Turn the Beat Around: The Secret History of Disco (20 page)

“YOU CAUGHT ME SMILIN’”

The Smiling Faces Trope of Seventies Soul

In December 1963, at the beginning of a long New England winter, graphic artist Harvey Ball was commissioned by the State Mutual Insurance Company of Worcester, Massachusetts, to design a feel-good campaign to boost morale among the workers. What Ball came up with was two dots above an inverted arc on a vivid yellow, beaming sun background. The company initially printed up one hundred badges, but they proved so popular that Worcester was soon overrun with these caricatures of vacant cheerfulness. Ball’s fee for designing what is probably, aside from the cross and the swastika, the world’s most iconic symbol: $45 (even adjusted for inflation, that ain’t much more than a couple hundred bucks).

However, despite the local success of Ball’s figure and its subsequent use in numerous advertising campaigns across the United States, smiley was truly born seven years later, a few hundred miles away in Philadelphia. In September 1970, two brothers, Bernard and Murray Spain, were looking for a way to make a quick buck. With America entrenched in the Vietnam War and riven by protests, generational conflict, and racial unrest, Bernard stumbled upon the image that summed up America’s Nixonite reaction to the ’60s in some old ad campaign. Bernard put the smiley on a badge and Murray came up with the slogan “Have a Happy Day,” which soon mutated into “Have a Nice Day.” Echoing such mantras of bland optimism as “Turn that frown upside down” and “A day without a smile is like a day without sunshine,” the “Have a Nice Day” campaign swept a country that was desperately trying to put the ’60s behind it and was looking more and more like
The Stepford Wives, Logan’s Run,
and
Dawn of the Dead
every day. The Spain brothers hooked up with New York button manufacturer N. G. Slater and the smiley face became the fad to end all fads, replicating the Worcester craze but on a national level. By 1972, some fifty million smiley badges had been produced, not to mention all the other paraphernalia the image appeared on.
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But as smiley was zombifying the country, narcotizing it with an empty, blissful grin, a group of musicians recognized the symbol as the pernicious little yellow devil that it was. After centuries of betrayals and lies, the smile, handshake, and pat on the back are no longer ways of sealing a social contract. Instead, they become things to fear, temporary placations mollifying rage and resentment, until the inevitable U-turn, retraction, and cutback come. For African Americans in the early ’70s, the Cheshire Cat grin was all that was left of the promises of the ’60s—the substance of which had long since vanished into thin air, gone up in smoke like the ghettos of Watts, Detroit, and Pittsburgh. Instead of turning their frowns upside down and grinning and bearing it, soul artists of the early ’70s engaged in a remarkable conversation centered on the “smiling faces” trope, an imagistic minefield that played confidence games with centuries of caricatures, the beaming faces of the white liberal establishment promising civil rights and integration, Nixon’s dirty tricks gang and, yes, smiley himself. Invariably, these smiling faces told lies, but rather than being simple protest shorthand for the duplicitousness of the ofay oppressor that worked in a similar way to other pop music tropes—like, say, stoner/doom rock’s “Witchfinder General” trope (derived from the great Vincent Price flick of the same name, also called
The Conqueror Worm
), which attacks the hypocrisy of squares and Moral Majority types—it is infinitely more complex and confusing, filled with self-loathing, and hectors any number of targets. Whether the central theme of the song or merely a seemingly thrown-away line, the image of “smiling faces” was universally wrapped up in some of the tensest music ever made in the stunning succession of soul records that used it, creating the ultimate expression of paranoia and elevating the answer song tradition above the level of kitsch.

