May 13 – His Talents Are A Natural Wonder

Two Steves who were musical prodigies and stars when young, in two days. Yesterday, Steve Winwood turned 76 today, happy 74th birthday, Stevie Wonder!

Born prematurely in Saginaw, MI, young Stevland Morris had complications which rendered him blind at a young age. Thankfully his other senses certainly weren’t harmed; by age 11 he could play piano,harmonica and drums and signed to Motown, where Berry Gordy decided to use the moniker “Little Stevie Wonder.” At the time, his money was going into a trust fund, with only a tutor and $2.50 a week stipend provided while he racked up his first hits, including 1963’s “Fingertips Pt.1″, his first #1 hit. 50-odd years, 27 U.S. top 10 singles, 22 Grammys, an Oscar (for best original song, “I Just Called To Say I Love you” from Lady In Red) and a Library of Congress Gershwin Award later, he’s become one of the most beloved musicians in the world. Among his Grammys were Best Male Pop Performance in 1974, ’75, “77 (he must’ve been slacking off in ’76!) and again in ’85 and 2006 and Best Album of 1975 and ’77 for Fulfillingness First Finale and Songs in the Key of Life, respectively.

Rolling Stone rank three of his albums among the 100 greatest of all-time and rank him as the ninth greatest singer ever. They point out that despite his lack of sight, his songs are “very visual, very graphic” and applaud the “richness to his voice, a clarity to all of his inflections.” They’re not alone in being fans. Among his others, Bob Dylan, who said “if anybody (in music) can be called a genius, Stevie Wonder can.” Shania Twain says her wish “as a child was to be Stevie Wonder’s backup singer,” and adds she’d still love to. Barack Obama said “if I had one (musical hero), it would have to be Stevie Wonder. Music of My Mind, Talking Book, Fulfillingness First Finale, Innervisions, and Songs in the Key of Life – those are as brilliant a set of five albums as we’ve seen,” and added that “had I note been a fan, Michelle might not have dated me.” Elvis Costello says of him, “he’s the most influential musician alive,” while Annie Lennox said performing with him was “more important to me than any award” and Bon Jovi’s Richie Sambora says “he was the guy I emulated when I was young.” Paul Simon simply calls Stevie “the composer of his generation.” We’ll give the last word on that to fellow superstar pianist Elton John: “wherever I go in the world, I always take a copy of Songs in the Key of Life. For me, it’s the best album ever made.”

Wonder is currently married to his third wife, Tameeka, and has nine kids ranging from nine to 49! One daughter, Aisha is a singer who’s toured as a part of his backing band. We hope Stevie’s doing well. He apparently had a kidney transplant in 2019 and has been fairly quiet in the music scene since. Still, over 20 Grammys, lauded by Dylan and Elton – how much more does Stevie need to do?

April 25 – Motown Answered Stax With Its Own All Stars

A major hit from Junior made its blew onto the scene this day in 1969. That was Junior Walker & the All Stars sax-happy “What Does It Take (To Win Your Love)?”. The single represented quite a comeback for Junior, who’d scored a major hit five years prior with “Shotgun”, a song which has lived on to this day in numerous commercials and movies. It solidified Walker’s reputation as one of the best sax-men in the business and helped usher in the widespread use of horns in pop or rock songs.

“Junior” was born Autry Mixon, in rural Arkansas in 1931. He seemed to get to music rather late in life, at least in a professional way, forming a band called the Jumping Jerks around the beginning of the ’60s. At some point, a fan jumped on stage with them and declared “these guys are all stars!” Junior agreed and decided that would be a better name for the group. Apparently Berry Gordy agreed as well; soon after the Motown mogul signed them to Soul Records, a subsidiary of Motown. Walker’s prominent tenor sax differentiated them from most of the other Motown acts of the day, and made them (in the words of Britain’s Independent) “Motown’s answer to Stax’s Booker T & the MGs.” They had good success off the bat with “Shotgun” and were a major presence on R&B radio stations and charts in subsequent years but had only minor mainstream success until this.

