by Bob Stanley
Gamble and Huff’s answer to the Supremes was the Three Degrees, who’d had a small hit called ‘Gee Baby (I’m Sorry)’ in the girl-group era (US no. 80 ’65), released a few crackers in between (1968’s excellent ‘Collage’ is one of the few singles you can file under girl-group psych) but were strictly C-list when they signed to PIR. Singer Sheila Ferguson was ninety per cent hair and lipgloss, the other ten per cent being her eyes, and she used her assets with slo-mo Marilyn Monroe moves. Her voice, likewise, was all seduction, coming over softly like Diana Ross on ‘Take Good Care of Yourself’ (UK no. 9 ’74) one minute, then belting out the chorus of epic heartbreaker ‘If and When’ the next, as the other two Degrees billed and cooed around her. One of the great long-distance smoochers, ‘When Will I See You Again’ (UK no. 1, US no. 2 ’74) was their biggest hit, but ‘Year of Decision’ (UK no. 13 ’74) was their best: ‘Yes, this is the year to open up your eyes,’ they sang as Watergate unfolded and America prepared to bail out of Vietnam. It had the Impressions’ sense of friendly persuasion – you didn’t have to actually name Richard Nixon in the lyric to make your political point.
Billy Paul, already on the edge of forty when he signed to PIR, burst into town selling medicine for the afflicted, with his wide-brimmed hat and an endless grin. He took Paul McCartney’s ‘Let ’Em In’ and Elton John’s ‘Your Song’ and turned them into a kind of festival gospel, ridiculously upbeat, joyous to an irritating degree. His biggest hit, ‘Me and Mrs Jones’ (US no. 1, UK no. 12 ’73), was like a Del Shannon single in reverse – Billy was happy to be on the run, ‘holding hands, making all kinds of plans while the jukebox plays our favourite song’. Such was his bonhomie that he made cheating sound not only acceptable but a whole heap of sunny fun.
Rather more racked were Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes, who had recorded one of the great singles on the cusp of doo wop and soul, ‘Get Out (and Let Me Cry)’ in 1964. ‘Club work was how we ate,’ said Melvin; hits didn’t bother them. So when Gamble and Huff first approached them to record for PIR, they were unfazed: ‘Working with Kenny and Leon would mean a month with no pay.’ But PIR was on a roll, and gave them ‘If You Don’t Know Me by Now’ (US no. 3 ’72, UK no. 9 ’73), a tense, 6/8 ballad of devastating doubt and suspicion that burst into life from the very first second; there is no intro. Lead singer Teddy Pendergrass also had the saddest scream since Levi Stubbs, and the Blue Notes were later given Gamble and Huff’s sexiest songs (‘Satisfaction Guaranteed’, ‘The Love I Lost’) as a reward for finally acquiescing.
Girl trio First Choice (‘Smarty Pants’, ‘Armed and Extremely Dangerous’) and the Intruders (‘Win, Place or Show’) got the daft songs with playground-friendly lyrics, snatches of horse-racing commentary or TV detective themes, anticipating hip-hop corn like Doug E. Fresh’s ‘The Show’. They were daft, but all of them were Top 50 UK and US hits.
Was it all down to Gamble, Huff and Bell? Couldn’t just anyone have used the same studios and session musicians and come up with the same magical formula? No. Producer Peter DeAngelis took Eddie Holman’s skyscraping falsetto into Sigma Sound and cut a revival of Ruby and the Romantics’ ‘Hey There Lonely Boy’; with a gender change and all the Philly details – even the French horn – present and correct it made number two in the US in early 1970, and number four in Philly-hungry Britain four years later. It was beautiful. But DeAngelis had recorded it as an afterthought, as a Holman album track, and when he tried to follow his fluke hit he couldn’t, crushing Holman’s power with a hundred-weight of strings, burying him under easy-listening gloop. Holman, who had created the very first Philly sound 45, ‘This Can’t Be True’, with Gamble, Huff and Bell in 1966, deserved better.2
Could anyone outside Philadelphia create anything as luscious? They certainly gave it a go. By 1973 the smooth, aspirational sound had taken over other cities. Eugene Record took the Philly sound to the Midwest and made the Chi-Lites an even smoother proposition: the sentimental but two-million-selling ‘Have You Seen Her’ (US and UK no. 3 ’72) had an epic monologue intro that was closer to Rod McKuen than Isaac Hayes, while ‘Oh Girl’ (US no. 1) added Southern harmonica and a Nashville piano sound to the stew. No one-trick balladeers, the Chi-Lites cut the swampy, mellow electro-soul ‘Stoned out of My Mind’ (US no. 30 ’73), the calypso-flecked ‘Too Good to Be Forgotten’ (UK no. 10 ’74), cutesy school-love ballad ‘Homely Girl’ (UK no. 5, US no. 54 ’74) and a truly odd disco-dub song with blasts of twenties jazz brass called ‘You Don’t Have to Go’ (UK no. 3 ’76), and – like the Turtles in the sixties – became one of the most versatile pop groups, soul or other wise, of the seventies.
