A Remarkable Legacy, Arranged

MOTOWN MAESTRO PAUL RISER, ON THE RECORD

The most successful sandwich at Motown?

      “Working with these guys, they were like the perfect match. They complemented each other, like a sandwich with the meat. If you have two pieces of bread and no meat, you ain’t got a sandwich. I think of the Holland brothers as the bread, and Lamont as the meat.”

      That particular analogy belongs to Paul Riser, and this most-revered of Motown arrangers – the alchemist who sent “My Girl,” “What Becomes Of The Brokenhearted,” “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough” and “Papa Was A Rollin’ Stone” into the cultural stratosphere – voiced it during a recent interview in Detroit, his hometown.

A ‘65 session: Paul Riser is second left, George Bohanon is first left (photo: Bud Johnson, Detroit Free Press)

      “I hated R&B music,” Riser also confirmed. “I was strictly classical and jazz, in that order.” Such musical superiority was fuelled during his earliest school years. “The one who started teaching me was Dr. Harold Arnoldi – at seven.” He began to play the trombone. “It’s seven positions and I couldn’t reach the seventh because my arm was too short. It took me a couple of years.”

      A dozen years later, the trombone took him to Motown.

      Riser has discussed his career before, including at the Motown Museum in 2022 and the Red Bull Music Academy in 2011. Yet his January 17 interview this year with Ann Delisi of Detroit public broadcaster WDET may have been his most engaging yet. And candid.

      “What would happen sometimes, if the musicians did not like a producer – this is real now, we’re talking about the Funk Brothers – who was coming in just to milk them, without giving them their proper dues, not necessarily money, but just saying, ‘I appreciate what you guys are doing, help me out a little bit.’

      “But if they come in, in three-piece suits and briefcases, and just kind of look like they know everything and [thinking], ‘These guys, I’m paying them so they just have to do what I need,’ then they will get nothing. The musicians give each other a little nod across the room, and they won’t give him nothing.

      “You’ve got to know the quality of the musicians, the engineer, you’ve got to know the acoustics of the studio, the business of the project, money spent, money needed – there was always money needed. You’ve got to put the right people in the room at the right time, to work together, and if they don’t, if attitudes don’t go together, you ain’t going to get anything.”

THAT R&B CHEMISTRY

      As an arranger, Riser got everything from the musicians of Motown, not to mention those of the Detroit Symphony Orchestra. The recordings cited above are among the milestones of 20th century popular music. As Ann Delisi noted during the interview, the Temptations’ “My Girl” alone has been streamed 3.7 billion times. “His influence on the Motown sound,” she added, “cannot be overstated.”

      That influence also helped to deliver three of the record company’s first five Grammy honours, for “Papa Was A Rollin’ Stone” in 1972, including R&B instrumental performance (Riser himself picked up an award for that). To Delisi, he spoke about his particular regard for Norman Whitfield, whose first production at Motown was also Riser’s first arrangement there, cut in the final weeks of 1962.

The Q&A at Detroit’s Willis Show Bar

      A talented teenager, he had joined the firm earlier that year as a session player, recruited by Dale Warren, who – like Riser – had graduated from Detroit’s Cass Technical High School. (Warren was the son of a sister of Berry Gordy’s second wife, Raynoma.) “He called me up one day and says, ‘Paul, we need a trombone player.’ So I says, ‘Well, I don’t know Motown from smotown.’ He says, ‘OK, come and play.’ So I had the opportunity to sit next to the great George Bohanon,” a fellow trombonist.

      By this account, it was for a Stevie Wonder session, produced by Clarence Paul. “I had not a clue,” said Riser. “It could have been one of the country and western things that were being produced on him at that time. I sat there in that chair. They said, ‘Take one.’ And then they said, ‘Take 20.’ And then, ‘Take 30.’ So I gained respect for the R&B chemistry that it takes to make that music.”

      The Whitfield session for which Riser wrote his first Motown arrangement yielded Kim Weston’s “It Should Have Been Me,” released in February 1963. And he got to watch Whitfield first-hand in the Snakepit. “First of all, Norman thought he could play piano, but he knew maybe three chords. No left hand, but he always had a headful of ideas. He really was the most creative one there, [who could] take nothing and make it into something. He knew the singers, he knew who could do what, and get the most out of whatever part in the song. He was just a genius.”

