RIP Michael Jackson (1958-2009)

If you're a member of the baby boomer generation, you remember exactly where you were at the moment presidents, civil rights leaders and Beatles were assassinated. I'd wager many also remember where they were the night in 1983 when Michael Jackson performed Billie Jean live on the anniversary special Motown 25. I know I do.

I was in my apartment in Columbus, Ohio, and can still recall virtually self-ejecting from my couch when he began his performance; he had just completed some minutes of a crowd-pleasing medley of songs with his brothers. They walked off, Michael made a few goofy transitional remarks, then donned a fedora and launched into the vamp seen around the world. I know I stood and gyrated, literally awestruck, for the duration of the performance, while the Thriller held the audience of millions in the palm of his gloved hand. It was a seminal moment in the history of rock music.

I just saw a YouTube comment to the effect that Michael Jackson was our generation's Elvis Presley. I'd never thought about it before, but in many respects it's probably true. At his peak, he was a phenomenal musical artist who had powers over audiences that will probably be studied for years. I'm reminded of a recent visit to the Rock Hall, and the wing I entered where Billie Jean was suddenly pumped through the sound system. For a brief moment I pondered whether to maintain a modicum of decorum since other people were around, but in the end I told myself "you're at the Rock Hall, fool!" and, throwing my self-consciousness to the winds, I gyrated and thrilled to the song just as I had in 1983. I don't know who saw me, nor do I care.

Despite his status as a preteen, somehow when Jackson sang I Want You Back (1969) and I'll Be There (1970) it came across as right, not creepy and exploitative. For all his descent into childishness as he got older, as a youth he seemed a very old soul. Plain and simple, he had a luminous pre-adolescent voice and his confidence onstage just couldn't be denied.

I don't know why Jackson became the bizarre tortured ghoul that he was for far too many of his later years - or why, for all his money, no one ever stepped in to help him lead a more normal life. Perhaps that was impossible; maybe all superstars are destined to self-destruct. His abusive upbringing certainly had to have affected him at the most molecular level; that he had it within him to channel his life force the way he did is an amazing testament to the human being's ability to transcend the most life-obliterating circumstances.

Sad to say I can't help but think that's he's better off now. Rest in peace, Michael.

Don't Mess With Bill, Marvelettes (1965)

Yesterday I received a cryptic message from my friend Barry - almost like a cry in the wilderness! - asking for a Marvelettes song. His wish is my command.

Motown, which turns 50 this month, had a hierarchy for its artists, and the A-list got most of the attention, a list that was more or less constructed on the basis of Berry Gordy's sense of who had the greatest crossover potential into the largely white pop charts. With that in mind, consider the "marvelous" Marvelettes, who were second tier at best, but still given songs such as the sultry, even menacing, classic Don't Mess With Bill. Written and produced by the master, Smokey Robinson, with uber-funk rhythm provided by the man some called the greatest bass player who ever lived, James Jamerson, this song reaches out and hooks you from the first note.

First, there's that priceless, take-no-prisoners title. On that basis alone, it was a single destined for the charts. But that aside, the song stands out in its directness, its absence of sugar-coating.

Under the heading of "where's the justice?" I'm wondering why the group who delivered Motown's first-ever #1 hit and put the company on the map - Please Mr. Postman, the week of December 11, 1961 - ended up on that second tier. The group had two equally strong lead singers - Wanda Young Rogers and Gladys Horton (it's Young on Don't Mess With Bill, Rogers on Postman) - and seemingly as much star power as any of the other girl groups. Everything I've been able to find on this indicates there were a lot of internal politics and competition between them and the Supremes, who were viewed as more refined than the Marvelettes and thus easier to groom for pop stardom. (They hailed from a rural area outside of Detroit.) One source even reveals that the Marvelettes declined to record Baby Love in 1964, for what reasons I do not know.

Although the Rock Hall has not seen fit to recognize their seminal influence (eligible since 1986, they've never even been considered, according to futurerockhall.com, a fascinating repository of commentary on the decisionmaking of the Rock Hall powers-that-be), they were inducted into the Vocal Group Hall of Fame in 2004.

A curious related YouTube find is a fellow from the UK who channels Jamerson, and demonstrates the bassline in numerous videos of Jamerson signature songs, including this one. He has many appreciative fans who can't get over his mastery of Jamerson's improvisatory style, which involved plucking the strings with only the index finger of his right hand while adding embellishments that no one had previously heard.

As Don Was says in the Standing in the Shadows of Motown documentary, "You have to be absolutely fearless to play those notes in that place and yet be responsible for the bottom of the groove like that." Although the public knew little about him or any of the other Funk Brothers until the documentary was released, his work inspired many bassists who came after him including Paul McCartney, who, in an interview with Bass Guitar magazine, called Jamerson his "hero," because he was "so good and melodic."

