Reaching Out, Sounding Strange
‘THAT IS NO HIT RECORD’
Is there any greater monument to Motown than “Reach Out I’ll Be There”?
On today’s date, October 15, in 1966, the Four Tops reigned, their single at the summit of America’s pop charts, their supremacy confirmed. Two weeks later, the disc repeated the feat on the other side of the Atlantic. “After you have heard it,” wrote revered British music writer Penny Valentine, “you will never need to listen to another record for as long as you live.”
A couple of months earlier, the Four Tops had doubted the wisdom of issuing it at all. “Berry, stop. Don’t do this to us. That’s not the Four Tops. This record has no anchor. We’ve got momentum, we’re riding the crest. Don’t screw us up.”
Those were the words in 2013 of the Tops’ Duke Fakir, recalling when the quartet met with the Motown founder just before “Reach Out I’ll Be There” was due for release. Fakir remembered the doubts of lead singer Levi Stubbs, too: “Oh no. We were experimenting and doing some talk singing. But that is no hit record.”
History loves such stories – and it’s sure to be a scene in the forthcoming Four Tops musical, currently in rehearsals for a Detroit debut next year. This has a working title of I’ll Be There! and puts Fakir together for its making with producer Paul Lambert and director Aakomon “AJ” Jones. The latter is the latest recruit to the project, known for choreography work on the worldwide hit movie Black Panther, as well as the TV drama series, Vinyl.
Media reports suggest that the team wants to avoid a production in the style of Ain’t Too Proud, in part to minimise creative (or commercial) comparisons with the Temptations’ hit, which returns to Broadway tomorrow (16). In other words, I’ll Be There! does not wish to be regarded as yet another jukebox musical.
At least there’s plenty of material to draw upon for the tale of the Tops’ signature song. In fact, it has been one of the most documented recordings from Motown’s golden era. “For some reason I was thinking about the way Bob Dylan phrased the verses on his song ‘Like A Rolling Stone,’ which provided the inspiration for the feel of ‘Reach Out I’ll Be There,’ ” wrote Lamont Dozier in his recent autobiography, How Sweet It Is. “That was another song where we raised the key to get Levi Stubbs singing with that pleading gospel shout, and it’s another of our records that I’m particularly proud of today.”
More than a quarter-century before that book, Lamont Dozier spoke of others who had influenced him and co-producer Brian Holland. “We were trying to open up to different things,” he told me for The Billboard Book of Number One Rhythm & Blues Hits. “We respected John [Lennon] and Paul [McCartney] because of their freeness, and we were able to have carte blanche at Motown to do whatever we wanted, because we had been successful and proven ourselves.” Of “Reach Out I’ll Be There,” Dozier said, “It was so different from anything anybody had ever heard before. I mean, what do you call this? R&B? Pop? What is it? It was all mixed up there, and it was like the talk of the music industry…because it had so many different moods and changes. We took some chances.”
Critics were impressed, then and since. “A man lost in a welter of misery, his shouts emerging from an abyss,” wrote Dave Marsh in The Heart of Rock & Soul: The 1001 Greatest Singles Ever Made. “The music is dizzying, the drums collide against every phrase he sings, but Levi soldiers onward, riding out a maelstrom.” (Marsh rated the record at No. 4 in his book’s countdown.)
Lamont Dozier and Brian Holland got the basic track for “Reach Out I’ll Be There” laid down in the Motown studio on Friday, July 8, 1966. “Brian would go into the studio with chords,” his brother, Eddie, recalled for Heaven Must Have Sent You: The Holland/Dozier/Holland Story. “He directed the musicians what to play and how to play it. A lot of the musicians who would listen to Brian put his chords down, they would be confused. They would ask him, ‘Why would you chord it this way? Because in school, they teach us to do it this way, and you’re doing it that.’ By the book, it was incorrect. But it creates a different type of sound.”
The Four Tops – Levi Stubbs, Lawrence Payton, Renaldo Benson, Duke Fakir – cut their vocals during several recording sessions that July, having done major concert dates earlier in the month, including a music festival in New York’s Central Park. Stubbs was known to work fast and efficiently in the studio, satisfying producers with just two or three vocal takes per track. His preferred prep was to write out the lyrics of a song – often with Eddie Holland singing them to him, verse by verse – to absorb its meaning and mood. Then he was ready.