*   *   *

Motown producer extraordinaire Norman Whitfield was perhaps the first to see smiley as the lobotomized, jaundiced, signifyin’ so-and-so that he really was. But before he did this, he laid the groundwork for soul’s interrogation of America’s “Have a Nice Day” positivity. Soul may have blasphemed the church by using the language of salvation in the service of worshipping the flesh, but it never really strayed that far from the flock. Motown’s relentless optimism, the NAACP platitudes of the Impressions, the “dignity” of the Southern soul singers, the theatrical arrangements and singing of New York soul: Change a word here and there, and there’s nothing to mark this “devil’s music” from the gospel-based tradition of positivity and noble struggle. In 1968, though, Whitfield broke this bond by creating a sound that had more to do with the starkness of ancient spirituals like “Motherless Children” and pretty much defining the strain of paranoid soul that dominated black radio in the late ’60s and early ’70s with Marvin Gaye’s version of “I Heard It Through The Grapevine.” Whitfield had written the song with Barrett Strong in the summer of 1966, and Smokey Robinson & the Miracles, the Isley Brothers, and Gladys Knight & the Pips all recorded or released versions before Gaye. Even though Knight’s gospelly, Aretha Franklin–influenced version reached #2 on the American charts, it was Gaye’s version that would eventually become the classic. Gaye’s “Grapevine” was recorded in February 1967, six months after the versions Whitfield had cut with the Miracles and the Isleys. With Gaye, however, Whitfield slowed the tempo down, way down. In fact, he cut it in half. The new tempo created a coiled tension that perfectly suited the stinging string arrangement of Paul Riser, Earl Van Dyke’s somber Wurlitzer organ lines, and Richard “Pistol” Allen’s drums-along-the-Mohawk tom-toms. Gaye’s performance is every bit the equal of the arrangement. In order to get Gaye to sound truly intense, Whitfield used a trick that would come to characterize his productions: He set the song in a key that was beyond the singer’s natural range, so that he had to strain to reach the notes. The result was the greatest performance of Gaye’s career, unifying all of his gospel training and earthly sensuality in one sustained cry of desperate passion.
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Inevitably, the Motown brass hated it. At the label’s legendary Quality Control sessions they would play the current pop Top 5, and in order to be released as a single a new song had to be able to segue neatly into one of them. Needless to say, “Grapevine” sounded like nothing else at the time and even went so far as to abandon nearly all the conventions of the Motown sound. (Holland-Dozier-Holland’s towering triptych of paranoia with the Four Tops—“Reach Out I’ll Be There,” “Standing in the Shadows of Love,” and “Bernadette”—while working in slightly similar terrain, still kept the driving beat that was Motown’s signature and thus escaped censure.) Motown boss Berry Gordy refused to release the song until they relented to Whitfield’s pleading and used it as filler on Gaye’s August 1968 album,
In the Groove.
The song would have died a quiet death were it not for Chicago’s legendary disc jockey E. Rodney Jones. The WVON spinner abandoned his usual singles format and played the album track on his show and the phones wouldn’t stop ringing. Gordy finally agreed to release “Grapevine” as a single on November 30, 1968.

It quickly became Motown’s biggest-selling single up to that point, and was #1 for seven weeks. Nineteen-sixty-eight was the year that both Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy were assassinated, the year that the Vietnam War became the longest military conflict in American history, the year that Chicago policemen savagely beat hundreds of protesters at the Democratic National Convention. It was also the year when the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, appointed by President Lyndon Baines Johnson and under the leadership of Illinois governor Otto Kerner, delivered its report on the causes of the race riots that had swept major American cities during the mid-1960s. The commission found that the United States was “moving toward two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal.” The report recommended initiatives aimed at improving education, employment opportunities, housing, and public services in black urban communities. Most radically, it recommended a system of “income supplementation.” This was perhaps the strongest acknowledgment by the federal government that America was, indeed, a racist society and that the grievances and anger of urban African Americans were justified. However, by the time “I Heard It Through the Grapevine” was released, Nixon was in power and the backlash had begun. The Kerner report became yet another promise that had gone up in smoke. “I Heard It Through the Grapevine” captured the mood of the country as a whole, and most especially the African-American community. Originally based on a motif inspired by Ray Charles, the new simmering, moody, scary, paranoid “Grapevine” now seemed to connect the slang expression back to its roots as a term for the means of communication that blacks used during the Civil War. The rumors, the whispers, the uncertainty, the fear—they were all summed up by “I Heard It Through The Grapevine.”

“Grapevine” was far from Whitfield’s only run-in with Motown’s rather conservative Quality Control. When he first heard Sly & the Family Stone’s amalgam of soul and rock, Whitfield immediately knew that was the sound of the future. Unfortunately, no one else at Motown did. Nevertheless, Whitfield got his chance to experiment when the Temptations’ lead vocalist, David Ruffin, left the group in 1968. Whitfield drafted in white session guitarist Dennis Coffey to add wah-wah guitar to his increasingly dense and tense productions. Along with Sly Stone, Whitfield’s “psychedelic soul” records with the Temps would change the course of black music for the next several years: “Cloud Nine,” “Runaway Child, Running Wild,” “Don’t Let the Joneses Get You Down,” “I Can’t Get Next to You,” “Message From a Black Man,” and “Ball of Confusion.”

