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Monday, October 13, 2008
GIRL (WHY YOU WANNA MAKE ME BLUE)
The Temptations
Temptin' Temptations
Motown : 1965
[Buy It]
SINCE I LOST MY BABY
The Temptations
Temptin' Temptations
Motown : 1965
[Buy It]
YOU'RE MY EVERYTHING
The Temptations
The Temptations With a Lot O' Soul
Motown : 1967
[Buy It]
I WISH IT WOULD RAIN
The Temptations
Wish It Would Rain
Motown : 1968
[Buy It]
I COULD NEVER LOVE ANOTHER (AFTER LOVING YOU)
The Temptations
Wish It Would Rain
Motown : 1968
[Buy It]
JUST MY IMAGINATION (RUNNING AWAY WITH ME)
The Temptations
Sky's the Limit
Motown : 1971
[Buy It]
IS THERE ANYTHING THAT I CAN DO
The Four Tops
Second Album
Motown : 1965
[Buy It]
"Battle Song" (Part 4 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]
More than anything, the Temptations could make exuberance contagious. True, many of their early songs - including "The Way You Do the Things You Do," "It's Growing," "You've Got to Earn It," and "Get Ready" - retain the stamp of their writer, Smokey Robinson; Eddie Kendricks' falsetto even sounds like Smokey's. But songs cut by the Miracles always had a hazy melancholy that the Temptations' voices (and handclaps, and, in person, the seven-step "Temptation Walk" routine) cut right through. And if "Girl (Why You Wanna Make Me Blue)" and "I'll Be In Trouble" seem ridiculously ebullient given their lyrics, well, ridiculous ebullience isn't something to sneeze at. The world needs to feel goofy sometimes.
The exuberance could also serve as an ironic twist - the joyful call-and-responses of "Since I Lost My Baby" underscore Ruffin's clouds-on-a-sunny-day plaint. In a sad-sack inversion of "My Girl" (the coda even quotes the earlier song's string arrangement), Ruffin leaps into the hopeful bridge section ("inclined to find my baby/been looking everywhere") and steers the course back to misery ("determination is fading fast/inspiration is a thing of the past").
And then there's the greater irony that hangs over so many of the songs: the unhappiness behind the scenes. The subject of the majestic, generous "You're My Everything" was the wife of lyricist Roger Penzabene. She repaid his generosity by compulsively cheating on him. He then wrote "I Wish It Would Rain," and, completing a tragic trilogy, "I Could Never Love Another (After Loving You)," before putting a gun to his head on the last day of 1967. David Ruffin, meanwhile, began riding in a separate limo to concerts, and was finally voted out of the group in 1968. "He was never comfortable in the Temptations," said his brother, Jimmy. "In his heart of hearts, he was a [solo] artist." But his solo career was only sporadically successful, as were attempts at sobriety. He died of an overdose in a Detroit crack house in 1991. Eddie Kendricks left acrimoniously in 1971, after repeated clashes with Otis Williams. Paul Williams, battling depression, alcoholism, and sickle-cell disease (he kept an oxygen tank backstage) also left the group in 1971; a year later, he sat in a parked car a few blocks from the Hitsville studios, wearing only swimming trunks, and shot himself in the head.
* * *
Liz is at her parents' house. Speaking with them, she's found herself in the peculiar position of alternately defending herself and defending Bill. She calls home every night to talk to the kids, and says she'll be home soon. On Tuesday, Liz starts crying on the phone, and tries to regain her composure before Andrea hands the phone to Phillip. But Phillip needs to go to the bathroom, and starts tugging on Andrea's arm, telling her to hand over the phone because he needs to pee and wants to talk first.
* * *
Soon we'll be married, and raise a family
In a cozy little home out in the country
With two children, maybe three
I tell you, I can visualize it all
This couldn't be a dream, for too real it all seems
The last song that Paul Williams and Eddie Kendricks sang on before leaving the Temptations, "Just My Imagination (Running Away With Me)," is without a doubt the group's greatest post-Ruffin recording. Kendrick's sad falsetto floats over swirling strings, horns, and the group's dreamlike legato backing.
* * *
"Oh how I hate to wake up, 'cause that's when we have to break up"
-"Is There Anything That I Can Do" (The Four Tops, 1965)
* * *
After the success of the Four Tops/Temptations team-up on the Motown 25 special, the groups record "Battle Song (I'm the One)"; it appears on the Temptations' 1983 Back to Basics LP. Really, nobody - not the Tops, not the Tempts, not the listener - wins. Sometimes a whole is less than the sum of its parts.
