A Talent Taken Too Soon
THE MOTOWN LEGACY OF TOM BAIRD
Tragedy can trump talent.
In Motown folklore, the name of Tom Baird is probably familiar as much for his premature death in a 1976 boating accident as for his remarkable tenure as a musician, songwriter, arranger and producer.
During his five years at Hitsville, Vancouver-born Baird was versatile and prolific, working across the company’s talent roster from Rare Earth to Diana Ross. For the former, he wrote and produced albums; for the latter, he authored songs and supervised some of her more intriguing material. He co-produced “Touch Me In The Morning” with Michael Masser, and played keyboards on that and on “I Just Want To Celebrate.” Both were major hits for Ross and Rare Earth, respectively. “Touch Me…” earned Baird a Grammy nomination, too.
A hit for Taylor, Tommy and Tom
Another of his signature songs was, of course, Bobby Taylor & the Vancouvers’ provocative “Does Your Mama Know About Me,” co-written with Tommy Chong, with whom he had previously connected in – where else? – Vancouver.
“I got a kid who co-wrote this song with us,” Taylor reportedly told Berry Gordy soon after his band arrived at Motown in ’67. “He should be at this company. He can tell you what notes are on your doorbell.” Gordy apparently took the advice. “Send for him,” he told Taylor.
It was in Western Canada in the mid 1960s that Baird kick-started his career, playing piano with the Classics, the house combo for a top-rated AM station CFUN, and then for Let’s Go, a national TV music show. “Tom loved innovation,” says Claire Lawrence, one of his bandmates at that time. “I remember recording the first song he wrote for the Classics, an instrumental called ‘Coming Home.’ When I started my tenor sax solo on the ninth – that is, a high B on an A minor chord – he flipped out, he loved it. I came from a jazz background where that was a normal choice, but not so in the world of rock and roll.”
Another former member of the Classics is equally complimentary. “Tom certainly did play piano,” says Howie (Vickers) Vickberg, who was the group's lead singer. “He was an excellent musician! Plus, he had a very early ‘string synthesiser’ which had been made by a local musician. This enabled Tom to add what at the time sounded like strings to demos that he did, making them quite sophisticated for the time.”
“The Classics’ style was largely R&B,” continues Lawrence, “which Howie loved to perform.” They also backed visiting performers, including the Coasters, Del Shannon and Freddy Cannon. Let’s Go was the Vancouver edition of a five-city series aired by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC); Baird was musical director, writing arrangements for songs featuring various guest performers. “We were on Mondays,” recalls Lawrence, “followed by shows from Winnipeg, Toronto, Montreal and Halifax. Tom was great at arranging songs by people like Burt Bacharach, whom he greatly admired.”
A SYMPHONIC CONNECTION?
It was during those CBC days that Baird met Bobby Taylor, who had moved north from San Francisco to join the band in which Tommy Chong played. According to notes in The Complete Motown Singles: Volume 8, Taylor also sang with the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra for a radio show produced by Baird.
Such improbabilities were common among Hitsville music makers. Good luck played its part, too. After a Supremes performance at Vancouver’s Cave Theatre in May 1966, Mary Wilson and Florence Ballard were said to have visited a club, the Elegant Parlor, where, by then, Taylor and Chong were playing together, impressively. Wilson and Ballard urged Berry Gordy to hear them, and thus Bobby Taylor & the Vancouvers came to Motown – and, soon after, so did Tom Baird.
The Classics, with Tom Baird at second left; Claire Lawrence and Howie Vickberg are first and third left
“Their conditions [for joining] were interesting,” explained spouse Joanie Baird in a 1969 Vancouver Sun interview. “Tom had to submit four songs he had written, then the Motown brass checked them out. The material had to be up to their standards.” Apparently it was, and Baird was put under contract to Jobete Music. After “Does Your Mama Know About Me” was a hit single in the spring of ’68, Taylor & the Vancouvers’ debut album featured four songs written or co-written by Baird. That year, another of his songs, “Believe In Me,” was recorded by Diana Ross & the Supremes.
Baird’s next significant step was the result of meeting members of Rare Earth in New York in 1970. “He had some material he wanted to run by us,” remembered the band’s Pete Rivera in his memoir, Born To Wander, “and after some initial chit-chat with our manager, Ron Strasner, he walked over to the nearest piano. The moment he started playing and singing, I couldn’t believe my ears. My mouth dropped to the floor. Every word and note was exploding in my heart. I remember thinking to myself: ‘This guy was put on earth just for me to learn from.’ I knew he had the groove we were looking for.”
So he did. Baird produced Rare Earth’s second album, Ecology, also composing four of its songs, including the Top 20 single, “Born To Wander.” He co-produced their third, One World, which included “I Just Want To Celebrate.”
