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Here's an old post from ten years ago. It's been significantly revised and republished today as a new Almost Hits entry along with its original comments. The Supremes roared out of Detroit in 1963 with the classic Motown sound that young people all over America craved. It began their reign as the most successful female group of all time, a crown they held for decades. Unfortunately, The Spice Girls (ugh!) eventually sold more records and stole their throne. Signed by Berry Gordy in 1961, the trio made seven earlier attempts to have a hit, but until "When The Lovelight Starts Shining Through His Eyes" reached number 23 on the Billboard Hot 100 near the end of 1963 - just a few weeks ahead of the British Invasion - they had little success. After that, Mary Wilson, Florence Ballard and Diana Ross were off to the races. Over the next few years, they placed twelve #1 singles on the Hot 100. "Lovelight" had the vibrant accessi...

Along with my life-long obsession with The Beatles and my love of Southern California's Laurel Canyon sound Motown always possessed a big chunk of my heart during their powerhouse years of the 1960s. The Detroit hit factory's biggest act was The Supremes, and in November 1965 Diana Ross, Mary Wilson, and Florence Ballard earned the top spot on the Billboard Hot 100 for the sixth time with "I Hear A Symphony." On "Symphony" The Funk Brothers and composers Holland-Dozier-Holland took Motown productions to a whole new level. It's a good thing they did because Motown President, Berry Gordy, was angry that the trio's previous single, "Nothing But Heartaches" broke their streak of five consecutive chart toppers. It failed to reach the top ten, peaking only at #11. Gordy then issued this directive, " We will release nothing less than Top Ten product on any artist; and because the Supremes' world-...

One-hit-wonder Barrett Strong passed away on January 29, 2023 at age 81, so today we'll honor him and his song "Money (That's What I Want)." "Money" has the distinction of being the first hit Berry Gordy released from his now iconic Motown recording studio in Detroit. It was originally issued on Tamla, Gordy's first label. "Money" reached #23 on the Hot 100 and #2 on the R&B chart. It sold 1,000,000 copies and earned a gold record. The song didn't become a hit nationally until it was leased to another fledgling label, Anna Records , led by Gordy's two sisters. It was their only significant hit before the label was absorbed by their brother's company. Gordy's production sounds earthier and less polished than most of his later Motown songs we've come to know and love, but it's the record that helped the company become one of the dominant forces of pop music in the sixties. It brought in a lot o...

It may not be as worn out as many other Christmas classics heard on the radio every holiday season, but Stevie Wonder's "Someday at Christmas" has still become a much-loved standard. Wonder's first Christmas song is not a party record. Motown released the single in November 1966, probably in response to the tumultuous times America was living through that winter just a few months before the Summer of Love. Racial tensions were at a high point while the war in Vietnam was raging and becoming the biggest issue of division between hawks and doves, young and old. Despite the factional tensions, the record takes a positive tone that all poverty, war and hate will be overcome in the future, even if it doesn't happen in our lifetime. Both subjects are addressed in the opening stanza. " Someday at Christmas, men won't be boys,  Playing with bombs like kids play with toys,  One warm December our hearts will see,  A world where men are free." "Someday at ...

Temples Of Sound is a great book! I delved into it gradually during my spare time over a period of a year, and even re-read much of it on a recent vacation because I read the first parts of it so long ago. Temples Of Sound offers the reader fifteen chapters about the great American recording studios, how they came to be, how they rose to their great heights, and where they are today. Most of these studios began in the 1950s or early 60s but others, including Miami's Criterion Studios and Philadelphia's Sigma Sound Studios came to prominence in the 70s. The intriguing thing about this book is that no matter what kind of music was recorded in these "temples" there seemed to be one common factor among most of them. Many of the great studios were started from scratch by young entrepreneurs who were naive about the music business. Most of the studios were makeshift in nature, housed in stark old buildings that frequently needed massive rehabilitation, and built on ten...

Those of you who saw the movie High Fidelity may recall the moment when Barry, played hysterically by Jack Black, destroyed Stevie Wonder’s 1980s music and humiliated a customer who came in to the used record store where he worked asking for a copy of the Motown star's huge 80s hit, "I Just Called To Say I Love You" for his daughter. It was a very funny scene based around a music snob's opinion that Wonder's 80s and 90s music doesn't compare favorably with his seventies output. Despite the laughs generated from Barry's outburst, Wonder's career is not one that should be made light of because even his lesser 80s music is still head and shoulders above the work of most other artists. I don't believe I'm exaggerating at all by stating that Wonder's albums, beginning with 1970's Where I'm Coming From and continuing through 1980's Hotter Than July , earned him a place as one of the top five artists of the entire decade. After that,...