      (Talking to me 30 years ago for The Billboard Book of Number One Rhythm & Blues Hits, the arranger acknowledged his own debt to the producer: “He had faith in me to help him through.”)

‘I’VE GOT SOME CHORDS’

      For “What Becomes Of The Brokenhearted,” Riser worked with songwriters William Weatherspoon and James Dean. “At Motown, there was a lot of research and development, where…you could just bring an idea, you didn’t have to have a title, you didn’t have to have lyrics. I was doing a session for Weatherspoon and Dean, they were producing Jimmy Ruffin. We had a three-hour block of [studio] time. We had two songs to do, they finished in two hours, so we had an hour left. I said, ‘I’ve got some chords,’ I pulled them out and let Weatherspoon hear it. We cut it in an hour and that became ‘What Becomes Of The Brokenhearted.’ They did excellent lyrics and melody, all I had to do was chords, and that set the foundation.” When it was released, Riser was credited as a co-writer.

      “When I heard the complete song…oh, man! Because I had no idea…I know I had the chord pattern for the verse/chorus/verse/chorus and whatnot, I had all that worked out in my head, but no melody. I just had chords. So that’s basically what they did with that song, they took it and I didn’t know where it would end up.

Ann Delisi at WDET-FM Detroit

      “That’s the Detroit Symphony, by the way,” he added about the strings, prompting Delisi to ask if he picked the players. “No, it was contracted.”

      Intriguingly, Riser went on to suggest that “there was no reason we shouldn’t have had five or six hit records of this nature on Jimmy Ruffin back then, it was so big. But I was dissatisfied so they didn’t get any more music from me. Therefore, no more songs.” He concluded, “I shut down.”

      Another question from Delisi directed the interview elsewhere, so exactly what Riser meant is unclear. He was credited as co-writer of Ruffin’s “Tomorrow’s Tears,” released more than a year after “What Becomes Of The Brokenhearted,” but other composing collaborations with Dean and ‘Spoon’ were thin on the ground. The arranger’s next burst of songwriting credits was evident in 1969 with and for Stevie Wonder, including tracks featured on the star’s Signed, Sealed & Delivered album. He also arranged its title hit single.

      “Stevie doesn’t write a bad song,” said Riser. “And always a challenge. He plays piano wrong, might as well having boxing gloves on, but he plays, and then he plays chords that don’t exist. I’m serious. You’ve got to listen to them. You think it’s one thing and it’s something else.”

      The master arranger left Motown in 1973, going on to work with the likes of Luther Vandross, the Doobie Brothers, Aretha Franklin, Quincy Jones, Natalie Cole, Meshell Ndegeocello and R. Kelly (“I Believe I Can Fly” is a fine example of his post-Motown arranging work). During the 1980s, Riser reunited with Wonder, arranging strings on tracks such as “Rocket Love” (from Hotter Than July) and “Overjoyed” (In Square Circle). In 1982, the pair was Grammy-nominated for “Do I Do,” in the category of instrumental arrangement accompanying vocals. And now, Riser has confirmed that he’s working on a so-called Stevie symphonic project, which may include a version of “Rocket Love” that hasn’t been heard before. “It is,” he concluded, “a duet.”

      Kinda like a sandwich with meat, Paul?

Fellowship notes: to his credit, Paul Riser acknowledged and praised his peers during this latest interview, including McKinley Jackson, Hank Cosby, Willie Shorter (“with ‘My Girl,’ Willie arranged the rhythm section and the horn parts for Smokey”) and Wade Marcus. Too, he name-checked studio engineers – Mike McLean, Ed Wolfrum, Lawrence Horn – and, of course, the Funk Brothers. In the latter case, he recalled some nicknames, including those of Jack Ashford (Bullwinkle), Earl Van Dyke (Big Funk), Robert White (Odd Job) and Eddie Willis (Chank).

Host notes: Ann Delisi has worked in Detroit radio for more than 35 years, primarily at public broadcaster WDET-FM. In addition to her regular weekend show, Ann Delisi’s Essential Music, she partners on the airwaves for The Don Was Motor City Playlist with the Blue Note president.

Music notes: there’s an abundance of choice when it comes to Riser’s work, but here’s a WGB playlist with a selection of significant tracks (on “My Guy,” he’s playing trombone). And there’s more detail to be found via these links to “Baby I’m For Real” and “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough.”