Instruments of Truth
SOUL, SWEAT, SKILL AND STYLE IN THE SNAKEPIT
At the Toronto Film Festival, the standing ovation lasted eight minutes – so powerful a response that the musicians present had tears in their eyes. In the shadows no longer…
Yes, it’s 20 years since the release of Standing In The Shadows Of Motown and that remarkable audience reaction when the movie was shown at the Toronto event. “The ovation lasted through the entire credits crawl,” remembers Allan (Dr. Licks) Slutsky, “and a few minutes beyond.”
Two-dozen tracks, for your listening delight
It was Slutsky’s evangelism on behalf of the Funk Brothers which made SITSOM happen, bestowing overdue recognition on those who had helped to fuel the Motown rocket ship: James Jamerson, Benny Benjamin, Earl Van Dyke, Robert White, Mike Terry, Johnny Griffith, Jack Ashford, Eddie Willis and more.
A quieter evangelism, no less sincere, continues to this day. The musicians of Hitsville U.S.A. are at the centre of a new CD from Ace Records, compiled and produced by Mick Patrick and Keith Hughes. All Turned On! is a 24-track assembly of instrumentals sourced from Universal Music’s Motown vault and dating from 1960-1972. It includes five previously-unreleased titles, and a half-dozen only hitherto available as digital downloads. The players range from bandleaders like Van Dyke and Choker Campbell to star names like Stevie Wonder and Jr. Walker, and to obscurities such as Frank Morelli, the Jaguars, the Agents and the Morrocco Muzik Makers. Studio A, otherwise known as the Snakepit, was where most were cut, although not all.
“We first planned Motown Instrumentals in 2016,” says Hughes, “but the project was turned down by Universal because [they told us] they had something similar planned.” (That, ultimately, did not come to pass.) This time, a few tracks were rejected, due to lack of original paperwork. One was “Sack O’ Woe,” the Cannonball Adderley track covered by organist Levi Mann, who led the band at Detroit’s 20 Grand club. “Manfred Mann used to include the track in their act,” adds Hughes, “and a version by them appeared on their first LP.”
THE MYSTERIOUS AGENTS
He continues, “The original idea was to include some band tracks – recordings that were intended for vocal accompaniment, but [where] no version with vocals survives. In the end, there’s just one track in that format: ‘True Fine Boy,’ originally intended for Saundra Mallett. Maybe we’ll revisit the ‘band track’ idea for Volume 2! The rest were all intended as instrumentals.”
Choker Campbell, bandleading maestro
One combo which makes a couple of appearances on All Turned On! are the Agents, with the sharp-edged propulsion of “Soul Line” and the tenor-and-organ tension of “Double O And A Half.” Says Hughes, “The writer credits for these tracks include members of Jr. Walker’s All Stars, but I can’t trace any appearance of the All Stars as the Agents.” Harvey Fuqua co-wrote and produced both numbers, which were recorded in 1967.
On the subject of credits, this Ace compilation features liner notes (by Hughes) of engaging depth, and photos of delight from the Eric Charge collection. One rare shot captures Earl Van Dyke, Robert White, Jack Ashford and Uriel Jones walking through an airport, most likely when they travelled to the U.K. with Kim Weston in late 1964.
There are track recording dates on All Turned On! where available, and biographical sketches of even the most obscure performers. Take the Mysterions, who are said to include guitarist Joe Sladich (otherwise a member of Mike & the Modifiers, another Motown act) and drummer Jerry Plunk. Their percussive 1962 track, “Hot Sausage,” was co-written and produced by Motown’s A&R chief, Mickey Stevenson. (Unsurprisingly, they don’t show up in Stevenson’s autobiography, The A&R Man.)
“Great Google Mook,” another edgy Mysterions track and one thought to have been previously unreleased, is among the contents. “One eagle-eared listener wrote in to say that ‘Great Google Mook’ had already been issued in edited form,” recalls Hughes, “as ‘Call It What You Like,’ on one of the 1962 Motown Unreleased digital releases. I compiled that set, too, so I’ve no excuse.”
