Ready For a Brand New Beat

by Mark Kurlansky

  • • •

  Meanwhile in Detroit, with the Beatles at their heels, Motown was still searching for the perfect sound for young America. Among the more recent Detroit people who had come to Motown looking for opportunities was Ivy Jo Hunter, a horn player. While Gordy and Stevenson had been picking up talent in the local clubs, Hunter was away in the Army. When he returned to Detroit in the winter of 1963, he found work shoveling snow. He also sang R&B in local clubs. He occasionally helped out young groups and was overheard by Hank Cosby, a saxophone player at Motown, giving tips to one group. Cosby recognized that this small man with a fast and mischievous sense of humor had a deep understanding of music. Hunter’s response to the offer of a job at Motown was, “It pays better than shoveling snow.” That was about as high a praise for Motown pay as was ever heard.

  Neither he nor Martha Reeves could exactly remember this, but they thought they had once gone out on a date. They had met at a rent party, a common practice in urban black communities where people would throw a party in their own home and charge admission for music and dancing or sometimes gambling. The goal was to earn enough money to pay the rent.

  In 1964, just as that throbbing summer of discontent was getting started, back in the Motown bubble Hunter worked on a song with Mickey Stevenson and Marvin Gaye. Stevenson and Gaye had done many songs together, and Hunter would go on to do songs with Gaye, and songs with Stevenson, but this was the only song the three did together. The exact evolution of the song is unclear. Stevenson was interviewed in Los Angeles and Hunter in Detroit, and they had slightly varying stories. Gaye died tragically in 1984, shot to death by his troubled father.

  The one thing Stevenson and Hunter both agree on is that Gaye contributed the phrase “dancing in the street.” He, of course, did not invent the phrase. In past centuries it was a common expression connected with carnivals, especially in black culture. Dancing in the street was celebrating. In law, the phrase was best known for the response of a celebrated First Amendment scholar, Alexander Meiklejohn, to the Supreme Court’s landmark decision that The New York Times could not be responsible for damages for an ad criticizing the Montgomery, Alabama, police in their handling of a civil rights demonstration. Sullivan v. New York Times held libel to a higher standard of proof to avoid inhibiting freedom of the press. When Meiklejohn learned of the unanimous court ruling he said, “It is an occasion for dancing in the street.” The statement stuck to the decision, and over the years is frequently quoted in essays both for and against the Supreme Court ruling. It is a phrase that sticks.

  At Motown, songs were not written the way Rodgers and Hammerstein did, combining a composer and a lyricist. Everybody did a bit of everything. “Once you start writing,” said Mickey Stevenson, “it comes as a collaboration.” He could not give any specifics on who wrote what, but he did say, when asked about the meaning of the song, that it had come to him and Gaye when driving through the city on a hot summer day, watching kids of different races playing by fire hydrant water spouts. Gaye said to him, “Dancing in the street.” So to Stevenson it was a song about integration.

  Hunter recalled that most of the song was written in the attic of the home of Mickey Stevenson and Kim Weston. “I was writing this melancholy song, and Marvin Gaye was listening and said, ‘That’s no melancholy song, that’s dancing in the street.’”

  According to Hunter, the other Gaye contribution was that he named the cites in the song, selecting urban centers that had important black communities, including his hometown, Washington, DC. After Gaye listed several of these, Hunter said, “Can’t forget the Motor City.” And it went into the song just like that.

  There was already a tradition, especially in black music, of songs listing American cities. Probably the most famous was Chuck Berry’s “Sweet Little Sixteen,” which mentions Boston, Pittsburgh, Texas, San Francisco Bay, St. Louis, and New Orleans. It even contains the line, exactly like the one in “Dancing in the Street”: “Philadelphia, P-A.”

  There are also conflicting versions of how Martha Reeves came to sing this song. It is agreed that she just happened to be in the studio on the right day. It also seems to be true that Kim Weston had been offered the song first. Guitarist Joe Messina recalled that “Kim Weston” was the artist name on the music he was handed for the session. The story that Kim Weston did not want the song and that Marvin Gaye seized on Martha on a whim as a replacement is at best an exaggeration. When interviewed, Kim Weston denied turning down the song, and said that she wanted it. Furthermore, Martha, in her autobiography, said that she initially did not like the song. Later in an interview, she backed off slightly from that, saying that it was just a momentary feeling. “I was not impressed. I don’t want to dance in the street. I want to dance on a big stage or a big elegant ballroom.”

  Mickey Stevenson said that his wife had been assigned the song. The track had already been made, and they needed a demo tape for Kim to study. This was the usual practice. The artist would spend two days studying the song with the tape before the recording session.

  Stevenson said he had never intended it for Martha. But she was extremely professional and reliable. Late one night, according to Stevenson, they wanted to make the demo tape for Kim, and Martha was still there. Stevenson said that he and Marvin Gaye and Ivy Jo Hunter were in the studio working on a demo tape on top of the finished music track. After hearing the track with Paul Riser’s arrangement, Gaye and Hunter were concerned that Kim Weston’s usual heavier approach was not well suited for the light feel of the song.

