Back in Their Arms Again
THE HOLLANDS HIKE THE MEMORY TRAIL
To the credit of everyone involved, Eddie and Brian Holland’s newly-published Come and Get These Memories proves that illuminating, captivating tales about Motown Records are still there for the telling.
“The key thing was, we wrote teenage songs,” declares Eddie, about halfway through the book. “That’s what I always said. ‘We’re writing teenage songs in an adult situation. The kids are too young to feel like the songs say they felt, but they could identify with those feelings.’ ”
That’s hardly a revelation, but it does reflect the unpretentious way in which the brothers recall their remarkable work and their industrious lives, helped by a skilful, experienced collaborator, Dave Thompson. I confess to no interest in the characters of author Thompson’s many previous music books – the New York Dolls or Hawkwind, for example – but he knows how to shape a narrative and to deploy effectively the facts and drama of his subjects’ timeline.
Drama? Readers of earlier Motown tomes will know that a married Brian Holland had an affair with Diana Ross, which, on one occasion, led to a fracas at the 20 Grand nightclub involving his wife Sharon and the singer. “Sharon was shouting obscenities at Diane,” recalled Mary Wilson in her autobiography, Dreamgirl, “and we all circled around Diane, with Flo stepping right in the middle.”
Come and Get These Memories relates such incidents without sensationalising them, while setting each in the context of the Hollands’ personal and professional lives. Brian explains that he and fellow songwriter/producer Robert Bateman “would crash around town together” with Sharon and her sister Sandra, “and we always had so much fun.” When the fun led to marriage and, later, trouble and strife, Holland channelled his emotions into music.
“Night after night, feeling rejected and unable to sleep, I’d go out to the piano and start playing, simply to stop my thoughts from turning over and over.” This was, the songwriter admits, a form of therapy. “But one night, sitting in the dark, crying, a song did come to me. Over and over I played it, night after night, in darkness, in utter despair.” It was “Baby I Need Your Loving.” He took the melody to Eddie and Lamont Dozier, “and I didn’t even need to explain what it was about. They understood, especially Edward. His lyrics for that song were perfect.”
Another Motown jewel from 1964, “Baby Love,” emerged from those same marital woes. “Of course, I still provided for my family,” Brian remembers, “took care of Sharon and the kids. But when I was daydreaming, sitting around, I was thinking about Diana, and when I was writing, I was thinking about her as well.” He adds later, “Songwriters are like movie people; they come up with an idea, they write it, they stick to it, that’s what happens. I was sitting at the piano, came up with a little melody, and started singing, ‘Baby love, oh baby love…’ ”
The result was not immediately hailed within Hitsville. “I started singing and everybody was cringing around me,” admits Brian, his brother among them. “I thought ‘Baby Love’ was the stupidest title I ever heard,” comments Eddie. “It took me two weeks to even agree to write the song because it was the dumbest title.” Brian Holland and Diana Ross eventually parted company as lovers, but tragedy persisted; Sharon Holland committed suicide many years later, after the couple’s divorce in 1974.
TO BE OR NOT TO BE?
(Incidentally, members of Dave Godin’s Tamla Motown Appreciation Society learned about Sharon Holland before most. During a 1965 visit to Britain, she spent time with him, as noted in the club newsletter. She was an actress, performing Shakespeare with the Restoration Arts Theater of Detroit; she also told Godin that she didn’t like “Please Mr. Postman” upon first hearing. He added, “It grew on her, though!”)
As welcome as the personal stories are, the book does not neglect the professional process by which H/D/H recorded and produced their unique body of work, nor does it fail to recognise the roles of others, including (obviously) Berry Gordy, Janie Bradford, Paul Riser, Hank Cosby and Lawrence Horn, as well as Motown’s many musicians and singers. Eddie tells of toiling with the Four Tops (“those songs…challenged the hell out of Levi”) and recalls – as he once did for me – how bringing some female fans into the studio helped Stubbs reach the high notes of “Bernadette,” because the singer wanted to perform at his best in front of them. Equally, it’s interesting to learn how the Hollands handled the tragedy of recording engineer Horn, found guilty in 1996 of conspiring to kill members of his family.
Brian Holland, suited and (presumably) booted
Dave Thompson notes that he had his first conversation with Eddie Holland for Come and Get These Memories in late 2017, with the final manuscript sent to publisher Omnibus Press a year later. That’s an accelerated schedule, Thompson concedes, “but we spent a lot of time talking in between. At the same time, though, I’ve been an H/D/H fan since I first worked out who they were and what they did: namely, write more or less every favourite song I had while growing up. So that’s half a century of prep work.
“I knew when we started how I wanted the story to flow,” continues Thompson. “It’s very easy in situations like this to allow the career to overwhelm the personal life, or vice versa, but my belief is that one will always influence the other – cause and effect – so it’s vitally important to show that in action. Some of my favourite parts of the book are where there’s really ‘nothing of interest’ happening. They’re just images, really: the chili bubbling on the stove, the all-night card games. Little things that just drop the reader into a certain time and place.”