West-coast operator Barry White did even better. First off, he took three girls, named them Love Unlimited, and came up with ‘Walking in the Rain with the One I Love’ (US and UK no. 14 ’72), an almost narcotic love song with a four-note keyboard hook straight out of an Italian giallo, topped with meteorological sound effects and a husky spoken intro – it was a masterpiece.3 White himself was not an obvious pop star but, emboldened by his production success, he cut a single of his own. Critics were suspicious of this jewellery-laden ex-con. They accused him of plagiarising Isaac Hayes’s million-selling Hot Buttered Soul, which was hardly a crime (it was more mystifying that no one else had done it); he made the Hayes sound simpler, to the point, more pop. And then the critics said his subsonic, unmusical voice was comical, a gift for impressionists, and this time, maybe, they weren’t wrong. And also they said that his girth, his powder-blue suit, his perma-sweat, his pompadour were laughable. So what? He didn’t look or sound like anyone (OK, he sounded a bit like Isaac Hayes) and this is why he reached number three in the States, straight away, with ‘I’m Gonna Love You Just a Little More Baby’. Also, it was the most blatant record about sex to date – with White muttering and groaning right in your ear, and the backing dark, slow, almost scary until its sweet string-led outro – that had been made to date in the US. No one said that about Hayes’s Hot Buttered Soul. Barry White was set up, and he scored a long list of hits with long, long titles – ‘You’re the First, the Last, My Everything’ being the biggest, a transatlantic 1974 number one. He was also responsible for an instrumental US number one as the Love Unlimited Orchestra with ‘Love’s Theme’ in ’74, one of the earliest disco hits, and you fell for its April uplift even when you knew it was nothing but soft-porn Mantovani. ‘The real superstars are the people who buy the records,’ Barry White would say, sweating charm as he bought another Cadillac.
By 1976 soul was mutating into disco, and Philly’s ingredients were in the hands of less talented chefs. Philadelphia International was disco’s bedrock, the musicians creating the rhythmic template with Harold Melvin’s ‘The Love I Lost’ (US no. 7 ’73), and the epitome of the genre’s high camp with ‘TSOP (The Sound of Philadelphia)’, another PIR number one in the spring of ’74, this time for their MFSB session men,4 with a little help from the trilling Three Degrees. With its history and its mastery of the raw materials the label should have bossed disco, but instead it was all but dead by the time the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack was breaking sales records in ’78.
What went wrong? Kenny Gamble simply got greedy. Like Berry Gordy before him, he wouldn’t share the spoils, and the musicians all left; his plan to create another Motown in record time had come back to haunt him. The Three Degrees left Gamble, rubbing his nose in it by recording the 3D and New Dimensions albums5 with the new disco king, Giorgio Moroder, in 1979. One of the last great Gamble and Huff records, ironically, was the Jacksons’ ‘Show You the Way to Go’ in ’77, their first UK number one after leaving Motown. Michael Jackson watched the producers ‘like a sponge with eyes’, knowing that there was no one better at their craft – mastering a rich, inclusive studio sound. Two years later he concocted Off the Wall, at that time the biggest-selling album ever by a black artist, and one that was unintentionally coached by Philadelphia’s masters.
1 Randazzo and Stepney are both unique voices in pop w
ho really deserve more than a footnote: the former was a New Yorker who took Bacharach’s baton and ran with it. Restrained emotion through clipped verses and florid choruses was his speciality – his Italian roots were clearly audible. Randazzo’s biggest UK hit was Cupid’s Inspiration’s ‘Yesterday Has Gone’, a number four in 1968. Charles Stepney was the vibes player in a jazz trio when he met the Dells, who convinced him to do orchestration on their next single, ‘O-O, I Love You’ (US no. 61 ’67); they soon scored a brace of Stepney-produced hits (‘Stay in My Corner’, ‘Oh What a Night’), the only Top 10 hits of their six-decade career. His jazz background then helped to make the production on four-octave Minnie Riperton’s 1969 album Come to My Garden one of the most sensuous and exotic this side of Laura Nyro. Stepney was in discussions with Michael Jackson and had just finished work on Deniece Williams’s This Is Niecy when he died of a heart attack in 1976 – Williams’s ‘Free’ gave him a posthumous UK number one in 1977.
