Put the Speakers in the Window
‘SO PRESENT IN ALL OF OUR LIVES’
“There’s a soul in the city/Watching over us tonight/There’s a soul in the city/Saying everything’s gonna be alright.”
What better sentiment to accompany this weekend’s Motown 60 celebrations in Detroit, as the Motown Museum honours the heroes and heroines of Hitsville and continues to raise funds for its expansion?
That said, those lyric lines are not excerpted from a Jobete copyright, but from one of the select number of songs about Motown which have appeared over the past few decades. This one, logically enough, was called “The Motown Song,” and it became a major transatlantic hit in 1991 when recorded by Rod Stewart. The Briton was well-known for his love of Motown, not to mention a friendship with David Ruffin. “You were a great influence on me,” Stewart wrote with flowers sent to Ruffin’s funeral. “Rest peacefully.”
Rod and Ruffin, singing those Motown songs (photo: Charlie Auringer/Creem)
“The Motown Song” was the work of American singer/songwriter Larry John McNally, whose original recording was released in 1986. “It was my favourite music growing up,” McNally told Gary Graff in the Detroit Free Press. “I remember being in New York, probably around 1982, and everywhere I went, I heard all this Motown stuff. It just amazed me that it was so everywhere, so present in all our lives, sort of like the background music of our lives.”
The song came to Rod Stewart’s attention thanks to the acuity of Rob Dickins, CBE, who ran Warner Music U.K. in the 1980s and ’90s. He was visiting the offices of McNally’s publisher, Geffen Music, and was introduced to the songwriter himself. “The Motown Song” came up in the conversation, and Dickins was impressed. “I thought it combined a contemporary song with the Drifters and ‘Up On The Roof,’ that kind of feel,” he told Graff.
Speaking to me recently, Dickins recalled that when he told Stewart about it, the singer asked for a demo personally sung by McNally – in the same key as his high-range tenor. “I went back to Larry, and when he did the demo, he was practically screeching the song, to reach Rod’s key.”
Evidently, Stewart approved, cutting “The Motown Song” for his Warner Bros. album, Vagabond Heart. “He quite likes lyrics which take him back,” said Dickins, “which relate to how he felt when he was young, which touched his memories. He grew up, like I did, with Motown and with Otis Blue and all that.” The song’s hook is especially effective in summoning that nostalgia: “Bring over some of your old Motown records/We’ll put the speakers in the window and we’ll go/On the roof and listen to the Miracles/Echo to the alley down below.”
A LEGACY TO OUTLIVE THEM ALL
Stewart made one more move to maximise the appeal of “The Motown Song”: he recruited the Temptations to sing with him. “It occurred to me that it might not be flattering to the Temptations,” McNally ventured to the Detroit Free Press, “because the song mentions the Miracles and not them. Fortunately, they didn’t take it that way at all. They liked it a lot.” Dickins confirmed as much. “When he was recording it, Rod said, ‘How about getting the Temptations to sing on it? I was with them just last night.”
Thirteen years later, the group chose to sing again about Motown. “Still Tempting,” a track on their 2004 album, Legacy, was about as autobiographical as they come. “It was a cold winter night,” voiced founder member Otis Williams in the song’s intro. “January 1964, Detroit, Michigan. Five young men walked into music history, not knowing that they would become part of a legacy that would outlive them all: the sound of Motown.”
To make right everything that’s wrong…
It’s a powerful, evocative portrait (“Some of the faces change/But the name’s the same/Still the Motor City running through my veins”) even if composed by writers not born when the Temptations first assembled. Perhaps the song even tempted Dominique Morisseau, the Detroit playwright who has turned the group’s life story into one of Broadway’s newest hits, Ain’t Too Proud.
Will Smokey Robinson ever be celebrated on the Great White Way? (For the purposes of this conversation, let’s discount the one-dimensional character portrayed in Motown The Musical.) His story may not be as dramatic as that of the Temptations – apart, perhaps, from his late-period drug addiction – but the music score would be second-to-none. In the meantime, there’s “When Smokey Sings” by Sheffield’s own ABC, as deserving as “The Motown Song” and “Still Tempting” to be included here.
