Payne and Pleasure
A GOLDEN CAREER, AND STILL MAKING NEW MUSIC
In the alternative Motown Records universe, there are any number of “what if?” scenarios.
What if Jackie Wilson had hitched his star to Hitsville after his first run of success with the songs of Berry Gordy (and Billy Davis)?
What if Mary Wells had not decided to leave the company in 1964? Would she have been first to record “Where Did Our Love Go”?
What if Smokey Robinson had decided that Freda Payne should have first call on his songwriting, instead of Wells?
Wait, Freda at Motown? Well, it might have happened but for a parent’s judgement call. “I was, in fact, Berry Gordy’s first female artist – period,” she reminded me the other day. “But I never signed with the company, because he and my mother couldn’t agree on contractual points. That’s what happened. I was 14 then.”
It takes two: Freda Payne and Johnny Mathis
That much is part of Motown folklore, familiar to followers, if not to the wider world. If Payne was 14 when she first met Gordy, that would place the encounter during the 12 months ending September 1957, when his work with Davis was just beginning to attract attention – specifically, Wilson’s “Reet Petite (The Finest Girl You Ever Want To Meet)” – and his music ambitions were taking shape.
“We were even ‘writers for hire,’ ” Gordy noted in To Be Loved, mentioning “local businessman” (and, later, convicted cocaine smuggler) George Kelley, who commissioned the two men to work with Frances Burnett, while they also sought out new, young artists “to teach songs to.” One of those was “a teenage Freda Payne, who I hoped would become my first big female star,” Gordy wrote.
Soon enough, Detroit daughter Payne’s recollections of that time and place will be part of her autobiography, Band Of Gold. This was announced last summer, with best-selling author Mark Bego recruited as her collaborator, and with a tentative 2021 publication date. “Freda has worked and associated with a virtual ‘who’s who’ of show business,” Bego said, “and she ‘names names.’ ”
Payne was herself named in two recent books: Lamont Dozier’s How Sweet It Is and Eddie & Brian Holland’s Come and Get These Memories. “Eddie was drilling her over and over while I sat at the piano to demonstrate the feeling we wanted,” recalled Dozier about the recording sessions which yielded “Band Of Gold,” her worldwide hit of 1970. “Once she finally caught on, she really got into it.”
SPOTTED ON A SATURDAY
For his part, Eddie Holland remembered “Band Of Gold” as a laborious task. “It required a lot of editing, and something like 30 overdubs – so many that I actually turned the session over to Ron [Dunbar] at one point, I needed a break that badly,” he wrote. “They were like that,” says Payne today. “They would go over and over and over, and – guess what? – they wound up going back to some extracts from one of the first three or four takes.”
Nonetheless, the singer acknowledges H/D/H’s important role in her career: “They’re the bridge that brought me across,” she states. That was as far as hit records were concerned. Previously, Payne’s progress was remarkable for the stature of musicians with whom she had appeared as a youngster, including Duke Ellington and Lionel Hampton. The springboard for that career was membership of the “Make Way for Youth” chorus, showcased on Detroit’s WJR-TV; then, the teenager won talent contests on Ed McKenzie’s Saturday music show on WXYZ-TV, where Gordy spotted her. “Berry used to come [there] and when he found out that I also took dance classes, he used to come to those. It was an Afro-Cuban class, and I also had been taking ballet. From that point on, he wanted to work with me.”
A cover girl in 1962
Gordy penned four songs for Payne, including “Father Dear” (with Billy Davis) and “Save Me A Star” (with Gwen Gordy and Janie Bradford). These were cut at Detroit’s United Sound circa 1957-58, with hopes to lease them to a record company. “We all went to New York,” says Payne. “My mother, Berry and I, and we drove with this guy, George Kelley, who was a nightclub owner and also one of Berry’s financiers.” One port of call, she remembers, was Morris Levy’s Roulette Records.
“Then, when we all came back to Detroit, Berry wanted to have a meeting with my mother about managing me – but it didn’t go well. Whatever he was proposing business-wise, my mother wasn’t agreeing. She thought [the contract] was unfair, and she just didn’t feel that it was right to let me go and have him manage me, and so that never happened.” (In fairness, Payne’s mother wouldn’t permit her adolescent daughter to sign at least one other long-term contract, to tour with Duke Ellington, although she did perform at some of the band’s individual dates.)
Subsequently, Payne moved to New York, securing her first record deal, with ABC-Paramount, at the age of 20. “I was singing middle-of-the-road, jazz, cabaret, because I was working in clubs,” she says. “ That’s how I made my living: nightclubs and supper clubs – I never really played the Chitlin’ Circuit.” Her debut album was released on ABC’s Impulse! label in early 1964, After The Lights Go Down Low And Much More!!! “She has the jazz quality, perception and vocal equipment of a Diahann Carroll,” reported Variety of Payne’s first Hollywood club date the previous year, when she opened for comedian Don Rickles, with whom she shared agent/manager Joe Scandore.