2 Holman’s other great recording under DeAngelis’s instruction was ‘I Surrender’, a 1969 throwaway B-side built on brass stabs, sparse rhythm guitar, minor chords and an imploring, acquiescent vocal: ‘Here is my heart darling, take it … I surrender my love to you.’
3 Nat King Cole’s 1960 ‘two act’ album Wild Is Love had been a part-spoken, part-sung forerunner but, most likely, White used the sole album by a sweet-voiced Philly girl group called the Fuzz as a blueprint. They had cut one major hit, ‘I Love You for All Seasons’, in 1970 and their sole album was made up of upbeat love ballads, occasionally bordering on danceable (‘I’m So Glad’), and linked by spoken-word soliloquies to the Boy – it was as if the Chiffons had grown up and developed an appetite for Valium (this is meant to sound like a good thing).
4 MFSB stood for Mother Father Sister Brother – or Mother-Fucking Sons of Bitches, depending on who you believe.
5 These albums did nothing in the States but they gave the girls a whole new run of hits in Britain with ‘Giving Up Giving In’ (no. 12 ’78), ‘A Woman in Love’ (no. 3 ’79), ‘The Runner’ (no. 10 ’79) and ‘My Simple Heart’ (no. 9 ’79). The latter’s playful Bacharach/Philly-isms clearly showed the respect Moroder had for Gamble, Huff and Bell.
33
PROGRESSIVE ROCK (AND SIMPLER PLEASURES)
The music is immediate yet technical. It threatens to throttle the ears and mind with its complexity of styles and expressions.
Advertisement for Gentle Giant’s Free Hand, Melody Maker, 1975
Creating intelligent pop music is not an inherently noble endeavour, though it may have seemed so in the early seventies. Norman Whitfield concocted ever more elaborate Temptations singles, and electric soul warriors like the Isley Brothers and sophisticates like Gamble and Huff playfully reinvented soul in a post-Beatles era. For rock, a vastly more dispersed field than soul in the early seventies, the challenge to progress its sonic invention was grave.
The Beatles had been the role models for an ever-changing, forward-looking pop. It was a given, from the perspective of the music press, that pop would not only consistently come up with new sounds but new, more adventurous sounds. Commercialism and bubblegum were seen as regressive, and new British music mags – Sounds, Let It Rock – were set up purely for the rock fan. Within the major labels there was also an element of sniffiness: with the sounds of ‘Sugar, Sugar’ ringing in their ears, and flush with the profits of ever-increasing album sales, they set up various labels for the burgeoning British underground: Polydor begat Vertigo, Pye created Dawn, RCA glowed Neon.1 The buzzword was ‘progressive’.
Conceptually, the most influential album in the wake of Sgt Pepper had been the Who’s 1969 album Tommy. With encouragement from manager Kit Lambert, Pete Townshend had been banging on about creating a rock opera since their second album, A Quick One, in ’66. In keeping with previous Who albums, Tommy featured some crackling electric power pop (‘Pinball Wizard’, ‘I’m Free’), and a few comedy moments for Moony and Entwistle to let fly (‘Tommy’s Holiday Camp’, ‘Fiddle About’), but it was stretched to double-album length in order to accommodate the album’s overriding concept (deaf, dumb and blind kid finds deliverance in amusement arcades). As a pop record Tommy is patchy; as an opera it is badly executed on every level of pacing, plot and characterisation. But it wasn’t received this way in a world hungry to move forward.
Eighteen months before Tommy was released, Birmingham R&B group the Moody Blues had been asked by their label, Deram, to record an album with the London Festival Orchestra in order to showcase the company’s latest studio equipment. The group’s brief moment in the sun had come with a cover of Bessie Banks’s ‘Go Now’, a UK number one back in early ’65, but they had barely sold a record since, and had lost their main singer and songwriter Denny Laine, who went solo in early ’67. To Deram, the 1967 Moody Blues must have seemed desperate, a group on their last legs who would have done anything – including a stereo test record, effectively an album-length advert – to keep their contract. Hats off to the Moodies, then. They took full advantage of the opportunity to create their own Sgt Pepper: Days of Future Passed was loaded with Mellotrons, snatches of poetry and minor-key whimsy, wrapped up neatly as a suite to give it added gravitas. At times it was overly precious but it was cleverly sequenced (from ‘The Day Begins’ to ‘Nights in White Satin’), songs overlapped, and it was clearly meant to be listened to in a single sitting. ‘Nights in White Satin’ also provided their first hit single in years (UK no. 18, US no. 6), a quill-penned ballad that sat midway between eerie, breast-beating sincerity and Barbara Cartland.
