The Glue of Robert's Gibson
THE RHYTHM OF THE REIGN OF ROBERT WHITE
The most famous four bars ever recorded?
In the 21st century world of digital music, Robert White’s signature guitar riff has – as of this writing – been streamed 1.7 billion times. That’s right: 1.7 billion, across all platforms (as they say in the business) and around the world. To say nothing of the hundreds of millions of times it’s been heard on terrestrial radio, at home and abroad, since the original release of Gordy 7038 on December 21, 1964.
It is, of course, the four bars which open “My Girl,” when the sound of White’s thumb-picked Gibson L-5 rises above James Jamerson’s foundational Fender bass to create the landscape onto which David Ruffin and the Temptations then march so magnificently.
In the Snakepit: Robert White (left) with Joe Messina
The secret of White’s alchemy? “He kept his nails very clean, very sharp, very well-manicured,” the late Motown producer Johnny Bristol once explained to me, “and he had strong nails. They were like picks!”
It was much more than that, needless to say, and Bristol – like many others at Motown – admired all of White’s instrumental precision, his professional skill, his personal outlook. “I had tremendous respect for him as a person, as a man.”
The individual who has done more than anyone to gain recognition for the musicians of Motown, Allan Slutsky, agrees. “Now there’s a guy I can talk about with nothing but fond memories for days on end. And the film would have been much better if he could have survived to be in it.” (The film is 2002’s Standing in the Shadows of Motown, the result of Slutsky’s years-long crusade to celebrate the Funk Brothers, which ultimately delivered on its promise.)
“I remember interviewing Robert about Jamerson calling himself Diego Diegerson, trying to make people think he was Spanish. He said, ‘Everybody knew that was bullshit, because Diego may be Spanish for James, but Diegerson was not the Spanish version of Jamerson.’ But before he said that, my reminding Robert of the name brought about a low-rumble laugh that started somewhere deep in his being and erupted through every pore of his body. It was infectious.”
“My Girl” aside, White’s most famous guitar riff is probably the “S-O-S” octave part which electrifies the Supremes’ “You Keep Me Hangin’ On.” He told Slutsky, “I invented that part. It made me famous. Somebody told me to do something that sounded like a telegraph or Morse code type of thing, like the news used to come on in the old days.”
EVERYBODY KNEW THEIR ROLE
But the truth is that White is acknowledged as much for his teamwork in the Motown studio as for any individual riffs. “It was like a Dixieland band,” he explained to Slutsky in an article published in Guitar Player in 1988. “Everybody knew his given job. Mine was rhythm, Eddie [Willis] would play bluesy fills, and Joe [Messina] would usually read something or play backbeats. We did a lot of role playing, and this is why we got along so well. Motown wasn’t giving album credits in those days, so there was nothing to be gained from thinking you were better than somebody else – and besides, we knew what we had to do to make money.”
Celebrating with the gang, including brothers James Jamerson (back row, centre), Earl Van Dyke (third right) and Uriel Jones (first right)
Typical of this period were White’s strums on Stevie Wonder’s “My Cherie Amour” and “For Once In My Life.” He said, “That was my thing, loose strums. I tried to make them all run together. I let everybody grab at the good juicy parts on paper, and then I would play a rhythm part that would complement all of it. It was an attitude, a feeling. I wasn’t one of the stand outs, but I was the glue.”
“We would let each of them play separate parts,” Johnny Bristol confirmed, “but all three parts would make up one particular phrase. It gave each one time to concentrate on what they had to do, and feel comfortable with it. They worked it out well together, so they would not get in each other’s way.”
White and Willis were black, while Messina was white, and so the trio came to be known around Motown as “the Oreo guitar section.” Each, however, had begun playing for Berry Gordy’s business at different times: Willis being the first, brought in circa 1958 by Marv Johnson, followed by White, then Messina. In her autobiography, Gordy’s second wife, Raynoma, remembered the ’59 recording date which yielded Barrett Strong’s “Money (That’s What I Want),” and she named Willis and White as among the players.
Pennsylvania-born White had come to Motown through Harvey Fuqua’s Moonglows, for whom he played (bass, as it happens) on a tour which ended in Detroit in 1958. This led to session work at Anna Records and, soon enough, for Gordy’s start-up at 2648 West Grand.
