How Sweet It Was
REMEMBERING LAMONT DOZIER
The Broadway producer who knew and worked with Lamont Dozier is convinced that he died of a broken heart.
For a music maestro whose work touched the lives of millions around the world, that seems a dreadfully sad, yet somehow appropriate, way to leave. “She really was the glue that kept him together,” said Paul Lambert, speaking of Barbara Dozier, his wife of more than 40 years. “When she died last year, I believe that Lamont went into a deep depression.”
Barbara and Lamont Dozier: the deepest bond
Interviewed by Euro Weekly News, Lambert also recalled his experience with Dozier and the Holland brothers, Brian and Eddie, in creating a stage musical aimed at Broadway, The First Wives Club, some years ago (the venture subsequently failed). Now, Lambert is collaborating with fellow producer Michael Swanson and the Four Tops’ Duke Fakir on the forthcoming musical, I’ll Be There. It, too, is populated with the songs of Holland/Dozier/Holland, and has Broadway ambitions.
Lamont Dozier first met Barbara Ullman in 1976, when she was working with leading Hollywood filmmaker Stanley Jaffe. Their romance developed over time, and the couple married in 1980. In his memoir, How Sweet It Is, the singer/songwriter/producer called it “the deepest bond of love I’d ever experienced.” It was also a professional bond: his wife was to manage his business affairs and direct his career for almost all of their time together.
(My own, first-hand experience of that came when commissioned to write liner notes for 2005’s Heaven Must Have Sent You: The Holland/Dozier/Holland Story. Barbara provided unimpeachable help on all the project’s aspects related to Lamont, as she had done for my interviews with him in previous years.)
“He had a lot of energy for work,” Eddie Holland told the Detroit Free Press, paying tribute after Dozier’s death. “He was always at his piano, still producing work. He was most active when he was at his piano. I don’t care what his situation was – depressed, brokenhearted, happy – he was at that piano. And he was happier when he was there.”
A BRITISH TOUR, UNPLUGGED
Holland went on, “The fact of the matter is, when his wife, Barbara, died, it just took a lot out of him.” She lost her life in July last year; no cause was publicly disclosed. Similarly, no cause has yet been reported for Lamont’s death, which occurred on August 8 at his home near Scottsdale, Arizona. He was 81.
Paul Lambert said he was unaware of medical problems afflicting Dozier, “or at least nothing anyone in our inner circle was aware of.” However, he did suffer from high blood pressure, and it restricted his travel in later years. Barbara Dozier told me in 2018 that Lamont was medically advised not to take long-haul flights, and so his scheduled “Unplugged Songs & Stories” U.K. tour that summer had to be cancelled – and was never reinstated.
Holland/Dozier/Holland: the band of gold
Few such details were included in the obituaries and tributes published in the wake of Dozier’s demise, but his stature as one of the 20th century’s most successful and prodigious songwriters, in partnership with the Holland brothers, was widely acknowledged. Among those paid their respects were Berry Gordy, Diana Ross, Smokey Robinson, Martha Reeves and Duke Fakir, as well as Eddie Holland. “Maybe we’re going to see each other in a different life,” said Holland. “Every time a person from Motown dies, someone we grew up with, it takes a little bit more out of us. It sort of chips away at the memories, the thought of ‘this will go on forever.’ ”
The music, of course, will go on forever. In that spirit, and reflecting all his memorable charm, candour and modesty, here are excerpts from my interview with Dozier for Heaven Must Have Sent You. Rest in peace, Lamont.
“Martha was great. A very good artist in the studio. No fooling around, very respectful and really grateful that we were doing what we did with them. Appreciative, I should say. They were sweet girls, but it was all business. They made some really good records together, and they conducted themselves [as] all business, all the time. ‘Let’s do it again – can we take another shot at that?’ A lot of artists couldn’t wait to get out of there, but in their particular case, they wanted to make sure that whatever they did, they were right on the button. The Vandellas, they were always very conscious of the way they sounded – and they knew the competition was there, too. Martha knew she had competition, and she wanted to make sure her records sounded right when they came up to Berry.”
“Marvin was hard work. Because he had his own schedule, if you get my drift [laughing]. I loved the guy – everybody loved Marvin – but he could be a handful. ‘Man, I gotta go.’ But he was fast, and he was creative. We used to cut in his keys, not all the time, but some of the time. He could be so creative when you cut him a little bit out of his range: when he had to go up into falsetto and do different things, creative things, with his voice. He was phenomenal in finding different ways to deliver a song, even after we had taught the song to him, like, ‘How Sweet It Is.’ I was just sitting at the piano and it came out, like a lot of things. I was just searching for something to make sure we got back on the charts with this guy. It was just a means to an end. A lot of those songs were a means to an end, a necessary situation where we had to come up with hits.”
