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.She met DorisDay, which Diana said was the biggest thrill of her life.We wantedeveryone to know that Diana Ross was the next biggest thing, and toget on the bandwagon.The impetus for all that was her going solo. However, Ross s insecurities and the Supremes ever-expanding bot-tom line put all that on the back burner, with Gordy holding back onthe move he desperately wanted to make.The Flamingo run was still a267 0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:06 AM Page 268268 THE SUPREMESsmashing success though not without its hurdles.The most vexing, asusual, had to do with Flo.Although she posed no problem early in therun, after one particularly long night of drinking she was still asleepwhen the other two Supremes arrived at the hotel for the night s shows. I ll never forget [that night], Ross would recall. Mary and I werethrilled to be there, it was one of the places that we never imagined atthe beginning of our career we d get the chance to play.But here wewere, as excited as we could be, and then Florence showed up, lateand drunk.Our costumes were tuxedos.Florence had gained so muchweight, her stomach was bulging out of her costume.We were embar-rassed to go onstage with her. Gordy, who could barely watch, buried his woes at the blackjacktables.But even with his lucky lady on his elbow, he lost something like$25,000 and his credit was cut off, forcing him to call Motown andhave more cash wired out to Vegas; also, Diana blew several thousandmore on her own.The mixed bag of their Vegas debut was a proper augury of theSupremes path ahead.As Gordy looked beyond to the terrain of 1967,the future suddenly seemed considerably less titillating.But there was adefinite upside.Because Gordy had intentionally held back on bookingthe girls, anticipating what would have been a gradual break-in periodfor the new Supremes and with his own time surely to be domi-nated by all matters Ross the same old Supremes actually had littleelse to do but record songs in the studio.Following their Christmas gigat the Eden Roc Hotel in Miami and at the New Year s Eve King Or-ange Jamboree Parade, the only time they left the Detroit area the firstthree months of 67 was to do an Ed Sullivan Show on January 22.That suited HDH just fine.Over that winter they cut a hardy flowof vinyl, including an album that seemed the height of egomania butwhich in reality was simply a sure-shot profit-maker for them andGordy.Titled The Supremes Sing Holland Dozier Holland, it was formany casual fans the first time they d heard of or seen the names ofthe tunesmiths behind the thrones; and for those who had, a bitredundant hadn t the Supremes been singing Holland-Dozier-Hollandfor years? For Gordy, though, it offered a unique and irresistible lurea secondary bonanza of royalties on old hits by having his biggestartists cover them.Mixing HDH evergreens like Heat Wave, It s theSame Old Song, I Guess I ll Always Love You and I ll Turn toStone with You Keep Me Hanging On and the latest Supremessingle Love Is Here and Now You re Gone Gordy had himself alow-overhead cash cow. 0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:06 AM Page 269 SHE S OUTTA HERE 269Predictably, the album, released on January 23, quickly went to No.6 on the pop charts and No.1 on the R&B charts, and even broughtthe Supremes back onto the British album chart for the first time sinceMeet the Supremes, at No.15.Concurrently, Love Is Here and NowYou re Gone, released two weeks prior with the aptly titled There sNo Stopping Us Now on the flip, ran all the way up to No.1 the weekof March 11, making for a telltale triumvirate of No.1 hits in succes-sion, with Ruby Tuesday coming right before it and Penny Lane right after.It also provided the strongest proof yet that the Supremeswere on such a roll that even a song that deviated from the forensics ofthe hit-making machinery could still come up aces.It wasn t that the HDH formula was different but, rather, a matterof where and with whom it was carried out not Studio A and not theFunk Brothers.In fact, Love Is Here may be the best rebuttal HDHcould make in the dust-up about who was most responsible for theirsound.The song was recorded in L.A.after Gordy, thinking ahead tofuture session work for his big acts on the coast, had sent HDH out inthe late summer of 66 so they could test the acoustics of the studios(mainly Hollywood Sound Recorders, a virtual copy of Studio A, con-verted from a garage in a two-story home by its owner, engineer ArminSteiner) and connect with West Coast musicians.Those sessions were historic, in that they were apparently the onlyknown instances when some of the later musicians from Phil Spector s Wrecking Crew pianist/keyboardists Don Randi, Larry Knechtal,and Mike Rubini; guitarist Tommy Tedesco; bassists Carole Kaye andBill Pitman; drummer Earl Palmer (who went back to the mid- 50swith Fats Domino s band); and arranger Gene Page also played forthe second most famous producers in the world (as