Carmichael turned on its head the old civil rights refrain, What do we want? And the answer: Freedom!
Don’t be afraid. Don’t be ashamed. We want black power. We want black power. We want black power. We want black power. We want black power. That’s right. That’s what we want, black power. And we don’t have to be ashamed of it. We have stayed here and we’ve begged the President, we’ve begged the federal government. That’s all we’ve been doing, begging, begging. It’s time we stand up and take over. Take over.
In September 1966, Liberator, a black power journal from Harlem, published an editorial by Daniel H. Watts:
Young Stokely represents the best in our Afro-American youth, he is daring, courageous and creative. He along with hundreds of others had travelled the long and painful road of non-violence and turn the other cheek, before they had discovered that preacher King had them in one big trick bag, consisting of awards, degrees, money and medals for King and bruised, battered and dead bodies and raising frustration for Black people.
This was a new civil rights movement that rejected the older, nonviolent one that King had led. Martha Noonan was an SNCC activist from Detroit with a music background. Her mother was a singer and classical pianist. She first went south to Mississippi, and Georgia in 1963. Martha said, “I thought I could sing until I went south. Those incredible voices from church singing.” So she learned the freedom songs, but she never led them.
She was more of an R&B girl from Detroit anyway. In 1963 she had an idea that Motown might do a fund-raiser for SNCC. She met with Berry Gordy, who received her cordially and turned her down.
Martha did not participate in the Freedom Summer project because she thought it was a mistake to bring large numbers of people to Mississippi when they had been doing well with local grassroots leadership. She stayed with SNCC after Carmichael, whom she had worked with several times, took over.
Carmichael came to Detroit for a rally as SNCC’s new leader. SNCC organizers told Martha and a friend of hers that they were to introduce Carmichael by singing freedom songs. Martha had never done this before, which made her a little uncomfortable, but she knew the songs and she had a voice. She had attended many SNCC rallies in the South, where the songs had been sung.
So Martha and her friend sang until Stokely Carmichael came onstage and turned to her and said, “We don’t sing freedom songs anymore.”
Mortified, Martha became silent until after the rally, when she walked up to Carmichael and said, “You could have told me that before!”
After the rally, as was usual after SNCC rallies, there was a party. At SNCC parties they played R&B music. But it was mostly a newer, politically edgier R&B, such as Chicago-born Curtis Mayfield’s “Keep On Pushing” with the Impressions, released by ABC-Paramount only a month before “Dancing in the Street.” It made it to number 10 on the Billboard chart, behind the Supremes and the Vandellas, but it had a political edge that was now more suited to the times. It was also the song that introduced Barack Obama for his address to the 2004 Democratic Convention that made him a political star.
The new R&B of the mid-1960s was making the old Motown songs of requited or unrequited love, such as those by the Supremes or Smokey Robinson, seem slightly old-fashioned. But “Dancing in the Street” was different. SNCC rallies still played “Dancing in the Street.” Noonan said, “It was very upbeat, positive music which did reflect the spirit of the time that change was coming and it was going to be better. It was in the air, a good time to be born. I thought it had to do with black unity.”
Movements needed songs, and just as the civil rights movement had its freedom songs, this new breakaway movement needed its own songs, and these were to be R&B, especially “Dancing in the Street.” The new movement did not care if Martha Reeves and Motown were backing them any more than the civil rights movement worried about whether or not the old-time authors of their freedom songs would have approved of their movement.
• • •
These were difficult times for Motown. The Washington versus Du Bois argument was smoldering, and Gaye was increasingly taking up the Du Bois argument for activism. Stevie Wonder began raising money for the civil rights movement. Kim Weston left Stevenson and Motown and recorded a stirring rendition of “Lift Every Voice and Sing.” This song, from a 1900 poem by the principal of a segregated school, written to introduce Booker T. Washington at the celebration of Lincoln’s birthday, was later set to music and has become known as the “Black National Anthem.” To this day blacks will sometimes stand when the song is played. Having their own national anthem is as good a piece of evidence as any that there are two separate Americas.
