Ginsberg saw himself in the prophetic tradition, confronting America with its soul-sucking dark side in order to heal it. In “Gates of Eden” on Bringing It All Back Home, Dylan chants stridently as if he were a biblical prophet. What exactly he is prophesizing is unclear, though, as he deliberately replaces the easy interpretation of his earlier morality tracts with Zen koan-like images that veer into the bizarre. Perhaps Eden was the state of enlightenment, the only thing real in a hopelessly twisted world, or perhaps the song was designed to be impenetrable.
The main message of “It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)” seems to be that society will exploit you if you don’t get hip (a theme that especially resonated as the Vietnam draft kicked in that spring). But what blew people’s minds more than any individual aphorism or cinematic image was Dylan’s ability to endlessly play folk-blues riffs while reeling off stanza after spellbinding stanza in enigmatic emotionless delivery, leaving his live audiences stunned and unsure if he was a mystic oracle channeling divinations, a genius, a charlatan, or all the above.
The album’s final track, “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue”—with the sky folding under you and orphans crying like a fire in the sun—showed that he had surpassed Rimbaud, just one of many spirits in his magpie synthesis of ancient folk bards, Ginsberg, Guthrie, Berry, Johnny Cash, and the Stones. With Bringing It All Back Home, he had created the first rock album that sucked the art of poetry into its bloodstream, the moment in which LPs became not just collections of pop songs but works to stand alongside masterpieces in any form, from Picasso’s Guernica to James Joyce’s Ulysses. But unlike those pièces de résistance, Dylan’s would soon be heard by youth across the planet, listening, as Ginsberg put it, “to the crack of doom on the hydrogen jukebox.”
* * *
The Byrds’ first single had failed to chart after its release the October before, and their manager, Jim Dickson, knew they needed something special to break through. He’d heard Dylan sing “Mr. Tambourine Man” live, but the song hadn’t been released yet, so Dickson got a copy of the acetate and pushed the Byrds to record it. None of them really liked it at first. Vocalist Gene Clark gave it a shot, but rhythm guitarist–vocalist David Crosby convinced him it wasn’t worth pursuing.11
Lead guitarist Jim McGuinn resisted initially as well. Back when he was a folk singer in Greenwich Village, he knew Dylan, “but he was my enemy … I felt competitive. He had like twenty little girl fans and I didn’t so I was mad at him. I didn’t particularly dig his imitation of Ramblin’ Jack Elliot or Woody Guthrie. I thought, okay, anybody could get up there and do that. But he was sincere about it so he carried it. That’s why he made it, because he was sincere about everything he tried. And he used to play these trust games with all his friends back then. Like he’d tell me confidentially that he was really down and out and hooked on heroin—you know, a complete lie—just to see if it would get back to him. He was pretty weird.”12
But McGuinn gave “Mr. Tambourine Man” a shot. He cut down the lyrics, focusing on the line about boot heels wandering because it made him think of the Beatles’ Cuban-heeled boots and Jack Kerouac wandering across America.13 They set it to the beat of Beatles and Phil Spector songs. The track needed some kind of intro, so McGuinn took eight notes from Bach’s “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring.”
On January 20, five days after Dylan recorded his official version, the Byrds went into Columbia Records’ Los Angeles studio to record “Mr. Tambourine Man.” Their producer was Terry Melcher, the son of Doris Day. Melcher decided that no one in the band except McGuinn was technically good enough to play their instruments on record yet, so he hired LA’s top session musicians to accompany McGuinn on guitar and lead vocals: Hal Blaine on drums, Leon Russell on electric piano, and Larry Knechtel on bass. (Along with other musicians such as guitarist Glen Campbell and bassist Carol Kaye, these three formed the core of a loose-knit band of session musicians called the Wrecking Crew, which played on countless hits, including those by the Beach Boys and Phil Spector.) Clark and Crosby added their harmonies. Melcher tweaked the beat to imitate “Don’t Worry Baby,” the Beach Boys’ take on the Spector drums.14
They wanted the guitar sound the Beatles had gotten on the Beatles for Sale cuts “What You’re Doing” and “Words of Love.” But Columbia’s engineers had not worked with rock musicians before and were afraid McGuinn’s twelve-string Rickenbacker guitar would blow out their expensive equipment. So engineer Ray Gerhardt ran the guitar through a compressor, a mixing tool that lowered the loud audio signals but left the quieter ones untouched. Then to be safe, he double-compressed it—which ended up making the guitar sound especially trebly and bright, and allowed each note to sustain a few extra seconds. At the mixing board, they tweaked McGuinn’s vocals to sound like a cross between Lennon and Dylan.15
* * *
Now it was just a matter of waiting for these three records’ release dates: February 26 for the Stones, March 27 for Dylan, April 12 for the Byrds.