Now go sway to Don't Mess With Bill.

RIP Levi Stubbs (1936-2008)

It seems I've already written most of what I'd want to say about the soul paragon Levi Stubbs in my July 6, 2008, post about Ask the Lonely. So I'll just repeat it below and maybe a few new people will read it. By all accounts, Levi was an uncommonly decent and certainly talented soul, and his passing is a bittersweet reminder of those days of baby boomer innocence that seem so far away now, when his inspiring voice was so much a part of the musical backdrop of my own lonely existence. I'll just add in two other favorite Four Tops songs that were perfect showcases of the instrument Levi was blessed with: It's the Same Old Song and their beautiful interpretation of the Left Banke's Walk Away Renee.

*************************************************************************
Sometimes it's hard to believe what it takes for people with mammoth talent to hit the big time. If we had to guess, we wouldn't imagine, for example, that a Levi Stubbs, with his magnificently evocative baritone, along with his fellow Four Tops, would have had to spend more than a decade finding an audience when they started singing together after high school. But that is in fact what happened.

Along with his boyhood friends Duke Fakir, Obie Benson and Lawrence Payton, the Detroit-based Tops, originally known as the Four Aims, were the hardest working men in show business for years and years while they worked the club circuit, often as a backing group for the likes of Billy Eckstine, Brook Benton and Della Reese. One single each with Columbia, Red Top and Chess Records didn't even get them the exposure they needed.

As with so many talented acts, it took being discovered by Berry Gordy in 1963, taken under the Motown tent, and given the right material for the rest of the world to catch on. At first, though, the Tops were used in a jazz subsidiary Gordy had, which didn't pan out, and later contributed only backing vocals to other acts, as on the Supremes' When the Lovelight Starts Shining Through His Eyes.

But in 1964, house songwriters Holland-Dozier-Holland had the necessary epiphany and Baby I Need Your Lovin' launched them as an act to be reckoned with. All those years perfecting their dance moves and vocal arrangements paid off in ways even they probably could never have predicted. (Atypically for any successful act of that time, the Tops' original lineup remained constant for 40 years although they left Motown in 1967.)

Of all the Four Tops songs, I think Ask the Lonely, their second hit (not an H-D-H composition but rather written by Mickey Stevenson, Motown's A&R director, and songwriter Ivy Jo Hunter), woke people up to the group's enduring possibilities. I know it did me.

Though the many songs that followed generally charted higher than Ask the Lonely did, Stubbs' heartbreaking delivery and the silky smooth harmony line of Fakir, Benson and Payton made this one cathartic and downright irresistible. The Four Tops at their absolute best.

Cool Jerk, Capitols (1966)

We all looked pretty goofy when we danced in the 60s, and never goofier than when we got down to the fabulous soul ditty Cool Jerk by the Capitols. But who cared - this song was pure kinetic energy that converted instantly to joy - which can happen when you're, as the song said, cookin' and smokin.'

The person we have to thank for this is Ollie McLaughlin, one disc jockey and record producer who refused to be dwarfed by the Motown juggernaut. Based outside of Detroit in Ann Arbor, not exactly an urban hotbed, McLaughlin started three record labels, named them after his daughters Karen, Carla and Moira, and started to turn out and promote artists that captured the attention of young America, including Del Shannon and Barbara Lewis.

Motown's house band, the Funk Brothers, were known to moonlight, and if the instrumental arrangement of Cool Jerk sounds vaguely familiar, it's because some of the Funk Brothers were serving it up in their spare time. That's Bob Babbitt on bass, Johnny Griffith on piano and Eddie Willis on guitar, and it was as tasty as tasty could be. The Capitols themselves were singer and drummer Sam George, guitarist Donald Storball (who wrote the song), and keyboardist Richard McDougall.

Nothing much happened for the Capitols after Cool Jerk, and I don't recall ever seeing them even perform it anywhere. However, Parliament/Funkadelic's Bootsy Collins gives it all he's got with the surviving Funk Brothers in their documentary Standing in the Shadows of Motown. Catch it if you can.

Ask the Lonely, Four Tops (1965)

Sometimes it's hard to believe what it takes for people with mammoth talent to hit the big time. If we had to guess, we wouldn't imagine, for example, that a Levi Stubbs, with his magnificently evocative baritone, along with his fellow Four Tops, would have had to spend more than a decade finding an audience when they started singing together after high school. But that is in fact what happened.