opposed to crank-ing out Motown filler for Hal Davis and Marc Gordon, as had the leg-endary West Coast drummer Hal Blaine).While Love Is Here and Now You re Gone sounds not a bit dis-cordant from other Supremes songs, Motown scholars and purists canimmediately discern it as an outside product.Allan Slutsky, for in-stance, says, You can tell it s an L.A.session just by listening to thedrum and bass, which sound great but lack the round fatness the De-troit players were known for.And the guitars and tambourine arepulled back far beyond what was the norm in Detroit. The tempo wasglacial, even maundering, with an electric harpsichord intro featuringWilson and Ballard in a high soprano wail melding into a mass ofstrings and horns nearly Spectorian in its hollowed stateliness.And 0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:06 AM Page 270270 THE SUPREMESEddie Holland s grim tract of a woman wooed, won, and abandonedincluding three spoken soliloquies, a novel and even daring gimcrackfor the times was every bit as hopeless as My World Is Empty With-out You. What made it fly farther was the hazy prettiness of Gene Page sarrangement and Diana s uncanny knack for tapping the very nuancedrange of emotion of that lyric; while she made the usual wounds burnthrough the radio, so did her sense of optimism that she and the cheat-ing dog would work it out; that she wouldn t let it not.Just acing thosethree Lady MacBeth proto- raps which with their over-the-topmelodrama could easily have been laugh-out-loud funny was a world-class coup, intoning as she had to with dead seriousness a bathetic linelike You closed the door to your heart / And you turned the key, lockedyour love away from me, and stamping the pity of it all with a knife-in-the-heart glottal gasp, something that would emerge as a signatureRoss vocal affectation (and years later for Michael Jackson, who shame-lessly cribbed it).So delighted were HDH, and Gordy, by this accidental gem thatthe auteurs returned to L.A.trying to strike gold again on the nextSupremes single, which actually made perfect sense because the girlswould be recording the title song of a new movie moving Motown sfootprint further into the Hollywood community.The flick, a Colum-bia Pictures kidnap-ransom farce called The Happening, starring An-thony Quinn and Faye Dunaway, had the pedigree of producer SamSpiegel, he of Lawrence of Arabia and Bridge on the River Kwai fame,and its plot blurred good and evil [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
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.She met DorisDay, which Diana said was the biggest thrill of her life.We wantedeveryone to know that Diana Ross was the next biggest thing, and toget on the bandwagon.The impetus for all that was her going solo. However, Ross s insecurities and the Supremes ever-expanding bot-tom line put all that on the back burner, with Gordy holding back onthe move he desperately wanted to make.The Flamingo run was still a267 0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:06 AM Page 268268 THE SUPREMESsmashing success though not without its hurdles.The most vexing, asusual, had to do with Flo.Although she posed no problem early in therun, after one particularly long night of drinking she was still asleepwhen the other two Supremes arrived at the hotel for the night s shows. I ll never forget [that night], Ross would recall. Mary and I werethrilled to be there, it was one of the places that we never imagined atthe beginning of our career we d get the chance to play.But here wewere, as excited as we could be, and then Florence showed up, lateand drunk.Our costumes were tuxedos.Florence had gained so muchweight, her stomach was bulging out of her costume.We were embar-rassed to go onstage with her. Gordy, who could barely watch, buried his woes at the blackjacktables.But even with his lucky lady on his elbow, he lost something like$25,000 and his credit was cut off, forcing him to call Motown andhave more cash wired out to Vegas; also, Diana blew several thousandmore on her own.The mixed bag of their Vegas debut was a proper augury of theSupremes path ahead.As Gordy looked beyond to the terrain of 1967,the future suddenly seemed considerably less titillating.But there was adefinite upside.Because Gordy had intentionally held back on bookingthe girls, anticipating what would have been a gradual break-in periodfor the new Supremes and with his own time surely to be domi-nated by all matters Ross the same old Supremes actually had littleelse to do but record songs in the studio.Following their Christmas gigat the Eden Roc Hotel in Miami and at the New Year s Eve King Or-ange Jamboree Parade, the only time they left the Detroit area the firstthree months of 67 was to do an Ed Sullivan Show on January 22.That suited HDH just fine.Over that winter they cut a hardy flowof vinyl, including an album that seemed the height of egomania butwhich in reality was simply a sure-shot profit-maker for them andGordy.Titled The Supremes Sing Holland Dozier