The song was written by Motown staffers Harvey Fuqua and Johnny Bristol, who also produced the record. It would have been a mere “hurtin’ unrequited love song” were it not for Junior’s impassioned pleading voice – he was one of the rare sax players who also sang lead – and of course, the sax that could rival the best horns Chicago or Blood, Sweat and Tears could have thrown at you in the day. It’s 35-second sax solo intro was like nothing else on air at the time. Which perhaps was why Gordy balked at releasing it as a single.

However, radio DJs found it buried on the Home Cookin’ LP and began playing it, and eventually Motown relented and put it out as a single. A smart move, as it would revitalize the All Stars career and become a gold seller. It got to #4 in the States, topping R&B charts, and made the top 20 in the UK and Canada as well. It was nominated for the very first Best R&B Performance Grammy Award, losing out to the less-remembered King Curtis.

Clarence Clemons later said this was one of the most influential records to him and his playing, and it also found fans in the guys in Foreigner. They liked his playing so much, they wrote a sax part specifically for him on their song “Urgent.” Meanwhile, also in the the ’80s, easy-listening sensation Kenny G re-recorded it and made it a minor hit.

Walker never had as big a hit again, and passed away in 1995 from cancer.

April 23 – Four Tops First Top…Of Charts

The Four Tops were heading to the top on this day in 1965 with the release of one of Motown’s biggest, and best singles – “I Can’t Help Myself (Sugar Pie, Honey Bunch.)” It would go on to be their first #1 single and one of the defining ones of the whole Motown sound of the ’60s.

The quartet had “paid their dues” as they say, having been around for over a decade at that point, and having put out their first single way back in 1956 on Chess Records. They signed to Motown in ’63 and had decent success with “Baby I Need Your Loving” on their first album, with it getting to #11 in the U.S. and making their name known among the growing roster of stars on the Detroit-based label.

Like most of that company’s hits in the first half of the decade, “I Can’t Help Myself” was written by the great trio of Holland-Dozier-Holland, with Lamont Dozier seemingly the chief creator of this one. He admitted the melody was similar to the one in the Supremes “Where Did Our Love Go?”, and when someone had pointed it out to him when tooling around with the new song, he answered “I can’t help myself” – from writing the same tune over again basically. He liked the way the phrase sounded and worked it in, as well as the parenthethical one, “Sugar Pie, Honey Bunch.” That one dates back to his childhood.

“I stayed with my grandmother when I was a kid. She owned a home beauty shop, and when the women would come up the walkway to get their hair done, my grandfather…was a bit of a flirt (and he) would say ‘How you doin’, sugar pie?’ ‘Good morning, honey bunch’…just flirting with a big smile.”

They recorded it with the Funk Brothers – an unfortunately rather anonymous set of Detroit studio musicians – playing the music and Levi Stubbs of the group singing lead…against his wishes. He apparently hated the song, thinking it too lightweight and “sugar”y.

He was in the minority though. At the time Billboard called it a “spirited, fast-paced wailer performed in their unique style”; years later allmusic would simply classify it as “magnificent.” The public agreed, with it spending two weeks on top of the charts that summer and nine weeks at #1 on the R&B one. It also became their first top 40 in the UK, where it eventually was certified gold. And like it or not, 20 years later it was a highlight of their set at Live Aid. At that time, Stubbs seemingly couldn’t help himself from enjoying the moment.

March 7 – Standing In The Shadows, Paul Helped Spotlight Motown Greats & Brother’s Band

Since we quite often try to spotlight great session musicians here, it seems fitting to today spotlight someone who did so on a bigger stage. A movie theater stage as it were. Paul Justman died a year ago today at age 74. Paul worked in film and was mostly known for two things – directing and producing the 2002 movie Standing in the Shadows of Motown, and being the brother of J.Geils Band keyboardist and oft-times songwriter, Seth Justman.