And the defining, soul-baring urgency of Stubbs’ performance? It came from the strain experienced while singing at the top of his range. Levi was a baritone; H/D/H wrote him tenor parts.
Imagine now the Quality Control meeting at Hitsville when “Reach Out I’ll Be There” was introduced, and which the creators of I’ll Be There! must surely recreate – even at the risk of repeating a similar depiction in Motown The Musical. There’s Billie Jean Brown, supervising and spinning the newly-recorded tracks to be assessed that Friday morning. Berry Gordy, believing in the power of the room’s democracy, but always able to cast the deciding vote if and when necessary. Barney Ales and his promotion lieutenants, impatient to know what potential hits they would be taking to radio in the weeks ahead. And finally, each chosen track’s producers, anxious to learn how their latest work was regarded by their peers and, especially, by Gordy.
Brian Holland was present, but Eddie was usually not. “I would get information from Brian in those meetings,” Eddie told me, “and find out exactly what was going on. I would pump him, ‘Who said this?’ ‘What happened here?’ ‘When is the release date on that?’ ”
If another producer’s record was scheduled for release three weeks after the meeting, Eddie wanted to wait before submitting the final mix of their own production. “I was concerned that if a [competing] producer or writer had three weeks to listen to [our record], that they would possibly come up with something stronger, or just as good, and create a different kind of competitiveness. We didn’t have a lot of time to go back and compete.”
Such concern mattered less when the moment came for “Reach Out I’ll Be There.” Those gathered on that particular Friday morning were more curious than competitive. “When we took the finished record into Quality Control,” Brian Holland recounted in Come and Get These Memories, “almost everybody said, ‘Whoa…wait a minute. That sounds strange. Smokey especially. ‘That’s too strange. That ain’t gonna sell.’ ”
“But Berry said, ‘Wait a minute…let me hear that again.’ So we played it again, and he thought about it for a moment, then said, ‘That sounds good. It’s different enough to sell.’ He decided it would be the Four Tops’ next single, and it went to number one.”
Good luck, Duke, Paul and AJ. I’ll Be There has much to deliver, including a monument at its heart.
Music notes 1: to the making of “Reach Out I’ll Be There” by the Four Tops with Holland/Dozier/Holland, many contributed, of course. There were Motown’s in-house musicians, including the foundational skills of bassist James Jamerson and drummer Richard “Pistol” Allen; arrangers Hank Cosby and Paul Riser, the latter responsible for shaping the strings of the Detroit Symphony; and the Andantes – Louvain Demps, Marlene Barrow, and Jackie Hicks – whose voices so often illuminated those of the Tops. Norman Whitfield, meanwhile, is said to have played sticks on the head of a no-bells tambourine for the session (R. Dean Taylor has also laid claim to handling a tambourine on that occasion). Then there’s the scene-setting piccolo by flautist Dayna Hartwick, recruited because of her work with the Detroit Symphony. It was her first recording date at Motown; she was 14.
Music notes 2: “Reach Out I’ll Be There” has been subjected to remakes by scores of singers and musicians these past 55 years. The latest West Grand playlist offers a selection of the more, uh, interesting versions. They include Lamont Dozier’s own 2018 rendition with British jazz stylist Jo Harman, but not, unfortunately, Eddie Holland’s rare, rattling 1980 edition. (That was part of a promotion-only LP package from Jobete Music, highlighting the H/D/H catalogue.) Elsewhere in the physical world, 2001’s four-CD Fourever package from Hip-O/Motown is worth seeking out, not least for Stu Hackel’s thorough “Brothers in Arms” liner notes.
Knight time: the celebrated picture sleeve for “Reach Out I’ll Be There” and two other shots from the same session, as shown above, were the work of photographer Leo Knight, taken on Detroit’s Wayne State campus. (With thanks to David Yellen, who worked for Knight in the 1990s.) For more on Motown snappers, there’s this WGB post from 2020.