Along with his boyhood friends Duke Fakir, Obie Benson and Lawrence Payton, the Detroit-based Tops, originally known as the Four Aims, were the hardest working men in show business for years and years while they worked the club circuit, often as a backing group for the likes of Billy Eckstine, Brook Benton and Della Reese. One single each with Columbia, Red Top and Chess Records didn't even get them the exposure they needed.

As with so many talented acts, it took being discovered by Berry Gordy in 1963, taken under the Motown tent, and given the right material for the rest of the world to catch on. At first, though, the Tops were used in a jazz subsidiary Gordy had, which didn't pan out, and later contributed only backing vocals to other acts, as on the Supremes' When the Lovelight Starts Shining Through His Eyes.

But in 1964, house songwriters Holland-Dozier-Holland had the necessary epiphany and Baby I Need Your Lovin' launched them as an act to be reckoned with. All those years perfecting their dance moves and vocal arrangements paid off in ways even they probably could never have predicted. (Atypically for any successful act of that time, the Tops' original lineup remained constant for 40 years although they left Motown in 1967.)

Of all the Four Tops songs, I think Ask the Lonely, their second hit (not an H-D-H composition but rather written by Mickey Stevenson, Motown's A&R director, and songwriter Ivy Jo Hunter), woke people up to the group's enduring possibilities. I know it did me.

Though the many songs that followed generally charted higher than Ask the Lonely did, Stubbs' heartbreaking delivery and the silky smooth harmony line of Fakir, Benson and Payton made this one cathartic and downright irresistible. The Four Tops at their absolute best.

Ain't No Mountain High Enough, Marvin Gaye & Tammi Terrell (1967)

And speaking of duets ... I've been wrestling for weeks now over which Marvin Gaye song to include here. There were so many, and he was such a gifted, though tormented, soul. The obvious choice is What's Going On, which is anthemic and for the ages, but something keeps calling me back to Ain't No Mountain High Enough.

And I know the reason for it. In any video you see of Marvin singing this Nick Ashford-Valerie Simpson classic with his beloved Tammi Terrell, you see a man who was, at least for those moments, the personification of happy. I remember seeing this video on a Motown retrospective and being overwhelmed by the joy emanating out of these two doomed people. What came through couldn't be faked. See it again in this video.

So in this instance, context might not be the deciding factor for me. At the time it was released, no one was the wiser; it was just a great love song with a killer beat served up by the Funk Brothers' Uriel Jones, sung, seemingly effortlessly, by two of Motown's many uber-talented artists.

It's only when you know that Tammi collapsed in Marvin's arms during a performance later this same year, never to perform again and dying of a brain tumor in 1970 at the age of 24 ... and that Marvin was so heartbroken he didn't perform live again for several years ... and that Marvin himself, though he would go on to further greatness after his 20-year Motown contract ended and he went out on his own, would die violently at the age of 44 ... it's only when you know all of these things that this song becomes more precious.

Compounding the tragedy is that Marvin's death was at the hands of his father, a Pentecostal preacher who as much as anyone was the catalyst for Marvin's career - at the age of 5, he sang at one of his father's religious meetings where everyone present knew this was a prodigy through whom a spiritual force flowed that would take him places.

Although the exact nature of Marvin and Tammi's relationship has never been completely established and was purported by some to be entirely platonic, regardless, they had a singular alchemy that transformed a simple Motown song into incandescence.

Midnight Train to Georgia, Gladys Knight & the Pips (1973)

I don't know precisely what it is about the first 15 seconds of this timeless classic by Gladys Knight & the Pips, but those seconds will forever whisk me back to the summer of 1973, when this song was just an integral part of the musical landscape of my life.

Actually originally recorded by Cissy Houston, who had a minor hit on the R&B charts earlier the same year, it went mainstream big time, becoming Gladys Knight & the Pips' first #1 hit for Buddah Records after their contract expired with Motown. Considered by many to be as close to perfect as a ballad gets, Knight's smooth soulful delivery and the seductive call-and-response of the suave Pips made for a class act if there ever was one.

Part of its appeal, I think, is how it parlays a realistic backdrop and an idealistic sensibility - without sugarcoating it - into one neat little package. Mississippi songwriter Jim Weatherly told a very simple but unforgettable story of one woman's devotion to and compassion for her man.

I've always thought some songs are blessed with precision lyrics that make them irresistible; this is one of those. When Gladys sings: I'm going to be with him / On that midnight train to Georgia / I'd rather live in his world / Than live without him in mine ... there is no escaping the shivers. How many of us have had those feelings about someone? For better or worse, I know I have.

Come See About Me, Jr. Walker and the All Stars (1967)

Again with the covers. But walk on by, Supremes version. Impaled on Junior Walker's squealing tenor saxophone, Holland-Dozier-Holland had a whole new song on its hands.

