No Synergy for Sammy

ECOLOGICALLY UNSOUND: A JOINT VENTURE GOES NOWHERE

Later this year, a beloved entertainer who was once signed to Motown will be the star of a new musical in London. Next year – or beyond – that same individual will be the star of a movie currently being co-produced by another beloved entertainer once signed to Motown.

Sammy Davis Jr. is back.

Admittedly, that’s thanks to others, and he’s not live in person (Davis died 30 years ago). One of those others is Lionel Richie, who has teamed up with fellow producers Lorenzo di Bonaventure and Mike Menchel to put together a Paramount Pictures biopic about Davis. “It’s an honour for me to bring the life of one of my idols to the screen,” said Richie when Davis’ heirs agreed to back the movie. “I’m so grateful to be working closely with the Davis family on this and couldn’t be happier to be moving forward on this passion project.”

***“You’re a fighter, you’re a lover…”***

There’s more such PR puffery later in this edition of West Grand Blog, but first, the news of that London production. Sammy will open at the Lyric Theatre in late July for a seven-week run, with Giles Terera in the title role and Clarke Peters as director. To be strictly accurate, it’s not a new show, but rather a fresh production of a musical created by Leslie Bricusse and first staged in San Diego in 2009. (The Los Angeles Times described it then as mixing “eager-to-please revue numbers with variety show sketches summarising the high and low chapters of this triple-threat entertainer’s life.”)

Bricusse met Davis almost 60 years ago, and subsequently wrote (with Anthony Newley) two of the star’s biggest hits, “What Kind Of Fool Am I” and “The Candy Man.” Later still, after Davis died, the composer took the advice of Quincy Jones and created Sammy, the show. Why it’s taken so long to reach London – an ambition Bricusse voiced in 2009 – is unclear, but better late than never, perhaps.

And Motown? Davis’ brief, unsuccessful recording venture with Berry Gordy dates back to 1970, but there were connections between them before and after that time. Davis was in the audience in July 1965 when the Supremes made their bow at one of the temples of American showbiz. “Had you been at the Copacabana when this album was recorded, you would have seen a miracle take place,” he gushed in his liner notes for The Supremes At The Copa, released that November.

More seriously, there was a striking image of Davis and Gordy walking arm in arm during the Poor People’s March to Freedom in Atlanta, shortly after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King in 1968. Davis was a very public figure in the era’s civil rights struggle, while Gordy’s support was mostly behind the scenes, but there was no disputing their unity for the cause.

BLINKY’S ON BOARD

On TV, Davis appeared with various Motown acts. The Supremes were guests on The Sammy Davis Jr. Show in 1966, and with him on Hollywood Palace later that decade. In cabaret, he recruited Hitsville newbie Blinky for his Las Vegas and Reno club residencies as the ’60s turned into the ’70s. “I was with him longer than I was at Motown,” she told Joe Marchese in liner notes for her recent Heart Full Of Soul anthology.

***Berry and Sammy, 1968 (photo: Sonny Edwards)***

And it was through Davis that Gordy became acquainted with Nancy Leiviska, who worked for the entertainer’s production company when the two men went into business together. She later gave birth to Gordy’s youngest son, Stefan (otherwise known as Redfoo), and ran the record company’s music-video operations in the ’80s.

The Davis/Gordy deal was announced in Detroit in April 1970 with the sort of PR hyperbole (“multi-faceted music development, business synergies, widescale entertainment, leisure-time programming”) which was the hallmark of Motown executive Mike Roshkind. Gordy was quoted as saying, “In a greater sense, I believe [that] this alignment will serve a long-standing objective of mine, and that it would grant a greater opportunity for new talent, particularly for the youth of this country seeking a place in our industry.”

The basics were the formation of a joint-venture label, Ecology Records, and two music publishing subsidiaries, Ecology Music and, yes, Synergy Music. The first album release was to be Sammy Davis Jr. At Carnegie Hall – Live, recorded during his three-night run at the New York venue in February 1970.

Before the Ecology contracts were finalised, Gordy agreed to issue a studio album which Davis had completed the previous autumn with producer Jimmy Bowen (the two worked together at Frank Sinatra’s Reprise Records). Finding hits for Davis was hard, Bowen admitted in his autobiography, Rough Mix. “Slowing him down long enough for a song meeting was difficult. And he always had his Rat Pack entourage and yes-men around. When he did show up for meetings or recordings, he was worn out or just pitifully unprepared.”

