The Supremes: A Saga of Motown Dreams, Success, and Betrayal (4 page)

“I assume,” he began, “they’ll be regarded as a great vocal group.” A second lull, with discomfort, knowing he couldn’t get by with just that brief throwaway remark.

“They were the greatest ever did it,” he amended, before returning to his breakfast.

Was there a song he favored above all others?

“Nope. It was just music to me. Just songs that we did at the time.

That’s what I liked, it’s what I felt. It’s what we all felt. We never thought in terms of, this is going to be a No. 1. We just thought, this is going to be a hit record.”

You’d think there’d be more to it than that, considering that the Supremes’ potentiation of HDH’s songs made both the act and the production team wealthy beyond words. Before hooking up with Ross, Wilson, and Ballard, HDH were good, reliable Motown song-meisters; 1

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after, they existed in a kind of ether not quite of this earth. Anyone with knowledge of Motown knows their catalog includes a flow of hits roughly equal to that of the Supremes, though far fewer chart-toppers, by the likes of the Four Tops, Marvin Gaye, Martha and the Vandellas, and nearly every other headliner on the company payroll. However, HDH’s eternal identification as a vestigial organ of the Supremes, while a matter of pride, is at the same time a sore spot.

As Eddie Holland put it, walking a fine line, “Yeah, we had something good going with them so we produced them—when we took the time to produce them. It wasn’t like we hung around them, begging to produce them. Hell, they were the ones beggin’
us
to produce
them
.” Sensing a cue, the Holland brothers’ manager, an enthusiastic woman named Shirley Washington, interjected: “Why, do you know that Holland-Dozier-Holland songs have been heard more than any other songs by any other writers in history? I got that from BMI

[Broadcast Music, Inc.].”

“More than Lennon-McCartney songs?” somebody wondered.

“Did you hear me?” she said, sternly.

“If all we did was the Supremes,” Eddie went on, “then why am I sitting here?” Here being a continent away from home so that HDH

could collaborate on a scheduled 2008 Broadway musical version of the Oscar-nominated
The First Wives Club
, the 1996 Bette Midler-Diane Keaton-Goldie Hawn chick flick based on Olivia Goldsmith’s novel of the same name. Who better to compose the score for such a vehicle than the ultimate chick-group overlords? Indeed, not only was it a coup that the show’s producers landed the trio, it was a chance for HDH to be real-world, real-time relevant again after decades of dormancy, and to carve another landmark: their first venture composing for the Broadway stage. Only this kind of A-List project—which was announced as far back as 2005 and still not ready for the stage in mid-2008—could gauze over the age-old feuds between the Hollands and the ever-reclusive Dozier, who’s lived on and off in Europe since the ’70s and been heard from little. It even got them all in the same room, and speaking again, as long as it was just about music.

Perhaps all that helps to explain why going back in time and reliving the Supremes’ experience made Eddie Holland chafe, though he and Brian had agreed to do this retrospective. Indeed, dissecting their work for the group comes easily and in great detail—once the focus is squarely on their production concepts and techniques. Not that the Hollands and Dozier can ever really distance themselves from the Supremes in any case, nor would they want to.

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For example, on the table near Eddie Holland’s bacon and eggs sat a copy of Hip-O Records’ 2005 three-CD box-set compilation,
Heaven
Must Have Sent You: The Holland/Dozier/Holland Story
. On the inside cover are two superimposed vintage Motown publicity photographs, circa 1965. One shows the guys in a set-up studio shot, Eddie in the middle, pencil in one hand, music sheet in the other, as Dozier and Brian check out the piece of paper; all three wear snappy open-necked shirts and casual sport jackets, and are grinning broadly. The other photo shows them and the Supremes lounging on the lawn in front of the West Grand Boulevard house—“Hitsville”—where all the great hits were cut. They’re intermingled, the young Brian at the far left looking eerily like Smokey Robinson, next to Diana Ross and Mary Wilson, and Lamont and Eddie flanked on the right by Florence Ballard. Ross and Wilson are wearing designer casual skirt-and-top outfits, Ballard a white sundress. Naturally, Eddie is the one doing the talking. No one appears particularly happy, with only Wilson bearing anything close to a smile. Ross seems to be staring into the ground with something approaching a scowl.

When this weird, un-serendipitous vibe was pointed out to Eddie, a grin crept through the brush of his beard.

“Diana looks mad, don’t she?” he said merrily.

“They probably took that picture after you had to teach her to sing one of those songs,” Washington offered, hinting that perhaps Eddie’d had his hands full with Ross in the studio.

“Well, I’ll put it this way,” he said. “A Holland-Dozier-Holland song is difficult for a singer to sing. We did a lot of off-beats, sharps, flats. The singers sang away from the chorus and the melody at times.

The colorization of sounds is different; the voice trails off on a sharp key to extend the effect. It took a lot of work, with me working with the vocalist. Diana, Levi [Stubbs], Martha, whoever it was, they couldn’t just hear the song on a demo and then sing it—they had to
learn
it.

Diana did that. Definitely. She took direction perfectly. Levi was tougher.

