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.If he ever did hear that in the song, he never let on.Because of the exposed nerve of the song, Brian and Dozier strippedthe arrangement to its essentials.This was now adult music; gone werethe chink-a-chink electric guitar backbeat and the honking sax, leavinga throbbing Jack Ashford tambourine, a dark Wurlitzer electric pianoline by Earl Van Dyke, and a subtler drumbeat by Pistol Allen.Jamer-son s nimbly brooding bass filled the bottom; swelling, stabbing stringsthe top.There were dead stops, long notes echoing into silence.And awhacked-out intro not to be believed to this day.Seeking a sci-fi effect to almost literally reproduce disturbing brainwaves, something like the theremin Brian Wilson used on Good Vi-brations the year before but less kitschy, they used an electronic oscil-lator, a juiced-up version of the common instrument that merelymeasures sine waves.The amped version gave them a sound at lowpower Sputnik-like beeps, at higher power futuristic swirling like some-thing out of Plan 9 from Outer Space.That very jump, in a six-secondsequence, became the intro.But not before Brian, thinking it might bea tad too cheesy, nearly nixed it. I wanted to kill him, Eddie says. Cause it just blew me away.Itwas perfect! Through the mirror of my mind.that was the sound! Itold him, Don t you dare take that out! There were also more practical reasons to leave it in, what with therising commercial niche of songs suggesting a drugged-out feel. Itmade that song sound psychedelic.It was like a person on a high, beingin a whole other space in their own body. Remember, this was about the time of Sergeant Pepper s LonelyHearts Club Band, when all the rules were broken.We wanted to tapinto that and we could do what we wanted to do, no matter how crazy,if it made sense to us. 0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:06 AM Page 300300 THE SUPREMESThe Beatles influence in Reflections is obvious in other, technicalways Alan Slutsky speaks of the Beatle-esque chamber music texturein the low-register strings and the shifting meters of the melody. Butit surely was the mild psychedelia to be taken much further by Nor-man Whitfield s brilliant late 60s and early 70s Temptations produc-tions like Cloud Nine and Psychedelic Shack that bought it andthe Supremes a little sanctuary in the Summer of Love. This alone was no small feat: that the Supremes of the Copa andthe casinos could sound cool to the flower-power crowd as well as tothe cigar-chewing carnivores of the clubs.One can add to that list souldevotees and both sides of the Vietnam War divide; in 67, a Time dis-patch from the combat front noted that Supremes songs were heardechoing in the jungle on soldiers transistor radios, having had no diffi-culty getting through the Armed Forces Radio censors.Two decadeslater, Reflections was used as the theme song of the retro-Vietnam TVseries China Beach.The Supremes, in the wake of Reflections, had become all thingsto all people the perfect commercial equation, at least.Not that theycould have had a place at the Monterey Pop Festival that summer be-tween Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix, or even the Mamas and the Papasand the Association, or that they could ever have been seen taking hitsof Monterey Purple.(The only Motown artists who could have fit inwith that scene were Marvin Gaye on style and, on substance, StevieWonder, who had dragged Motown into the loam of its own commu-nity, using a ghetto street milieu on the cover of his 66 Down to EarthLP, which included period-relevant songs like A Place in the Sun anda cover of Dylan s Mr.Tambourine Man. )Yet the widespread reach of Reflections was an important hurdleto clear at a time when Motown was, in some circles, approaching ex-cursus.It had begun not to be good enough to some rock critics, andthe general record-buying market, that the label belonged simply byits black birthright.Indeed, within the soul market, many had writtenoff Motown in favor of the real deal of the Atlantic Records Staxand Volt labels that mined soul gold from the studios of Memphis andMuscle Shoals.Atlantic seemed to have no interest in going wide, notif it meant sending the likes of Sam and Dave, Wilson Pickett, OtisRedding, Solomon Burke, and Aretha Franklin to Vegas casinos and theCopacabana.With much cheek, Stax-Volt pointedly dubbed itself Soulsville, in living-color contrast to the more generic Hitsville,where too many soul acts had gone to die.It had a right to gloat on this 0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:06 AM Page 301A DISTORTED REALITY 301point; without a single No.1 record in the decade, save for Aretha scover of Redding s Respect, the Atlantic stable was spanking Motownon the purity issue.This was the price Gordy had to pay for its taking crossover appealto unimaginable, even unseemly heights in the first place.That aim,once admired in the community, had come to be reviled.WashingtonUniversity professor Gerald Early, author of One Nation Under aGroove: Motown & American Culture, recalling the Motown records ofthe middle to