Paul was born in Washington, DC, but moved around some as a child before moving to New York and going to university to get a degree in philosophy. However, his calling seemed to be film. He edited the 1971 movie about the Rolling Stones, CS Blues and worked on a handful of documentaries in the ’70s about things ranging from sculptors to South American politics. The 1980s however, were the MTV years and the high point for his brother’s band and Paul got into music videos directing several massively-popular videos, including not surprisingly J.Geils’ “Centerfold” and “Freeze Frame” as well as ones like “Since You’re Gone” by the Cars, “Don’t Talk to Strangers” by Rick Springfield, and appropriately enough given his future work, one by Diana Ross, “Muscles.” He also got to work for HBO doing some TV shows about artists like Jimmy Cliff and James Brown.

Although he’d directed one borderline-successful Hollywood movie in the ’80s (Rock’n’Roll Hotel , a film about a fictitious band starring Judd Nelson), his ambitions seemed to grow in the 1990s. He made two well-reviewed non-fiction movies about music – The Doors Live In Europe and Deep Purple : Heavy Metal Pioneers. And as far back as 1990 he began planning his magnum opus, which wouldn’t see the light of day until 2002 – Standing in the Shadows Of Motown. The documentary highlighted the sadly under-appreciated and oft unrecognized “Funk Brothers”, the talented session musicians hired by Motown to play on the majority of their 1960s smashes by the likes of The Four Tops, Supremes and Temptations.

They included most famously bassist James Jamerson, but many others like keyboardist Earl Van Dyke and guitarist Joe Messina, “The White Soul Brother.” The musicians were highly talented but Motown made a point of not listing them on the credits and not showing them in performance clips by and large through the ’60s . Justman set out to right that wrong and in the process won both the New York Film Critics’ Award and National Film Critics’ one for Best Non-ficition Film of the Year.

Little else seems written about Paul other than he was survived by his wife Saundra, his famous brother and a sister. So he too is a wee bit anonymous like the Funk Brothers he tried to put the spotlight on. Today we try to do the same for him.

February 17 – Temptations Star Went Higher…In More Ways Than One

We looked at Sly & The Family Stone’s first #1 hit a few days ago and noted how it really pushed the boundaries, mixing together different styles of music like rock, funk and R&B. They were San Francisco-based, and on Epic Records, but their influence spread far from that city and label. Case in point, The Temptations, who put out their ninth – and different-sounding – album, Cloud Nine, on this day in 1969. This came a few months after they had their popularity raised to an even higher level by recording an album with fellow Motown stars The Supremes.

Cloud Nine was different in two ways for them. First, it was the first full record on which Dennis Edwards replaced David Ruffin, who was possibly their most famous individual member upto then. Nonetheless, the vocals and harmonies didn’t seem to suffer for it. But, perhaps more importantly, it signaled a change in direction for the five, from the rather simply-structured love songs they were best known for, like “My Girl”, towards a more complex, funkier musical sound and at times, more downbeat and socially-aware lyrics. And all fingers point towards Sly Stone for being the reason they decided to make a change. There though, the story becomes murky. Some stories suggest that Otis Williams, one of the two Baritones in the group, particular liked the Sly music he was hearing and sold the others on it, despite veteran Motown producer and songwriter Norman Whitfield (who was producing the album) objecting, calling the West coast funk “ a passing fancy.” . The other version is that Whitfield spearheaded the change, walking into the studio “and announcing it was time to shake things up”. Whichever was true, the difference was apparent, at least on Side 1 of the LP. There were three of the ten songs, most notably the nine-minute plus “Runaway Child, Running Wild.” Dealing with a runaway (as the title suggests) who finds the bright lights on the street less fun than they had imagined, and with an instrumental break, it was a far stretch from “My Girl” but did perhaps foreshadow the greatness that would follow in a couple of years with “Papa Was A Rolling Stone.”

Also on the first side was the title track, generally assumed to be promoting drug use (“riding high, on cloud nine!”) and banned by some stations … but winning them their first Grammy nonetheless, for Best R&B Group Performance. They’d win three more regular ones down the road, plus a Lifetime Achievement one in 2013. Sandwiched between those two was their cover of “I Heard It Through The Grapevine”, which had already been a big hit for Marvin Gaye (and a small hit for Gladys Knight) but was co-written by Whitfield himself.