A REUNION IN MANCHESTER
With a diary including bookings in Europe, Payne was playing a club date in Manchester in March 1965 when the Tamla Motown Revue hit town. At the city’s Britannia Hotel, the 22-year-old reconnected with Berry Gordy, and – with his own record company then in full flow – he suggested meeting up again when they were back in the States. But there was no deal that time, either. “When the Supremes became big hitmakers and they were all on The Ed Sullivan Show, I saw what was going on and I thought, you know what, if I was still with Berry, there would have been a big conflict there. Although I believe that Diana was meant to be the one. You can’t deny it. He saw it, and he went with it.
“I believe in fate, and because I had been raised in the African-American Methodist Church, I felt that whatever’s meant for you is meant for you. And you have to follow your path. I just felt that somehow I was going to make it regardless, whether I was with [Gordy] or not.”
Freda on BBC-TV’s Top Of The Pops, 1970 (photo: Michael Putland)
Payne’s path continues. She has been recording new music with producer Rodrigo Rios, encouraged and financed by J. Michael Goetz, who she met at Mary Wilson’s birthday party three years ago. “We started dating,” explains the singer, “and he became extremely interested in my career. He was concerned about keeping me relevant and keeping me out there.” The result? Sessions at Capitol Records’ Studio A in Los Angeles in the summer of 2019, with the first track released last month: a duet with Johnny Mathis, interpreting the Gershwin standard, “They Can’t Take That Away From Me.”
“It was Rodrigo’s idea to get other top-name singers on the album to do duets with Freda,” explains Goetz. “It was fairly easy to call these great singers on the phone: Kenny Lattimore, Dee Dee Bridgewater, Kurt Elling and Johnny Mathis. When you ‘drop the name’ Freda Payne, people tend to respond quickly and call you back! As for me, I wanted the music to be familiar and commercial, to entice the jazz listener to purchase. Although we used ‘American Songbook’ songs, we re-arranged them with a twist. I was constantly pushing our composer/arranger, Gordon Goodwin, to insert 3/4 jazz waltz tempos whenever possible.” The goal, he says, was “to shake things up and make us sound different to the regurgitated jazz offerings from some of the other famous singers doing this same thing.”
Payne evidently had fun. “It was a wonderful, wonderful session,” she enthuses. “It was like I was in seventh heaven. The band was there, everybody was there. When I was recording at Invictus, we never had the musicians in the room. The music was always pre-recorded, and when I came in to lay down my vocals, it was just me and the engineer and the guys: Eddie, Brian and Lamont. The way we do it now with jazz, you basically have the musicians in the studio at the same time. I like that.”
With luck, so do the musicians – in this case, an 18-piece big band under Goodwin’s leadership, which included guitar legend Weldon Dean Parks, Grammy-nominated pianist Shelly Berg and Rios himself on drums. Payne’s duet partners recorded on site with her at Capitol, except Elling. With Bridgewater, she cut a medley of Bobby Timmons’ “Moanin’ ” and Horace Silver’s “Doodlin’,” while with Lattimore, the choice was Nat “King” Cole’s “Let There Be Love,” and with Elling, another Gershwin classic, “Our Love Is Here To Stay.” Some additional recording is under way – albeit complicated by COVID-19 – and the final album is expected this year from Goetz’ label, Alain Franke Music.
And to this day, does Payne still keep in touch with that other entrepreneur, the one who almost signed her? “Yes, yes. I saw Berry sometime last year. He’s very friendly with me, always shows me love. He said, ‘You’re family.’ I said, ‘OK.’ ” She concludes, “I have no complaints, and no regrets.”
Music notes: the four songs Freda Payne recorded at United Sound were never commercially released. There were later versions by others of two of them: “Save Me A Star,” cut by the Supremes (with Florence Ballard on lead) in August 1961, and “Father Dear” by the Miracles (sung solo by Claudette Robinson, and closely resembling the original) in March 1963. Both sessions were produced by Berry Gordy, and kick off this West Grand Blog playlist. His other songs recorded by Payne, “Applications For Love” and, uh, “The Moon Rock,” seem to be untraceable. The playlist also features one track apiece from her 1960s albums for Impulse! and MGM, her two biggest Invictus hits, “Band Of Gold” and “Bring The Boys Home,” and her 1977 duet with Tavares, “I Wanna See You Soon.” To Payne’s delight, “Bring The Boys Home” was included in the soundtrack of Spike Lee’s recent Vietnam War drama, Da 5 Bloods.