In the mid-1960s not only music but all of the arts were separating into black and white visions. In 1965, Amiri Baraka, who had been LeRoi Jones until 1967, left his home in Greenwich Village, where he had been a hip ex-beatnik writer, and moved to Harlem to lead what he called “the Black Arts Movement,” an artistic wing of the black power movement, in which blacks would create their own literature, theater, and poetry, rather than be exploited by the white literary establishment.
Their art would express a black perspective, something totally distinct and apart from white art. The movement went beyond art to the fashion of wearing African-style clothes and the emergence of “soul food” restaurants. While Baraka saw all of this as part of a political program that would give political power to blacks through “a radical reordering of the Western cultural aesthetic,” polls consistently showed that these cultural manifestations of black separatism were far more popular in the black population than was the black power political movement itself. Even those who did not agree with the political aspirations of black nationalism wanted to see a celebration of a distinctly black culture. One of the most important accomplishments of this movement was the emergence of black studies programs in most universities. This was the most popular of all the manifestations of black power.
But Gordy still operated in the belief that black art flourished only when it reached out to include white audiences. This was a simple mathematical calculation. He had arrived at a formula that was working. He told anyone who would listen that they could not argue with his success. In 1963, when he met with Martha Noonan he told her, “I played a little different and people liked it and we got other people who played differently and a million people like it.”
He was pleased to get the black market as long as it wasn’t at the expense of the far larger white market. He wanted to show white people that in the age of dangerous, angry black people, of black power, and ghetto rebellions, Motown blacks were neither angry nor dangerous.
The non-threatening black was becoming a big seller. In 1965 Bill Cosby became the first black star of a television drama, I Spy. Cosby was the epitome of the black who showed no anger, no anxiety, nothing to indicate he had experienced abuse and descended from centuries of worse. It was a difficult role for people who grew up in northern ghettos or the Jim Crow South. As Baldwin once wrote of his own background, “Escaping Harlem is like an animal that escapes a trap by amputating a leg. You always leave something behind.” But for those who could do it, such as Marvin Gaye, who always struggled with it, it was a formula for success. Even in the next century, Barack Obama, in order to be elected president, had to convince the public that he was without anger.
Motown wanted Bill Cosbys, too. Gordy, in his zeal to prove the harmlessness of “Dancing in the Street,” despite its African drumming and African-style call-and-response harmony, would shoot film shorts of Martha and the Vandellas playing to all-white crowds. Martha would wear a wide, bright smile that was not in her eyes. You could see her face strain to hold on to the smile while belting out a song of such strong emotion and force. In one film, the Vandellas wore suits with broad, vertical stripes and little matching hats so they looked like some kind of candy striper volunteers singing in a park. The park had only happy children with lollipops and balloons,
and all of them were white.
“The only place you don’t feel the tension in the music of 1966,” said Montague in his 2003 autobiography, “is in Detroit, where Berry Gordy is managing to go the other way and make Motown less black, less tense, and more controlled.”
Gordy was not the only one trying to keep his artists away from the trouble of the 1960s. Beatles manager Brian Epstein forbade the four to talk about the Vietnam War, which got bloodier every day. Epstein would not allow Vietnam questions at press conferences. But Lennon and Harrison would speak on the banned topic anyway. And with their album Revolver, the acoustic guitar and folk sound of the previous one, Rubber Soul, were replaced by a hard electric sound, almost similar to Stokely Carmichael’s replacing freedom songs with R&B. Likewise, songs such as “Eleanor Rigby” were much edgier than the cheerful pieces that had made the Beatles stars. In what belongs in the annals of premature obituaries, Time in September 1966 ran an article titled “Is Beatlemania Dead?” The article noted that their latest tour, which had still brought in staggering quantities of money, did not draw as big a mob around their hotels, possibly, the article noted, because three of the four had gotten married. They were still banned from a Texas radio station, and in one concert in Memphis, the free Christian protest rally against them drew more people than the music concert. Time also noted, presumably with irony, that while two girls threatened to jump out of the twenty-second floor of a fifty-story Manhattan building in honor of the four, in the old days they would have chosen the top floor.