Side 2 was a bit more conventional, with seven shorter songs more in the typical Motown ’60s vein, such as “Love Is A Hurting Thing” and “Hey Girl”, written by Carole King and Gerry Goffin.

One would guess Berry Gordy, the label boss, might not have been happy with the album, given how much resistance he gave Marvin Gaye when he changed his focus to deeper songs with socio-political meaning soon after, but he probably was happy enough after the album hit the stores. “Cloud Nine” was released as a single and hit #6 at home (their seventh top 10 single in the States) and #9 in Canada. It was followed by a shortened version of “Runaway Child, Running Wild” which topped the R&B charts. Both went gold. The album itself reached #4 in the U.S. and became their tenth-straight gold one, with a live one and a greatest hits one included.

Years later, allmusic gave it a solid 4.5-stars, calling it “one of the defining early funk sets”, and calling the title track “audacious” and a “psychedelic frenzy”. They added that “the Temptations brought things back to form on Side 2 (with) their gorgeous vocals dominated the slick arrangements.”

February 8 – No Stop In Motown’s Supreme ’60s Sellers

No one could match The Beatles when it came to enduring popularity in the ’60s, nor in lasting impact on the musical landscape. But some acts did give them a run for their money in terms of commercial appeal back then. It’s been widely noted that The Monkees outsold the Fab Four in that magical year of 1967, and a couple of years before that, Motown was a force to be reckoned with here. Especially, The Supremes.

On this day in 1965, the flagship ladies of Motown put out their classic “Stop! In The Name of Love.” It quickly rose to #1 on Billboard and earned them their second gold single.

Moreover, it was their fourth-straight #1 single, and when the next one of theirs, “Back In My Arms Again” also topped the chart, it gave them five #1s in a row. That’s something even The Beatles could also do only once. They were in the midst of a run of five-straight themselves, starting with “I Feel Fine” and ending with “Yesterday.” In case you’re wondering, the rather forgettable “Boys” ended the string of #1s for the Beatles, while “Nothing But Heartaches” did the same for the ladies.

“Stop! In The Name Of Love” was helped along (as if their popularity needed any boost) by them performing it on the TV show Shindig three weeks after it was released. It featured Diana Ross, Florence Ballard and Mary Wells doing their now-famous choreography and raising their hands up to indicate “Stop!”. It was an enduring hit; Rolling Stone recently ranked it as the 254th greatest song of all-time, praising the “killer Brian Holland hook.” The single came from their sixth album, the optimistically – or arrogantly – titled More Hits From The Supremes. Lucky for Motown, it delivered on that promise and sold better than a million and a half copies itself, a lofty total for an LP back then.

Like much of Motown’s output back then, More Hits From the Supremes could have been titled “More Hits From Holland-Dozier-Holland”. The trio wrote all the songs on it and produced the album as well, something not atypical for them. Add in “I Can’t Help Myself” by the Four Tops to four Supremes #1 hits in ’65 and Holland-Dozier-Holland scored five #1 singles in the year, the same number The Beatles did with Lennon & McCartney writing. In their relatively brief tenure at the Detroit label, Holland-Dozier-Holland would write 25 #1 hits, including ten for the Supremes plus other classics like “How Sweet It Is To Be Loved By You” for Marvin Gaye and Martha & the Vandellas “Heatwave.” If you think this success probably made them popular guys in Motor City, you’re probably right. It’s reported that Lamont Dozier wrote the lyrics after being caught in a motel by his girlfriend, cheating on her.  Dozier laughed “this particular girl is very headstrong… she started swinging, missed me, hit the floor. And I laughed and said ‘Please stop! Stop, in the name of love!'” It stopped the fight and gave him the idea for a hit song. No word on whether the headstrong girlfriend stuck around to enjoy that with him.

