Dozier's 'Sweet' Reflections
UP CLOSE AND PERSONAL, AND SOME PLOTTING
I had hoped that she might sing “Invisible.”
At a music charity fundraising dinner a couple of weeks ago, Alison Moyet was among the performers, reminding me of the sorrowful song which Lamont Dozier composed for her more than 30 years earlier. “It became a big hit for her,” he recalls about “Invisible” in his newly published autobiography, “and marked a turning point for me in terms of getting back on track financially.” Had Dozier been at the dinner that night, I’m sure Moyet would have obliged.
How Sweet It Is comes with the subtitle of A Songwriter’s Reflections on Music, Motown and the Mystery of the Muse, although an alternate choice could have been Love (Makes Me Do Foolish Things). The book is as enjoyable for Dozier’s candid admissions of personal trouble and strife as it is for the stories of how his platinum-plated songbook came to be.
“One night I was driving home drunk and crashed my car into a tree,” he remembers. “The impact knocked the tree into some electrical wires, which fell down onto the car.” Without thinking of the high-voltage jeopardy, he jumped out. “There’s no other way to explain why I didn’t electrocute myself other than to say that the Master Muse wasn’t done with me yet.” Dozier’s wife, Daphne – his second – was not amused. “Before I could fall into bed to sleep it off, she decided we needed to yell at each other about it for a couple of hours.”
Then again, his first wife was a challenge, too. “Though music drove a wedge between me and Ann when we were married, after she kicked me out of our home, she became increasingly preoccupied with maintaining a public image. She would refer to herself as ‘the first and only Mrs. Lamont Dozier.’ ” Still, he agrees that he was hardly an ideal husband and father. “As I began to get my footing in the music industry, I was increasingly away from home. Motown was a competitive environment, and achieving success today meant you had to to work twice as hard to keep that success tomorrow.”
The songwriter is equally honest about his work. Dozier concedes, for example, that his initial material submitted to Aretha Franklin for the 1977 album which became Sweet Passion wasn’t created specifically for her. “ ‘But this is my top shelf stuff,’ I assured her, ‘I would only bring you the good stuff.’ ” The Queen of Soul “just smiled and adjusted one of her bracelets. ‘That’s all fine and good,’ she quipped, ‘but you go home and write some songs that are just for me.’ ”
Much of the book’s Motown narrative is familiar territory, including how some of the most celebrated Holland/Dozier/Holland anthems were created. “Of course we put it in Gladys Horton’s key, since I couldn’t imagine any reason why The Marvelettes might not want to record it,” he declares of “Where Did Our Love Go.” About another hit, Dozier reinforces the accepted history: “For some reason I was thinking about the way Bob Dylan phrased the verses on his song, ‘Like A Rolling Stone,’ which provided inspiration for the feel of ‘Reach Out I’ll Be There.’ ”
TENSION IN THE ROOM
More revealing is how other producers at Hitsville developed jealousy about H/D/H’s A-team status. Dozier writes about dropping into the studio with Bobby Rogers of the Miracles one day in late 1965. “When Bobby and I walked in, everyone suddenly stopped talking. They all turned and looked at me. It was an incredibly awkward moment, and I could feel the tension in the room.” He adds, “It came to light that some of the producers were plotting to discredit Holland/Dozier/Holland because they were envious that we were getting so many releases.”
Dozier goes on, “When Berry found out about the plot to unseat us, he hit the ceiling. ‘Listen,’ he told them, ‘H/D/H are keeping the doors open around here. They’re the reason you have a job, so cut out the bullshit and get your head screwed on straight before you shoot yourself in the foot. We vote on what to release, and as soon as you guys start coming up with better material than H/D/H, you’ll get the vote.’ ”
This is intriguing. Dozier doesn’t name the conspirators, but the company’s other producers at the time included Norman Whitfield, Clarence Paul, Hank Cosby, Harvey Fuqua, Robert Staunton and Robert Walker, California-based Hal Davis and Marc Gordon – and Smokey Robinson. There’s an oblique jab at Smokey later in the book, but in 1965, he was riding high with hits for the Miracles, the Temptations and Marvin Gaye, so it seems unlikely that he was in the anti-H/D/H cabal.
Lamont with wife Barbara, Ahmet Ertegun with Atlantic artist Debbie Gibson
Dozier gets more specific – engagingly so – about a minor music man, Harry Nivens, who was a pre-Motown mentor of his and who operated “a little local label” from his Detroit home. “I noticed right away that Harry was a jittery, nervous kind of guy. He had me come into his little makeshift studio and sing a couple of things for him. ‘You’ve got a nice sound to your voice,’ he told me as he lit a fresh cigarette.” They toiled together intensely on defining and improving the teenage Dozier’s singing. “All that hard work gave me a good ear for harmony and how to construct vocal parts,” he notes.
