Live and Kicking in Amsterdam

FINANCIAL ‘EQUATIONS’ BROUGHT MARVIN GAYE TO EUROPE

Marvin Gaye’s first-ever European tour delivered his second Top 3 album on the Billboard pop charts, Live At The London Palladium. Now, a recording of one of the tour’s later dates is about to be released – or, more accurately, re-released.

      Greatest Hits Live in ’76 becomes available next Friday (27) on vinyl and compact disc, capturing the singer’s sell-out show at Amsterdam’s Jaap Edenhal venue on October 10 that year. This 23-track album (22 tracks on vinyl) comes from Universal Music’s Mercury Studios unit, whose assets include the audio/video catalogue of music film producer Eagle Rock Entertainment.

Marvin in Amsterdam (photo: Gijsbert Hanekroot)

      Gaye’s Dutch concert was filmed, and made available on DVD in 1999 by Eagle Rock. It’s being suggested that the Mercury release is the show’s audio-only debut, but the material appeared as a “bonus” CD (Live in Holland 1976) with Universal Music’s 2006 DVD package of Gaye shows entitled The Real Thing: In Performance 1964-1981.

      Enough of the trade-paper guff, what about the show?

      Well, it must be said that reviews in the Dutch newspapers at the time were not the best. “A rather weak performance,” judged NRC Handelsblad’s critic, Peter Koops. Mostly a “lacklustre hour,” carped Jim van Alphen, writing for Het Parool. “Marvin Gaye completed the concert…without any real effort,” suggested Algemeen Dagblad’s Ton Olde Monnikhof, who was also unimpressed by the star’s “professional striptease act” which accompanied “Let’s Get It On.”

      De Volkskrant’s Elly de Waard was more forgiving, noting that the Jaap Edenhal was an “acoustically impossible space.” She added that Gaye’s “vocal nuances and understatements do not come into their own in an ice-hockey stadium.” Nor did it help that he was accompanied by “a large orchestra that drowned him out for most of the time.” (The venue was, indeed, better-known locally for its ice-rink virtues.)

FROM ICE RINK TO ‘PADDED BED’

      Monnikhof was more impressed when dancer/singer Florence Lyles joined the headliner on stage for his popular duets, including “It Takes Two” and “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough.” It was, the reviewer wrote, “as if Marvin Gaye had found his home form and commitment after this, because the finale, ‘Distant Lover,’ was beautiful. He turned out to be able to transform the bare concrete hall into kind of a padded bed.”

New from Mercury Studios

      Whatever the critical judgement, Gaye’s European concerts in ’76 were welcomed by tens of thousands of fans – not least because he had never previously performed live on that side of the Atlantic. (An earlier visit, in 1964, was just for record promotion.) The credit belonged to British-based concert promoter Jeffrey Kruger, who told Variety magazine that he had persuaded the Motown star of the financial benefits of touring Europe, despite nominally earning less than he would for U.S. shows. “I pointed out that in Europe, he was just a name that had not been seen, that his records were just selling in 12, 10 and 15 thousand units.”

      By this account, Gaye accepted $20,000 a day to do the U.K. concerts, compared to the $50,000 he was accustomed to being paid on the road in America. “Whilst he was [in Britain], he played to capacity houses,” said Kruger. “I persuaded him to cut a [Motown] album with us, and do a video show so that the ancillary benefits would more than make up for what he was losing here.”

      When released in March 1977, Live At The London Palladium generated $2.75 million in revenues in the U.S., according to Kruger. “He’s been given a platinum disc in England for 1,000,000 pounds’ worth of sales. The potential of his TV show is over 200,000 pounds. So, as a result of his tour, he has earned more than $5 million for being sensible enough to listen to the equations and arguments I gave him.”

PATTI SMITH’S DETOUR

      The Amsterdam concert, which featured Edwin Starr as opening act, drew a capacity crowd of 4,500. Gaye’s setlist was, naturally enough, the same as that of the Palladium date, one week earlier. He opened with tracks from I Want You (“All The Way Around,” “Since I Had You”), segueing into “Come Get To This” and “Let’s Get It On.”

      As in London, these were followed by “Trouble Man,” which was mostly instrumental, with Gerald Brown’s undulating bass lines and David Li’s impressive tenor sax solo. Then Gaye delivered a rather perfunctory, nine-minute medley of his ’60s hits, followed by more heartfelt renderings of material from What’s Going On and, as noted above, a selection of duets with Lyles – which were a “highlight” of the night, according to Het Parool’s Jim van Alphen.

Marvin and Flo, elsewhere on the ‘76 European tour

Critics aside, there was another notable member of the audience: American punk rocker Patti Smith, whose debut album, Horses, had been riding the Billboard charts earlier in the year. According to Sjeng Stokkink, a local record company staffer, she and her group were booked to play Amsterdam’s Paradiso the same night as Gaye’s show. When Smith became aware of his gig, she insisted on seeing it before her own. Stokkink later remembered taking her by car to the Jaap Edenhal, where she found her way to the standing-only section, “jumping into the middle of the crowd and shouting to Marvin as [his] biggest fan of all.” Then, he continued, “with lightning speed back into the limousine with all of us, and just barely, with a police escort, back to Paradiso, where the capacity house was just about to start with chants. So the band went straight on stage.”

      Whether or not Smith is audible on Greatest Hits: Live in ’76, Mercury Studios obviously hopes for similar levels of enthusiasm for Gaye’s performance when it comes to vinyl and CD sales – although, presumably, ardent fans bought the DVD when it was released in 1999. It’ll also be interesting to see how present-day reviewers react, and how they compare to, say, this assessment by Elizabeth Nelson just three years ago.

      Finally, there appears to be one anomaly about the Amsterdam recording. “Trouble Man” was not included in the original Eagle Rock video release, or – to judge by its track listing – is it in Mercury Studios’ audio-only version. And yet this song appears on the afore-mentioned 2006 compact disc, Live in Holland 1976, in exactly the same place in the setlist as it was in London.

      A mystery for the ages? Perhaps not. There were enough other anomalies, peculiarities and contradictions in Marvin Gaye’s extraordinary career – not to mention some of the finest music of his era – to put this omission on ice.

Credit notes: my thanks to Frans de Beer for his invaluable help in identifying, sourcing and translating the newspaper reviews of Marvin’s Amsterdam show. Motown fans in Holland have been among the most enthusiastic and knowledgeable worldwide, and Frans is no exception. (The Dutch market’s importance to Hitsville U.S.A. over the years was embodied by the late Pete Felleman, profiled here.)

Title notes: one mistake on Eagle Rock’s DVD packaging of the 1976 Amsterdam concert was to identify “Your Precious Love,” Marvin’s duet with Florence Lyles, as “Heaven Must Have Sent You.” (That’s obviously a line from the song’s lyrics, not a matter of the pair venturing into Elgins territory.) The error may have been repeated on the Mercury Studios artwork.