to the cops that this was a musical show on tour, and the surveillance was finally lifted.

Flo and the others were often shocked by the squalor they were forced to endure. “The hotels we stayed in were unbelievable. Bad,” she said. “But you know I would like to go back just to see the changes. . . . [Then it was all]

roaches, broken-down facilities, bad plumbing, face bowls and stuff; some of them didn’t even have bathtubs. You know, like a flophouse. But you’re black—you’ve got to stay there.”

Nevertheless, especially in the North, the Motortown Revues often attracted large, somewhat integrated, and entirely peaceful crowds. “We were the only whites there,” said Nancy Van Goethem, who attended one show in Detroit, “but there was no fear in us. Maybe we were naive girls from the suburbs, but there was such a feeling of camaraderie and togetherness. Everyone would be on their feet, moving their bodies as much as they could, dancing in front of their seats.”

The Motortown Revues would eventually be disbanded, but only because individual Motown artists would become so well known that they could draw large crowds touring on their own.

After the 1962 Motortown Revue, the Supremes, still without a hit record, languished in the record-biz equivalent of a segregated rooming house.

It’s hard to imagine what not having a hit meant at Motown in terms of the pecking order, but one clue is that at a Motown Christmas party held in the 43

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Supremes’ early days, they received tiny transistor radios as Christmas pres-ents. The hit-making Marvelettes received diamond rings.

Still, Gordy was impressed by the professionalism the Supremes displayed.

Undaunted by their string of duds, they continued to perform as background singers, tour, and make local appearances into 1964. Also, Gordy hadn’t worked in a factory for nothing: he knew the value of interchangeable parts.

The way he arranged things at Motown, nothing tied any particular artist or group at the company to any particular producer or writer, unless they began making hits together. In fact, writers, producers, and artists were like the hands of a clock, constantly revolving—sometimes together, sometimes apart.

Sometimes, the tracks that were recorded revolved rather than the groups themselves. The Supremes, for instance, recorded many tracks that were never finished and that are still sitting in Universal Music / Motown’s vault waiting to be overdubbed. In fact, in 1975, reacting to an epidemic of discomania, Motown released an album called
The Magic Disco Machine
, which consisted entirely of old background tracks never fitted to lead parts.

If a song didn’t work for the Supremes, it might work for the Vandellas or the Marvelettes. The company would lay different voices over the same background track and see what happened. Writers and producers also were interchanged, rotated from group to group as the company searched for better combinations. Gears revolved within gears. Producers would rotate from song to song on a single album recorded by a single group. As many as twelve different producers would produce songs on the same album, causing one critic to call some Motown albums “musical quilts.” If a group didn’t create a hit with one producer, it would be moved on to another producer, and then to another.

Artists also climbed aboard the mechanical merry-go-round. Different artists performed together at different times or on different albums. These constant revolutions were necessary because Motown’s products were not always perfect. Brenda Holloway wrote a song for the Supremes that she was going to call “You Don’t Hold Me in Your Arms the Way You Did,” but someone 44

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goofed. On the master record, the background singing and music, which sounded like “bah-bah-bah,” was much louder than the lead tune the Supremes were singing. Motown would release it anyway, on the Supremes’

Reflections
album, under the title “Bah-Bah-Bah.”

When a superb combination was found, however, the gears stopped revolving a while. So, when the Supremes were finally assigned to the songwriting team of Lamont Dozier and the brothers Eddie and Brian Holland, known within the company and eventually throughout music world as “Holland-Dozier-Holland” (H-D-H), the gears stopped, and real time began.

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The song was different, simple, and had

good timing.

—Flo Ballard, on “Where Did

Our Love Go?”

Eddie Holland was
best known for his lyrics, his younger brother Brian for his engineering and production skills, and Lamont Dozier for his melodies.

The Supremes’ first single with H-D-H, “When the Lovelight Starts Shining Through His Eyes,” climbed into the Top 40, peaking at #23 on the
Billboard
charts in the fall of 1963. Heavy on saxes and tambourines, rhythm, and melody, it was a harbinger of hits to come. The flip side of this record,

“Standing at the Crossroads of Love,” was reworked three years later and became “Standing in the Shadows of Love,” which, as recorded by the Four 45

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Tops, reached #6 on the Pop charts. Apparently not recognizing either tune’s potential, H-D-H next foisted the bland “Run, Run, Run” on the Supremes and watched the song nearly fall off a cliff (it barely clung to the #100 mark).

In the spring of 1964, however, H-D-H wrote “Where Did Our Love Go?” When they brought it to Gordy, he suggested it for the Marvelettes, but they turned it down. It was then offered to the Supremes. Their unanimous reaction: forget it. Flo remembered, “We said, ‘Huh, we don’t like this record.

It don’t sound like nothing to us.’ We wanted something like ‘Please Mr. Postman,’” which they were well aware had reached #1 almost instantly in 1961.

“Where Did Our Love Go?” was the best and earliest example of what came to be called the Motown Sound, a sound that stemmed from Gordy’s ancestral roots in Africa and Georgia and his life in mechanized Detroit. The beat was all-important; all else was built upon it. This heavy beat was a natural connection between the African past and the mechanized present.

Motown itself called the Motown Sound “a stylized reflection of African-American tradition,” and that’s what it was: African American tradition updated by the incessant pounding of the punch press and buffed to a shiny gloss by contact with an urban society.