  Kim Weston, later in life still living in Detroit in poor housing and long separated from Stevenson, still remembered being offered the song. She recalled being in the kitchen cooking when Stevenson and Gaye burst in full of excitement and announced, “We’ve got your next hit.”

  The three ran up to the studio in the attic and played it on the piano and sang it.

  “I loved it,” said Weston. “They wrote it for me.”

  Mickey said, “Okay, what we will do is, we’ll dub somebody in on it, let Kim take the record, and study the voice and know what we’re looking for.” Although Martha Reeves has always remembered Marvin picking her for the song, and he may have been the one who approached her, Stevenson recalled that she was his idea. It would have been his decision. In any event, they were only looking for someone to make the demo and not the final record. According to Stevenson, they had Reeves listen to the song twice. Then she sang it.

  According to the oft-repeated legend, she tore through the song brilliantly, and then they had to tell her that they had made a mistake and failed to record it. So they did it again. This myth was destroyed in the fall of 2011 in her old Eastside family home, a two-story white-shingled, purple-trimmed house with a yard enclosed by a chain-link fence. No one lived there anymore and it might have been just one more abandoned building. There was no market for selling such homes. There were many abandoned, boarded-up, decaying houses in the neighborhood.

  Martha was sentimental about the house where she had grown up, where she learned to sing at the kitchen sink, the oldest girl of eleven children, assigned to washing the dishes; the house where she used to play with the child Stevie Wonder to keep him out of everyone’s way at the studio. The house is full of posters of concerts and recordings from the 1960s and 1970s and shelves of scrapbooks. Martha liked to go there to think and to talk. We were sitting on the lumpy old furniture in the living room and she was explaining about how they failed to tape the first take and how she had to do it again, and how this irritated her. As she spoke, she was playing the famous recording. I asked her which take she thought was better, and before she could answer, Hunter interrupted with a sly grin and said, “Look at me. I’m sitting in a studio with an artist you don’t want to upset. Do I say, ‘Do it again,’ or do I say the machine wasn’t on?”

  Martha slapped her thigh with a look of shock on her face. Forty-seven years earlier she was trick
ed into redoing a recording and producing her best and most famous work. Not only that, but Hunter revealed another fact that she had never known. She had been “up for a release.” At Motown, artists were often the last to know things. “Up for a release” meant that either Gordy or Stevenson had put the word out to the approximately fifteen songwriters that they wanted a new song for Martha and the Vandellas. Holland-Dozier-Holland would have had the option on them because they had written their last hit. But other songwriters could try to steal them away. “Dancing in the Street” was just the song to do that.

  Reeves said, “I just sang it the way I felt it.” As she sang, she thought about being an Eastside teenager, on a porch, with one of the small portable record players that had become available in the 1950s, playing 45s while kids danced to the music out on the street. When she finished the second take, she looked up at the small and crowded control room, where Gaye, Stevenson, Hunter, and the engineer, Lawrence Horn, were. Martha said, “When I saw grown men up in the window slapping each other, I knew.”

  That is not exactly how Stevenson remembered that moment in the booth. Martha’s voice was just as he had observed at her first audition: “not great, but a unique sound.” It was neither sweet nor beautiful but it had an undefeatable power that some would call sexy, others edgy, some even said political. Landau called it “a straight, tough soul voice.” In the words of drummer Stephen Jordan, “Her voice was pleading and not super aggressive. It makes you feel good.” It had that element of the church music with which she had grown up. Whatever that force was, it had never been more evocative than on the recording they just made.

  But Stevenson had a problem at home with Kim Weston, to whom he had promised the song. He remembered:

  She finished the song. Ivy Jo looked at me. Marvin Gaye looked at me. And they both said at the same time, “What you going to do, William R.?”

  I say, “What you mean?”

  They say, “You know exactly what we mean.”

  “It do sound like a hit, don’t it?”

  Ivy Jo, who had a huge bush of hair, a giant head on a small body because he had vowed not to cut his hair until he had a hit, said, “Sound like it? I’m going to the fucking barbershop.”

  Then Stevenson said, “Well, I got to take this into Kim.”

  To which Gaye replied, “And do what? You are the A&R man. Your word is the best song goes on the best person. Isn’t that your word?”

  Stevenson had established a sacrosanct rule that the artist who had shown herself or himself to be the best singer for a song was the one who got it. He had always insisted that it didn’t matter whose toes got stepped on, including his own. If you could show that you were the best singer for the song, you got it. Now that moment had come.

  According to Kim Weston, the reckoning that Stevenson was dreading never happened. The next time she heard the song was when she heard Martha and the Vandellas singing it on the radio.

  The record was produced quickly. There were no stops or doctoring in the four-track studio. The Funk Brothers’ track was one of the best they had ever done. Despite that, the few musicians who are still alive don’t recall the session. It was just one of many. Asked if he remembered the session, during an interview in 2012 back in his home in Gore Springs, Mississippi, guitarist Eddie Willis said, “Man, we did thousands of sessions.” Joe Messina thought he remembered that it was a short session with not many takes. Some Funk Brothers tracks took nine hours to produce, but not this one.