SERIOUS AND CEREBRAL
“Robert was thought by most of us as being serious-minded and the brain of the group,” wrote fellow Funk Brother Jack Ashford in Motown: The View From The Bottom. “None of us was dumb or illiterate, and we were all pretty clever with words. With Robert, sometimes, the depth of his conversation required you to do some serious brainwork, or what he was saying would go right over your head.”
His musicianship was equally serious, not least because his influences included the extraordinary Wes Montgomery, and Nat “King” Cole’s formidable guitarist, Oscar (“Jesus Boy”) Moore. That was just as well, given the intense, demanding nature of recording routines in the Snakepit. These ran six days a week, with two or three three-hour sessions during the course of a day. (When Motown signed up to the union in the mid 1960s, the musicians earned $52.50 per session, the equivalent of $425 today; before that, the pay was often $10 per tune.)
Strumming that L-5 with Stevie and Earl
“We had a lot of concepts,” said bandleader Earl Van Dyke, quoted by Slutsky in Guitar Player. “For instance, we often doubled parts in unison or at an octave above or below. Robert and I did this a lot. We played so close and tight that a lot of times they would stop the session in the middle of a tune and say, ‘I can’t hear the piano,’ or ‘I can’t hear the guitar’ – because they couldn’t separate us. Like in ‘You Can’t Hurry Love’ or ‘Ain’t That Peculiar.’ ”
Equally important was teamwork with the producers. “A perfect example would be ‘Someday We’ll Be Together,’ ” said Johnny Bristol. “That opening line, it was something [White] and I worked out in the studio together, because I knew I needed something on the front of the song, and I wasn’t sure exactly what. Robert’s playing all the way through the song, and it’s the perfect example of how he and the other guys were so willing to work with producers who weren’t necessarily musicians, but who knew exactly what they wanted.”
In Bristol’s case, White delivered more. “Robert sat me down at the piano – because I learned by ear – and he showed me quite a few things about the piano and chord changes, and progressions, and so forth. He was teaching me. I’m talking about from middle C!”
Like all of Motown’s Detroit musicians, White’s life and income were disrupted by the company’s move west. Eventually, he relocated to Los Angeles, too, but did not prosper. There was some session work – heard on albums by Zulema and Gloria Gaynor, among others – and he was in the band behind the Temptations’ “Reunion” tour of 1982.
Earl Van Dyke told Allan Slutsky that, like James Jamerson, White was professionally lost in Los Angeles. “But Robert found personal peace, hooked up with a woman he loved, and got involved in a spiritual path called Eckankar,” says Slutsky. “He had just started playing again – on a crappy solid body guitar, having sold his signature Gibson L-5 because he needed the money – when he died.”
The death was as tragic as it was premature. “He needed a single bypass surgery that most heart doctors could perform in their sleep,” Slutsky recalls, “but the doctor who operated on him fucked up and left Robert in a coma.” While White was in that state, Slutsky sent recorded messages from the Funk Brothers “that his girl played to him via headphones. She insisted that his life signs on the monitor showed positive responses to the tapes.” Nonetheless, the guitarist did not recover, and died in Los Angeles on October 27, 1994, at the age of 57.
“Robert was a pioneer in his own way,” Berry Gordy said in tribute at the time. “Not only that, he was a beautiful person to be around.”
Even so, his soul survives in sound. Soon, without a doubt: two billion streams.
Music notes: this WGB playlist features a selection of the hits which Robert White helped into history, beginning with his signature recording. It closes with “The Flick,” which he wrote with Earl Van Dyke and James Jamerson, and which – in this version – was recorded live at Ben’s Hi Chapparal Club in Detroit on January 10, 1970. White’s last-ever session for Motown took place 24 years later in Los Angeles: he played on a new recording of “Do You Love Me” by the Temptations, which later opened a various-artists collection, The Music, The Magic, The Memories of Motown: A Tribute to Berry Gordy. When released in 1995, after White’s death, the track was dedicated in his memory. The album does not appear to be available on streaming services, although “Do You Love Me” is here on YouTube.