The Supremes: A Saga of Motown Dreams, Success, and Betrayal Read Free

send Gordy gold or platinum disks back in the day as a promotional sop. Not that Gordy gave a whit; he simply issued ersatz gold and platinum records for his acts.
    But if these estimates are right, the Supremes, who likely would have racked up four gold and two platinum records, can be considered the third most profitable act in pop music history in terms of album sales—again, save for the Beatles and Elvis, but ahead of even the Rolling Stones.
    Those recordings are a musical lodestone—“Where Did Our Love Go,” “Baby Love,” “Come See About Me,” “Stop! In the Name of Love,” “You Can’t Hurry Love,” “Back in My Arms Again,” “I Hear a Symphony,” “My World Is Empty Without You,” “Love Is Like an Itching in My Heart,” “You Keep Me Hangin’ On,” “Love Is Here and Now You’re Gone,” “In and Out of Love,” “Love Child,” “I’m Gonna Make You Love Me,” to name just a few—and the chain of those smash hits never got tiresome. Even the songs with similar themes, lyrics, backbeats, and hooks provided a fresh gift to the ears. Eventually, set against a more socially conscious subset, they plumbed inner-city indi-gence (“Love Child,” “I’m Livin’ in Shame”), making it possible for Diana Ross, all covered in chiffon and sequins, to wail convincingly about wearing a worn, torn dress that somebody threw out, being always second best, but vowing redemption.
    The Supremes’ tart three-minute melodramas, which from 1963
    through 1967 blushed with Holland-Dozier-Holland’s roiling arrangements and fetchingly clever lyrics, worked on the counterpoint of not being overly girly. The adolescent “yearning, burning” motif was 0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:05 AM Page xvi xvi
    INTRODUCTION
    burnished by a sweaty hybrid pop and R&B that was left to the instincts and devices of jazz cats whom Berry Gordy culled from the
    “black and tan” clubs along Hastings Avenue—the nuclear core of which was the rhythm section of pianist Earl Van Dyke’s jazz band and grew to include James Jamerson on bass; Johnny Griffiths on piano; Benny Benjamin and Richard “Pistol” Allen on drums; Robert White, Eddie Willis, and Joe Messina on guitar; Eddie “Bongo” Brown on percussion; and Jack Ashford on vibe and tambourine. Pledging loyalty to Berry Gordy, they were paid well and noticed little by the outside world until four decades later when they were “discovered” and dubbed the
    “Funk Brothers” (taken from a long-ago inside joke by Benny Benjamin); their own legacy is Motown’s very spinal cord, putting the lie to facile criticism that Gordy always shouldered for compromising soul appeal for sales appeal. (For confirmation of the rhythm-and-blues root of the Supremes’ songs, take a listen to Lamont Dozier’s slowed-down and grittified renditions of several of them on his 2004 CD Reflections Of on the Lightyear label.)
    The Supremes’ songs were buttressed by horns and at times strings, but the hub of it all was that peerless rhythm section, which both geographically and sonically fell between the more stately R&B strain coming out of Leiber and Stoller’s studio sessions in New York and Phil Spector’s distilled “Wall of Sound” R&B in L.A. Unfurled in Motown’s cramped basement Studio A, the songs congealed into a winning formula. Across the spatial image of each song, the rhythm rocked and rumbled and the horns blew the top off while the vibes, bongo, and tambourine provided the accents. The chink-a-chink of a sharp, jabbing guitar lick kept in time with a pounding snare drum and a twitchy bass line. Sneaking through this great tide of rhythm, Diana Ross’s little-girl trill took flight, never rushed, and was surprisingly versatile across the scale, yet always on the precipice of an emotional crack. Behind her, Wilson’s sugary alto and Ballard’s forceful tenor meshed in tandem, filling in the lower end of the scale. We recognize this casserole