2
Hitsville USA and the Sovereigns of Soul
The Supremes enjoy their first No. 1 of the year with “Come See about Me” on January 16, while Smokey Robinson’s songs help the Temptations and Marvin Gaye unlock their potential. Also in January, the Impressions release one of the greatest civil rights anthems, “People Get Ready,” while Solomon Burke records his ode to the slain Sam Cooke. Martin Luther King Jr. turns to gospel greats the Staple Singers and Mahalia Jackson when he needs solace.
Detroit, Michigan, was the nation’s fourth-biggest city, an integrated promised land for countless workers bustling round the clock at General Motors, Chrysler, and Ford. Department stores and nightclubs teemed in the evenings. Women of either color could walk by themselves most hours through the metropolis of marble, sandstone, and granite.
Berry Gordy named his record label after the nickname for the Motor City, a combination of the words motor and town. Headquarters was a two-story house at 2648 West Grand Boulevard, with a sign reading “Hitsville, USA” above the front window. The ground floor housed the office, tape library, and Studio A, a.k.a. “the Snake Pit,” where the session men known as the Funk Brothers recorded the backing tracks. After sessions, musicians such as bassist James Jamerson and drummer Benny Benjamin played jazz all night at the 20 Grand club or the Chit Chat Lounge, coming up with ideas for tomorrow’s cuts, then hung out on the corner of John R. and E. Canfield Streets, where a guy sold sausages and tamales, telling dirty jokes till dawn.1
Gordy’s production method was inspired by his time served on the Ford Motors assembly line. He wrote in his memoir, “At the plant, cars started out as just a frame, pulled along on conveyor belts until they emerged at the end of the line—brand spanking new cars rolling off the line. I wanted the same concept for my company, only with artists and songs and records.”2 The songwriters wrote the track, the Funk Brothers laid down the music, and then the singers overdubbed their vocals.
Gordy instituted his own form of quality control in production evaluation meetings. Every Friday morning, Motown staffers would gather in his office to listen to twenty new recordings and decide which should be released, rating each cut on a scale of one to ten. The big question was: if you had only a buck and you were hungry, would you buy the record or a hot dog? Staffers would usually pick the hot dog, but the time they took to decide indicated how good the record was. Sometimes records got shot down only to be reworked and brought back. Gordy promised the staff that they would never be punished for being honest; in turn, he was ruthless in his own dissections. The end result was that 75 percent of the 537 singles Motown released during the decade made the charts, and 79 were Top 10 Billboard pop hits.3
The key was a relentless, pounding beat. A songwriter-pianist from the rival label Stax named Isaac Hayes said, “Now it was a standard joke with blacks, that whites could not, cannot clap on a backbeat. What Motown did was very smart. They beat kids over the head with it. That wasn’t soulful to us down at Stax, but
baby it sold.”4
In February’s “Nowhere to Run” by Martha and the Vandellas, the Funk Brothers accentuated the drums and tambourine by hitting snow chains. Written and produced by the team of Holland-Dozier-Holland, the song is a variation on the storyline that ran through many of the producers’ hits: the singer knows she’s in a bad relationship but is unable to forget her lover and move on. But its foreboding groove turned it into a theme song for both Vietnam soldiers and inner-city rioters in the second half of the year.
Lamont Dozier and Brian Holland wrote the music and produced the sessions, while Brian’s brother Eddie wrote the lyrics and arranged the vocals. Dozier recalled, “We would listen to John (Lennon) and Paul (McCartney) and Brian Wilson and see what everybody was doing. They probably inspired us to be better than we even felt we could be. When they got hot, we tried to get hotter. When they did something spectacular, we tried to be even more spectacular. In that regard I think we were doing the same thing for them. When I talked with John Lennon, he said, ‘You guys inspired us to do things.’ I said, ‘That’s funny, you guys did the same thing for us.’”5
Except for the Beatles, no one sold more records through the decade than Holland-Dozier-Holland, or HDH, and the Supremes: Diana Ross, Mary Wilson, and Florence Ballard. They had scored three No. 1’s in 1964, and would score three more this year. “Come See about Me” was No. 1 in December, and then interrupted by the Beatles’ “I Feel Fine,” but it returned to the top spot on January 16. Ross’s sexy come-hither groove was so catchy in “Come See about Me” that even garage rockers Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels covered the song.
