A Motown Christmas (Alternate Reality Productions, The Springhill Company, KelChris, Motown, aired December 11, 2024)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night’s “feature” was a sometimes inspiring and sometimes ponderous show called A Motown Christmas, which didn’t just confine itself to the Christmas songs a number of Motown artists recorded but included generalized tributes to their entire careers. At least two of the key artists from Motown’s glory days (from 1959, when the label released its first hit – “Shop Around” by Smokey Robinson and The Miracles – to 1972, when abruptly and without notice to anybody Motown founder Berry Gordy packed up and moved the label from its Detroit origins to Los Angeles) who are still alive, Diana Ross and Stevie Wonder, weren’t part of the show. Robinson and Black singer Halle Bailey (whom at first I got confused with Halle Berry), opened it with “Winter Wonderland,” after which Martha Reeves and The Vandellas, with guest singer Ashanti, did a medley of three of Reeves’s biggest hits: “Dancing in the Street,” “Nowhere to Hide,” and “Heat Wave.” Reeves’s voice is hardly what it used to be (a bit of a disappointment; mostly Black singers’ voices have held up better than white ones because of the professional vocal training they got from choir directors in the Black churches where most of them started out) but she still had some infectious soul growls with which to punctuate the classic songs. Then a woman named Jordin Sparks came out and did the song “This Christmas,” originally recorded in 1970 by Donny Hathaway (who also co-wrote it with Nadine Theresa McKinnor) for Atlantic’s subsidiary Atco, but which became identified with Motown when The Temptations and Gladys Knight and The Pips both recorded it for their Motown Christmas albums. Then came the cast of the current Broadway show MJ : The Musical covering the Jackson 5’s version of “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town” and Smokey Robinson doing his own medley of three non-Christmas hits for him: “Tears of a Clown,” “Being with You,” and “Tracks of My Tears.”

After that an odd apparition named mgk – that’s how he was billed – who was white, tall, lanky, with a skinny body, a punk haircut, and lots of body art and piercings in odd places, did a quite well-done cover of the late George Michael’s “Last Christmas” (ironically, Michael died just as his record company was doing a holiday-season reissue of “Last Christmas,” so it really was his last Christmas!). For the first chorus mgk did the song at the same medium tempo Michael had used, but then he sped it up and “Last Christmas” essentially became a punk-rock song. After that came a multi-artist tribute to the late Marvin Gaye: October London doing a medley of three of his hits (“I Want You,” “Come Get to This” – from his sex-themed 1971 concept album Let’s Get It On – and “What’s Going On?”) followed by him and the white singer Jojo reproducing the classic duet between Gaye and Tammi Terrell on “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough” and Jojo singing “I Heard It Through the Grapevine.” That last song was actually a hit for Gladys Knight and The Pips in 1967; Gaye and his band were just doing a slowed-down jam on it in the Motown studio the following year when Berry Gordy stopped by and ordered the recording machine turned on. When he played it back he decided that, even though the song had already been a hit for Gladys Knight, Gaye’s version was different enough it could be a hit for him, too. Gaye’s “Grapevine” became the biggest hit of his career, just at a time when he needed it most: his contract with Motown was about to expire and he was fighting with Gordy over his ambitious project for a political concept album, What’s Going On? Gordy insisted that Motown was just an entertainment company and as long as he ran it, it wasn’t going to release politically-themed material; Gaye equally strongly insisted that if Gordy wanted him to renew his contract with Motown, What’s Going On? would be his next album. Eventually Gordy caved, Gaye recorded What’s Going On?, and it would generate three hit singles and be acclaimed as Gaye’s masterpiece.

Given that background, I was a bit surprised that director Leon Knoles didn’t have Gladys Knight sing “I Heard It Through the Grapevine” – she did have the first hit on it, after all – but they decided to present it as part of a Gaye tribute instead, and Knight followed it up with a medley of two lesser-known but still popular songs, “Best Thing that Ever Happened to Me” and “I Got to Use My Imagination.” After that the show presented a tribute to The Four Tops – all of whose original members are dead by now, so they enlisted the mostly a cappella group Pentatonix for the tribute: “Reach Out, I’ll Be There,” “It’s the Same Old Song,” and “(Sugar Pie, Honey Bunch) I Can’t Help Myself.” I was trying to figure out whether the backup band for everyone else was contributing any parts to the Pentatonix performance – at least one woman in the band was visibly shaking a tambourine and I looked for evidence that the Pentatonickers weren’t supplying all the “instrumental” parts themselves. (Pentatonix even has one member who does an annoying impression of a drum machine, an effect I could do without.) Then Ashanti came back for a cover of Eartha Kitt’s delightful pre-Motown novelty “Santa Baby” and Audra Day belted out “For Once in My Life,” written as a ballad by Ron Miller and Orlando Murlen in 1965 but best known for the uptempo version Stevie Wonder recorded two years later. After that the MJ: The Musical cast returned for a medley of Jackson 5 hits: “Stop! The Love You Save May Be Your Own,” “I Want You Back,” and “ABC.” (My husband Charles, born in 1962 – seven years before “ABC” was released – said that “ABC” was the first pop song he specifically recalled from his childhood.) Then Halle Bailey returned for a three-song tribute to Diana Ross and The Supremes: “Stop! In the Name of Love,” “Baby Love,” and “You Keep Me Hanging On.”

The next group up was The Temptations, or at least the rump group thereof currently touring under that name (which Motown owns) since the original members are all dead, doing “My Girl” (the lead singer on that was good but hardly in the same league as the late David Ruffin, who sang lead on the original), “Ain’t Too Proud to Beg,” and “Get Ready.” After that there was a four-artist tribute to the living but unaccountably absent Stevie Wonder, including Jamie Foxx kicking off the proceedings with “The Little Drummer Boy,” followed by Audra Day singing “Sir Duke” (a particular favorite of mine because it’s about Duke Ellington: one African-American musical genius paying tribute to another!), Jordin Sparks on “Superstition” and gospel star Be Be Winans, appropriately enough, on Wonder’s closest approach to a gospel song, “Higher Ground.” There were two more songs before the show closed, Gladys Knight doing “Midnight Train to Georgia” (ironically not a Motown recording – she made it for Buddah Records in 1973 – and originally a white country song by Jim Weatherly called “Midnight Plane to Houston” until Black singer Cissy Houston, Whitney Houston’s mother, offered to record it if he agreed to change the lyric to “Midnight Train to Georgia”) and an ensemble performance of “Joy to the World.” I’m sure some viewers were disappointed that Motown’s Christmas special didn’t include more Christmas songs, but the tribute was nicely done and the band was pretty good even though whoever the bass player was had a hard time reproducing the famous hesitation beat of Motown’s founding bassist, James Jamerson. (Then again, no one living can play like Jamerson; even Jamerson’s son, on the documentary Standing in the Shadows of Motown, admitted that he couldn’t play those licks without using at least two plucking fingers, where Jamerson, Sr. just used one.)