Flashback, November 1968: Temptations, Supremes Join in ‘I’m Gonna Make You Love Me’

Few songs fill me with the kind of elation I hear in every note of “I’m Gonna Make You Love Me,” released as a single 50 years ago this week. This collaboration between male and female singing colossi—The Temptations and The Supremes, respectively—could have been merely an example of Motown mogul Berry Gordy Jr.’s matchless sense of the musical mainstream of the Sixties. 

But producers Frank Wilson and Nick Ashford crafted what the London Independent called a “shivers-down-the-spine remake” of a song by 25-year-old Philadelphia-based composer Kenny Gamble and his mentor Jerry Ross. In the process, Wilson and Ashford coaxed some of the most inspired performances from two groups that, at close to their commercial zenith, were integral to the success of “Hitsville, U.S.A.” 

The genesis of the hit began with the 20 minutes it took Gamble and Ross to write it at the piano in 1966. In the next two years, versions of it became middling hits for Dee Dee Warwick (Dionne Warwicke's sister) and Madeline Bell (Dusty Springfield’s friend and backup singer), and Jerry Butler also recorded a very fine cover. 

But now, Motown, in having The Supremes join forces with The Temptations, was reaching beyond its own music factory for a not-terribly-well-known product (Warwick’s take had been released by Mercury Records). The studio had succeeded only once before with a similar move, with the Four Tops' cover of "If I Were a Carpenter" the year before.

Maybe it took Ashford, who had sung backup on Warwick’s single, to find the key to unlocking the song’s full commercial potential. Having joined Motown, with writing-producing partner Valerie Simpson, after working on the original single, he was now in a position to do something about it. 

What also can’t be discounted was Gordy’s decision to magnify a highly successful studio formula. He had seen how duets with Tami Terrell had nudged the diffident Marvin Gaye away from more traditional jazz vocalizing and towards powerhouse rhythm and blues. Gordy especially loved the opportunity that duets afforded to double an album’s customer base. That, though, was with two voices. When Gordy gave the green light to Diana Ross and the Supremes Join the Temptations, he was putting eight in the studio mix: three female, five male.

Those eight voices had been increasingly clamorous of late. The year before, the Supremes’ Florence Ballard had been kicked out of the group. Gordy yielded to Ross’ demand that her frontwoman status be formally in the group’s new name—“Diana Ross and the Supremes”—altering the dynamics between the lead and fellow singers Mary Wilson and Cindy Birdsong.

Turbulence was also the order of the day with The Temptations. Heavy drug use and resulting erratic behavior by Dennis Ruffin led to the painful decision to part ways with this powerful lead singer and replace him in July 1968 with Dennis Edwards. 

Though the addition of Edwards continued The Temptations’ string of hits with the psychedelic “Cloud Nine,” a smash upon release in October, Gordy may have felt the group could use, in effect, an insurance policy. The combination with The Supremes seemed the best route to go.

Diana Ross and the Supremes Join the Temptations was meant to reinforce a splashy prime-time TV special, TCB, set to air during the 1968 holiday season. The climax of that production, “The Impossible Dream,” was intended to be the single, with “I’m Gonna Make You Love Me” a seeming afterthought. 

Those careful plans were hastily put aside when radio DJs, once they got hold of advance copies of the album, started to play “I’m Gonna Make You Love Me” instead. It’s easy to see why. 

The production contrasted the moods and styles of the leads—Ross, arch and playful (“I'm gonna use every trick in the book/I'll try my best to get you hooked”) and the Temptations’ Eddie Kendricks, tender and yearning in his falsetto (“Every minute, every hour/I'm gonna shower you with love and affection”). It was all supported by Motown’s ace background musicians, including “Ready” Freddy Washington, who managed to sight-read the tune’s complex bass chart on the first take.

Unexpectedly hearing the Temptations-Supremes version of his song on the radio while out driving, Gamble had to pull over to avoid crashing. “That was unbelievable, hearing them play that song. This was my favorite group, the Temptations.”

After that, a string of hits followed (notably, Jerry Butler’s “Only the Strong Survive”), and, as Gamble recalled in an interview for the Grammy Awards Web site, “Everything was busting wide open. It was a musical explosion.” 

Gordy offered him and partner Leon Huff jobs at Motown, but the two decided to strike out on their own. By 1971, they had enough of a track record to launch Philadelphia International Records, later home of such million-sellers as "Love Train" (the O'Jays), "Me And Mrs. Jones" (Billy Paul), and "If You Don't Know Me By Now" (Harold Melvin and The Bluenotes).

As for the song that gave birth to it all: The Temptations played “I’m Gonna Make You Love Me” by themselves live in concert in their heyday (e.g., this audio recording, from YouTube, at a 1970 London appearance), but they never did so live with Diana Ross and The Supremes. (Ms. Ross had a flirtatious duet with Steven Wonder on The Hollywood Palace a year later.) 