But more than that, it sold records. “Rhythm is basic,” Gordy said. “If you get that, that’s what people want.” He invited local kids to drop by and evaluate early Motown songs. He learned that they wanted something to dance to, so the beat came first and the lyrics second. Gordy listened to what they said. Characteristically, once convinced that a strong, accentuated beat would be accepted, he took no half measures. He added rhythmic hand clapping, a repetitive chorus, and jangling tambourines to the pounding drums, giving Motown’s records a unique drive. This heavy but happy beat not only made Motown’s records good to dance to, it also forced the company’s music into the ear, making Motown’s music highly contagious and instantly recogniza-ble. You could literally hear hits coming. Millions of people would soon anticipate “Where Did Our Love Go?” the moment they heard, “Boom-boom-boom-boom, boom-boom-boom-boom, Ba-by Ba-by.”
Rolling Stone
wrote that 47

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“the sound mixes with your bloodstream and heartbeat even before you begin to listen to it.”

Motown producers argued over which Supreme should have the lead on this one. Few people in Detroit or at Motown at the time believed Diane to be a very good singer. When she had started working as a secretary at Motown, other employees called her “a secretary who thought she could sing.” People outside the company also criticized her vocal skills. For example, reviewer Alan Betrock later noted that “on recording after recording on their first album,
Meet the Supremes
, Ross is noteworthy only for her inability to stay on key.”

Despite these assessments, the producers decided on Diane to sing lead on “Where Did Our Love Go?” Her sound, they said, was unique. Besides, Ross had other qualities that impressed Gordy, traits that he shared himself—

ambition, talent, a strong work ethic, a love of competition, and a burning desire to win. When the Supremes were still unknown and were the warm-up act rather than the featured act in the Motown Revue, Ross would sit in the audience the day before and watch what all the other acts did. Then she’d imitate them before they appeared. The other performers complained that they looked ridiculous and imitative when they finally got out on stage, but Gordy so admired her determination that, rather than tell Ross to stop, he told the other artists to alter their routines.

And Ross, in turn, admired Gordy. While Flo had the talent to be the lead singer of the Supremes, she was self-contained and remained aloof from Gordy. Diane was just the opposite. From the very first day she met Berry Gordy, she admired him, flirted with him, catered to him, and strove to impress him. She succeeded, and eventually the two would fall in love. Starting in 1965, they would become romantically involved, and although they would both go on to marry several times to other people over the years, they would carry on a long romantic relationship and, after that, a friendship throughout their lives.

Shortly after “Where Did Our Love Go?” was recorded, Motown persuaded Dick Clark, the host of the popular television program
American Bandstand
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to include the Supremes in his summer of 1964 “Caravan of Stars” tour of the United States. They persuaded him partly by agreeing to send the Supremes on the thirty-six-day tour for a total cost to Clark of $600 a week. Although the young women were all in their early twenties now, Diane’s mother was sent along as chaperone. That meant the Supremes and Mrs. Ross were earning $150

a week apiece on the road. Even in the 1960s, that wasn’t much to write home about, especially when the group’s expenses were deducted from it. But Motown execs made it clear to the Supremes that they were doing them a favor by including them on such a prestigious tour. The ads for the tour, which began in June 1964, highlighted “Gene Pitney! The Shirelles! Brenda Holloway! And Others!” Gordy’s sister Esther Edwards, who worked at Motown, made it explicit. She told the Supremes that the company had had to beg Clark to include them in the tour group and that they were really along only for filler.

(Later, Gordy would reverse the bargaining field with Clark, saying he would
allow
Clark to have the Supremes only if Clark agreed to take along another Motown group still trying to make it.) The Supremes, especially after Esther Edwards’s pep talk, assumed the Dick Clark tour would be just another tour.

“Thirty days on a bus. Good grief,” Flo said.

Acts such as Bob B. Soxx and the Blue Jeans, and Bobbie Freeman were part of the tour and on the bus with the Supremes. And mashed in with the vocalists was the band, mostly older guys who knew how to party. “You’d try to sleep, and they’d get happy blowing their horns in your ear,” Flo said, “but after a while you’d get so tired you’d get on the bus and—I don’t care how much noise they were making—you’d go to sleep; you’d just go to sleep.”

She had a lot to sleep through. This was the tour on which Diane began showing her royal side. According to accounts from her fellow bus passengers over the years, including Mary Wilson, Diane fought bitterly with other female vocalists over such items as hairspray, the borrowing of a pair of shoes, and the use of the mirror in the bus’s one bathroom. Diane clearly believed that she was always right and that anyone who clashed with her was always 49

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Between the lack of suitable integrated motels and the fact that a busload of people shared one bathroom, it was difficult for any of the women to style or even wash their hair. Their only fallback was to wear wigs, which grew in number, size, and complexity almost every day. The Supremes’ wigs became fetishes, with Diane’s the most extravagant of all. Her eventual crowning glory was a wig modeled after the hairstyle worn by former Mouseketeer and beach-movie icon Annette Funicello. Diane combined Funicello’s hairstyle with the makeup style of the superthin, “It” model of the day, Twiggy, to create a new look for many women and certainly a new look for black women. Of course the slender Diane
could
be a black Twiggy; Flo definitely could not.

When the tour began, the Supremes were again the lowly opening act, and the applause they received was unimpressive. By contrast, Flo noted, when the master of ceremonies mentioned the Marvelettes’ name, “the audience just flipped out.” The Supremes were performing gamely, even under such conditions, when they began to notice that something was up. It turned out to be them. The MC kept calling on the group later and later in the show, the applause increased in volume, and the crowds at each stop acted differently.

“They’d just mention our name before we’d walk out on stage, and people would start going mad,” Flo said. The three women soon found out why.

“Where Did Our Love Go?” had rocketed to #1 on the charts. It was to stay there for eleven weeks.