“Eve of Destruction” was released in July 1965 as the B side of “What Exactly’s the Matter with Me.” The A side was quickly forgotten as the B side moved up the charts. Written by nineteen-year-old P. F. Sloan, several groups turned it down before Barry McGuire, who had just left the folk group the New Christy Minstrels, agreed to record it. The song listed many of the events of recent years that had darkened the times and the music, including racism and violence. The clear underpinning was the war in Vietnam—the maelstrom Johnson once described as unwinnable, into which he was pouring more and more American troops. The song concludes that the end of the world must be near. Bob Dylan had already made the point more eloquently. Despite the huge sales and angry denunciations from right-wing groups, neither the music nor the words showed much finesse. Even musicians sympathetic to the message criticized it artistically. Folksinger Phil Ochs, a constant presence at antiwar rallies with his song “I Ain’t Marching Anymore,” applauded the message but not the artistry. Paul Simon told Rolling Stone that it was an example of how bad a protest song could be. Still, apocalyptic visions had become trendy.
In September Time reported that with “Eve of Destruction” at the top of the charts and
with a dozen more songs of protest snapping close behind it heralds a radical change for rock ’n’ roll. Suddenly the shaggy ones are high on a soapbox. Tackling everything from the Peace Corps to the PTA, foreign policy to domestic morality. They are sniping away in the name of “folk rock”—big-beat music with big-message lyrics. Where once teen-agers were too busy frugging to pay much heed to lyrics, most of which were unintelligible banshee wails anyway, they now listen with ears cocked and brows furrowed. The rallying cry is no longer “I wanna hold your hand” but “I wanna change the world.”
Meanwhile, “Dancing in the Street” was well on its way to being a standard. The first of many covers was already coming out the year after the song was released. It was always part of Gordy’s financial plan to have his songs covered, and covers have made him very wealthy, even though they have not always been a triumph for the artists picking up the songs. Drummer Steve Jordan said, “Covers are great. Songwriters hope to have lots of covers of their song. But you have to choose your covers. Some songs, the recording is so strong, you are just setting yourself up for disaster. With this one, the original will never be topped.” So far that has proved true.
In 1965 “Dancing in the Street” was so popular in Great Britain that there were five British covers of the song. The 1965 album Kinda Kinks, by the British group the Kinks, was an example of how performers set themselves up for disaster. The Kinks had become stars the year before with their hit “You Really Got Me,” but although they were known for working with R&B, their version of “Dancing in the Street” with no particular interpretation, and without Martha’s voice or horn arrangements or a distinctive rhythmic groove, was a surprising demonstration of how dull this song could be.
Another barely remembered cover was by the Rokes, a British group that moved to Rome and became extremely popular in Italy singing British and American R&B hits in British-accented Italian.
Petula Clark, at thirty-three, was already a seasoned professional, partly because she began her singing career at the age of nine. By 1964 she was in danger of being a has-been when she came out with “Downtown,” which electrified people all over the world and made her an international music star. She was a singer who could belt out an R&B song and did a rousing version of “Dancing in the Street” that further popularized what was already a hit song in the UK.
At almost the same time, Cilla Black recorded the song. Ironically, given her love of black American music, Cilla Black was born Priscilla White. She grew up in Liverpool and knew the Beatles, who befriended and promoted her. For Black’s first break, an audition for Beatles’ manager Brian Epstein, with the Beatles playing backup, she chose Gershwin’s “Summertime” from Porgy and Bess. The Beatles played it in a key that was impossible for her, and the audition was a disaster. A second chance went better.
As for many of her generation of British female vocalists, including Petula Clark and Dusty Springfield, covers of American R&B were a mainstay of her repertoire. Like her mentors, the Beatles, she did a great deal with her voice, although her body barely moved, a fact that seemed underscored by the way her sprayed hair was equally motionless. Cilla Black hit stardom in 1964 with a Burt Bacharach song made famous by Dionne Warwick, “Anyone Who Had a Heart.” In the UK charts, Black’s cover rose higher than Warwick’s original. She also sang a number of Beatles compositions and had a number 1 hit with “You’re My World,” an English-language cover of the Italian hit “Il Mio Mondo.”
