Too Many Song Snippets by Barely Identified Artists, and
Too Much Whitewashing
by MARK GABRISH CONLAN
Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights
reserved
Our “feature”
for last night was the long-awaited and heavily hyped Motown 60: A Grammy
Celebration on CBS, which turned out to be
a horrendous disappointment, mainly because instead of the way the previous
Grammy tributes to the Beatles, Elton John and Stevie Wonder (who, as one of the few survivors from
Motown’s glory days, was prominently featured last night) have done — both
veterans and modern singers doing complete songs from the artists being paid tribute to — the show
was co-hosted by Smokey Robinson and the thoroughly repulsive piece of garbage
known as “Cedric the Entertainer,” whose attempts to pose as a D.J. in various
historical eras of Motown music were disgusting and took the edge off the show.
It opened
magnificently with Wonder leading the house band in a performance of his
beautiful song “Sir Duke,” in which one of the great Black musical geniuses of
the 20th century paid tribute to another, Duke Ellington, reflecting
a sense of history that got lost in the relentless “first-itis” (my term for
the tendency of biographers in any medium claiming that the person, people or
institution they’re biographing were the first to do a particular thing, when
there are plenty of other people who did it before them) of this program. The
main problem with Motown 60: A Grammy Celebration was that all too many of the songs and singers were reduced to mere
snippets — among the first numbers was a weird round-robin in which some white
women singers with long blonde hair were given bits of Motown songs to warble,
but no one bothered to provide anything more than a quickly barked announcement
of who any of these people were.
After “Sir Duke”
the show introduced Smokey Robinson and Motown founder Berry Gordy, who was
prominently featured throughout the program. Not surprisingly, he’s so old he
seemed like an éminence noir haunting
the show, and of course his presence ensured that the show wouldn’t cover some
of the darker aspects of the Motown legacy and the extent to which Motown
sometimes seemed like an ante-bellum plantation whose evils were onmy mitigated
by the plantation owner’s being the same color as his sharecroppers. One case
in point is the abruptness with which he relocated the company from Detroit to
Los Angeles in the early 1970’s without any notice to the members of his staff, including the Funk
Brothers, the great backing band that had played on virtually all Motown’s
great early records. They suddenly found themselves out of work and reduced to
scuffling in jazz clubs, playing the sorts of gigs that had more or less
supported them before Berry Gordy founded his label in 1959.
Robinson and
Gordy did a reproduction of the scene in which Robinson demonstrated the song
“Shop Around,” Motown’s first hit, to Gordy — who released the record and then,
after it was already on the market, demanded that the song be redone so he’d
have a tighter master that would have a better shot at becoming a hit. Then we
got Robinson doing a complete version of “Shop Around,” and after that a great
film clip from the August 25, 1966 Ed Sullivan Show featuring Diana Ross and the Supremes doing “You
Can’t Hurry Love.” Unfortunately, they cut away from that clip to a modern-day
blonde-haired white singer doing the same song, followed by other mediocre
modern would-be divas doing “Ain’t Nothin’ Like the Real Thing” (a title almost
too ironic in this context!) and
“Please, Mr. Postman.”
Then another
singer whose name sounded like “Fontane Bell” in the quickly barked-out intro
did a nice version of Mary Wells’ hit “My Guy.” Wells had one of the saddest
stories of any of the Motown pioneers. After “My Guy,” the biggest hit of her
career, she abruptly left Motown and signed with 20th Century-Fox
Records, which had absolutely no idea of how to record or promote a Black
singer, and her career plummeted before she got deathly ill and died way too soon. The medley ended with Thelma Houston, who
at least got the dignity of a proper introduction and the opportunity to
perform a complete song, doing her 1977 hit “Don’t Leave Me This Way” — which I
couldn’t help but joke to Charles, “A song from that brief period in which
disco was actually good.”
After that John
Legend was brought on to do two songs from Marvin Gaye’s classic 1970 album
What’s Going On, the first time anyone at
Motown had performed socially conscious material on record. Legend’s voice has
seemed awfully anemic to me in other contexts but here he rose to the material,
doing heartfelt versions of “Mercy Mercy Me (The Ecology)” and “What’s Going
On” that were better than almost anyone else currently alive could have done. That
was the good part; the bad part was the rank example of first-itis in which he
introduced the songs by saying that nobody else before Gaye had combined music
and activism.
With my usual
snottiness, I yelled at the TV, “Does the name ‘Woody Guthrie’ mean anything to
you?” — and Charles followed me by naming other Black performers who had combined music and activism,
including Billie Holiday and Nina Simone. (We could also have mentioned Black
jazz musicians Charles Mingus and Max Roach — in 1960 Roach and his then-wife
Abbey Lincoln collaborated on the album We Insist! Freedom Now Suite, a Black concept album about civil rights and
liberation a decade before What’s Going On.) Then a heavy-set older Black woman whom I presumed was Gladys Knight
was pulled out of the audience to sing “I Heard It Through the Grapevine” and
an old Black guy was put on stage to do the Temptations’ big hit, “My Girl.”