late 60s, remarked that [t]here was a feeling that whiteswere sort of co-opting this music and there was no longer a sense ofpride that whites were playing the music.There was this sense thatGordy was making a mistake by trying to make his music have thisintegration-assimilation appeal.I remember one kid I knew, he said, This music shouldn t [have been] called The Sound of Young America.It should [have been] The Sound of Black America, which was ofcourse what Gordy had studiously avoided.And, indeed, Reflections hardly silenced the growing choruschanting sellout, which only became more voluble when real-worldevents made a mockery of the Motown model of assimilation themost immediate and traumatic being one that literally hit close tohome.On July 23, 1967, while Gordy, the Supremes, and most of theMotown hierarchy were still hunkering in the desert oasis of Las Vegas,living large and white, Detroit began to go up in smoke.This was sur-prising in only one respect: that it took so long to blow.Of all the inner cities in America, Detroit s had probably eroded thefastest and hardest.By 1967, the old urban romance of Paradise Valleywas perfect urban rot.As if boxed in by the ugly steel-gray erector-setmaze of new highways, the Valley was a hypoxic ghetto in every sense:From a population one-third white when the Supremes were born, it wasnow almost completely black, poor, and neglected, its last thread of pridestripped when the highway construction necessitated that most of Hast-ings Street be obliterated.On John R, Beacon, 12th, St.Antoine, War-ren, nearly every street, apartment buildings were subdivided so that sixfamilies could occupy space once barely sufficient for two families.Most of the great old clubs where Louis Armstrong, John LeeHooker, T-Bone Walker, and Bobo Jenkins and the Supremeswailed were either rubble or abandoned, starved out by too-high rents 0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:06 AM Page 302302 THE SUPREMESand increasingly dangerous neighborhoods.The sirens heard everynight in Brewster-Douglass were the music of the streets now.TheFlame Show Bar, where Berry Gordy and Maurice King incubated,went down in 63.The Twenty Grand and the Roostertail and theGraystone Ballroom the latter still owned by Motown and used torecord string arrangements, but in an increasing state of disrepairwere hanging on for dear life, their days numbered as their neighbor-hoods crumbled around them.With blight and crime came the usual suspects, at least for theMan [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
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.If he ever did hear that in the song, he never let on.Because of the exposed nerve of the song, Brian and Dozier strippedthe arrangement to its essentials.This was now adult music; gone werethe chink-a-chink electric guitar backbeat and the honking sax, leavinga throbbing Jack Ashford tambourine, a dark Wurlitzer electric pianoline by Earl Van Dyke, and a subtler drumbeat by Pistol Allen.Jamer-son s nimbly brooding bass filled the bottom; swelling, stabbing stringsthe top.There were dead stops, long notes echoing into silence.And awhacked-out intro not to be believed to this day.Seeking a sci-fi effect to almost literally reproduce disturbing brainwaves, something like the theremin Brian Wilson used on Good Vi-brations the year before but less kitschy, they used an electronic oscil-lator, a juiced-up version of the common instrument that merelymeasures sine waves.The amped version gave them a sound at lowpower Sputnik-like beeps, at higher power futuristic swirling like some-thing out of Plan 9 from Outer Space.That very jump, in a six-secondsequence, became the intro.But not before Brian, thinking it might bea tad too cheesy, nearly nixed it. I wanted to kill him, Eddie says. Cause it just blew me away.Itwas perfect! Through the mirror of my mind.that was the sound! Itold him, Don t you dare take that out! There were also more practical reasons to leave it in, what with therising commercial niche of songs suggesting a drugged-out feel. Itmade that song sound psychedelic.It was like a person on a high, beingin a whole other space in their own body. Remember, this was about the time of Sergeant Pepper s LonelyHearts Club Band, when all the rules were broken.We wanted to tapinto that and we could do what we wanted to do, no matter how crazy,if it made sense to us. 0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:06 AM Page 300300 THE SUPREMESThe Beatles influence in Reflections is obvious in other, technicalways Alan Slutsky speaks of the Beatle-esque chamber music texturein the low-register strings and the shifting meters of the melody. Butit surely was the mild psychedelia to be taken much further by Nor-man Whitfield s brilliant late 60s and early 70s Temptations produc-tions like Cloud Nine and Psychedelic Shack that bought it andthe Supremes a little sanctuary in the Summer of Love. This alone was no small feat: that the Supremes of the Copa andthe casinos could sound cool to the flower-power crowd as well as tothe cigar-chewing carnivores of the clubs.One can add to that list souldevotees and both sides of the Vietnam War divide; in 67, a Time dis-patch from the combat front noted that Supremes songs were heardechoing in the jungle on soldiers transistor radios, having had no diffi-culty getting through the Armed Forces Radio censors.Two decadeslater, Reflections was used as the theme song of the retro-Vietnam TVseries China Beach.The Supremes, in the wake of Reflections, had become all thingsto all people the perfect commercial equation, at least.Not that theycould have had a place at the Monterey Pop Festival that summer be-tween Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix, or even the Mamas and the Papasand the Association, or that they could ever have been seen taking hitsof Monterey Purple.