From left: Earl Van Dyke, Robert White, Jack Ashford, Bob Cousar
The earliest item on the album is also the most unlikely: “Ich-I-Bon” by Nick & the Jaguars sounds like the thunderous surf-rock later made popular in the U.S. by guitarist Dick Dale and others. This 45 originally appeared on Tamla, and was reviewed in Billboard and Cash Box in the spring of 1960 – predating Dale’s first chart hit by several months (although the first volume of The Complete Motown Singles actually pegs the release of “Ich-I-Bon” to August 1959).
Either way, the recording is thought to have found its way to Berry Gordy’s barely-born business by way of Gus Ferro, father of the Jaguars’ drummer. Perhaps Gordy ’n’ Gus met at the Itchi-Bon Donut Shop in Owosso, the Michigan town where much of Motown’s output was manufactured by American Record Pressing. Who could resist the bakery’s blueberry Bismarcks or maple cream-filled triangles, delicacies cited in the All Turned On! liners?
A contender for the album’s weirdest cut is trumpeter Jonah Jones’ unconstrained “Uptight (Everything’s Alright)” – at least in Hughes’ opinion. “Fine performance though this is,” he says, “it’s unrecognisable as Stevie Wonder’s hit. That’s why I chose it! Jonah isn’t too well-known to Motown fans, and I thought this might attract a few people to hunt down his Motown albums, to hear more.”
HARDLY A TEMPTATION TO BE HEARD
There’s better-known material among the two-dozen tracks, of course, such as Earl Van Dyke & the Soul Brothers’ barrelhouse “I Can’t Help Myself (Sugar Pie, Honey Bunch),” the Choker Campbell Big Band’s brassy “Come See About Me” and the CD’s speed limit-busting lead-off track, “Festival Time” by the San Remo Golden Strings. All were issued as singles in their day. Also, there is Stevie Wonder’s lively, harmonica-driven “Grazing In The Grass” from his 1968 long-player, Eivets Rednow; another Wonder track here, the “Fingertips”-flavoured “Let Me Loose,” was only previously available as a digital download.
1977 vinyl on Motown’s Natural Resources imprint
Motown shipped its share of instrumental albums over the years, including those by the above-cited Van Dyke, Campbell and Jones, as well as by artists signed to its Workshop Jazz imprint, such as Griffith. Too, there was Motown Instrumentals, a nine-track, 1977 compilation featuring Jr. Walker, Rare Earth, the San Remo Golden Strings and the Commodores, among others, plus the six-minute landscape of “Papa Was A Rolling Stone” with not a Temptation (aside from a grunt by Dennis Edwards) to be heard. In 2011, there was The Detroit Instrumental Sessions and More, a collection of rare Marvin Gaye material packaged into the 40th anniversary vinyl-plus-CD reissue of What’s Going On.
Obviously, many of the players heard on All Turned On! were acknowledged and celebrated in Standing In The Shadows Of Motown – not only in the film, but also in the deluxe edition of the soundtrack, which came out via Hip-O/Motown in 2004. The latter 2CD set included “naked” instrumental remixes of such hits as “Standing In The Shadows Of Love,” “I Was Made To Love Her,” “I Heard It Through The Grapevine” and “For Once In My Life,” augmented by dialogue with surviving members of the Funk Brothers.
Whatever the source, listening to the soul, skill and style of those remarkable musicians has always been a religious experience. No wonder there was a thunderous ovation in that Canadian cinema, two decades ago.
Music notes: the full track listing for All Turned On! is to be found here on the Ace Records website, complete with excerpts from each. A number of the instrumentals are also available on digital streaming services via The Complete Motown Singles series, as is the soundtrack of Standing In The Shadows Of Motown (but, unfortunately, not the deluxe edition). What can be heard there, however, is the bumper Earl Van Dyke set from 2012, featuring both his Motown albums and a bunch of bonus tracks, as well as Stevie Wonder’s Eivets Rednow excursion. As for Jonah Jones, there are plenty of his albums available digitally, but not the Motown pair. (Also accessible digitally is the Marvin Gaye adventure mentioned above, as Funky Nation: The Detroit Instrumentals.) Returning to the realm of compact discs, you might care to seek out 2003’s half-dozen (or were there more?) albums of Motown Master Recordings from The Singing Machine Co. These karaoke-intended releases featured the original tracks, with and without lead vocals, of a wide range of Hitsville hits by the Supremes, the Temptations, the Jackson 5, Marvin Gaye, the Four Tops, the Miracles and more. SingalongaFunks, as it were.