Motown

It’s the Same Old Song – The Four TopsOf course you could pick a million Motown slices, but this has always been my super schliiiice. Can still remember as a young buck, maybe 7ish, going out to play catch with my brother. I had to quickly run back into the house to get something, and as I was reaching for whatever it was this came on and I was stunned. That fat rollicking riff, still got a hold on me. Can remember what I was wearing, my brother was wearing (a dress? Hiyooo!) and where I was (bedroom, in front of window looking out on backyard.) Desert island slice.  - XMASTIME

Via Sully we see a joint on Motown, and besides this always-amazing-sounding fact:

Perhaps best of all, the book gives long-overdue praise to the people who were the key to the Motown sound – the house band known as the Funk Brothers, who Gordy refused to credit on album covers until Marvin Gaye’s smash 1971 concept album, What’s Going On. (For an expanded treatment of the Funk Brothers’ story, check out the 2002 documentary Standing In the Shadows of Motown, which opens by stating the astonishing fact that this unknown band played on more #1 hits than the Beach Boys, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and Elvis combined.)

I personally had never known this tidbit on probably the greatest songwriting team ever not named Lennon/McCartney or Xmastime/Xmastime, Holland/Dozier/Holland:

“H-D-H’s proficiency won them awards, respect, and money,” George writes. “They should have been happy. Yet bubbling under the surface was the uneasy feeling that, considering all the capital they were generating, all the acts they had helped make marketable live commodities…and the musical identity they had given Motown, maybe they should have been given a bigger piece.”

When that bigger piece wasn’t forthcoming, H-D-H mimicked a practice common to Detroit’s automobile assembly lines. They went into a production slowdown. Gordy, furious, sued them for $4 million for breach of contract in 1968. H-D-H counter-sued for $22 million.

See a list of songs by them HERE. Ridiculous.