In March, Gordy shepherded a number of his biggest acts across the Atlantic for a European tour. On March 18, Britain’s blue-eyed soul diva Dusty Springfield taped The Sounds of Motown TV special, hosting the Supremes, the Miracles, the Temptations, Martha and the Vandellas, Marvin Gaye, Little Stevie Wonder, and the Earl Van Dyke Sextet. (Van Dyke was the bandleader of the Funk Brothers.) The Supremes didn’t have any choreography for their new single “Stop! In the Name of Love,” so Melvin Franklin and Paul Williams of the Temptations led them into the men’s room and brainstormed the famous traffic officer hand signal move. The song hit No. 1 that month.
In the track, Ross begs her man not to have an affair with another woman. But in real life, Ross became the “other woman,” to the married Gordy. During the British tour, Ballard and Wilson believed Gordy was imposing a curfew on the Supremes because he was obsessed with Ross. Gordy later recalled that it was in Paris that he realized he loved her, the night they fought over Dean Martin’s “You’re Nobody Till Somebody Loves You.”6
Martin’s song was currently No. 1 on the easy listening chart, and that was the audience Gordy wanted the Supremes to cross over to. The big money was in the supper clubs, nightclubs where dinner was served while people watched performers, places such as New York’s Copacabana and Howard Hughes’s Sands nightclub in Vegas, where Frank Sinatra’s Rat Pack held its summits. Nat King Cole had integrated the Sands just a decade earlier. Gordy wanted Motown to become the soundtrack not only to blacks but also to whites, and not just white kids but also white adults. It was about the numbers—the black population made up about 11 percent of the United States; the white population, about 80 percent.
So Gordy wanted Ross to do Martin’s hit, but Ross felt she couldn’t sing it properly. A bad argument erupted, and he stormed out, assuming she was going to defy him. But when he returned to watch the Supremes’ performance later that evening, he was surprised to hear Ross sing Martin’s song onstage. In her dressing room, he asked her why, and she said she’d done it for him.
They spent the night together for the first time in Paris—or rather, tried to. To his chagrin, Gordy was impotent. “I was so engrossed in her. It was something I’d wanted, and I was in love with her long before she was in love with me, so when she fell in love with me in Paris, I couldn’t believe it. Of course, nothing happened on my part, and it was so embarrassing. I wanted to smother myself. Then Diana said, ‘It’s not that bad. Look at it this way, at least you have power over everything else.’”7
The problem was rectified soon enough; they had a love child at the end of the decade. But he never told her he loved her. Gordy said later that they both vowed not to let their personal life interfere with her quest for stardom.
There was a lot of passion flowing backstage at Motown. Before Gordy, Ross had gone out with Smokey Robinson, and then Eddie Kendricks of the Temptations;8 then she began a flirtation with Brian Holland—until his wife stormed over to Detroit’s 20 Grand club and had to be restrained from attacking Ross.9 Mary Wilson also reportedly dated Eddie Kendricks, and later Abdul “Duke” Fakir of the Four Tops. Meanwhile, Florence Ballard saw the Temps’ Otis Williams.
* * *
In terms of writing and producing hits, HDH’s greatest rival inside Motown was Smokey Robinson. Robinson, Warren “Pete” Moore, and Ronald White had sung doo-wop together since they were eleven, and eventually coalesced into the Miracles. Both Moore and White cowrote many of the hits with Robinson. Moore, the bass vocalist, also arranged the background harmonies, drawing on his gospel influence. Robinson’s wife, Claudette, was in the group as well. Guitarist Marv Tarplin was the Miracles’ “secret weapon,” writing the riffs to many of their greatest hits.
Robinson was Gordy’s first breakout artist in his effort to have his singers cross over beyond R&B and become the “Sound of Young (read: White) America.” Robinson was a suave front man à la Sam Cooke, but his beautiful falsetto made him particularly nonthreatening to white audiences; it led rock journalist Nik Cohn to call him “pop’s first female impersonator.”10 Robinson’s great-grandmother was Caucasian, and when he was born, the segregated hospital put him in the whites-only section of the nursery. It was because he was light-skinned that his uncle gave him the nickname Smokey, as a joke.
