Dusty Delivers — Adam White

A MOTOWN MILESTONE ON BRITISH TELEVISION

A new documentary about Ready Steady Go! is due for broadcast by BBC-TV next Friday (20) in the U.K., illuminating how this weekly show redefined the presentation of music and youth culture on British television during the first half of the 1960s. “Its style rewrote the rulebook for music programmes,” declares the network preview, “with its intoxicating blend of performance, celebrity interviews and items on fashion.”

That rule-rewriting claim is reasonable enough: RSG! was the Friday night guide to the zeitgeist, aligned with the trendsetting fashions, lifestyle and personalities of young Britain from 1963-66, and co-hosted by “mod” poster girl Cathy McGowan. Featuring live and mimed performances, the show was a compelling platform for the Beatles, the Stones, Dusty Springfield and the Who, as well as many others less memorable, and for the hippest of American visitors.

Little Stevie Wonder was one of the latter category on December 27, 1963, becoming the first Motown star to appear on RSG! as he made his way home after a two-week concert run in Paris. The 13-year-old helped to start that particular weekend with the lip-synced electricity of “Workout, Stevie, Workout,” “Hallelujah I Love Her So” and “I Call It Pretty Music But The Old People Call It The Blues.”

And then there’s this bird’s eye view…

***With Dusty Springfield, Detroit’s finest rehearse for ‘The Sound Of Motown’ TV special in London (photo: Getty Images/Popperfoto)***

The shot was taken on March 18, 1965 by an unnamed photographer at the north London studio facilities – in Wembley, to be precise – of Associated-Rediffusion, the commercial U.K. broadcaster which produced Ready Steady Go! But the details don’t do justice to the moment, as the rehearsal takes place for what is now seen as a milestone in Motown history: a one-hour TV spectacular designed to excite young British viewers and to showcase the company’s stars as never before.

Created by the RSG! team, The Sound Of Motown was a breath-taking sequence of non-stop, supercharged performances by Stevie Wonder (no longer “Little”), Martha & the Vandellas, the Temptations, the Miracles and the Supremes, all introduced by the TV special’s 25-year-old host, Dusty Springfield, in front of a boisterous audience, clapping and bopping to records which – in some cases – they simply had never heard before. And it was a global first. Even back home, Motown had by that point never presented so many of its artists together in one nationwide, prime-time television show.

But back to the photograph. At its centre are Smokey Robinson & the Miracles, rehearsing the finale with (on the left of this image) Springfield and the Temptations. In back are the Earl Van Dyke Sextet, five of whom are visible behind the pair of go-go dancers elevated on a podium. Almost invisible among the Tempts are Martha & the Vandellas, who sang along – as did everyone – for the show’s energetic climax, a fusion by the Miracles of their hits “Come On Do The Jerk” and “Mickey’s Monkey.”

FREEZING, SNOWING, THRILLING

On the right of the photo are Florence Ballard, Mary Wilson and Diana Ross, projecting their voices from positions in front of where the audience will be. It’s not clear who among the pictured TV professionals – three of them looking especially relaxed, just a few feet away from the Supremes – is director Rollo Gamble. Two other key players don’t appear to be in the photo, either: the man who persuaded Associated-Rediffusion to produce the show in the first place, Elkan Allan, and the 24-year-old who was both the alchemist of RSG! and programme editor of The Sound Of Motown, Vicki Wickham.

Allan was Rediffusion’s entertainment head, Wickham his secretary; it was her job to know music’s movers and shakers, to reach out to the cool acts sure to magnetise the audience in the studio and at home. She was a close friend of Springfield, who travelled with her and manager Vic Billings to Paris in December ’63 to see Stevie Wonder, Dionne Warwick and the Shirelles in concert. “It was freezing cold and snowing,” Wickham told me in 2013, “but the Olympia show was thrilling. Vic and I had heard the music before because Dusty had played it to us – she was our source of R&B, of black music – but we’d never seen any of these acts in concert. It was really life-changing.”

RSG! was framed by this affinity with American rhythm & blues, as perhaps next week’s documentary will illustrate. By the beginning of 1965, the show was firmly embedded in the cultural landscape, so that when Wickham and Allan learned of Motown’s plans for a U.K. package tour, the idea of showcasing that talent in a spin-off TV special was attractive. To the conservative management of Rediffusion? That was different. Only one act, the Supremes, meant anything to the wider viewing audience. “It was Elkan who thought that if we put on Dusty, it would be more palatable,” recalled Wickham. “He said to me, ‘Will she? We can’t do it without her.’ ”

To have black stars on RSG! – the Supremes, Martha & the Vandellas, Marvin Gaye, Kim Weston and the Miracles had all separately appeared there during 1964 – was one thing. Devoting an entire show to them was another. But Springfield’s participation sealed the deal. “It was such a coup to have an all-black show,” said Wickham. “I can imagine Elkan saying to [Rediffusion executives], ‘We’ve got the Supremes, we’ve got Stevie Wonder.’ They must have looked at him and thought, ‘This man has lost his mind.’ Maybe he never told them [the artists] were black. Maybe he just said they were American.” The fact that Britain’s leading record company, EMI, was to launch the Tamla Motown label to coincide with the tour may have added weight, too.