In 1965 she recorded “Dancing in the Street” as part of a campaign to become popular in the United States. “You’re My World” had hit number 26 on the American Billboard chart. But Cilla Black did not enjoy touring in the United States, and retreated to her native England, where she has remained a star ever since, though she is little known in the United States.
The fifth 1965 British cover of “Dancing in the Street” was by an American group. The Walker Brothers, three Americans who were not brothers and none of whom was born with the name Walker, were unknowns who formed the group in 1964 and moved to the UK on the theory that the Brits loved American rock ’n’ roll. They were right, and by 1965, when they sang “Dancing in the Street,” a number of their covers had made the top 10 on the British charts, though the Motown song was not one of them.
There were also two notable covers of “Dancing in the Street” in the United States that year. Brenda Lee made the U.S. charts thirty-seven times in the 1960s, making her one of the five top-selling pop music artists of the decade. She is only one of the surprises of this top five 1960s list. The only ones that are not a surprise are the Beatles and Ray Charles, the creator of soul, the consummate fusion of black music—gospel, blues, and R&B. But he is the only black among the top five sellers. Elvis Presley, whom young people in the 1960s considered a has-been, was still a top seller with his Las Vegas–style ballads. And as surprising as Brenda Lee and slightly higher in sales was Connie Francis, an Italian American who had tried out most genres. In 1965 Brenda Lee recorded “Dancing in the Street” in her strong but somewhat tinny voice, backed up by a close imitation of Riser’s arrangement, complete with trumpet intro and a slamming 2/4 beat.
The Everly Brothers, the melodic duet who harm
onized on parallel melodic lines and were both accomplished acoustic guitar players, did “Dancing in the Street” in the sweet sound for which they were known. To realize how strong the edge is to the Martha and the Vandellas original, the Everly Brothers offer a version that really does sound like it is about nothing but dancing.
In 1966 the Brits were at it again with the Red Squares, a hard-sounding electric band, covering “Dancing in the Street.” But this was also the year of one of the song’s most successful covers, by the Mamas and the Papas. Their producer, Lou Adler, who had also coproduced “Eve of Destruction,” Sam Cooke, and many others, said, “The first time I heard ‘Dancing in the Street’ I became a fan of Martha and the Vandellas.” When he opened a nightclub in LA, Martha and the Vandellas was one of the first acts that he booked. “When I first heard the song I thought it was really uplifting.” But he added, “I always felt that there was room for another interpretation.” He added that when whites sing R&B, it is immediately a different interpretation. The Mamas and the Papas often covered black artists with their own interpretations. Usually they changed the tempo. “But with ‘Dancing in the Street,’ said Adler, “you couldn’t really change tempos. Instead the interpretation was ‘They just had a lot of fun with it.’” And the Mamas and the Papas had a very different concept of harmony than the call-and-response style of Motown girl groups.
The result was a song that was very bright and energetic, with a sense of fun. At times in the history of the song it seemed a safer, more accepted interpretation than the original. It also became a signature song of the Mamas and the Papas.
From June 16 to 18, 1967, Adler and Alan Pariser produced the Monterey Pop Festival, at the outset of what became known on the West Coast as “the Summer of Love.” The event was billed as “three days of music, love, and flowers.” The new California music, “the San Francisco sound,” cemented its reputation to ninety thousand people with such groups as Big Brother and the Holding Company, Country Joe and the Fish, the Grateful Dead, and the Jefferson Airplane. Most of the San Francisco groups had not even cut a record yet. A brilliant, little-known guitarist who had built his reputation in Britain, Jimi Hendrix, as though his music wasn’t spellbinding enough, concluded his set by literally setting his guitar on fire. Here Otis Redding, a southern blues and soul singer, secured his white fan base and became a star. Sadly, six months later he would die in an airplane crash, and his recording “(Sittin’ On) The Dock of the Bay” would become the first posthumous number 1 hit.
Ready For a Brand New Beat Page 18