Unfortunately July 16’s “Nothing but Heartaches,” released a week after “It’s the Same Old Song,” was a little too much of a retread and made it only to No. 11, ending the Supremes’ streak of No. 1’s after five. An irate Gordy quickly issued a memo: “We will release nothing less than top ten product on any artist; and because the Supremes’ world-wide acceptance is greater than the other artists, on them we will only release number-one records.”
Gordy was particularly irked because his plan to have the Supremes cross over into the supper clubs was finally coming to fruition: they debuted at the Copacabana on July 29. The club was owned by the Mob and featured a Brazilian theme with Copacabana Girls and, incongruously, Chinese food on the menu. To prepare, Gordy hired a charm school teacher to give the singers etiquette lessons, along with a fashion expert, makeup artist, and choreographer. All three Supremes had grown up in Detroit’s Brewster-Douglass housing projects, and Ross said, “I think what stands out in my mind most about the Copa is the feeling of respect that we’ll never forget from those audiences.”2 By playing the Copa, the Supremes paved the way for the Temptations, Marvin Gaye, and Martha and the Vandellas to play there as well, and once you played the Copa, you could play anywhere in the world. Soon Gordy would make the Artists Personal Development Department, a.k.a. the Motown Finishing School, a division of his empire.
The Copa was a turning point for Florence Ballard, who had been frustrated with her diminishing role in the trio. Barbra Streisand’s “People” was Ballard’s showstopper in the Supremes’ set, but a few days after their Copa debut, Ross was assigned the song for good. Mary Wilson wrote in her memoir, “From that moment on, Flo regarded what was in fact the highest achievement of our career as a disaster. She was sad and moody, and I could see the three of us being torn apart.”3
Ballard was the one in the group who had initially been discovered, singing on her porch, by the manager of a doo-wop group called the Primes (later renamed the Temptations). He asked her if she had any friends who could also sing, and she brought in Wilson, who brought in Ross. Originally, they each took turns singing lead. But though Ballard had the stronger, more traditional R&B voice, Ross’s higher-pitched, breathy vocals turned out to be ideally suited for the era’s technology. Marvin Gaye said, “Motown understood the transistor radio. Back then, transistors were selling like hot cakes and Motown songs were mixed to sound good on transistors and car radios. Diana’s voice was the perfect instrument to cut through those sound waves.”4
As Gordy increasingly focused on Ross, Ballard protested the group’s shift away from R&B and toward “whiter” pop—to little avail. When the band’s success brought the singers the luxury of separate hotel rooms, she felt increasingly isolated. She turned to drink, gaining weight and missing performances.
She was haunted by a tragic event that happened shortly before signing with Motown. When she was sixteen, she had attended a sock hop with her brother but had gotten separated from him, so accepted a ride home from a boy she knew, future Detroit Pistons basketball player Reginald Harding.5 He drove her to a darkened street and raped her at knifepoint. Following the assault, she stayed inside her house for weeks before confiding in Wilson and Ross. They were supportive, but no one back then knew how to deal with rape trauma syndrome. Wilson wrote, “Diane and I never discussed it again, not even between ourselves. I chalk that up to our youth.”6
As for the Supreme caught in the middle, Wilson would later write that Ross was a diva and not very nice. She writes in her memoir that when she entreated Gordy to let her handle a lead, he said, “Oh, Mary. You know you can’t sing!”7 He said it jokingly, but it destroyed her confidence.
Despite the backstage tension, the trio was second only to the Beatles on the charts throughout the decade, with twelve No. 1 U.S. singles to the Beatles’ twenty. Elvis had seventeen, but that included his work in the 1950s. The Supremes were Gordy’s main weapon in ending the era when a black single could rise only so high on the pop charts before a white performer appropriated it and had a bigger hit with it. Today, aside from the Beatles, Elvis, and Madonna, none of the artists with the most No. 1 hits is white—Mariah Carey (eighteen), Michael Jackson (thirteen), Whitney Houston (eleven), Janet Jackson (ten), and Stevie Wonder (ten). (And, of course, Michael Jackson and Wonder got their start at Motown.)