The writing trio left Motown in a legal dispute over songwriting royalties, but while that may have slowed the Supremes roll, it far from put an end to it. They scored a number of other hits including the two #1s “Love Child” and “Some Day We’ll Be Together” afterwards, but eventually fell into irrelevance when Diana Ross, bolstered by Motown boss Berry Gordy, decided she was the talent in the group and quit for a solo career. That ended what Billboard rank as the most-successful “girl group” of all-time. “Although there have been many Girl Group smashes in the decades since…no collective since has yet to challenge their, for lack of a better word, supremacy,” that publication says. And when you’re talking five #1 hits inside of a year and a dozen in total, it’s probable none ever will.

February 8 has another, less happy significance to The Supremes; Mary Wilson passed away this day three years ago.

January 29 – ‘Bass’ically An Unknown Great

Remembering the best bassist you’ve never heard of today. Or, even if you have heard of James Jamerson, probably the best bassist – at least according to Bass Player magazine and Rolling Stone, we’ll still look over his life! Jamerson was born this day in 1936. Although he was a session player, he managed to play on at least 23 #1 singles and, according to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, bring the bass “out of the shadows and to the forefront of music.”

Jamerson was born in rural South Carolina, with a musical family. His grandmother was a talented pianist and one aunt a singer. So, not surprisingly, he learned to play piano quite young, and was good at it. He even played a little trombone, perhaps not so well. But when they moved to Detroit in the early-’50s, he found the standup bass and took to it quickly. Soon he was playing in R&B and jazz combos in the clubs there, then touring with Jackie Wilson. About that time, he’d switched to a Fender electric bass. That helped him get his foot in the door at Motown, where by 1960, he was getting regular work as the go-to session bassist. Through the ’60s, he played on the majority of Motown records, often with friends who dubbed themselves the “Funk Brothers.” “Bernadette” by the Four Tops? “You Can’t Hurry Love” by the Supremes? “I Heard It through the Grapevine” or later “What’s Going On?” by Marvin Gaye? All Jamerson on bass, as were countless others. “When they gave me that chord sheet,” he explained, “I’d look at it but I’d just start doing what I felt and what I thought would work.”

Jamerson treated it like a day job, working through the day in the Hitsville studio and often playing in jazz outfits in bars at night. Which he must have enjoyed, since by the late-’60s he was being paid $1000 a week by Motown, or about $8000 today. What he wasn’t getting though was public attention, since Motown would not list session musicians back in that era.

That only changed in 1971, and it started with Marvin. Gaye so wanted Jamerson to play on his “What’s Going On?” single that when he wasn’t in the studio, he sent crew out to look for him. They located James, very drunk, in a bar, and brought him back to Gaye. Unable to stand up, he played the track lying down! Gaye on that album was the first Motown act to list his backing players, putting Jamerson as “the incomparable James Jamerson.”

Things began to change when Motown moved west. Although he followed Berry Gordy & Co. to L.A., their sound was changing and he was less in demand. He quit the label in 1973, but kept quite busy through the decade working on albums by the likes of Tavares, Gladys Knight & the Pips, Marilyn McCoo and Billy Davis, and even Robert Palmer. The workload lessened more in the ’80s as his drinking escalated and he refused to alter his playing style to suit the times. Sadly he died in 1983 from a combination of cirrhosis and pneumonia. His son James Jamerson Jr. followed in dad’s footsteps, also being a well-received professional bassist, playing on records by the likes of Janet Jackson, Phillip Bailey and Aretha Franklin and also  sadly died quite young, in 2016.

Although not well-known to the listening public by name, other musicians took note, including Paul McCartney who cited James as a major influence on his bass-playing. In 2000, the Rock Hall inducted him, saying Jamerson “bestowed the funkiest, grooviest basslines in the Motown catalogue.” Since then, both Rolling Stone and Bass Player have listed him as the greatest bassist ever. The latter said he “wrote the bible on bassline construction and development.” Not bad for an anonymous player!

January 20 – Mature Marvin Miffed Motown Mogul

Marvin Gaye proved that just being the boss doesn’t automatically make you right on this day in 1971. That was when he released – much to the consternation of Motown boss Berry Gordy Jr.’s consternation – the great single “What’s Going On?” A few months later, he’d release the highly-successful album of the same name.

