Fever (11 page)

*   *   *

By their first hit, the Supremes, Diana Ross, Mary Wilson, and Florence Ballard had been hanging around the Motown offices like a bunch of junior campers trying to weasel their way into the varsity talent show. The Supremes began with Ballard in Detroit's Brewster-Douglass housing project after she'd begun singing backup with an up-and-coming male group known as the Primes (the precursor to the Temptations, featuring Eddie Kendricks and Paul Williams). Diane Ross (she became Diana in 1964) replaced original member Betty Travis, and it was Ross who got the group its first Motown audition through her neighbor Smokey Robinson. Berry Gordy passed on them at first, told them to finish school and get more experience. So they signed to Lupine Records in 1960, but produced no hits.

The Supremes were desperate to break on Motown, so they simply hung out at the offices long enough for Gordy to notice them, and changed their name from the Primettes to the Supremes in 1961. They finally were signed as the label's first girl-group act, but since they spent longer getting launched, the Marvelettes debuted before them. Even Gordy, the hitmeister, had trouble zeroing in on their potential; their lack of success earned them the nickname “the No-Hit Supremes.” As part of earning their Motown stripes, they sang backup on the Miracles' non-Smokey number “Mickey's Monkey.”

Although their first couple of songs were sticky-sweet clichés, “I Want a Guy” and “Buttered Popcorn” (with Ballard singing lead), the Supremes would soon cut a swath through other sixties girl groups with inspired writing, Ross's happy-to-be-tamed vocal purr, and the jolting beat of bassist James Jamerson and drummer Benny Benjamin. “Buttered Popcorn” is irresistible, and there's no telling what kind of metaphor the image took on when the bridge stopped for the catchphrase “When I asked him what was happening in the world today/He said ‘more butter, more butter, more butter, more butter…'” From such paradoxical beginnings, the Supremes came to symbolize how girl groups grew from a trend into long-running attractions.

“Your Heart Belongs to Me,” “A Breath Taking Guy” (both Robinson numbers), and “Let Me Go the Right Way” scored in the pop top hundred; the last was a charmer in the Marvelettes mold, with short, crisp rhythms and soaring silences for Ross to glide in between her partners. But it took the songwriting-production team of Brian Holland, Lamont Dozier, and Eddie Holland to put the Supremes on the map with “When the Lovelight Starts Shining in His Eyes,” a Top 40 hit in late 1963. The songwriting team had scored with Martha and the Vandellas' “Come and Get These Memories,” “Heat Wave,” and “Quicksand,” so Gordy recruited them to turn his new pet act into a sensation. (Stories of Gordy's nonmusical interest in Ross are legion; what's less clear is how much of this offstage heat fueled Ross's ambivalent passion in songs like “You Keep Me Hangin' On” and “I'm Livin' in Shame.”)

At first the Supremes themselves were disappointed in “Where Did Our Love Go.” In Nelson George's
Where Did Our Love Go,
Eddie Holland remembers, “I wanted Mary [to sing lead] because at the time Mary had a softer sound and I knew the song required a soft sound. And I had never heard Diana sing soft before. So my natural instinct was to try Mary on it.” Ross emerged as a star singer by doing exactly what Ronnie Spector couldn't: by holding back, conveying drama threw withheld charm, the kind of elegance she idolized in jazz singers like Billie Holiday (whom she went on to portray in
Lady Sings the Blues
).

Ross's delivery was a mew and a secret; she conveyed an elegant intimacy that wasn't above torrid sex. Where Ronnie Spector was the husky-voiced tomboy who had suddenly gone boy crazy, Ross was a tall drink of water who combined sophistication with innocence; she conveyed enough savvy and ambition to play hard to get. “The Supremes wear long, tight gowns and sing about where-did-their-damn-love-go in high-pitched voices. That's not sexy. That's Las Vegas!” Spector wrote in her autobiography,
Be My Baby.
“When people come to see us, we want them to feel something. They're supposed to fall in love with us … This is rock and roll. If they want to fantasize that they're making love to us—that's great.”

By July of 1964, with “Where Did Our Love Go” and the following smash hits, “Baby Love” and “Come See About Me,” the Supremes began pointing the girl-group sound toward “respectable” entertainment; the genre began to project more adult feelings, and the sound aspired unapologetically to Hollywood.