“It’s about the power of music to make you better,” said ABC’s Martin Fry of the song he authored with fellow bandmember Mark White. There’s no questioning that sentiment, nor arguing with its most memorable couplet: “When Smokey sings, I hear violins/When Smokey sings, I forget everything.” Little wonder that it became the group’s biggest American hit – and, coincidentally, shared the top 20 of the Billboard charts with Smokey’s own “One Heartbeat” in September 1987.
Robinson was grateful for ABC’s flattery, and even had an anecdote to go with it. “Earlier this year, I was in Europe when the song first came out,” he told the Los Angeles Times that December, “and I went on a TV show in Holland. It turns out that the producer had booked them on the show, too, but didn’t tell either one of us that the other was going to be there. He sort of threw us together, and it was a great meeting, man. They’re nice guys, we enjoyed each other and, like I said, I really appreciate their writing the song.”
HARMONY AND MIRACLES
Years before, of course, Smokey had paid his own tribute to brothers in music: “This song is dedicated to some people with whom I had the pleasure of living over half the years I’ve lived…’til now, when we come to our fork in the road.” That was the intro to “Sweet Harmony,” a graceful goodbye to the Miracles which was released as Robinson’s first solo single in 1973. “I believe in miracles,” he sang. “If you can dream it/It can be done.”
Joan and Stevie: miracles in music (photo: Barry Schultz)
Joan Baez believed in “Miracles,” too, but the song of that title on her 1977 album, Blowin’ Away, was a tribute not to Robinson’s group, but to Stevie Wonder. The folk singer was evidently a fan – she once recorded his “Never Dreamed You’d Leave In Summer” – although the lyrics of “Miracles” were not explicit. “It’s so subtle,” wrote one critic, “that one couldn’t tell it is a tribute to Wonder without the information in the album jacket liner notes.”
By contrast, there’s no mystery attached to “Levi Stubbs’ Tears” by Britain’s unique political/musical agitator, Billy Bragg, nor any shortage of critical attention. “Disaster is loaded into the tale from the first line,” wrote the dean of rock ’n’ roll historians, Greil Marcus, “and before 40 seconds are out, the chorus rises up and slams you back: ‘When the world falls apart/Some things stay in place/Levi Stubbs’ tears/Run down his face.’ ”
Marcus eulogised Bragg’s song in an essay for Artforum in 1986. “ ‘Levi Stubbs’ Tears’ is about a woman who listens to old Four Tops songs, maybe because their intensity lets her come to grips with her own feelings, maybe because the agony in Stubbs’ voice lets her take comfort, imagining that someone else hurts more than she does.” He added, “Rock ’n’ roll songs about rock ’n’ roll are legion,” he observed, “but songs about the place in music in the everyday lives of its listeners, songs about how people actually use what they hear, are rare.”
It’s difficult to imagine two pieces of music more different than “The Motown Song” and “Levi Stubbs’ Tears,” but both serve their subject matter well. Like Smokey Robinson, the Tops’ lead singer said he was flattered “that someone would use me in a song that way.” And since today’s Tops and Temptations are joining the party in Detroit this weekend, when better to play those songs one more time?
“Bring over some of your old Motown records/We’ll put the speakers in the window and we’ll go/On the roof and listen to the Miracles/Echo to the alley down below.”
Music notes: but wait, you say, what about all those songs honouring Marvin Gaye? Well, yes, that’s right – but they were the subject of an earlier West Grand Blog, to be found here. Still, there are other Hitsville homages to be heard, the most recent of which is Scherrie Payne’s “(Going) Back To Motown,” to be heard here. Earlier devotions include the Velvelettes’ “Ain’t No Place Like Motown,” Bobby Taylor & the Vancouvers’ “Ode To The Supremes,” and the Supremes’ salute to the boss, “We Couldn’t Get Along Without You.” Plus, that tribute to Berry Gordy’s own boss, “Pops, We Love You,” by Diana, Marvin, Smokey and Stevie. You can find all of those on digital streaming services, as well as Philly Cream’s “Motown Review,” George Harrison’s “Pure Smokey,” Boyz II Men’s “Motownphilly” and the above-mentioned tracks by McNally, Stewart, the Tempts, Smokey, Baez and Bragg. Oh, and there’s another McNally song, “Lose Myself,” in Motown’s inventory, as recorded by, uh, Bruce Willis for his 1987 album, The Return Of Bruno.