Posts Tagged ‘Berry Gordy’

DVD Review: “Motown: The DVD”

Motown: The DVDLet’s begin with the facts. Motown: The DVD contains 18 vintage clips of Motown artists performing some of their best known songs. Only five of the 18 are actually live performances. Of these, Gladys Knight and the Pips’ performance of “Grapevine” at the 1972 Save the Children Concert and Smokey Robinson & the Miracles doing “Tears of a Clown” on the Andy Williams Show in 1971 stand out. The rest of the clips have been gathered from a variety of U.S. and overseas sources including the Ed Sullivan Show, the Mike Douglas Show, Hullabaloo, and Live from the Bitter End.

Interspersed between the songs are excerpts from interviews with Motown artists. These include Mike Douglas speaking with Smokey Robinson, Motown-founder Berry Gordy on a local Detroit show called Teen Town, and some thoroughly cringe-worthy shtick featuring Lloyd Thaxton with the Temptations. Bonus features include previously unseen footage from the Motown Picnic, circa 1970. Basically it’s the company’s home movies. There are a couple of poignant shots of a young Michael Jackson in this footage. The complete Gordy Teen Town interview is here, as is a 1959 featurette about what was going on in the world in the year that Motown was founded. A Maypo commercial and a trailer for a Brigitte Bardot film are fun, but that is no reason to buy this DVD. Sadly, the 1959 newsreel is the most interesting thing in this package. The accompanying booklet features a nice essay by Stu Hackel. (more…)

CD Review: Human Nature, “Reach Out”

“In the style of the boy-band vocal bands of the time, Human Nature became Australia’s most successful pop group of the ’90s and beyond,” according to their Allmusic.com biography, “outselling their international contemporaries Backstreet Boys, *NSYNC, and Boyzone.”

Up until a few weeks ago, I’d never heard of these guys. Then again, what I don’t know could fill a warehouse.

And after listening to Reach Out (Sony/RED), I could swear that the vocal group’s introduction to American audiences will be filling warehouses for months to come, but Human Nature are multiplatinum artists Down Under — they transitioned from boys to men in the past decade by ditching dance-pop and embracing, well, dance-pop from an earlier era. In 2005 they released Reach Out: The Motown Album, followed by Dancing in the Street: The Songs of Motown II in ‘06, and by the time of 2007’s Get Ready, they were enlisting guest appearances by the Temptations, the Supremes’ Mary Wilson, and Smokey Robinson, who’s “presenting” their current “Ultimate Celebration of Motown” stage show at the Imperial Palace in Las Vegas. The back cover of the Reach Out CD booklet even advertises the show, which I have to assume, based on the contents of the album, is the main event.

The American version of Reach Out takes songs from all three of Human Nature’s Motown albums and erases any telltale copyright dates from the liner notes. In other words, “it’s new to you!” And if you’ve never heard the originals that are being covered by the Aussie quartet (brothers Michael and Andrew Tierney, Toby Allen, and Phil Burton, all of whom have been singing together since high school in the ’80s, when Motown nostalgia was first becoming a booming business), you might think the melodies are pretty catchy, with a good beat you can dance to. In other words, if you’re under ten years old, this is a serviceable introduction to Motown, but if you’re in double digits, Reach Out comes across as professional karaoke — the only acknowledgment of any Fauxtown backing band is “the gifted musicians who helped create this record.” Might one of those musicians be named Mac, and is it possible another one goes by the initials “PC”? (Allmusic.com does in fact list the musicians who worked on the three Australian releases, but their instruments still sound canned either way.)

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Bootleg City: Marvin Gaye in Tokyo, November ‘79

As mayor of Bootleg City, I’ve decided to make some changes around these parts. You see, recently I noticed that our fair city really is fair. In fact it’s downright pale. We need to diversify, fellow Bootleggers! To paraphrase a pioneering African-American American of the 1870s: “Where all the black women at?”

Last week I asked Jeff Giles, the man behind the curtain who funds this puppet government, if he had any R&B he could send my way. He delivered, so today I give you one of the greats, Marvin Gaye, performing at Budokan in Tokyo on November 13, 1979. (See? I brought in Japanese people too. Bootleg City is diversifying so quickly!) Jeff posted this bootleg at Jefitoblog in January 2006 under the name “Immortality of the Soul,” but I can’t find that title anywhere else on Google, so Jeff must’ve been drunk. But so was the person who incorrectly listed “After the Dance” as “When I First Saw You,” which is the opening line of the first verse, and, in another instance, “I Want You” — that sentiment is expressed in “After the Dance,” but “I Want You” is another song altogether by the Motown legend. However, my favorite “Too Busy Thinking About My Budweiser” track listing was the one for “Stubborn Kind of Fellow,” whose name had been changed by another stubborn kind of fellow to “Yeah Yeah Yeah,” which is probably the response he gave to anyone who tried to correct him.

In 1979 Gaye was two years removed from his most recent pop and R&B smash, “Got to Give It Up,” and still three years away from his comeback hit, “Sexual Healing.” When he divorced Anna Gordy, Berry’s sister, in ‘77, the settlement required that he give her all the proceeds from his next album, hence the name Here, My Dear (1978). Gaye also owed millions in back taxes to the IRS and was battling depression and drug addiction as the ’70s came to a close. Shortly after he returned to the top of the charts, his cross-dressing father, a conservative minister, shot and killed him on April 1, 1984, the day before his 45th birthday. Jesse L. Martin (Law & Order, Rent) and James Gandolfini (The Sopranos, Romance & Cigarettes) are set to star in a film about Gaye’s final years; it’s unlikely that writer-director Lauren Goodman will need to manufacture any extra drama.

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Motown at 50

The TemptationsToday is a very important day in the history of popular music. It was on this day in 1959 that Motown was born. An auto worker by the name of Berry Gordy borrowed $800 from his father to start the company, and to create a headquarters at 2648 West Grand Boulevard in Detroit. The sign over the door said “Hitsville USA,” and that was no idle boast. The building is a museum today. Motown left Detroit in 1972, leaving behind a city that is still struggling economically.

You’ve no doubt heard the story many times, but here are some of the names; The Temptation, The Supremes, The Four Tops, Martha and the Vandellas, The Marvelettes, Smokey and the Miracles, Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder, Mary Wells. The producers were equally legendary, including the team of Holland, Dozier and Holland, and Norman Whitfield.

The musicians who played on the records were known as the Funk Brothers. They were largely forgotten until the wonderful documentary Standing in the Shadows of Motown was released a few years back, giving wonderful musicians like James Jamerson, Benny Benjamin, Joe Hunter, Earl Van Dyke, and Richard “Pistol” Allen, the recognition that they have deserved for so long.

So if you’ve ever danced to a Motown song, or if hearing one of the songs on the radio takes you back to another time in your life, today is a day to celebrate this great American institution.

It’s impossible to choose one song to represent the incredible heritage of Motown Records. So I decided to choose something that I like, that you might not have heard recently. Enjoy:

The Temptations and The Four Tops Medley (live)