As a songwriter, Robinson was one of Lennon’s biggest influences, and for years just about every piece written on Robinson mentioned that Dylan had dubbed him the “greatest living poet.” (Though Motown’s head of PR, Al Abrams, admitted in his memoir that journalist Al Aronowitz had advised him to make that up, since Dylan would never remember whether he’d said it.11 In fact, Dylan had included Robinson when a reporter asked him on December 3 in San Francisco, “What poets do you dig?”) Robinson was a Don Juan who wrote candidly about it. “I felt that because of my love and respect for women, I could maintain relationships with more than one,” he says in his memoir.12 (In the Miracles’ March release “Ooo Baby Baby,” he tearfully begs his woman to forgive him for cheating and reminds her that she’s made mistakes, too.) No doubt the fact that he was married to someone in his band while dealing with the temptations of being a heartthrob exacerbated these tensions. Claudette looked the other way, but she warned him not to have a child with another woman (and when he did, she divorced him, in 1986).
Gordy had taught Robinson about writing and producing, and Robinson now handled the duties not only for his own band but also for many other Motown acts. With the Temptations, he initially wrote many of the hits for their singer Eddie Kendricks, whose falsetto made it sound almost as if Robinson were singing. But Robinson sensed that background vocalist David Ruffin was “this sleeping giant in this group because he had this—it’s sort of like a mellow gruff-sounding voice. And all I needed was the right song for his voice and I felt like I would have a smash hit record. So I sat down at the piano to write a song for David Ruffin’s voice. So I wanted to make it something that he could belt out, but yet make it melodic and sweet.”13 Robinson hit the jackpot when he flipped the gender of his previous No. 1 hit, Mary Wells’s “My Guy,” with the help of Miracle Ronald White.
The pumping bass, finger snaps, and halcyon guitar perfectly evoke the lyrics “sunshine on a cloudy day.” On TV appearances, the Temps twirled their arms, lunged, and spun while the strings of the Detroit Symphony Orchestra swelled in the song’s bridge. Ruffin,
tall and lanky enough to make thick black-framed glasses cutting-edge cool, raised his open hand to testify that all he needed was his woman’s love. Gordy gave Robinson a thousand-dollar bonus because he knew “My Girl” was going straight to No. 1—which it did on March 6.
Like Ruffin, Marvin Gaye was a moody prima donna, but he had the artistic genius and productivity to back it up. He also had understandable cause for his bad behavior, in the person of father Marvin Sr., a Hebrew Pentecostal minister who regularly beat Gaye in his youth, became jealous of his son’s phenomenal success, and eventually shot him to death—the Oedipus tragedy in reverse.
Originally, Gaye was the Miracles’ session drummer, and co-songwriter on his own early singles and on Martha and the Vandellas’ “Dancing in the Streets.” He wanted to be a crooner like Sinatra and Nat King Cole and not have to “shake my ass.”14 He was married to Gordy’s sister Anna, so that gave him some leverage as he struggled to find his voice. But his albums of show tunes and standards didn’t sell, so, reluctantly, Gaye would bang out the next R&B single. He recalled that in the mid-sixties, “When I wouldn’t want to record—just flat out refuse—Berry would get mad, his voice would get real high, he’d lose his cool. I’d feel bad and finally get my ass back in the studio.”15 Gordy had given Anna and Gaye his old house to live in, and producer Clarence Paul would pick up Gaye there and give him some coke in the car on the way to the studio16—and somehow Gaye amassed a string of classics despite the fact that he’d rather have been singing Cole Porter.
The rugged vocals of David Ruffin and the Four Tops’ Levi Stubbs compelled Gaye to make his own sound grittier. “I heard in their voices a strength my own voice lacked. Listening to these singers every day inspired me to work even harder on my natural midrange—my tough-man voice. I developed a growl. The Temps and Tops made me remember that when a lot of women listen to music, they want to feel the power of a real man.”17 The edge was there in January’s “I’ll Be Doggone,” Gaye’s first million-selling single, cowritten by Robinson, Pete Moore, and guitarist Marv Tarplin. The song was the closest Motown came in the mid-sixties to the riff rock of white bands. Tarplin was influenced by the proto-folk-rock of “Needles and Pins”; the Byrds pinched the same riff for “I’ll Feel a Whole Lot Better.”
1965: The Most Revolutionary Year in Music Page 5