Of course, the main boundary the Supremes crossed was racial: they appeared so often on
The Ed Sullivan Show
that they soon transcended tokenism—audiences all but forgot their skin color. (Sullivan once forgot their name and introduced them simply as “the girls.”) They all donned beehive hairdos, sparkling jewelry, and coquettish movements to become Motown's premier act. Diana Ross's film career may have floundered, but her significance as a sixties pop female icon is easy to underestimate. The Supremes were a microcosm of blacks making a greater place in pop for themselves than ever before, but overshadowed in this racial conquest is the subtler feminine achievement that got played as a sideshow.

While a good Supremes collection delivers kick where it needs to (especially in numbers like “Back in My Arms Again,” “Stop! In the Name of Love,” and “You Keep Me Hangin' On,” all of which have an urgency they don't usually get credit for), the Supremes were a girl group with the perfect sellout touch. Gladys Knight and the Pips followed Ross and her singers into a new realm where a woman could front male backup singers. This might have happened without the Supremes, but perhaps Diana Ross had to break wide before Gladys Knight could hold the spotlight in front of her men. And Knight brought the music a more gospel-tinged sound that set the stage for Aretha Franklin and a new black directness in pop. If the Supremes were playing the white pop game and coming up glamorous, they made the unimaginable possible: a black act tailored for Vegas and Hollywood, creating a new center so that a revived progressive left could flourish.

*   *   *

Gordy groomed Ross to be his biggest show-biz star; but early on, Smokey Robinson was his best songwriter as well as a singer who pulled off a striking coup for emerging male sensibilities in the sixties. Robinson didn't just hit with the Miracles, by any measure one of Motown's greatest acts, but he also wrote and produced smash singles for many other singers, often from a female point of view. In this respect, he trumps even Dylan as a songwriter. Motown's key storyteller wasn't just a male vocalist who sounded like a woman, he wrote about how it felt to be a man and how it felt to be a woman, without sounding at all like a producer puppeteer. His gift was writing for female characters who seemed oblivious to any male bias; Robinson's “feminine” narrative voice transcended fantasies of how men wished women would think.

And when Robinson sang lead, his feminine telepathy only grew. Nobody used a high, expressive falsetto more passionately, or more knowingly, than Smokey Robinson. To begin with, his natural singing voice so resembled falsetto that he had his lyrics floating on air long before you realized how high he was soaring. And Robinson wrote from the unique perspective of a man consciously pruning his female characteristics. His self-consciousness about the “femaleness” in his voice was central to his appeal. During an early Miracles tour down South, Robinson's wife, Claudette, substituted for him when he took ill with the Asian flu, and fans would scream at her, “Sing it, Smokey!”

The consciousness behind both behind both “My Guy” and “My Girl” was a man who had no trouble basing his vocal sound on a woman (jazz ideal Sarah Vaughan), but never sacrificed any of his manhood to express his passion for romance. “Long before I heard rock 'n' roll,” Robinson recalled to David Ritz in his autobiography, “Sarah was part of my household. Man, I worshipped her sound. I emulated her lush licks and tasty turn. Her range thrilled me. I loved the way she cried with her voice. I was awestruck by her subtlety and sensitivity. I understood why they called her the ‘Divine one.' No doubt about it, it was a woman who first shaped my style.”

Of course, Robinson wasn't the first man to realize his feminine aspect could attract women. “When Billy Ward and the Dominoes came along in the mid-fifties [sic] with ‘Have Mercy, Baby,'” said Smokey, “I was sure their lead singer was a girl. But when I ran down to see them at the Broadway Capitol Theater, it turned out Clyde McPhatter—a guy!—was doing the vocals. I saw a guy singing like a girl, driving the girls crazy! Man, that's all I needed to know. I never again thought about my own natural voice being too high or feminine.”

Robinson met Gordy after auditioning for Jackie Wilson's manager with his vocal group the Matadors. Gordy was one of Wilson's songwriters (he wrote “Reet Petite” and “Lonely Teardrops”). Robinson's first effort in 1958 was an answer song, “Got a Job” (answering the Silhouettes' “Get a Job”). Gordy pushed the young writer and co-wrote his first batch of songs with him. Pretty soon, Robinson was writing better than his mentor, and singing with a voice that cut through most preconceptions about how men portrayed themselves in pop.