Gordy didn’t like the song, and especially didn’t like Gaye doing it. Which, coincidentally it wasn’t really supposed to be at first. The song was brought to life by Renaldo Benson of the Four Tops, when he saw police violently quell an anti-war demonstration in California. He asked his bandmates and friends “what’s going on?” and pondering the validity of the Vietnam War as well as the response to protest. He and Motown staff writer Al Cleveland wrote the song…more or less. Benson wanted his band to record it, but the other Tops would have no part of it, telling him they didn’t do “protest songs.” He argued “no man, it’s a love song about love and understanding.” But they didn’t buy in, so in turn he offered it to Marvin. Gaye rewrote some lyrics and changed the pacing a little. In his words, “we measured him for the suit, then he tailored the hell out of it!”

Indeed he did. As the Detroit Free Press noted, he was by then tired of singing love songs, and the “death of singing partner Tammi Terrell had shaken him up, letters from his brother in Vietnam concerned him.” He had an idea of a very easy-sounding song that would have dramatic punch. He got that recording in Detroit, with some of the regular “Funk Brothers” musicians like guitarist Robert White and bassist James Jamerson as well as a few of his own musician friends. Then he even invited a couple of Detroit Lions football players and some rank-and-file Motown staff into the studio to sing some backing vocals and chat (the talking in the background that makes the song so unusual sounding) and doubtless partake of a little of the ganja that Gaye had in good supply to help keep things “mellow.”

Gordy didn’t like the idea of Gaye doing a protest song, but when he heard the finished product… he disliked it even more. He called it “the worst thing I ever heard in my life.” Initially he refused to release it, let alone as a lead-off single from a forthcoming album. However, Gaye stood his ground and more or less threatened to go on strike against Motown until it came out. The label owner decided discretion was the better part of valor as next to Diana Ross, Gaye was probably his biggest single star at that time. The rest is history.

The single sold better than 200 000 copies in its first week, and by year’s-end had become Motown’s biggest-selling single at that point. It got to #2 in the U.S. (he’d had a #1 before with “I Heard It Through the Grapevine” but this one outsold that) and was his seventh #1 R&B hit. It’s popularity then did seem restricted to the Red, White and Blue however; it failed to crack the top 60 in the UK, Canada or Australia. (As an aside, that is an odd statistic because a check of that singles chart for Toronto, Canada’s biggest market, showed it made it to #10 in May.) However, through the years it became acclaimed internationally.

Rolling Stone have consistently listed it among the top 10 greatest songs of all-time, ranking it #6 in their most recent stab at that list. VH1 considered it the 14^th greatest song ever, and in Motown itself, the Free Press readers voted it as the second “greatest Detroit song of all-time”, behind only Aretha’s “Respect.” They label the song “timeless and timely” and praise Gaye who “wasn’t shoving anything into listeners faces (but) he was leading them by the hand.”

Most reports suggest Berry Gordy never did warm up much to the record. But we bet he did warm to the influx of money to his company’s coffers from it. Of course, many of the problems Gaye decried remain relevant to this day and in 2019, his estate put out a new video for the song, cut with news footage and overdubbed dialog.

December 8 – Hit Album? Certainly Not Just Once In His Life

He was only 18, but it was becoming clear “little” Stevie Wonder was going to become a big star. On this day in 1968, he put out his eleventh album overall, For Once In My Life. A busy teen, it was his second album of that fall alone, following the overlooked instrumental work, Eivets Rednow (which was his name spelled backwards, in case you’re wondering.)