  Paul Riser, a twenty-year-old Detroit trombonist schooled in classical music, arranged it. He had been asked to join Motown in 1962 as an eighteen-year-old trombonist just out of high school.

  One of Riser’s most important contributions was the introduction. After drums and bass briefly “set the groove,” as they almost always did, two trumpets, Johnny Trudell, whom they had found at the Flame, and Floyd Jones, blasted a fanfare. The trumpet blast is the first thing to grab the audience. Martha Reeves said that as soon as she heard the trumpets, she started to feel good about the song. She also said that in fifty years of touring with the song, as soon as the audience hears the trumpets, they get excited.

  Motown did not do many brass introductions. But there were other unusual characteristics to the track. The drumming was different. This was partly because the track was not done with their usual drummer, Benny Benjamin, but with Fred Waits, who had played with blues greats such as John Lee Hooker. Waits was born in Mississippi and came to the University of Detroit on a scholarship to play flute. Motown found him, and he played drums in 1963 on Stevie Wonder’s first hit “Fingertips,” which also featured Marvin Gaye’s drumming. After Motown he went on to work with bebop jazz greats such as Sonny Rollins.

  Benjamin, especially on Holland-Dozier-Holland songs, had developed a distinctly Motown sound of hitting hard on every beat. But Waits hit the second and fourth beats very hard—really slammed them. Waits was known for his elaborate fills, the part of the drumming that propels the song forward after a pattern is established. He hit very hard on the cymbal, although some, including Ivy Jo Hunter, recall Jack Ashford being dubbed in with tambourine and stick cracking on the downbeats like gunshots. The downbeats crash loud and hard throughout the song and drive it forward. According to Stephen Jordan, a leading R&B drummer who had been a student of Waits, the drum picks up tempo slightly so that the song gradually gets slightly faster and gives a sense that it is rushing to its conclusion.

  James Jamerson was also unusual, basically playing one chord, switching the emphasis to the offbeat, known in music as syncopation. After the session, he said, “That was the most fun I ever had playing one note.”

  The trumpet introduction is the fanfare before the announcement. The announcement begins “Calling out around the world.” This is the hook, the phrase that grabs the listeners. The trumpets are the hook before the hook. The hook should be as early in the song as possible. Mickey Stevenson said, “The hook locks you in. After I give you the hook, I can take you different places and bring you back.” Stevenson remembered that when they were writing the song, “Calling out around the world” were the first words written. The rest of the song grew out of the hook.

  Repetitive phrasing, or as Frank Sinatra put it, “imbecilic reiteration,” is also part of the R&B formula. If you listen carefully, the phrase “dancing in the street” is repeated twenty-six times in this two-minute, thirty-six-second recording, or more than once every six seconds. A 45 rpm record could hold three minutes on a side, but if the recording was longer than two minutes and forty-five seconds, deejays became very reluctant to play it.

  After Martha sang, the Vandellas were called in to dub in a background. Annette Beard, married and pregnant, decided to give up being a Vandella and had been replaced by Betty Kelly; this was her first recording as a Vandella. Rosalind Ashford recalled not being in the studio but having been called in to do the recording, which is further evidence that they were not planning on having Martha and the Vandellas sing it. She remembered being taken into a side room to learn the song. She said that she and Betty Kelly learned it very quickly and then went into the studio with notes she had written on a piece of paper. She said, “It said things like ‘ooo’ four times, then four ‘ahs,’ then ‘dancing in the street’ three times.”

  They rehearsed a little more than an hour, according to Ashford—Betty Kelly remembers it being at most forty minutes—before making the recording. Ivy Jo Hunter sang along with them, and they did it in only a few takes.

  Rosalind remembers loving the song. “I assumed it would work. But I didn’t think whether it would be a hit. I just knew it would be a good song.”

  Stephen Jordan said, “The whole thing was something supernatural. It couldn’t happen again. That’s the beauty of records. You can catch a moment—this was a watershed moment.”

  Gordy agreed as soon as he heard it. This was what he had been working toward. He ca
lled it “the song that seemed to tie everything together.” He said that “the goal to hook people in the first twenty seconds was never accomplished better.”

  • • •

  It was released on July 31, while the Vietnam problem and the presidential election were heating up and Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner still had not been found in Mississippi. In New York, Cousin Brucie was so excited about the song that he aired the promotion copy even before the release date. He recalled:

  The record industry at the time was really boring. Motown sent me this song and said it was a new good-time R&B Motown release—a good party song. . . . We had nothing to play. We had British stuff. Motown gave us something to play. When I started out, I was told I couldn’t play “too Negro.” They didn’t think blacks were any market. But this was new. It was exciting. It had energy. It was black. It was R&B but it was very palatable to lily whites’ pink ear. It didn’t challenge us. That’s what Gordy did.