It's impossible to tell what gave Robinson so many good ideas for so many different kinds of songs, but his soft-male persona allowed him to tackle taboo subjects that macho men avoided. When his high, mellifluous voice rang out on his first hit, “Shop Around” (1960), he didn't sound the least bit embarrassed about recounting his mother's advice to “Be a man, my son/I know you can, my son…” “Real” men don't go around announcing what their mothers think about their manliness. Robinson turns this conceit inside out; if “Shop Around” means “play the field” to some men, Robinson's number was about how expert his
mother
was at this game.

In “The Hunter Gets Captured by the Game,” Robinson wrote another reversal of stereotypes, which made the Marvelettes central to any girl-group history. Here, it's a woman who pursues a man, only to find she's smitten by his charms once her plan works out. This is curious not just because it's from a woman's point of view (quite literally, the male puppeteer finding a new voice for feminist politics through a female singer). It's also a romantic pursuit where the twist involves female conquest that rings just as hollow as any man's. Falling for her own mark compromises her plan, turns it upside down; it's as if her tumble into true love makes her calculation look crass, and the love itself less noble. Most female songs were about how women wished the man would chase her, or how she struggled for the nerve to approach him. With Robinson writing for the Marvelettes, the rules of the game suddenly changed, subject to forces beyond traditional logic:

My plan didn't work out like I thought

I had laid my trap for you but it seems that I got caught …

Robinson's subjects included things you never mentioned out loud, never mind in song, like the way otherwise decent folks simply slept around causing unspeakable pain to those who cared about them (“Everybody's Gotta Pay Some Dues”), or how even decent folks found themselves lusting after somebody more than they knew was good for them (“Bad Girl”). When Robinson sang “Bad Girl” in 1959, the female protagonist was bad “because she's breaking my heart”—but the image of this mamma's boy lusting after the “wrong” kind of girl must have had as much cross-gender appeal as the Shangri-Las would with “Leader of the Pack.” In this confusing web of deceit, “to be bad is to be good and to be good is to be bad,” as only a very desirable lover can be.

Robinson made the ideal producer for Mary Wells, whom he once described as “a woman singing like a man whose singing was modeled on a woman.” For Wells, Robinson wrote “The One Who Really Loves You,” “You Beat Me to the Punch,” “Two Lovers,” and “My Guy”; for the Marvelettes, he penned “Don't Mess with Bill” and “The Hunter Gets Captured by the Game”; for Marvin Gaye, another dreamy vocalist with backbone, he wrote “I'll Be Doggone” and “Ain't That Peculiar”; for the Temptations, “The Way You Do the Things You Do,” “Since I Lost My Baby,” “It's Growing,” and, of course, “My Girl,” the perfect men's devotional because it's all about the how love renders them inarticulate.

The grown-man-crying taboo is met head-on in several important Robinson songs. “I Had to Cry” is an openhearted response to the censorious John Wayne code of withholding emotions: with romance, sometimes
not
crying isn't an option. In another song, he simply says “I Gotta Dance to Keep from Crying.” “The Tracks of My Tears” is Robinson's best-known song, and it's all about how his tears map his pain (it's also a man asking a woman to take a good look at
his
face; a singer asking women to take a good look at their men). Later on, Robinson had a hit with “The Tears of a Clown,” a 1970 hit with a quirky bassoon riff in its opening hook. This huge (delayed) hit—the number was actually recorded in 1966—opened up Robinson's voice to an entirely new audience.

“The Tears of a Clown” became a staple of oldies formats for good reason. As in his earlier work, Robinson sang so unabashedly, even exultantly, in his high, feminine voice that he made the confusion over male emotions seem not only natural but brave—it became an aural analog to long hair. And once again, he used his feminine qualities to make his case. Instead of doing a peacock strut to show how proud and manly he was, he weighed his anxiety openly. To say “The Tears of a Clown” was ironically joyous doesn't come close to capturing its exuberance. The song celebrates man's desire for women as well as his capacity for anguish, and that celebratory swoon carries you away before you get caught up in its contradictions.