Holland, it was formany casual fans the first time they d heard of or seen the names ofthe tunesmiths behind the thrones; and for those who had, a bitredundant hadn t the Supremes been singing Holland-Dozier-Hollandfor years? For Gordy, though, it offered a unique and irresistible lurea secondary bonanza of royalties on old hits by having his biggestartists cover them.Mixing HDH evergreens like Heat Wave, It s theSame Old Song, I Guess I ll Always Love You and I ll Turn toStone with You Keep Me Hanging On and the latest Supremessingle Love Is Here and Now You re Gone Gordy had himself alow-overhead cash cow. 0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:06 AM Page 269 SHE S OUTTA HERE 269Predictably, the album, released on January 23, quickly went to No.6 on the pop charts and No.1 on the R&B charts, and even broughtthe Supremes back onto the British album chart for the first time sinceMeet the Supremes, at No.15.Concurrently, Love Is Here and NowYou re Gone, released two weeks prior with the aptly titled There sNo Stopping Us Now on the flip, ran all the way up to No.1 the weekof March 11, making for a telltale triumvirate of No.1 hits in succes-sion, with Ruby Tuesday coming right before it and Penny Lane right after.It also provided the strongest proof yet that the Supremeswere on such a roll that even a song that deviated from the forensics ofthe hit-making machinery could still come up aces.It wasn t that the HDH formula was different but, rather, a matterof where and with whom it was carried out not Studio A and not theFunk Brothers.In fact, Love Is Here may be the best rebuttal HDHcould make in the dust-up about who was most responsible for theirsound.The song was recorded in L.A.after Gordy, thinking ahead tofuture session work for his big acts on the coast, had sent HDH out inthe late summer of 66 so they could test the acoustics of the studios(mainly Hollywood Sound Recorders, a virtual copy of Studio A, con-verted from a garage in a two-story home by its owner, engineer ArminSteiner) and connect with West Coast musicians.Those sessions were historic, in that they were apparently the onlyknown instances when some of the later musicians from Phil Spector s Wrecking Crew pianist/keyboardists Don Randi, Larry Knechtal,and Mike Rubini; guitarist Tommy Tedesco; bassists Carole Kaye andBill Pitman; drummer Earl Palmer (who went back to the mid- 50swith Fats Domino s band); and arranger Gene Page also played forthe second most famous producers in the world (as opposed to crank-ing out Motown filler for Hal Davis and Marc Gordon, as had the leg-endary West Coast drummer Hal Blaine).While Love Is Here and Now You re Gone sounds not a bit dis-cordant from other Supremes songs, Motown scholars and purists canimmediately discern it as an outside product.Allan Slutsky, for in-stance, says, You can tell it s an L.A.session just by listening to thedrum and bass, which sound great but lack the round fatness the De-troit players were known for.And the guitars and tambourine arepulled back far beyond what was the norm in Detroit. The tempo wasglacial, even maundering, with an electric harpsichord intro featuringWilson and Ballard in a high soprano wail melding into a mass ofstrings and horns nearly Spectorian in its hollowed stateliness.And 0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:06 AM Page 270270 THE SUPREMESEddie Holland s grim tract of a woman wooed, won, and abandonedincluding three spoken soliloquies, a novel and even daring gimcrackfor the times was every bit as hopeless as My World Is Empty With-out You. What made it fly farther was the hazy prettiness of Gene Page sarrangement and Diana s uncanny knack for tapping the very nuancedrange of emotion of that lyric; while she made the usual wounds burnthrough the radio, so did her sense of optimism that she and the cheat-ing dog would work it out; that she wouldn t let it not.Just acing thosethree Lady MacBeth proto- raps which with their over-the-topmelodrama could easily have been laugh-out-loud funny was a world-class coup, intoning as she had to with dead seriousness a bathetic linelike You closed the door to your heart / And you turned the key, lockedyour love away from me, and stamping the pity of it all with a knife-in-the-heart glottal gasp, something that would emerge as a signatureRoss vocal affectation (and years later for Michael Jackson, who shame-lessly cribbed it).So delighted were HDH, and Gordy, by this accidental gem thatthe auteurs returned to L.A.trying to strike gold again on the nextSupremes single, which actually made perfect sense because the girlswould be recording the title song of a new movie moving Motown sfootprint further into the Hollywood community.The flick, a Colum-bia Pictures kidnap-ransom farce called The Happening, starring An-thony Quinn and Faye Dunaway, had the pedigree of producer SamSpiegel, he of Lawrence of Arabia and Bridge on the River Kwai fame,and its plot blurred good and evil [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]