A young Lamont Dozier
“The Elgins were a big surprise to us. ‘Darling Baby’ went further than we thought it would. Johnny Dawson, he was a good friend of Brian’s, he worked at the barber’s shop, and he was always [saying], ‘Look, man, when are you guys going to do something or us?’ So this song came about, and a couple of other things. They were so appreciative and happy – and we were surprised! If we’re trying to do something with someone, we try to give them our best, but that was totally left-field. That was like a doowop situation, and we really didn’t think it was going to do all of that [chart action]. Of course, we didn’t think ‘Where Did Our Love Go’ was going anywhere, either. Who knew?”
“By the time we had got ‘Where Did Our Love Go’ to the Supremes – Gladys Horton had, somehow or other, had words with Mary Wilson and talked about this horrible song – they were already feeling like they had got the leftovers. We had cut the track in Gladys’ key, because we had no idea she would refuse it. We had previously done ‘When The Lovelight…’ with the Supremes, where Diana sang much higher and in a different key. When she was in the studio [this time], we noticed that the key change was very unique, in that it gave her a sound she didn’t have before. Because she was lower, she didn’t sound shrill. Being in this new key was just what it needed.”
“I loved working with the Tops. They were loose and not serious about everything. They did their job and enjoyed it, and they made it fun. Although we might have been in the studio working 14, 16, 18 hours at, who knows, three or four o’clock in the morning, it was joyful. They made it a party – everything we ever did with them was a party. It was lots of hard work, but it made the hard work easier and the time go by faster. No matter how big the Tops got, they were going to have their fun. Plus, they had had the experience, they had been with Billy Eckstine in Las Vegas. They had been around. They knew how things worked.”
“Were the Andantes important? Jesus, were they ever! If it hadn’t been for Louvain and Jackie and Marlene… At certain times, I had to come in, bring them in at night-time and clean up a lot of stuff. Because the groups, they all had hit records and they had these schedules, they had to go to artist development, they had to leave town. So some of the recordings were kinda shaky. With the Marvelettes, we really had to doctor up a lot of their stuff. To blend [the Andantes] in with the background parts, because the girls were on the road, they didn’t have a lot of time in the studio. That happened with a lot of groups, and sometimes with Martha as well. But Martha with the girls would try to make sure that they wouldn’t need the Andantes for the blend, because they were aware of [how we worked]. Funnily enough, the Marvelettes didn’t know. Which was very strange to me. ‘Boy, we sound good, don’t we?’ ‘Yeah, you sound really great.’ But we had to do it, because in defence of them, they didn’t have enough time.”
‘A factory within a factory’
“Basically we would start out with Benny Benjamin and James Jamerson first, and whoever was on piano – Earl Van Dyke or Joe Hunter, one of those two. Those three were our nucleus. From those three guys, we would have the foundation of the whole song, and we would tell them what type of feeling [we wanted]. I would usually work with Jamerson, Brian would work with Benny as far as how he wanted the kick of the foot drum to go. Then I would sing along, as well as show the piano player how the feeling should go. From there, once we had our nucleus – bass, drums and piano – we would move over to Robert White and Eddie Willis and Joe Messina, the three guitar players that we would use all the time, and show them what type of rhythm and feeling we wanted. And we wouldn’t cut unless we had those particular six guys. They were important to what we called ‘the H/D/H sound’ of getting what we wanted for our songs.”
“Hank [Cosby] brought the chord sheets down, once they were written out – he knew that Brian and I didn’t read music – so he made sure that there weren’t any mistakes on the chords, that they were voiced right. I was a stickler, sometimes I used to get into a few arguments with some of the guys about playing the right chords on the piano, because it would be essential to the sound of the music. And we didn’t want to sound like anybody else. Brian and I both had a way of playing C chords, and the way we voiced our chords was different to the other producers. We knew that these guys played for everybody, so we wanted to make sure that we let people know this was us. This was Holland/Dozier/Holland doing this stuff – a sound within a sound. We considered ourselves a factory within a factory.”
Music notes: any playlist related to Lamont Dozier can only scratch the surface of his work, whether that’s from his early days as a singer, his extraordinary collaborative output for Motown, the Invictus years or his adventures in California and London, writing for and producing artists of almost every stripe, as well as recording himself again. This selection is small, touching on various points of his compass, but – perhaps – it serves to reveal as well as reminisce. Oddly, Dozier’s Warner Bros. recordings of the 1970s, including the mighty “Going Back To My Roots,” don’t appear to be available on streaming services. With luck, that will change before too long.