That contrasts with the experience of Motown’s Deke Richards, who was assigned the task of prepping the Bowen-produced album for release. The content was already in the can, comprising Davis’ versions (questionable in some cases) of recent chart hits such as “In The Ghetto,” “Spinning Wheel,” “You Better Sit Down Kids,” “And When I Die,” “My Way” and two Motown copyrights, “For Once In My Life” and “You’ve Made Me So Very Happy.” So Richards’ main task was organising a weekend photo shoot for the gatefold cover artwork. He found Davis to be engaged and attentive – but then again, his instruction to Richards was to gather “50 pretty girls” for the shoot, so he was bound to enjoy the occasion. “That’s fine,” wrote Richards 30 years later in an exhaustive account on the Motown Forum website, “but what were they going to do? They couldn’t all be hanging on Sammy.”

PROCRASTINATION AND UNCERTAINTY

In the event, the shoot was successful, Davis approved the cover design, the title (Something For Everyone) was agreed upon, the multi-tracks turned into vinyl. Motown released the album soon after the Detroit press conference – and it turned out to be a complete stiff. This, even though the year before, Davis had delivered for Reprise a Top 20 single, “I’ve Gotta Be Me,” and a Top 30 album of the same name.

The performance of Something For Everyone would have been embarrassing for all concerned, but for Gordy, it can’t have come as a complete surprise. Previous Motown albums by old-school entertainers like Billy Eckstine and Barbara McNair broke no sales records, either. The immediate upshot for Davis was the cancellation of the release of Carnegie Hall live album, followed by procrastination and uncertainty about what to do next with Ecology.

Nevertheless, Davis proceeded to record while under contract to Motown, including such material as “Put Your Hand In The Hand” (a Top 3 smash for Ocean in 1971) and Ray Stevens’ near-hit, “Have A Little Talk With Myself.” The sessions took place in Los Angeles, with Jimmy Bowen in the control room. Yet only one single emerged, in March 1971: “In My Own Lifetime,” a Broadway tune, coupled with a movie song written by Leslie Bricusse, “I’ll Begin Again.” It was the sole flagbearer for Ecology, and disappeared without trace. Soon enough, Davis’ manager, Sy Marsh, secured his client’s release from Motown.

Years later, the singer recalled Marsh’s exit strategy: notifying Gordy that he would go public about the company’s inability – or reluctance – to deliver commercially on the joint venture announced with such fanfare, unless the unissued tracks were given to Marsh to place elsewhere. If the latter occurred, no public announcement would be made.

“Draw up the papers,” Gordy is said to have told Marsh a few days after receiving the ultimatum. “You get all the material and you’re out quietly.”

What followed is familiar history today: how MGM Records signed Davis and producer Mike Curb persuaded him to record “The Candy Man,” with the result being a Number One single in 1972 – the biggest of his career. At least Gordy had the manners to call Sy Marsh. “I’m just on your phone to admit to you that we blew it,” he said, according to Why Me? The Sammy Davis Jr. Story.

None of the above embarrassment will feature in the London production of Sammy, although “The Candy Man” is sure to be included in its score. Whether Lionel Richie and his partners will want to visit Davis’ Motown misfortune is another matter, but they have more substantial drama and distress to draw upon.

‘LIKE TONY BENNETT’S THING’

There are two footnotes. Marvin Gaye told Rolling Stone in 1972 that he had written some songs for Sammy Davis at Motown, but that the tracks – if they existed as such – never found their way to him. Then, in 1984, Davis’ name appeared once again on a Motown release – no hard feelings about Ecology, it seems – when he recorded “Hello Detroit,” a city-celebrating song sired by Berry Gordy and Willie Hutch.

This came about when Mayor Coleman Young, battling Detroit’s image as the murder capital of the United States, asked Gordy for help. “I told him I wanted something for us like Tony Bennett’s thing for San Francisco,” Coleman said to the Detroit Free Press. “You’re a fighter, you’re a lover/You’re strong and you recover,” ran the lyrics, encouraging the mayor to tout the record through the course of ’84, including at the Detroit Tigers’ spring training camp and at his city’s Thanksgiving Day parade.

The only trouble was that Davis was a native New Yorker. Appearing on The Tonight Show starring Johnny Carson, he sang “Hello Detroit” with spirit, but mispronounced Belle Isle in the lyric. He apologised immediately when talking to Carson, noting that it was the first time he had performed the song live. Then he joked that he be allowed “to still eat the barbecue on Hastings Street.” But that was an area of the city that was bulldozed for freeway construction – two decades earlier.

Watch out for that kind of detail in the film, Lionel. You know it bothers you when people mispronounce Tuskegee.

Music notes: there’s an abundance of Sammy Davis Jr. material on streaming services, but not his Motown recordings, whether those of 1970-71 or 1984’s “Hello Detroit.” Fortunately, his performance of the latter for Johnny Carson’s show can be found here on YouTube – complete with Belle Isle faux pas – and so can his treatment of “In My Own Lifetime,” which Davis introduced as made “for my new label, called Ecology.” Meanwhile, “Hello Detroit” has attracted several other singers in recent years, including Brazil’s Daniel Boaventura and England’s Rowetta. Both of those versions are available on Spotify and elsewhere.