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Thursday, October 09, 2008
WITHOUT THE ONE YOU LOVE (LIFE'S NOT WORTH WHILE)
The Four Tops
The Four Tops
Motown : 1965
[Buy It]
BERNADETTE (MONO SINGLE VERSION)
The Four Tops
Available on Fourever Box Set
Motown : 2001
[Buy It]
YOU KEEP RUNNING AWAY
The Four Tops
Available on Fourever Box Set
Motown : 2001
[Buy It]
SHAKE ME, WAKE ME (WHEN IT'S OVER)
The Four Tops
On Top
Motown : 1966
[Buy It]
I'LL TURN TO STONE
The Four Tops
Reach Out
Motown : 1967
[Buy It]
I'LL TURN TO STONE
The Supremes
Sing Holland-Dozier-Holland
Motown : 1967
[Buy It]
LOVE IS HERE AND NOW YOU'RE GONE
The Supremes
Sing Holland-Dozier-Holland
Motown : 1967
[Buy It]
AIN'T TOO PROUD TO BEG
The Temptations
Gettin' Ready
Motown : 1966
[Buy It]
"Battle Song" (Part 3 of 4)
By Sean Howe
Excerpted from Rock And Roll Cage Match: Music's Greatest Rivalries, Decided; edited by Sean Manning; Crown Books; 2008
[Buy It]
At Motown, the Supremes famously got first dibs on the best songs, with the Marvelettes and the Vandellas vying for scraps. But this kind of competition wasn't a problem between the Four Tops and The Temptations. At their peak, they each had their compositional patrons - Holland-Dozier-Holland and Norman Whitfield, respectively. The Four Tops were stewarded by HDH until 1967, when the songwriting team, in a royalties dispute with Gordy, left Motown. It was a tough split, since HDH had found Levi Stubbs to be the perfect voice for their most personal songs. Eddie Holland would lock the door, close his curtains, unplug the phone, and spend weeks on the lyrics. Lamont Dozier would run through the chords with the band. Levi would carefully handwrite all the lyrics as they were taught to him. Brian would turn off all the lights and kick everyone out of the studio when recording the Tops' vocals.
Despite Gordy's mandate that all Motown songs be written in the present tense ("make it sound like it's happening now!"), there's a past loss that haunts most of the great Four Tops narratives; the present, accordingly, is a sham. The eponymous first album is entirely about this despair, and it all spins from "Baby, I Need Your Loving." When Stubbs starts to get agitated ("empty nights...echo your name!"); everything feels like it's about to break open. But he quiets down again for the last verse, and reveals-
When you see me smiling,
You'll know that things have gotten worse
Any smile you might see
Has all been rehearsed
-and you realize that at some point drummer Benny Benjamin's insistent beat has invisibly turned from a steady calm to an nervous pulse, and Earl Van Dyke starts hitting his piano harder, and the Tops start to overtake Stubbs:
And I need you baby and I want you baby and I love you baby
At least on "Baby, I Need Your Loving," Stubbs feels "half alive"; on the very next song, "Without the One You Love," the situation's deteriorated: "I'm not living...I only exist." They've found a theme: the album also includes "Where Did You Go," "Ask the Lonely," "Sad Souvenirs," and "Love Has Gone."
In a few years, it would get even sadder. Nothing else on Motown - or all of pop radio - approached the effusive candor of their 1966-1967 songs: the possessive paranoia of "Bernadette"; the disbelieving anger of "7 Rooms of Gloom" and "Standing in the Shadows of Love"; the harrowed anxiety of "Shake Me, Wake Me" and "You Keep Running Away." At first, it's surprising that the same men wrote "Baby Love," "You Can't Hurry Love," and "I Hear A Symphony." But that's less a difference in lyrical content than in the singing of Stubbs and Miss Diana Ross.
The greatest Supremes songs create emotional truth by capitalizing on the way that Ross obediently serves the melody and the momentum of the song. It's perfect casting for songs about an individual still in denial, shocked and unable to fully register heartbreak - on "My World Is Empty Without You," her benumbed voice, the aural equivalent of a hundred-yard stare, mixes with baritone saxophones and a relentless beat to stir strong feelings in the listener. (One of several Four Tops songs she was given to cover on The Supremes sing Holland Dozier Holland was "I'll Turn To Stone." But she couldn't convincingly pull off the metastasis - her voice was already calcified and cold. So they had to write a song that was, essentially, "I Have Turned To Stone." Of course, the lonely masterpiece "Love Is Here And Now You're Gone" falters only when Ross attempts to simulate a sob after the first chorus.)
When Levi Stubbs sings, on the other hand, he sounds like he's fighting everything around him.
* * *
Bill sits in his empty house with a dwindling bottle of scotch and no plans. Liz has the kids for the weekend. This will be the first extended time they'll be spending with Jim, Bill thinks. Unless he came around before when Bill wasn't around, and Liz introduced him to them as a co-worker... Better not to dwell on that. Bill starts thinking instead about how she always used to get the Motown singers confused. He'd say that the Miracles sang in falsetto about what they would do to make a girl happy, and the Temptations sang in falsetto about how a girl made them feel. And the Four Tops were the ones where the guy always sounded like he was in a bar shouting over the music. And then Bill would play them back-to-back for her and quiz her and she'd get bored pretty quickly.
Tonight, he puts on "Ain't Too Proud To Beg" and starts singing along, and before long is thinking about the ridiculousness of the idea that begging Liz would do any good at all. As if life was anything like a Motown song. And at the part where Ruffin sings about a crying man being "half a man, with no sense of pride," Bill can't sing along anymore. Ruffin is hitting way too many high notes to be nearly as upset as he claims, and Bill begins to get furious at the record. It feels like some kind of cruel facsimile of pain. The way the other four Temptations buoy Ruffin at every turn, he's not alone, not by a long shot; his buddies have his back, and he's still dancing. Bill thinks that maybe The Big Chill had it right, and that "Ain't Too Proud To Beg" is simply a way to make doing the dishes more enjoyable. He tries not to think about how he is now older than the Kevin Kline and Glenn Close characters.
As soon as Side One of Gettin' Ready ends (with "Too Busy Thinking About My Baby" - someone's idea of a joke?), he takes off the record, washes down a sleeping pill, and stretches out diagonally in the big, empty bed.
This concludes part 3. Stay tuned for the fourth and final installment of Sean Howe's "Battle Song" on Monday!Labels: four tops, motown, sean howe, supremes, temptations
posted by Brian
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