(The only Motown artists who could have fit inwith that scene were Marvin Gaye on style and, on substance, StevieWonder, who had dragged Motown into the loam of its own commu-nity, using a ghetto street milieu on the cover of his 66 Down to EarthLP, which included period-relevant songs like A Place in the Sun anda cover of Dylan s Mr.Tambourine Man. )Yet the widespread reach of Reflections was an important hurdleto clear at a time when Motown was, in some circles, approaching ex-cursus.It had begun not to be good enough to some rock critics, andthe general record-buying market, that the label belonged simply byits black birthright.Indeed, within the soul market, many had writtenoff Motown in favor of the real deal of the Atlantic Records Staxand Volt labels that mined soul gold from the studios of Memphis andMuscle Shoals.Atlantic seemed to have no interest in going wide, notif it meant sending the likes of Sam and Dave, Wilson Pickett, OtisRedding, Solomon Burke, and Aretha Franklin to Vegas casinos and theCopacabana.With much cheek, Stax-Volt pointedly dubbed itself Soulsville, in living-color contrast to the more generic Hitsville,where too many soul acts had gone to die.It had a right to gloat on this 0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:06 AM Page 301A DISTORTED REALITY 301point; without a single No.1 record in the decade, save for Aretha scover of Redding s Respect, the Atlantic stable was spanking Motownon the purity issue.This was the price Gordy had to pay for its taking crossover appealto unimaginable, even unseemly heights in the first place.That aim,once admired in the community, had come to be reviled.WashingtonUniversity professor Gerald Early, author of One Nation Under aGroove: Motown & American Culture, recalling the Motown records ofthe middle to late 60s, remarked that [t]here was a feeling that whiteswere sort of co-opting this music and there was no longer a sense ofpride that whites were playing the music.There was this sense thatGordy was making a mistake by trying to make his music have thisintegration-assimilation appeal.I remember one kid I knew, he said, This music shouldn t [have been] called The Sound of Young America.It should [have been] The Sound of Black America, which was ofcourse what Gordy had studiously avoided.And, indeed, Reflections hardly silenced the growing choruschanting sellout, which only became more voluble when real-worldevents made a mockery of the Motown model of assimilation themost immediate and traumatic being one that literally hit close tohome.On July 23, 1967, while Gordy, the Supremes, and most of theMotown hierarchy were still hunkering in the desert oasis of Las Vegas,living large and white, Detroit began to go up in smoke.This was sur-prising in only one respect: that it took so long to blow.Of all the inner cities in America, Detroit s had probably eroded thefastest and hardest.By 1967, the old urban romance of Paradise Valleywas perfect urban rot.As if boxed in by the ugly steel-gray erector-setmaze of new highways, the Valley was a hypoxic ghetto in every sense:From a population one-third white when the Supremes were born, it wasnow almost completely black, poor, and neglected, its last thread of pridestripped when the highway construction necessitated that most of Hast-ings Street be obliterated.On John R, Beacon, 12th, St.Antoine, War-ren, nearly every street, apartment buildings were subdivided so that sixfamilies could occupy space once barely sufficient for two families.Most of the great old clubs where Louis Armstrong, John LeeHooker, T-Bone Walker, and Bobo Jenkins and the Supremeswailed were either rubble or abandoned, starved out by too-high rents 0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:06 AM Page 302302 THE SUPREMESand increasingly dangerous neighborhoods.The sirens heard everynight in Brewster-Douglass were the music of the streets now.TheFlame Show Bar, where Berry Gordy and Maurice King incubated,went down in 63.The Twenty Grand and the Roostertail and theGraystone Ballroom the latter still owned by Motown and used torecord string arrangements, but in an increasing state of disrepairwere hanging on for dear life, their days numbered as their neighbor-hoods crumbled around them.With blight and crime came the usual suspects, at least for theMan [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]