As part of Black History Month my original intent was to feature Motown founder Berry Gordy - the person most responsible for bringing black pop music into the mainstream of American life during the 1960s - but sadness has interfered with my plans. Unfortunately, the news broke today that Mary Wilson, one of the three original Supremes who rose to stardom with Florence Ballard and Diana Ross, has passed away at age 76. When I was growing up my true musical loves were the British invasion and Gordy's perennial hit factory. I loved The Supremes almost as much as The Beatles. I bought almost every one of the Detroit stars' 45 RPM singles featuring the original lineup whose run ended after "Reflections" became a hit in 1967.  During the years the trio was at the height of their popularity they were easily the most popular female recording artists in the world, placing twelve #1 singles on the Billboard Hot 100. I won't go into great detail about the group's histor...

Embed from Getty Images (L-R) Hicks, Barrow, and Demps in 1962 You will be forgiven if you've never heard of Jacqueline Hicks, Marlene Barrow-Tate, and Louvain Demps, known professionally as The Andantes. Almost nobody outside of Motown Records has heard of them either but as sure as you're reading this article you most certainly have heard them sing. They were the anonymous vocal trio who sang backup on what is reportedly 20,000 Motown songs. They were the go-to girls for the groundbreaking record company from 1961 until 1972 when Berry Gordy moved most of his business to Los Angeles. Until the move Gordy and the producers at Motown considered The Andantes' work so important that if one of them wasn't immediately available for a recording session it was often postponed. Smokey Robinson considered them an indispensable asset to the label. In 1961 Hicks and Barrow, both teenagers, were part of a trio singing in churches and they were just getting their f...

If you were a Motown fan back in the day (and who wasn't) you need to grab this Temptations anthology now. The Best of the Temptations is an excellent double CD set with all of the much-loved singing group's hits plus a few B-sides, album tracks, and detailed liner notes. It also includes a handful of their 1980s work for people who want an entire career retrospective. For most listeners it's all The Temptations they'll ever need because like most of the original, enduring Motown acts the famous vocal quintet concentrated on singles over LPs because that's the way Berry Gordy liked it. The Best of the Temptations consists of 46 chronologically placed songs that begins with their first hit "The Way You Do The Things You Do" released in January 1964, about a month after The Beatles' first stateside smash, "I Want To Hold Your Hand," began its historic climb up the charts. The second disc ends with "Lady Soul" from 1986. You get ...

Songs In The Key Of Life is easily Stevie Wonder's peak and one of the greatest albums of all time. It's also huge, clocking in at over an hour and forty-four minutes and twenty-one songs. Not only was Wonder's record a double it was accompanied by a four song EP. Similar to The Beatles' White Album in size, scope, and diversity it's more consistently great than the Fabs' 1968 epic. It's one of the few records of its size that does not wear out its welcome while listening to it from beginning to end. There is no filler. Motown's resident genius offered us ballads, funk, African rhythms, jazz, R&B, pure pop, vocals and instrumentals. There are love songs, songs about peace and spirituality, politics, the plight of Black people, and no "Revolution #9." The album also had four singles: "I Wish," "As," "Another Star," and "Sir Duke," the last one written as a tribute to the late bandleader Edward...

Where I'm Coming From is the big turning point in Stevie Wonder's career. Released in 1971, shortly before his twenty-first birthday and around the time his original Motown contract expired, it was the first album under Wonder's new deal in which Berry Gordy reluctantly gave the R&B superstar total artistic control of his work. When the record stiffed Gordy, who did not like it, began to have second thoughts about allowing Wonder to go off totally on his own. However, beginning with 1972's Music of My Mind through 1980's Hotter Than July this magnificent musician proved Gordy wrong by becoming one of the most creative, relevant, and popular artists of the 70s. The nine song album is as diverse as anything Wonder ever recorded even if doesn't quite reach the heights of Innervisions , Talking Book , and one of the greatest albums in the history of pop music, his gigantic, twenty-one song work, Songs In The Key Of Life . Where I'm Coming From's...

Growing up in the 60s and listening to music on the radio meant I heard a lot of Motown. Berry Gordy's stable of stars were the first black musicians I was exposed to except for a few adult-oriented artists like Louie Armstrong, Nat King Cole, and Ella Fitzgerald. To most kids their music wasn't cool, nor was it "black" in the same way Motown was considered black. The label's Stevie Wonder eventually became one of my all time favorite artists in the 70s, however, in the 60s, I preferred The Temptations, The Supremes, and the Four Tops. The Temps had an earthier sound than The Tops and a case could be made that the latter's more polished records made them the male counterparts to The Supremes. The two groups were almost identical when it came to their instrumental arrangements and they shared the fabulous composing trio of Holland, Dozier, Holland who wrote most of the huge hits for both acts. The big difference was in their lead singers. While Diana Ros...