By this point, Baird seemed to have comfortably settled into Motown, handling arrangements for tracks on various albums – the Four Tops’ Soul Spin, Diana Ross & the Supremes’ Cream Of The Crop, Kiki Dee’s Great Expectations – as well as songwriting. He also became close friends with ace Jobete songsmith Ron Miller, and the two worked together. One of their collaborations was Stevie Wonder's "Heaven Help Us All."
DIANA’S MATERNAL INSTINCTS
In 1971-72, Baird was centrally involved with Diana Ross’ To The Baby project, a collection of songs recorded while the singer was pregnant. He wrote and produced originals for her such as “Part Of You,” “A Wonderful Guest” and “Young Mothers,” while also arranging and producing covers such as “Brown Baby” and “Turn Around.” (Conflicting Ross priorities saw the album put on the shelf, but the repertoire was eventually released in 2009 as part of an expanded CD edition of Touch Me In The Morning.)
Another 1972 adventure was Cherry, a musical with a score by Baird and lyrics by Miller, based on a celebrated play, Bus Stop, about bus passengers stranded in rural Kansas during a snowstorm. The show never made it to Broadway, but its big ballad, “I’ve Never Been A Woman Before,” went on to be recorded by Vikki Carr, Shirley Bassey and Barbra Streisand. The song had also been assigned to Diana Ross, but she never recorded vocals for it.
Motown’s Matrix: Tom Baird is first left
There were further indicators of Baird’s versatility. In 1972, Motown’s Rare Earth imprint released an enigmatic album he made with songwriters Nick Zesses and Dino Fekaris (the trio was known as Matrix). A couple of years later, when Rare Earth – the band – split in half, two of its members, Pete Hoorelbeke (née Rivera) and Mike Urso, formed a new outfit with Baird called HUB, an acronym of their last names. The trio recorded a couple of albums released by Capitol in 1975-76.
“Tom had a brilliant mind,” wrote Rivera in Born To Wander. “In many respects, he was a true artist.” He added, “He was real reserved, too, which made it kind of difficult for a lot of folks to connect with him. But, sometimes, that’s the way a genius functions.”
“Tom was somewhat serious, somewhat light-hearted,” confirms the Classics’ Claire Lawrence. “He also had perfect pitch, and was really bothered by records that had been sped up or slowed down in the recording or mastering, thus changing the pitch of the recording – something that doesn’t happen in these days of digital recording.”
And then, it all ended in tragedy. In Los Angeles, Baird owned a twin-hull catamaran, and would sail for enjoyment and for the detachment which time on the ocean can provide. He drowned alone off the California coast in early 1976, his body found on February 25, three days after he was reported missing and after an intense U.S. Coast Guard search. He was 32.
“When Tom died in that tragic accident,” says Universal Music’s Andy Skurow, who was responsible for the 2009 expanded reissue of Touch Me In The Morning, “Ron Miller wrote a gorgeous song called ‘I Won’t Remember Ever Loving You’ as a tribute to the man he called his best friend. It was first cut by Walter Jackson, then covered by Charlene.” What’s more, he adds, the song was recorded by Miller’s daughter, Lisa.
Perhaps talent can trump tragedy, after all.
Music notes: the breadth of Tom Baird’s talent calls for a WGB playlist, so here it is. The choices range from Chris Clark to the Commodores, from Rare Earth to Diana Ross, with Baird featured as musician (on keyboards) or songwriter or arranger or producer – or all of the above. Just one track is non-Motown: Vikki Carr’s “I’ve Never Been A Woman Before,” from Cherry, the musical. Still, that particular album does feature Carr’s versions of “If I Were Your Woman” and “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough.” Jobete always wins.
Notes of gratitude: but for the help of Larry LeBlanc, a good friend from my Billboard years and the magazine’s onetime Canadian bureau chief, this WGB edition would likely not exist. Larry knew how to find members of the above-cited Classics, who then shared with me their recollections of Tom Baird and his talent. I’m also grateful for help from Andy Skurow, another admirer of the Baird legacy. Stories like this deserve to be told.
Ales addendum: when Rare Earth broke in two and HUB was created as a result, the latter turned to Berry Gordy’s former consigliere, Barney Ales, to manage them. The partnership proved productive – but brief. At the Detroit launch of HUB’s first album for Capitol Records, Ales had some extra news: he was returning to Motown, rehired to inject sales power and business savvy into the company he had joined 14 years earlier. When Rare Earth subsequently regrouped, their new material came out on Motown’s Prodigal Records – the label originally set up by Ales after he left Hitsville for the first time.