* * *
"If I've ever, ever dreamed before, somebody tell me I'm dreaming now"
-"Shake Me, Wake Me" (The Four Tops, 1966)
* * *
After Bill drops the kids off with Liz, he comes home and tries to continue with the Tempts. But he still can't shake the idea that Ruffin is just too in-control to be sharing any kind of grief. "I've been unfaithful, darling, I've caused you misery," he sings jauntily on "All on Me," with all the self-reflection of a sailor on leave. Bill finds his old cassette of Motown: 25 #1 Hits in 25 Years, gets in his car, and listens to "I Can't Help Myself" over and over. But every time he rewinds the tape, he hears the end of "My Girl," and David Ruffin's triumphal fadeout mocks Bill just like it did in the summer of 1983: "I've/ev/en/got/the/month/of May with my girl..."
This concludes the fourth and final installment of Sean Howe's "Battle Song." If you've enjoyed it, be sure to check out Rock and Roll Cage Match, on which you can find more info via the link at the top of this post.Labels: four tops, motown, sean howe, temptations
posted by Brian
LINK |
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
LINK |
Tuesday, October 07, 2008
MY GIRL
The Temptations
The Temptations Sing Smokey
Motown : 1965
[Buy It]
THE WAY YOU DO THE THINGS YOU DO
The Temptations
Meet the Temptations
Motown : 1964
[Buy It]
"Battle Song" (Part 1 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]
Friday, March 25, 1983: At the Pasadena Civic Center, Motown 25: Yesterday, Today, Forever is being taped for a May broadcast. Smokey Robinson's voice - a sound that's familiar but for its degree of shrill excitement - echoes within the auditorium, washes over the studio audience of three thousand: The Four Tops! And the tempting Temptations! Here to battle it out, just like in the old days!
The Tops take the stage in gold lame; the Tempts are in black tuxedos. The contest consists mostly of the groups alternating choruses of their biggest hits, in leaden arrangements that incorporate the pit orchestra's best idea of contemporary jangle-funk. "Reach Out (I'll Be There)" cedes to "Get Ready," "It's the Same Old Song" to "Ain't Too Proud to Beg." An awkward faux-cockiness emerges, with exaggerated arm-folding, eye-rolling, and back-turning yielding to it's-all-good smiles. The Temptations trot out their famous dance steps, while the Tops make do with a lot of clapping and snapping. "Baby, I Need Your Loving," "My Girl," and "I Can't Get Next To You" follow, before the Tops really heat things up with..."I Can't Help Myself (Sugar Pie, Honey Bunch)"? What kind of fool brings a song about a honey bunch to a knife fight? The Temptations respond with "I Know I'm Losing You," and the house band - not the legendary Funk Brothers, though James Jamerson watches from the cheap seats - signs off, everybody hugs, and the camera crane swoops over the audience.
Like the lyric says, it's the same old song, but with a different meaning now: It's all show biz. The songs that make up this murderer's row of classics have been clinically excerpted, delivered in key, and forgotten. The performers leave the stage, never having inhabited the songs tonight in the way they did decades ago (how can you inhabit a medley?) and gather across the street for a party at the Plaza Pasadena. When the special finally airs, the sing-off will be fondly received, and the two groups will tour together for the next few years, recreating the playful tussle for the oldies circuit. But the television audience will pay most of its attention to former child star Michael Jackson and his funny new backsliding dance step.
Among that audience is a sophomore at Buffalo State named Bill Garrett, who catches the NBC broadcast in the study lounge of his dormitory building. It's a week before finals start, and though anxiety looms, it's eclipsed by the acute infatuation he's experiencing with Elizabeth Arntz, a redhead in his Art History class. They've had four dates. It's too bad that Liz missed that show. She loves "Billie Jean."
Inspired by the Motown special, Bill goes to a record store the following day and spends $10.19 on a double-length cassette compilation entitled Motown: 25 #1 Hits in 25 Years. He'll listen to it several times in the next few weeks, and then frequently all summer, most memorably on an August trip to visit Liz in New Hampshire. She teases him for preferring the sentimental journeys of Motown to the Flashdance soundtrack and Men At Work's Cargo, but they sing along to "My Girl" and "Endless Love" and "I Heard It Through The Grapevine" while they drive around. The visit lasts four days. Before he leaves, she breaks up with him, as gently as possible. When he listens to the tape on the drive home, he gets the feeling that he's being taunted by the sweet nothings of Smokey Robinson and the Temptations and The Four Tops and Mary Wells and Marvin Gaye and the Commodores. (Rick James, on the other hand, is just doing his own thing.)
In September, Bill and Liz go (as friends, just friends) to see The Big Chill, and he experiences a quiet satisfaction in seeing these songs presented as sacred. He buys a stack of used Four Tops and Temptations records, but after a few months, Van Halen's 1984 rules his world, and the Motown records stay in their sleeves.
Bill graduates and moves to the Boston area. He works as an advertising manager for a newspaper. When he's 29, he sees Liz at a party of a mutual friend. He asks her out to dinner, and within a year they're engaged. Their wedding song is "The Way You Do The Things You Do" by the Temptations.
This concludes part 1. Stay tuned for part 2 of Sean Howe's "Battle Song" tomorrow!Labels: four tops, motown, sean howe, temptations
posted by Brian
LINK |
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