Says Clarence Clemons in a Rolling Stone interview, "Junior Walker and King Curtis were the two biggest influences on me. All those jazz cats were just too abstract for me; Junior was more animated, and he got straight to the point. He knew it wasn't how many notes you play but what each note says - quality, not quantity."

That principle is very much in evidence in Come See About Me. The individual notes of the wailing intro give me the shivers. Then I hop up and dance my brains out through the wailing outro. The 'adapted' lyrics exhorted us to "come see about Junior," and who could help themselves? No one could play sax like Junior, or had more fun doing it. (Unfortunately, this isn't on youtube, so here's the legendary Shotgun, which I was originally going to write about until I remembered how much I loved Come See ... )

Perhaps the only Motown instrumentalist who received his props while he was actually working there, Junior became a Motown artist after the label he originally worked for was acquired by Berry Gordy. Still, I'm not certain it was a natural home for him and the All Stars; they were a bit too rough-and-ready, too hard soul, for Hitsville USA. A really interesting factoid that just surfaced in my research: Steve Winwood based the original Traffic on the All-Stars!

Sometime in mid-to-late 80s, I had the privilege of seeing Junior at The Dell, a very intimate venue in Columbus, Ohio. At one point, he was so caught up in his groove that he walked off the stage and out the front door, playing all the while, and continued to blow on the sidewalk outside the club, serenading passers-by for some minutes before returning to the stage. He never skipped a beat.

I Can't Get Next to You, The Temptations (1969)

I wasn't planning on this song today, but it came on the radio while I was driving to work, and got me all stirred up. A group singular for its out-of-this-world vocal stylings and ultra smooth choreography, the Temptations were entertainers down to their DNA, and I wasn't prepared for how happy it was going to make me to hear them today.

The "Tempts" sometimes referred to themselves as "five lead vocalists," and I Can't Get Next to You is a sterling example of this principle in action. Always grittier, edgier and funkier than their Motown brethren, the Four Tops, here each of the Temptations chimes in with successive lines of the song's verses, showcasing their crazily diverse and spectacular singing voices, as well as their exuberant showmanship. And of course underpinning the whole affair are the Funk Brothers, providing the instrumental fundamentals.

I don't know what it says about the schizoid nature of the culture of the time that, when this song was #1 on the Billboard pop charts, 3 of the other top five songs were by Bobby Sherman, Oliver and the Archies. (The other was Sly & the Family Stone, which Temptations producer Norman Whitfield was reportedly attempting to emulate.)

In any event, while psychedelic influences were chipping away at the relevance of other Motown artists, the Temptations - with former Contour Dennis Edwards replacing the departing David Ruffin - managed to deliver red-hot hits (Cloud Nine, Ball of Confusion, et al) one after the other during the latter part of the 60s, of which this one is my favorite.

Heat Wave, Martha and the Vandellas (1963)

It's not so much irony as justice that, on the first Motown song I'm selecting, the first 29 seconds featured neither Martha nor the Vandellas, but rather the funky-fabulous backbeat and stylings of the then-uncredited Motown house band we only now know to be the Funk Brothers. Just try to remain inert in the face of drummer "Pistol" Allen's four on the floor drum rhythms. (See Allen's obituary in the Independent for some priceless background on him and life as a session musician under Berry Gordy.) It can't be done!

Any Motown enthusiast who hasn't seen the documentary Standing in the Shadows of Motown is missing a real treat; it's a labor of love by writer Allan Slutsky and director Paul Justman, who dedicated themselves to telling the story of "this unheralded group of musicians (who) had played on more number one hits than the Beach Boys, the Rolling Stones, Elvis and the Beatles combined - which makes them the greatest hit machine in the history of popular music."

Heat Wave was one of the first Motown songs to chart big, and deservedly so. Martha Reeves had worked for peanuts as a secretary at Motown hoping for the day when she could bust out into the limelight with her gritty, ebullient take on life and love. Far less sugar-coated and more soulful than most of the other girl groups, Martha and the Vandellas put all the cards on the table: "is this the way love's supposed to be ... it's like a heatwave burning in my heart ... can't keep from crying ... it's tearing me apart."

According to Gerri Hirshey's seminal history of soul music, "Nowhere to Run," the entire Heat Wave album was cut in a few hours. Says Reeves, "We flew in from Baltimore after doing five shows. We got in around midnight and went right into the studio. Recorded that whole album, then did three songs, backup, for Marvin Gaye. We all had to get shots for our throats because they were suffering from overuse. Understand, I'm not complaining. If I were that age, and the circumstances were the same, I'd gladly do it again. You know how it is. You do stupid, dangerous things when you're really in love. And if you're swept away by it, you don't stop for one minute to think. You say, 'Go get it, girl,' and you don't look back."