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For soul purists, Stax Records, in Memphis, was considered more authentic than Motown because its shouters’ vocals were grittier, its house band’s guitars were more distorted, and it used bluesy horns and organs more than strings. For the best illustration of the difference, listen to the original “My Girl,” by the Temptations (Motown), backed by the Funk Brothers and the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, and then Otis Redding’s version (Stax), backed by Booker T. and the M.G.s, the Memphis Horns, and pianist Isaac Hayes.
The funny thing was, while people called Stax “blacker,” it was owned by a white brother and sister, and its house band, Booker T. and the M.G.s, was integrated. Jim Stewart was a white banker who played country fiddle until being inspired, by the local success of Sam Phillips’s Sun Records, to start his own label. His sister, Estelle Axton, who worked at a different bank, mortgaged her house to buy the one-track Ampex tape recorder for the bands to record on.8 They couldn’t overdub as Motown did, which gave Stax an earthier sound for its first six years, though in June the studio finally had a four-track installed. The label’s moniker came from the siblings’ names: “Stewart” plus “Axton.”
They had their studio built in an old Memphis movie theater in the black ghetto, on 926 E. McLemore Avenue. (As an answer to the “Hitsville U.S.A” sign on the Motown house, they put “Soulsville U.S.A.” on the theater marquee.) The slope of the original theater floor gave the room unique acoustics.9 They transformed the theater’s candy shop into the Satellite Record Shop—Satellite was the original name of their label. In their own version of Motown’s quality-control tests, as soon as they recorded a song in the studio, Jim and Estelle would play the track in the record store, to check consumer reaction. If it was bad, they might rework it or drop it. Having a record store on site also let them keep close tabs on what was hot. Jerry Wexler, at Atlantic Records (the inventor of the term R&B for Billboard and the producer of both Ray Charles and the Drifters), arranged a deal for Atlantic to distribute Stax’s records nationally.
Booker T. and the M.G.s played on almost all the Stax cuts by Otis Redding, Wilson Pickett, Sam and Dave, and Carla and Rufus Thomas. The band included two black guys, Booker T. Jones on organ and Al Jackson on drums, and two white guys, Steve Cropper on guitar and Donald “Duck” Dunn on bass (replacing Lewie Steinberg). Unlike Motown’s Funk Brothers, Booker T. and the M.G.s had a No. 3 hit in their own name with “Green Onions.” Cropper went for a dirtier guitar sound than other session axe men, while Jackson hit the skins as hard as Zeppelin’s drummer John Bonham on tracks such as “In the Midnight Hour.” The Memphis Horns filled out the sessions. Isaac Hayes often sat in when Booker T. was away studying music at Indiana University. Hayes would go on to stardom with the Oscar-winning “Shaft” in 1971.
Cropper wrote a lot of tracks with Otis Redding, starting with “Mr. Pitiful,” which made it to No. 10 on the Billboard R&B chart in February. After Cropper heard a deejay say that Redding always sounded pitiful in his ballads, it occurred to him in the shower that the phrase might make a good song. He drove over and picked up Redding and, Cropper said, “We just wrote the song on the way to the studio, just slapping our hands on our legs. We wrote it in about ten minutes, went in, showed it to the guys, [Otis] hummed a horn line, boom we had it.”10 From then on, Redding would usually get an idea for a title, a lyric or two, a tempo, and an idea for horns, and then he would hum the horn arrangement to Cropper and the other players. Only two of his songs had background vocals; instead, horns were his call-and-response team.
Redding’s songs were usually either slow ballads or stompers. Two of his finest ballads were “That�
�s How Strong My Love Is,” the B side of “Mr. Pitiful,” and “I’ve Been Loving You Too Long,” cowritten with the Impressions’ Jerry Butler.
The archetypal stomper was “I Can’t Turn You Loose,” which probably started as a rip-off of the Four Tops’ “I Can’t Help Myself (Sugar Pie, Honey Bunch)” but ended up illustrating the difference between Redding and the Motown stable. Both he and James Brown had started out as Little Richard imitators, and both used lots of vocal interjections such as “Ha!” In terms of onstage physicality, Redding rocked circles around the Four Tops’ Levi Stubbs and everyone else except Brown. He was almost as impassioned as Brown, though not as intricately graceful—more of a wild freight train shaking back and forth, manic and beaming (“Got to, got to keep a grip!”). Motown’s lead singers, such as David Ruffin, by contrast, were cool, slick—farther removed from the black gospel tradition, in which the preacher hollered, rough and raspy; and more sedate for white consumption as per Berry Gordy’s ambitions.