Tommy and Days of Future Passed were rock’s first concept albums. A few years after the American experience, British groups started to focus exclusively on album-length pieces, as opposed to three-minute songs, using the Moody Blues’ sunny template and the Who’s angularity rather than Vanilla Fudge’s leaden, blues-based sound. Essentially an extension of British psychedelia, progressive rock was deeply rooted in Albion. Groups used instrumentation, phrasing and rhythms – as well as song topics – that they had learnt playing folk, jazz and blues; inevitably, many of the musicians had been trained in classical music. It lacked the lyrical earnestness of the singer-songwriters, and had more in common with Monty Python than James Taylor, but there was a seriousness of intent. Much maligned since, it could be very beautiful.2 On the other hand, musical chops were essential, which resulted in some of pop’s most tedious, self-indulgent music, and this has led to the entire genre being sharply unfashionable ever since its mid-seventies decline.
In 1971 Jon Anderson of Yes summed up the ambition, frustration and limitations of the progressives: ‘I think there is this feeling within Yes that we’d really like to stand for something very positive in music. I mean, we’re in an odd position at the moment – I look at the Beach Boys and think of the incredibly important things they did to music, and we want to do those same things and yet often we feel we’ll never be able to break through and stand for something in that way.’ The key problem with assessing the legacy of the progressive bands is trying to work out whether they actually were of greater significance than acts – say White Plains, or Tony Orlando and Dawn – knocking out three-minute singles, whether their pretensions were matched by their achievements, whether they embodied anything beyond what they were.
Jon Anderson may have been an unlikely front man, tiny, with a slightly alien face and a shrill high voice midway between that of a Canterbury chorister and a children’s TV presenter, but he was a romantic,3 and he wanted to write romantic songs about Albion. ‘I don’t know why the only acceptable songs about England have only been folk songs. I wrote a song about Accrington, which is near where I come from, and everyone cracked up about it. Somehow it’s all right and very romantic to write a song called “Cincinnati” – that sounds cool – but not a song about Bolton.’
Genesis, with their portentous one-word name, were the prog archetype, and ‘Musical Box’ (from Nursery Cryme, 1971) – a Victoria
n murder and rape fantasy – was the genre benchmark. On stage, singer Peter Gabriel would change costumes and voices mid-song, throwing in the odd mime or monologue for good measure. Genesis defined ‘rock opera’ and it’s not hard to see why some pop fans, impressed by scope and scale, would have considered their albums a cut above the latest Slade three-minute transistor-radio anthem. Opera is the sum of all the performing arts mulched to become a whole greater than its parts; on Selling England by the Pound it might have seemed they were channelling Noël Coward, Edward Elgar, Tubby Hayes and Sgt Pepper, as if they were genuinely progressing pop, leading it out of Tin Pan Alley with a theatrical smile, creating some new, higher art form.
Alternatively, it could be said that Genesis were a decent pop group with neat chord changes who mistook archness for intelligence; with its rather patronising references (‘Easy now, sit you down, chewing through your Wimpy dreams’ – can you picture Peter Gabriel in a Wimpy bar?) Selling England by the Pound is very sixth-form. Their magnum opus, the twenty-three-minute ‘Supper’s Ready’ from Foxtrot, has deserts of desiccated organ and drum twiddles, leading nowhere but the run-out groove. When they were concise – the soft, warm whisky-mac hallucinations of ‘Carpet Crawlers’ from The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway (1974), or the rag-week cuckooness of ‘I Know What I Like’ (a rare single, and number-twenty-one hit, also in ’74) – they were English as tuppence and all you’d want them to be. Unfortunately their philosophy of constant progression, ever heavier and more theatrical sounds, and the demands of their fans led to longer and longer suites, more opaque sci-filyrics, more luminous flower costumes. Almost inevitably, Peter Gabriel quit in 1975. If Peter Sellers couldn’t pull off the multiple roles he had in Lolita and Dr Strangelove, what chance Gabriel with his ever more complex rock operas?4