Whitfield continued along the same path with Edwin Starr’s stentorian 1970 #1, “War”—surely the most assertive pacifist statement ever. By this time, Whitfield’s vision had been vindicated, and black radio was awash with darker and more political songs: Jerry Butler’s “Only the Strong Survive,” the Chi-Lites’ “(For God’s Sake) Give More Power to the People,” Stevie Wonder’s “Superstition,” Bill Withers’s “Who Is He (And What Is He to You?)” (particularly in its ten-minute-plus wah-wah epic incarnation by Creative Source).

Among the most potent of this new wave of radical soul was Paul Kelly’s “Stealin’ in the Name of the Lord.” While many of the other tracks relied upon moody production for their vibe, Kelly’s track was remarkable for the directness of his attack and even more so for its target. “Stealing in the Name of the Lord” featured a straightforward gospel arrangement, with a Sister Rosetta Tharpe–influenced guitar figure front and center, a Holy Roller piano line, and a rousing choir. It could’ve easily been the Edwin Hawkins Singers’ follow-up to “Oh Happy Day,” except Kelly wasn’t singing about a happy day and the song wouldn’t have been played in any church in the world. Kelly was sermonizing against manipulative religious charlatans like Father Divine who preyed upon the desperation and willingness to believe of the poorest part of the population: “This man’ll walk up to you / And look you in the eye / Put his hand on your shoulder / And tell you a big fat lie / He’ll tell ya, ‘God’s gonna bless you children if you put your faith in me’ / Then he’ll pass the tray while the choir’s singing ‘Nearer My God To Thee’ / Step in the line / Can ya spare a dime? / I heard him say, ‘Step right on up good people / Can you drop a buck?’ / That man is stealin’ in the name of the lord.” The secular and sacred strains of African-American music have never seen eye to eye, especially since soul singers appropriated gospel’s language of religious ecstasy to articulate the pleasures of the flesh, but the antagonism of “Stealin’ in the Name of the Lord” was unique.

Perhaps even more remarkable was another Whitfield masterpiece, the Temptations’ “Papa Was a Rollin’ Stone.” Unlike “Stealin’ in the Name of the Lord,” whose attack was specific, “Papa Was a Rollin’ Stone” seemed to criticize everyone, at least everyone male. With a bass line that was more of a black hole than a groove, a frenetic wah-wah guitar part, and just about the most dramatic arrangement imaginable, “Papa Was a Rollin’ Stone” was a searing interrogation of black male stereotypes. The song was actually recorded first by the coed vocal trio the Undisputed Truth, but, as with many of the records of this period, the message was that much stronger coming from voices that seemed to represent the people being critiqued. The Temps’ lead singer at this point was Dennis Edwards, a powerful tenor almost as forceful as Edwin Starr, and the lyrics undercutting his machismo made for a startling contrast, a technique that would also be used on many of the records on the Philadelphia International label (see below).

The limits and constraints placed on male behavior are constantly variable, always contested, and forever in flux in any community. But ever since the publication of what has become known as the Moynihan report in March 1965, masculinity had been a hot-button issue for African Americans. In his controversial report, “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action,” future Democratic senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then working for the Department of Labor, largely blamed “the self-perpetuating tangle of pathology” in African-American society on matrifocal family structures. “At the heart of the deterioration of the fabric of Negro society is the deterioration of the Negro family,” Moynihan wrote, seemingly ignoring hundreds of years of slavery, Jim Crow laws, and simple, everyday racism. “It is the fundamental source of the weakness of the Negro community at the present time … In essence, the Negro community has been forced into a matriarchal structure which, because it is so out of line with the rest of the American society, seriously retards the progress of the group as a whole, and imposes a crushing burden on the Negro male and, in consequence, on a great many Negro women as well.”
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While Moynihan’s report was met with opprobrium from both blacks and liberals, this was perhaps the founding moment of the gathering neoconservative apocalypse and, more immediately and perhaps more crucially, it succeeded in altering the terms of the racial debate. After civil rights legislation had been in place for a grand total of one year, the onus of the responsibility for the plight of Afro-America had suddenly been shifted from the structure of society to the structure of the black family. The focus of the debate became the absent black father and his tangled web of pathologies. The Black Power movement reacted by attempting to reassert the strength and pride of wounded black masculinity—unfortunately, often in the worst possible way. There was Stokely Carmichael’s infamous declaration that “the proper position of women in the movement is prone” and Eldridge Cleaver’s boast in
Soul on Ice
that he had raped a white woman as an act of poetic justice against white society’s continual political, economic, psychological, and physical abuse of African Americans. The scabs picked open by this debate over black masculinity slowly festered, and the resentment stewed in bile until it bubbled over in the paranoid soul records of the early ’70s.