But as the 1960s progressed, the level of vocal distortion became the barometer of passion: the more the singer shredded his larynx, the more intensely soulful he was considered. Before the British Invasion, the Italian bel canto–style crooners (smooth and mellow) dominated white pop. But the Brits respected the “linen-ripping sound” of blues vocals, as Beatle producer George Martin called it.11 All the great Motown singers of the era had it in them, including Ruffin, Stubbs, Gaye, and Wonder—but it was the rise of the Stax soul singers such as Redding, Wilson Pickett, and Sam and Dave that pushed them to get rawer. For example, compare the Four Tops’ “I Can’t Help Myself (Sugar Pie, Honey Bunch)” to their hit “Bernadette,” released two years later.
These fierce soul belters were always pleading to their women, totally codependent, as Redding sings in “I’m Depending on You.” Redding just asked for a little “Respect,” the Four Tops couldn’t help being weak, Don Covay begged his woman to have “Mercy, Mercy,” the Temptations weren’t “too proud to beg.”
For Otis Blue, Redding’s second album of the year (after The Great Otis Redding Sings Soul Ballads), Redding started recording on Saturday, July 9, at 10:00 a.m. He took a break from 8:00 p.m. to 2:00 a.m., to let Booker T. and the M.G.s play a gig, and then resumed recording until 2:00 p.m. Sunday. When Redding briefly left to take a physical for medical insurance, Cropper (who was also serving as producer) got the idea for him to cover the Stones’ new single. “I went up to the front of the record shop, got a copy of the record, played it for the band and wrote down the lyrics. You notice on ‘Satisfaction’ that Otis said, ‘fashion,’ not ‘faction.’ I love it. That’s what made him so unique. He’d just barrel right through that stuff, unaware of anything. He just didn’t know the song. He hadn’t heard it, as far as I know.”12 The Stones would later base their stage version on Redding’s cover. The Stones’ original version reached No. 19 on the R&B charts, while Redding took it to the R&B Top 5 and the pop Top 40.
The centerpiece of Otis Blue, “Respect,” was written in a day, arranged in twenty minutes, and recorded in one take. Redding was complaining about the way his wife was treating him after he had returned from a tour, and M.G.s drummer Al Jackson said, “What are you griping about? You’re on the road all the time. All you can look for is a little respect when you come home.”13 Redding had originally written the tune as a ballad for his road manager, Speedo Sims, and Sims’s band, the Singing Demons, but after Jackson’s comment, he was inspired to speed up the tempo and change the words. Sims’s version didn’t work out, so Redding gave it a shot. The singer comes home and complains to his woman that he’s giving her all his money and just wants respect (and probably sex). Sims calls out, “Hey Hey Hey!” in the background.
“Respect” made it to No. 5 R&B. A week after it was released, the Los Angeles neighborhood of Watts blew up into one of the worst riots of the decade. But the track’s force as a possible civil rights protest song seemed to be overshadowed by the more dominant conflict between the man and woman at the heart of the lyrics. However, that conflict was what the women’s liberation movement was all about, so when Atlantic’s Jerry Wexler produced Aretha Franklin’s version two years later (in which she adds the “R-E-S-P-E-C-T” break and “sock it to me” repetitions), Redding’s words became the ultimate feminist anthem. At the Monterey Pop Festival, Redding introduced the song by smiling and saying, “This is a song that a girl took away from me, a good friend of mine, this girl she just took this song, but I’m still gonna do it anyway.”
“Coming to Stax literally changed my life,” Jerry Wexler said. He had been burned out recording in New York, and the Memphis studio reinvigorated him. “The idea of coming to a place [like Stax] where four guys came to work like four cabinetmakers or four plumbers and hang up their coats and start playing music in the morning, and then the beautifully crafted records came out of this! God, can I get some of this, ’cause this is the way to go.”14
Wexler brought Wilson Pickett to Stax in May, to cowrite with Steve Cropper. As they were coming up with “In the Midnight Hour,” Wexler demonstrated a new dance the kids were doing up north called the Jerk. It inspired a new beat that would come to define all the Stax records to follow, in which Stax drummers would ever so subtly delay the backbeat—the two and the four.
