Post by Admin on Feb 14, 2015 19:09:17 GMT -4
MOTWON GREATS.
Andrew Barker
Senior Features Writer
Songwriters, like writers of all stripes, are often prone to finding themselves left out of the spotlight. But for a select few, their names became a de facto seal of approval, a little parenthetical trademark on the middle of the record that lets listeners know they’re in for something good: Lennon-McCartney, Kander-Ebb, Bacharach-David. And of course, Holland-Dozier-Holland.
Operating as Motown’s indefatigable songwriting and production engine for most of the 1960s, the trio of Eddie Holland, Lamont Dozier and Brian Holland, who are receiving a star Feb. 13 on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, churned out more than a dozen No. 1 singles and just as many near-misses for the label, netting 35 Top 10s in all. “You Keep Me Hanging On,” “Baby Love” and “Stop! In the Name of Love” for the Supremes; “How Sweet It Is (to Be Loved by You)” and “Can I Get a Witness” for Marvin Gaye; “Baby I Need Your Loving” and “I Can’t Help Myself (Sugar Pie, Honey Bunch)” for the Four Tops – a complete list of their noteworthy compositions would take up the rest of this article.
After breaking with Motown in 1968, the trio finally splintered in the early 1970s, when Dozier left to pursue his own solo career. After more than three decades apart, the three finally reunited to pen new tunes for a theatrical adaptation of “The First Wives Club,” which is very gradually working its way to Broadway after several years in development.
“It all starts with personalities, with people digging each other, as they used to say,” Dozier says of the songwriting trio’s alchemy. “There’s something true about working with the same people, even if it’s for a short time. Usually, the ones that are successful, they have a 10-year span, and then everybody tends to want to do their own thing. Very few stay together — I guess the Stones, and a few others. But eventually, after 10 years, everyone wants to do something different.”
Under Berry Gordy’s magisterial control, Motown in the 1960s bore all the outward traits of a Henry Ford assembly line, churning out singles with a prolificacy rivaled only by Tin Pan Alley. The Holland-Dozier-Holland brand was seen as an essential gear in that machinery, but as Dozier attests, their work was hardly done according to formula.
“People figured that everything we did was automatic, but that’s not true,” he says. “There was a lot of trial and error, going back and forth, rethinking things.”
Eddie Holland typically took the role of lyricist, with Brian Holland and Dozier handling the music production side, but at its height the trio worked as a tandem, debating not just chord changes, but the underlying themes and philosophies of their deceptively simple pop music.
“We had this idea that it was the girls who bought all the records in those days, so everything was geared toward catching the woman’s point of view, her ear, her idea of what love is like,” he says. “We had all these philosophies about it — ‘if the man does this, then the woman should be saying this…’ — but they didn’t always work. We often ended up missing some little piece that threw off the equation.”
Indeed, he notes that the trio produced a number of seeming “sure things” that wound up lingering on the lower rungs of the charts.
“We had a couple of those with Martha and the Vandellas. And man, there was this Four Tops song we did” — Dozier pauses to sing “Without the One You Love (Life Is Not Worthwhile)” — “it just didn’t make it, and we couldn’t understand why. We cut that thing three times. The hook was there, we had that eight-bar intro — we always had those ear-candy intros — we had all of it. But there was just something missing, and people didn’t take to it.”
Of course, along with the labored-over misses came the off-the-cuff hits. The Isley Brothers’ only real Motown success, “This Old Heart of Mine,” was built around a scratch melody that Dozier used to vamp on while warming up in the studio. “The Isleys were always bugging us to write them something, so we said, ‘Let’s give them this thing here.’ We didn’t think much of it, then bam!”
While the 1960s still reign in the popular imagination as a period of constant musical experimentation and openness, Dozier notes that pop music of the time was no less faddish, with just as much reticence to playing outside the box. For that reason, the trio had no shortage of difficulty getting the Supremes — at the time a struggling outfit on the Motown roster — to record their career-making single “Where Did Our Love Go.”
“The Supremes had a right to feel like they didn’t want the song, because there was nothing like that at Motown, or on the radio, with that particular feel at the time,” Dozier says. “That was a song that was turned down by the Marvelettes and a couple other people, and we finally gave it to them because they couldn’t afford to turn it down — they didn’t have anything else happening. We went into the studio to put it together, there was all this arguing, the girls hated it, and then bam: We just looked up and the thing was No. 1 for a couple weeks. You don’t really know sometimes, you just toss the coin.”
After splitting with the Holland brothers, Dozier charted a respectable solo career as a singer — 1974’s Nixon-skewering “Fish Ain’t Bitin’” was a particular highlight — in addition to penning songs with Phil Collins. The Hollands remained a potent songwriting and producing team, writing for Michael Jackson as well as the Supremes in the 1970s, while Eddie Holland also enjoyed some solo success. The brothers and Dozier experienced their share of legal recriminations with Gordy and one another, but all was forgotten by the time they reconvened to write “The First Wives Club,” which preemed in San Diego back in 2009.
“We’ve had all kinds of bumps in the road with the production,” Dozier says. “Not necessarily with our relationship, because we all knew what the three of us, personality-wise, was going to be about.” Asked if the three would ever collaborate again, Dozier is both open and noncommittal. “You never know, and the picture changes everyday. But if one of us comes up with something that feels right, then bam, we’ll see what happens.”
C