Naturally, a substantial share of How Sweet It Is relates Dozier’s post-Motown experiences, including the initial success of the Invictus/Hot Wax enterprise and the eventual deterioration of his relationship with the Hollands. Yet his memories of the latter don’t come across as mean-spirited, perhaps because of the enthusiasm which greeted his later solo recording career – Out Here On My Own and Black Bach are superb albums – or because of the range of artists for whom Dozier wrote and produced, whether it was Aretha Franklin or Debbie Gibson, Z.Z. Hill or Lawrence Hilton-Jacobs, or a gaggle of Brits in the ’80s and ’90s, such as Mick Hucknall, Phil Collins, Joss Stone and…Alison Moyet.
Making How Sweet It Is all the more inviting is the calibre of the writing; Dozier’s collaborator was Scott B. Bomar, a former professional songwriter who came into contact with the Motown magician via a podcast, Songcraft: Spotlight on Songwriters. “We challenged ourselves to find a guest for the milestone one-hundredth episode who had written 100 or more Top 10 singles,” Bomar told me recently. “I didn’t even know if anyone had actually achieved that feat, but we did some digging and realised that Lamont Dozier fitted the bill. It turns out, it was one of the best interviews we’d ever done.”
HIS STORY, HIS TRUTH
This led to How Sweet It Is, since – fortunately for all concerned – Bomar is also the publisher and senior director of BMG Books. (In its previous life, the Bertelsmann Music Group owned the RCA and Arista labels, now held by Sony Music.) An autobiography was high on Dozier’s wish-list, and it came together swiftly. “We finalised the deal at the end of 2018, and Lamont and I got together for the first time in January of 2019. All the work really happened within a few months.”
Bomar lodged with Dozier for a solid week at the project’s start. “We worked all day, every day, only pausing to eat.” He recorded all the conversations, “because I wanted to make sure it was Lamont’s voice, and not me summarising what he’d said. As he writes in the introduction, some other people might remember some of these events differently, but the important thing is that it’s his story and his truth as he remembers it.”
Lamont with Scott Bomar of BMG Books
That the autobiographical truths of Dozier and the Hollands should emerge in the same year is a coincidence, according to Bomar. “He views the Hollands as his brothers.” He continues, “Sometimes brothers fight, but there is a bond among those three that will never be broken.” Still, the timing of the two books was a surprise. “In fact, I was at a conference in Chicago in the spring, and having lunch with the publishers of the Hollands’ book. One of them mentioned something off-handedly about their upcoming H/D/H book, and I nearly choked. That was the first I’d heard of it.”
The BMG executive admits to being “a little bummed out about the ‘competition,’ but then I realised that it gives the fans a chance to hear all three perspectives at the same time, which is actually pretty cool. I think it allowed everyone to simply share their memories without doing so as a reaction to the other.”
Readers – you, perhaps – will be the judge of each book’s perspectives, value and truth, just as the youngsters of Detroit, and the world, once had to decide which purchase was more appealing: a new Motown single or a sandwich. That the three men who contributed so much to the company’s creativity and influence have put their memories down on paper, finally, is welcome.
How Sweet It Is even offers some wisdom to modern songwriters, in the form of a list of “guiding principles” to help them understand, and prosper in, a competitive, idiosyncratic field. Personally, I like the first of them (“Don’t take something that belongs to someone else unless you have their permission”) in the context of Steve Winwood’s 1988 hit, “Roll With It,” and how its writers were found guilty of plagiarising “(I’m A) Road Runner,” the H/D/H-penned hit by Jr. Walker & the All Stars.
“I’m not suggesting that Steve Winwood is an out-and-out thief,” writes Dozier. “I’m sure he’s a good man. It might well have been an unintentional thing where our song was in his subconscious and just came out when he was writing ‘Roll With It.’ Maybe he was even attempting to pay tribute to ‘(I’m A) Road Runner’ and his intentions were good.” Even so, Dozier encourages young writers to be “very careful” to avoid such plagiarism, subconscious or otherwise.
Ah, the mysteries of the Muse.
Music notes: Dozier’s unique body of work as a songwriter and producer at Motown is well-served on digital streaming platforms, as are his most recent albums as an artist, namely, 2018’s Reimagination and 2016’s Reflections of Lamont Dozier. His individual albums for ABC Records in the ’70s are not digitally available, but there is a 15-track compilation of that output. Curiously, his recordings for Warner Bros. and Columbia appear to be unavailable online, including Peddlin’ Music On The Side, which contained one of his most popular, post-Motown songs, “Going Back To My Roots.”
Book notes: How Sweet It Is has a publication date of November 26 in hardcover and a Kindle edition, followed in December by a hardcover version bundled with Reimagination on CD. BMG Books offers a range of titles which cover various music genres; next April, it’s publishing Eddie Floyd’s autobiography, Knock! Knock! Knock on Wood! Floyd’s collaborator, Tony Fletcher, previously authored the Wilson Pickett biography, In the Midnight Hour.