Stax’s beat, bass sound, and cowbell made the Beatles want to come there to record, but McCartney said Stax asked for too much money and “were obviously trying to take us for a ride, because we were the Beatles.”15
More Pickett hits, such as “634-5789 (Soulsville, U.S.A.)” were recorded that year. To the casual listener, Pickett sounded very similar to Redding, especially since they used the same band, studio, and cowriter Steve Cropper. But live, clapping and swaying with his blindingly white smile, Pickett grooved a little less frantically than Redding did.
Sam Moore and Dave Prater met on the southern gospel circuit and teamed up as Sam and Dave. Sam was the tenor (higher pitched) and Dave the baritone (lower pitched), and they’d trade lines back and forth. Wexler found them in Miami and brought them to Stax, where they were paired with the songwriting team of Isaac Hayes and David Porter. Their hit “I Take What I Want” was inspired by the name of a story in Bronze Thrills, a confessional magazine,16 and took the opposite approach of most pleading soul man stances: they were just going to pick up the girl and carry her away. Next, Hayes and Porter took the melody and opening lines from the gospel song “You Don’t Know What the Lord Has Done for Me” to make “You Don’t Know Like I Know,” about what their woman has done for them. Hayes and Porter made Sam sing at the top of his range, which angered him, because it was hard to do; but he did it.17 It was the same trick that Holland-Dozier-Holland used to get intense performances out of Levi Stubbs.
Porter studied Motown songs such as the Temptations’ October release, “Don’t Look Back,” written by Smokey Robinson (and perhaps inspired by Dylan’s line in “She Belongs to Me”). As Rob Bowman writes in Soulsville, U.S.A., “He deduced that they all had an opening that laid out the scenario, followed that with a bit of action, and then some sort of denouement. All were in the first person, and none of them ended with a complete resolution. ‘All of the songs followed that formula,’ smiles Porter. ‘I knew right then. I said, “Hey, we’re gonna be some bad dudes in this music industry.” That’s when the thought processes really started working and an identity started taking place.’”18
Sam and Dave were the template for John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd’s Blues Brothers duo. Cropper, Donald “Duck” Dunn, and Stax drummer Willie Hall joined the Blues Brothers’ band, and Redding’s “I Can’t Turn You Loose” became their theme.
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The year was a rich one for artists unaffiliated with big labels as well. In LA, Sonny Bono hooked Lawrence Darrow Brown up with a small label called Stripe Records, which renamed him Dobie Gray, after the title character in the TV show The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis. Gray’s clubbing anthem, “The ‘In’ Crowd,” was qui
ckly followed by “See You at the Go-Go,” in which he is backed by the Wrecking Crew.
St. Louis’s Little Milton sang of life-and-death matters in “We’re Gonna Make It,” which topped the R&B charts in May and became a civil rights anthem. Milton sings to his woman that they may not be able to pay the rent or the heating bill amid the roaches, and they may have to go to the welfare line so they can afford beans, but they have each other, so they’re gonna make it. Milton’s protagonist even considers begging with a sign reading, “Help the deaf, dumb, and blind.”
Chicago’s Curtis Mayfield released his most explicit civil rights single yet, with “Meeting Over Yonder.” With its rousing falsettos, it was in a long tradition of “meeting songs”—anything from a church meeting to a union meeting. On the pop side, the Impressions’ exquisite “You’re Cheatin’” took the riff of the Four Tops’ “I Can’t Help Myself” and transposed it to strings. “Woman’s Got Soul” is a laid-back ode in the mode of the Temptations’ “The Girl’s Alright with Me.”
And then there was the most independent of them all—Mr. Dynamite, Soul Brother No. 1, the Hardest Working Man in Show Business, the Godfather of Soul—James Brown.
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Bob Dylan and the Animals may have sung about a gambling den/brothel in their versions of “The House of the Risin’/Rising Sun,” but Brown was raised in one. In his autobiography, he writes of his aunt’s roadhouse, “We were just trying to survive. That’s what everything that went on in that house—gambling, bootlegging, prostitution—was about: survival. Some people call it crime, I call it survival. It’s the same thing goes on right today in the ghetto.”19
1965: The Most Revolutionary Year in Music Page 18