Those who have interviewed the Hollands know that Brian tends to defer to Eddie (as recently evident in the documentary film, Hitsville: The Making of Motown). “That is very true,” responds Thompson. “At the same time, though, he lived his own life, so my focus when we talked was on the things that happened when Eddie was not involved.” He cites Brian and Lamont’s joint efforts, too: “those moments when one of them would be picking something out on the piano, and the other would leap onto the seat beside them, push them out of the way, and finish whatever the other was playing with.”
Dozier represents one of the challenges of Come and Get These Memories, not least because, some years after the trio left Motown, he had his own separation from the Hollands. The book offers the brothers’ perspective, of course, with some heretofore unknown detail, such as how a disillusioned member of the Invictus/Hot Wax team, Otis Smith, “convinced Lamont to leave us and sign with ABC Records,” according to Eddie. There is more on the “divorce” and on a later, bitter dispute over the stage musical version of First Wives Club, all of which heightens the anticipation for Dozier’s own book, How Sweet It Is, due for publication in November. (Both within a month of each other? Yes, I know, what’s the back story there?) Nonetheless, Thompson emphasises, “it was important to all of us that Lamont was given his due. None of this would have happened without him, which is a point Eddie makes quite forcefully when he admits that it doesn’t matter what any of them might do on their own, they’d never be bigger than H/D/H.”
BY GEORGE, LITIGATION IN THE MAKING
The train wreck that was H/D/H’s exit from Motown, and subsequent decades of litigation between the two sides, is amplified in this book. Eddie details that it was Berry Gordy’s refusal to give the trio their own label within the company which began damaging the relationship (and that’s more than Holland would admit when talking to me for Heaven Must Have Sent You, the career retrospective CD set). He confirmed that after Gordy ducked out of the discussions – understandable, given their close relationship from before Motown’s birth – it was lawyer George Schiffer who handled matters. This, according to Holland, was how the conversation went: “Eddie? Look. We have contracts on you, we have contracts on your brother and we have contracts on Lamont. We don’t have to give you anything.”
Little wonder that this led to leaving and lawsuits.
Eddie Holland, staying, not leaving
Even so, Gordy lent a substantial amount of money to Eddie Holland during one phase of the litigation. That’s just one of the many facts – minutiae, if you must – which are out in the open with Come and Get These Memories. Another is that Gordy gave the Hollands’ mother a loan, years before her sons learned about it. (I also wasn’t aware that she and Berry had known each other when he worked on the Ford production line.)
Other trivia will please we geeks. “I even renamed myself,” Brian reveals about his schooldays. “Instead of being Brian Holland, I was Brian Van Holland, because people with a Van in their name, they were all wealthy.” There’s corroboration that “(Where’s The Joy) In Nature Boy” – a 1958 single on the Kudo label, and a 78rpm release, no less – featured Eddie, even though the label copy carries the name “Briant Holland.” And confirmation that the first song Eddie wrote with Norman Whitfield was “Throw A Farewell Kiss,” initially cut by Freddie Gorman in 1962.
“They’re both such warm and wonderful people, so easy to talk with, on all manner of subjects,” summarises Thompson. “I remember one afternoon with Brian, we spent as much time talking about chess as we did music. He owes me a game, by the way.”
Come and Get These Memories concludes warmly with an anecdote about the writing of an ode to Esther Gordy Edwards, just as it opens authoritatively with a foreword by former Motown Records president Barney Ales. The book also has a thorough discography, and it lists material created by various permutations of the Hollands, Dozier and others, including compositions for First Wives Club, which played in San Diego in 2009 and Chicago in 2015.
There’s no false modesty in these pages, but there’s no call for it. The brothers “know the quality of our work, in the same way we’re aware of the artists we chose to record it. We know, because that’s what we set out to achieve: the best songs for the best singers, accompanied by the best musicians, for the greatest record label in the world. And that is what we accomplished.”
Book notes: more than 20 years ago, Dave Thompson and his agent worked up a proposal with Marvin Gaye’s brother, Frankie, and completed several chapters. “We couldn’t interest a single publisher in his story,” Thompson admits today. In 2003, Marvin Gaye, My Brother was published, authored by Gaye with Fred Basten. “It was a bittersweet experience reading it,” says Thompson, “not only remembering a truly lovely man, but also seeing how very different the book was to the one I’d have written. Better-different or worse-different is not for me to say.” Until Come and Get These Memories, that was the writer’s only encounter with the Motown family. “But I hope that will change. I have my secret wish-list…”
Music notes: much of the vast archive of H/D/H material is available on digital services, whether recorded by Motown artists, or later by others when the team operated Invictus/Hot Wax in the ’70s. There have also been projects since then, by the likes of Heavy Traffic, Liquid Heat, Cassandra and Keisha Jackson. Among this last group is a 2012 curio by Detroit singer/songwriter Mozella, entitled The Brian Holland Sessions. Unless I missed it, this isn’t mentioned in Come and Get These Memories, but there is a video online about the project.