More’s the pity: Though Gordy merged the male and female voices for entirely commercial reasons, the meshing of the two different sounds made this an artistic triumph, too. 

You will find upteen covers of the song between YouTube and the likes of Spotify (including by Lou Christie, and, inevitably, an “American Idol” version featuring contestants Candice Glover, Amber Holcomb, and Angie Miller). But I can’t hear any other version in my mind than the one by The Temptations and The Supremes. It carries everything before it, like the love they hail so exultantly.

Song Lyric of the Day (Marvin Gaye, on Love and War)

“You see, war is not the answer For only love can conquer hate.”—Renaldo “Obie” Benson, Al Cleveland, and Marvin Gaye, “What’s Going On,” performed by Marvin Gaye on his LP What’s Going On (1971)

 

The Motown masterpiece What’s Going On, released 40 years ago today, emerged from personal and national cauldrons. In much of the prior year, Marvin Gaye slipped out of the music business, so distraught over the loss of dear friend and vocal partner Tammi Terrell that he not only thought of leaving the industry entirely, but even tried out for the Detroit Lions training season in a midlife attempt to become a professional football player.

In addition, the return of Gaye’s brother from Vietnam made the singer question the value of hits such as “I Heard It Through the Grapevine” and “Too Busy Thinking About My Baby.”

When Gaye finally returned to the studio, he was brimming with ideas for the most ambitious and challenging album of his career. While the music would blend jazz and classical elements into the now-familiar brand of Motown soul, the lyrics would cover all the churning discontents of the America of his day: the war, inner city poverty and hopelessness, the generation gap, civil rights, and the environment.

A decade before, Gaye had supplied one of Motown Records with one of its first two albums, The Soulful Moods of Marvin Gaye. But now label founder Berry Gordy Jr., normally a shrewd judge of material, dug in his heels against releasing his star’s latest offering, believing it would go nowhere. Not even friend and label exec Smokey Robinson’s assurance that Gaye was serious about his threat to leave the company could sway him.

In the end, what changed Gordy’s mind was something far simpler and familiar: the certain smell of a hit.

Someone leaked to a local DJ the single “What’s Going On,” even while Gordy remained adamant against its release. The song--started by Al Cleveland and Four Tops member Renaldo Benson, after watching the violent crushing of a demonstration, then completed by Gaye--began to be requested continually at the station. With everyone soon asking where the album was, Gordy relented.

Gaye’s self-produced LP did more than hit #6 on the album charts and spawn three top 10 singles, the title cut, “Inner City Blues (Makes Me Wanna Holler)” and “Mercy Mercy Me (The Ecology)”; did more than influence Stevie Wonder, Curtis Mayfield and other artists within the Motown fold in gaining creative control of their work; or, even a personal level, did more than move Gaye, formerly known best for his romantic crooning, onto an entirely new artistic plane.

No, Gaye’s smooth tenor, his mastery of a three-octave range, was put in the service of creative reconciliation, of bringing understanding to a divided country and his own fractured heart. The self-mastery he temporarily achieved was not long lasting (see, for instance, my prior post on his violent, unnecessary death at the hands of his father).

But, standing mere inches from a microphone, he gave unforgettable voice to issues that, two generations later, have not faded in urgency.

This Day in Pop Music History (Smokey Makes U.S. “Shop Around” for Motown)

Feb. 12, 1961—Motown Records, a toddler of a music company in Detroit, won mass acceptance from a white audience with “Shop Around,” its first million-selling single, penned by company creator Berry Gordy and his friend, the lead singer of the group recording it, Smokey Robinson of the Miracles.

About 10 years ago, with a bit of time between flights, I chatted for a minute with security guards at Dayton Airport. They had “quite a bit of excitement” there earlier that day, one told me. “Smokey Robinson came through. What a great, classy guy!”

The guards were white and late middle-age--hardly the audience for the 20-year-old singer when he first burst upon the nation’s consciousness with that swooping, swooning, acrobatic tenor voice.

But their reaction testifies both to the cross-over impact made by the first record label owned by an African-American, as well as Smokey’s own unbounded personal charisma.

It wasn’t surprising that he took the label to the top. After all, the first song released on Motown Records two years before was the Miracles’ “Bad Girls,” and the first slotted for national release was the group’s “Way Over There.”

Moreover, if Gordy--a former Korean War vet, boxer and Ford Motor Co. worker who wrote tunes in his head to break assembly-line boredom--had the ambition and marketing savvy to make broaden the audience of records traditionally considered "rhythm and blues" to whites, it was Robinson who, with his friendliness and uncanny ear, would work with upcoming acts in the company (e.g., Mary Wells, The Temptations), crafting songs to their talents, as Motown vice-president throughout the rest of the Sixties.

To put “Shop Around” on the map at all, though, Robinson and his bandmates had to follow the hard-driving Gordy's lead. First, Gordy dissuaded Robinson from offering the song (written, the singer recalled, “like water," in less than a half hour) to the label’s Barrett Strong, convincing him that it would be better if the Miracles performed it with Smokey’s wife, Claudette Rogers, singing lead.