The eventual outcome is familiar: how even though The Sound Of Motown was taped before the Tamla troupe (minus the Temptations) set out on their 20-city circuit of England, Wales and Scotland, it wasn’t broadcast until two weeks after the roadshow wrapped up. The advance promotional opportunity was entirely lost, contributing to the poor audience turnout in most of the country.

The TV special itself couldn’t have been a better endorsement of the Hitsville elite, with short snatches of their past hits and complete performances of their latest singles, due to be released by EMI the day after the taping: “Ooo Baby Baby” (the Miracles), “It’s Growing” (the Temptations), “Nowhere To Run” (Martha & the Vandellas), “Kiss Me Baby” (Wonder) and “Stop! In The Name Of Love” (the Supremes). Springfield’s passion for the music was evident as she introduced the acts and spoke about the Motown sound, as well as in her duets with Martha (“Wishin’ And Hopin’ ”) and all the Vandellas (“I Can’t Hear You No More”).

GIGGLING WITH MARTHA

“It was absolutely rehearsed in the same way that we would have rehearsed ‘Ready Steady,’ ” said Wickham. “That is, on the day, and then shot in the evening. And again, there were no retakes, no stopping, it was recorded live. You can hear Dusty giggling when she’s singing with Martha, so that was absolutely live.”

The artists performed their vocals to tracks pre-recorded on-site by the Motown musicians: Earl Van Dyke on keyboards, Robert White on guitar, Bob Cousar on drums, Jack Ashford on tambourine, Tony Newton on bass, and Eli Fontaine on sax. The besuited sextet is seen “playing” in the shadows for the most of the show, although there’s a closer view as Springfield sings “I Can’t Hear You No More” and Fontaine fires up a solo, plus a glimpse of Newton behind Springfield as he moves a mike stand in readiness for Wonder’s harmonica-heavy take of “Kiss Me Baby.” A British brass section, unseen on camera, had beefed up some of the pre-recorded tracks.

***Vicki Wickham with Berry Gordy, 2015***

The Sound Of Motown has since figured in various Motown books, as did (to one degree or another) the U.K. tour of ’65. In her autobiography, Martha Reeves dwelt on the prominence given to the Supremes at Berry Gordy’s direction – even though she got to duet with Springfield – while Mary Wilson remembered the costumes, the wig changes and the choreography, plus Florence Ballard’s comment “on how square the English go-go dancers were.” The more interesting angle appeared in Jack Ashford’s Motown: The View From The Bottom and in Nelson George’s Where Did Our Love Go: namely, that Van Dyke’s musicians were told they would each be paid $52.50 for cutting the Rediffusion tracks, augmenting the $350 per week Motown paid them for the tour.

“In addition to being excited, we welcomed a chance to pad our purse with a few extra bucks,” wrote Ashford. But midway through the trek, Van Dyke was instructed by Motown’s Esther Edwards to tell his men that the Rediffusion fee would have to be returned – a move which led to a strike threat when the show was due to play Liverpool on April 4 (although Ashford recalled the venue as Bournemouth, a few days earlier). Gordy was obliged to step in and reinstate the $52.50 payment.

The Sound Of Motown was broadcast in the U.K. on the evening of April 28 across Britain’s commercial TV network, although not in every region. “It must have been weird to people watching it,” said Wickham. “Some of it was music they would have heard in clubs or on RSG! They might perhaps by then have heard inklings about it on the radio, but it must have been a weird experience. There were very few English black acts, so you weren’t used to seeing this many black artists on TV. It was something completely different.”

The broadcast’s ratings were unlikely to have been good, admitted Wickham. “The programme was wonderful, beyond all our expectations, and all of us were absolutely pleased to bits. It wouldn’t have done any good for Rediffusion’s bottom line, but the fact that we are talking about it years later means that there was something right about it.”

Meanwhile, due in May is a new book, Ready Steady Go! The Weekend Starts Here by Andy Neill, which includes a six-page mini chapter devoted to The Sound Of Motown. The righteous conversation continues…

TV notes: the footage, rights and use of Ready Steady Go! was in the hands of Dave Clark (yes, he of the Dave Clark Five) for many years, but relatively little was licensed for commercial release. One exception was The Sound Of Motown, made available in 1985 on VHS with the addition of a couple of RSG! performances by Marvin Gaye. The show has never officially appeared on DVD, although bootlegs exist in that format. There are also YouTube clips, although some have been edited out of sequence. Outside the U.K., The Sound Of Motown rights were thought to have been retained by Berry Gordy; it was broadcast in the U.S. in 1965 on various channels. Some two years ago, multinational music firm BMG announced the acquisition (presumably from Clark) of the RSG! name and branding, and “certain surviving audio visual broadcast footage.” Next week’s documentaries and Andy Neill’s book are among the first fruits of that deal.

Music notes: Dusty Springfield’s devotion to Motown went beyond that Rediffusion TV special. She recorded and/or performed a range of Hitsville hits during her career, including a couple of unexpected choices. All can be found on the latest West Grand Blog playlist. For sanity’s sake, it doesn’t include 1960’s “You Got What It Takes” by the Lana Sisters, of whom Springfield was once a member.