While not as great as much of the work that he brought out in the following decade, it gave us a clear indication of the talent he had…and would continue to develop. For example, it was the first record on which he used the clavinet, an instrument he would become the master on with later songs like “Superstition”. Although he had lots of help in the studio for this album, he did play harmonica, drums and various other percussion instruments on it, and co-wrote 8 of the 12 tunes. An indication perhaps of how excited about Stevie Motown was – one of the songs on the album, “The House on the Hill” was co-written by the label’s owner, Berry Gordy. And why wouldn’t they be excited about his potential? He’d been recording since he was a pre-teen and already had seven U.S. top 20 singles. As well, while Motown had a number of consistent hit makers (The Supremes, Four Tops etc), few could write their own songs or play instruments like Wonder could.

Among the noteworthy tracks on it were “Shoo-Be-Doo-Be-Doo-Day”, which became his sixth U.S. top 10 single, his cover of Bobby Hebb’s “Sunny” and of course the great title track, which hit #2 in the U.S. #3 in the UK and #5 in Canada. However, allmusic (which rated the album as 3-stars, calling it “one of Wonder’s more consistent albums of the ’60s”) said the “real find” on it was “I Don’t Know Why”, which became a top 40 hit as a two-sided single. The other side was pretty good too, the song which would end up being the title track to his next album, “My Cherie Amour.”

November 30 – Public Loved Those Supremes, Child

Although they were Black, American and female, it may be reasonable to say in terms of popular appeal, no one rivaled White, British male quartet The Beatles as much as The Supremes in the 1960s. They hit #1 on the U.S. charts for the 11th time on this day 55 years ago, in 1968…which was second to only the Fab Four who’d had 17 chart-toppers by that point in the ’60s. Elvis, by way of comparison, had tallied “only” five thus far in the decade, none of them after 1962. Appropriately enough, this single knocked a Beatles single (“Hey Jude”) off the top spot.

While it was therefore normal enough for The Supremes to be sitting atop singles’ charts in their homeland, “Love Child” was a departure for them for several reasons. things were changing at Motown and that was reflected in several ways on this record. First off, Berry Gordy Jr., the boss of the label, was having a romantic relationship with the group’s lead singer, Diana Ross. That no doubt colored his view of the money-making girl group and for “Love Child”, they were labeled Diana Ross & the Supremes for the first time. This didn’t sit all that well with Mary Wilson, the other remaining original member of a group which had started in Detroit nine years earlier (as The Primettes), nor with Cindy Birdsong, who’d just been recruited to replace Florence Ballard who was turfed not long before.

Making matters worse, internally, was that not only were The Supremes relegated to backing status behind Diana, but they weren’t even brought to the studio to sing on this hit! Gordy used some of his studio musicians to add backing voices to Ross. On TV performances, they were dressed far more casually than in the evening gowns they’d usually adorned themselves in earlier. Then there was the subject matter.

While the Supremes had built a huge following with peppy love songs like “Baby Love” and “You Can’t Hurry Love”, and a few “hurtin’” type love songs like “Love Is Here and Now you’re Gone”, this single, while remaining upbeat in tempo was decidedly more serious in nature. The lyrics about a girl trying to put her boyfriend off having sex, not for a lack of desire but rather a fear of pregnancy, then relating how she too was from a single-parent home in a “old cold, run-down tenement slum” was quite racy and controversial for ’60s radio. The shift was as likely as not a direct result of it being their first hit not written by Holland-Dozier-Holland, who were feuding with Gordy as many seemed to be doing then. Gordy brought in some other Motown talent known as “The Clan” to write and produce the new Diana Ross and the Supremes record.

“The Clan” consisted of R. Dean Taylor (a producer who’d later hit the charts himself with “Indiana Wants Me”), Deke Richards, Pam Sawyer and Frank Wilson. Talented writers and producers all, but with different perspectives from the traditional Motown Holland-Dozier-Holland trio.

It the sound was a bit different, it wasn’t deterring to the public. It raced up the charts to #1 at home and in Canada as well only weeks after first being performed, on (yet another Beatles parallel) the Ed Sullivan Show.

Ross quit the band about a year later to go solo; The Supremes carried on without her until 1977. However, Gordy may have been guided by his ear as well as his, umm, “manly parts”… while Ross would go on to have six more #1 singles by 1981, the Supremes never got above #7 again and essentially were commercially irrelevant by 1971.