Of course the
show didn’t mention that Marvin Gaye had had to fight with Berry Gordy to be
allowed to make What’s Goin’ On and it
was only the huge success of his
version of “Grapevine” — he released the biggest hit of his career just when
his Motown contract was expiring — that enabled Gaye to overcome Gordy’s
prejudice against political material. Coming off the huge success of
“Grapevine.” Gaye was able to give Gordy an ultimatum: “If you want me to stay
on the label, What’s Goin’ On is
my next record.” Following those two odd bits, the show did a tribute to
Motown’s previous TV specials, highlighted by a weird clip of Diana Ross in
drag as Charlie Chaplin in a rather lame tribute to silent-movie comedy.
Then the show
moved on to Motown in the 1970’s and did something surprisingly creative — a
modern woman singer named Sierra got to
do a cover of Rick James’ “Super Freak” — it’s still not a great song but it
takes on a quite different, and more liberating, affect when sung by a woman!
Then Smokey Robinson did a medley of some of his hits that began with one of
the show’s most moving moments — a chorus of “Tracks of My Tears” backed only
by a softly played electric guitar — and while the rest of the medley (“Ooh,
Baby, Baby,” “Tears of a Clown” and “Just to See Her”) didn’t sustain the
intimate mood it was still quite capable singing from a veteran whose voice has
held up remarkably well.
After that they did an expanded version of Jennifer Lopez’s
God-awful tribute to Motown from the last Grammy Awards show, which was
criticized at the time because the Latina Lopez was performing songs created
and introduced by African-Americans. That didn’t bother me as much as the whole
ultra-sexual context of Lopez’s act. Motown’s own performers had moved in
tight, respectable moves worked out by veteran Black tap dancer “Honi” Coles,
but they hadn’t dressed in spangled street-hooker outfits and shaken their
asses at the audience the way Lopez did.
Then there was a
tribute to Motown’s great songwriters — Eddie and Brian Holland, Lamont Dozier,
Valerie Simpson, Mickey Stevenson — and after that the show reached higher
ground with Stevie Wonder singing a great version of “Higher Ground.” (His
voice has deteriorated more than Robinson’s has but he’s still a great
performer with enough vocal chops to put over his classics.) He followed it
with “Never Thought You’d Leave in Summer,” the song he wrote for his first
wife, Syreeta Wright, who died young of cancer just as her own career was
taking off. Wonder’s song to his late wife was followed by an “In Memoriam”
segment that rather gave short shrift to the Funk Brothers (especially James
Jamerson, whose famous hesitation bass beat basically was the Motown sound) and oddly showed Michael Jackson
via a Bad-era picture with his
face bleached a ghostly white (how did he do that?). “Couldn’t they have found a more Black-looking photo of
him?” I asked, and Charles agreed.
After that
Ne-Yo, the surprisingly good retro-soul singer (from his stage name I expected
him to be a rapper, but blessedly he isn’t), did a medley of miscellaneous
Motown hits including “I Need You,” the Jackson 5’s “I’ll Be There” and Lionel
Richie’s “All Night Long.” (I’m still
bitter that Richie won the 1984 Grammy Album of the Year award over the year’s
two towering masterpieces, Bruce Springsteen’s Born in the U.S.A. and Prince’s Purple Rain.)
Then came Diana
Ross’s segment, which featured songs from the two movies she made under
Motown’s auspices — her botched Billie Holiday biopic Lady Sings the Blues (I can barely type out a reference to that film
without wanting to barf!) and Mahogany, the latter directed by Berry Gordy himself and a lousy but
delightfully campy film best remembered as a 90-minute music video for one of
Ross’s greatest post-Supremes records, “Do You Know Where You’re Going To?”
That’s the song she led off with last night, following it with two Billie Holiday
covers — “Good Morning, Heartache” and “My Man” — that showed off both her
strengths (a basically attractive voice that has survived the years remarkably
well) and her weaknesses (almost no instinct for phrasing — at which Billie
was, of course, the Master — and a tendency for just the sort of overwrought
melodrama Billie eschewed).
Of course, on
“My Man” she’s competing not only with Billie Holiday (whose first recording
from 1937 features a different, less abject lyric on the verse and an altogether
tougher attitude than her two remakes from 1948 and 1952) but with Fanny Brice
(who first introduced this song, originally a French piece called “Mon Homme,”
to American audiences in 1920), Alice Faye (who sang it surprisingly movingly
in the unofficial Brice biopic Rose of Washington Square in 1939) and Barbra Streisand (who sang it in the official Brice biopic Funny Girl in 1968).
Then there was a
speech by Berry Gordy in which he said, “Motown made music for all people” — which has become the company’s party-line
response to the criticism they and the Grammy organization got for picking
Lopez instead of an African-American artist for the Grammy Awards’ Motown
tribute, but which has a great deal of truth. Berry Gordy famously turned down
Aretha Franklin as “too rough” — the same words a previous Black record
entrepreneur, W. C. Handy, had used in turning down Bessie Smith — meaning he
didn’t think Aretha’s voice would appeal to white audiences. It eventually did,
but as I wrote in my obituary for Aretha it’s certainly arguable that white
listeners needed to be acclimated to Black music via the pop-soul of Motown
before they could accept the unvarnished soul of Aretha in 1967.
The show went out on a high note with a
finale led by Stevie Wonder doing the great song “Signed, Sealed, Delivered
(I’m Yours)” — a great ending to a show that missed as many points as it made,
and would have been considerably better if they’d treated both the material and
the artists with more respect.