Several weeks later, dissatisfied with the results, Gordy called Robinson at 3 in the morning with a brainstorm: He could fix the record with a faster beat. He was able to persuade the reluctant and bleary-eyed Robinson that this time it would work, but it was up to the latter to round up his fellow musicians right then and there to re-record it.

Robinson wasn’t completely successful in this last endeavor--the piano player was missing, requiring that Gordy himself step into the role for the moment--but the new beat, along with the substitution of Robinson for Rogers in the lead, was everything the producer promised.

In time, Gordy was able to present the thrilled band members with their first gold record at the state fair, and to watch with satisfaction as they landed a gig on Dick Clark’s “American Bandstand.” It also launched Smokey and the Miracles on a decade of further hits, including “You Really Got a Hold on Me,” “Tracks of My Tears,” “Tears of a Clown,” and my personal favorite, “Ooh Baby Baby.”

This Day in Pop Music History (Berry Gordy Jr. Founds Motown)

January 12, 1959—Using an $800 loan from his family, feisty 29-year-old former boxer and fledgling record producer-composer Berry Gordy Jr. established Motown Records, the first record label owned by and starring African-Americans that achieved success with white audiences.

I chose the headline for this post, referring to “pop music” rather than “R&B” or “soul,” because that’s how Gordy would prefer it. In a recent Vanity Fair oral history of his company, the legendary Detroit music entrepreneur related how he convinced radio stations with predominantly white listeners to play his firm’s music. What he was peddling, he insisted, was “popular,” not the more limiting labels, usually race-tinged, that they ascribed to it.

You know what? Gordy was right. The songs created at “Studio A” in the two-story building on 2648 West Grand Boulevard have become an indelible part of American music, played over and over again the world over, just as surely as those by the Gershwins, Porter, and other masters of the Great American Songbook.

Gordy even got his singers to mix in songs by white composers to supplement those crafted by dear friend Smokey Robinson and other tunesmith who created “Hitsville U.S.A.”: The Four Tops, for instance, covered my favorite Jimmy Webb song, “MacArthur Park,” and the label’s top female group, the Supremes, sang the Bernstein-Sondheim song “Somewhere” from West Side Story.

More than 50 books have been written about the Motown creative community, including by Gordy himself and singer Martha Reeves. But I think that to really understand what Motown meant to America and what life was like within the organization, two types of literature should be read:

* A social and cultural history that, sifting carefully through both the most banal celebrity bios and the most turgid government hearings, nevertheless provides a vividly impressionistic sense of a unique time and place. Let me be more specific about the model I have in mind: the late Otto Friedrich’s thrilling portrait of Hollywood in the 1940s, City of Nets. (I understand that his similar histories of Weimar Germany and Paris in the Age of Manet are equally good, but this is the one I can recommend, having read it.) Is there such a book about Motown? If any readers know of any, please let me know.

* Legal documents, from lawsuits and investigations. I prefer to keep my associations with attorneys on a personal rather than professional level. Witnesses have lied through their teeth and evidence is not always the way it’s portrayed. In short, I’m frequently of the opinion that the Keanu Reeves-Al Pacino film The Devil’s Advocate verges at times on being a documentary rather than a work of fiction.

Nevertheless, legal documents can yield a basic stratum of fact that often can’t be gainsaid. Though Motown had elements of a family, as claimed in the Vanity Fair piece, it was ultimately a corporation. The elemental truths of this fact can be glimpsed in some of the civil actions in which it’s figured over the years, including Martha Reeves’ suit for 14 years’ worth of lost royalties; Marvin Gaye’s bitter divorce from Gordy’s sister Anna; and Teena Marie’s attempt to break a contract signed as a minor without benefit of legal counsel.

Motown’s corporate status also explains why Gordy, like many white business leaders of the period, moved to the Sunbelt, despite the visible pride and the economic benefits it brought the city, in 1971. So much of the move to Los Angeles was motivated by the music leader’s desire to achieve a Hollywood film career for then-paramour Diana Ross. God knows, as Detroit continued to hemorrhage over the following three decades after his departure, the city could have used Hitsville, U.S.A.

Quote of the Day (Martha Reeves, on Motown)

“You can’t really have a good house party unless you play some Motown.”—Singer Martha Reeves, quoted by Lisa Robinson, “It Happened in Hitsville,” Vanity Fair, December 2008

(Check out Lisa Robinson’s new oral history of Motown in the latest issue of Vanity Fair, now on the newsstands. Fifty years before Barack Obama, Berry Gordy Jr. founded an organization that, at a time when America badly needed it, managed to bring blacks and whites together. Yes, it was only on the dance floor, but it was as good a place to start as any—and, at a time now in the music industry when everything is hopelessly demographically segmented, this is not something to dismiss.)