But she listened. That’s why the Supremes happened. She was interpret-ing Holland-Dozier-Holland’s vision, what we heard. It wasn’t what she wanted sometimes. But it had to go down our way.” When HDH stopped producing the Supremes, both groups were on top of the world; HDH was big enough to walk away from Berry Gordy and live to tell the tale, eventually walking all the way to the 0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:05 AM Page 4

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Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1990, just two years after the Supremes were inducted. Now, unlike his more excitable older brother, the normally Buddha-like Brian Holland can’t avoid looking back and getting misty about HDH’s Supreme oeuvre.

“I’ve never told anyone this,” he said the day before. “I was driving down Sunset Boulevard one day in the ’80s when I heard ‘I Hear a Symphony’ on the radio. And it just got to me, Eddie’s lyrics really. I pulled over to the side of the road and cried, man. Now, this was like twenty-five years after we recorded the song. And I hadn’t had any emotional reaction to it before that. It took twenty-five years for it to sink in how good that song is.”

His voice rose. “Listen to the lyrics!
Listen
to it.
Those tears that fill
my eyes / I cry not for myself but for those who never felt the joy we felt.

Things were happening in our lives by then, Eddie’ s and mine, that began to creep into the songs. Those songs were supposed to be about simple things. And at the beginning, they were. It was ‘baby this, baby that.’ But when I hear something like ‘Symphony,’ man, there ain’t nothing simple about it.”

While he won’t deliberate on it today, unconvincingly laughing it off, his not-so-secret affair in the early ’60s with Ross was the talk of Motown, precipitating a ballistic outburst from the woman he was married to at the time. All these years later, it’s clear the infatuation never really ended, even after the sex did. Apropos of nothing, he found himself saying, “Diana was . . . very pretty.” Then there was the ill-fated Supreme. Of Florence Ballard, Eddie Holland said: “There was a girl who needed a good psychiatrist. Because what she was really frightened of was her own demons. That’s what killed her, tryin’ to push those demons away. We all . . . somebody needed to be more attentive to her, to save her from herself.” But then, everybody at Motown, it seems, had demons of some kind. Fucked-up people roamed through the house on West Grand Boulevard, artists sniping at each other—and at Ross—all the time, producers sniping at the musicians or at Berry Gordy over money, including a fistfight between Berry and Marvin Gaye in Gordy’s office.

Or, artists would be sliding between the sheets with someone they shouldn’t be—a code of conduct that applied to Gordy himself, who 0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:05 AM Page 5

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5

has been married three times and constantly at play during and in between. This was the underbelly of what Gordy wanted the world to believe was an isolated culture of young, happy, shiny people—the

“Motown family.” By 1967, even several million dollars a year in advances from Gordy couldn’t satisfy HDH’s notions of self-worth and creative control, and so they were outta there. The Supremes, however, thrived as the Motown gold standard, cutting two more No. 1’s written and produced by lesser entities, though by then the Motown soul was drained.

The Holland brothers can easily look back upon decades of courtroom wrangling with Gordy—which in the end concluded almost entirely in Gordy’s favor—and blithely slough it off as business, not personal. Eddie Holland can wax glorious about Gordy all day, in a way he cannot muster for the Supremes. Because that was about money, not art. By contrast, an uneasy look on his face appears in a trice when that hoary canard about Motown’s lost soul is entered into the record. This one especially hurts, given the obvious syllogism for some that soul began losing ground there once HDH sent the Supremes’ crossover success through the roof with their songs. What of the notion that those tunes weren’t “black enough”? What of the cries of “sellout”?

Though betrayed by his fidgety unease, Eddie tried to be defiantly blasé about it, even taking the tack that it
wasn’t
black in nature, as if the entire matter were too parochial to matter.

“We never wrote black music. We grew up on pop music. We didn’t set out to write R&B for the Supremes. That’s why it had such mass appeal.”

Didn’t Dozier’s
Reflections Of
CD reveal the imbued R&B in, say,

“My World Is Empty Without You”?

“You can take any song and make it R&B. Shit, I can take the ‘Star-Spangled Banner’ and make it R&B, if I care to. We didn’t want to be just another bunch of black guys making music as a cause. We didn’t want to put all our energies year after year into making music three people would listen to, that would never get beyond a black radio station and the jukebox in some dingy blues club on the edge of the docks. Then, too, we loved what the Drifters were doing—‘There Goes My Baby’ was our favorite song. It blew Brian and me away. But we knew we couldn’t write like that. We did our thing. We wanted to make hits. We wanted every goddamn thing we wrote to be a hit!” 0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:05 AM Page 6

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HDH’s curse, of course, was that they did exactly that, too damn well with the Supremes to ever be mortal again, even in times of extended failure later on. For all of their assembled body of work, for all the eternal cool of “Heat Wave” or “How Sweet It Is (to Be Loved by You),” only the Supremes ever made Brian Holland bawl on the side of a road a quarter-century after the fact. Only the Supremes’ string of hits took them, and Motown, to an other-worldly level, and may have saved Berry Gordy’s empire from an early demise.

In this context, Eddie Holland’s reticence about standing in the shadows of the Supremes forty years after blowing out of Motown is an indicator of how powerful this Supremes thing is within popular culture. And how it permeates so many levels. Even for the Hollands—

especially for the Hollands—it’s not just about the music.

“Yeah, “ Brian Holland would find himself saying, as if involuntar-ily, the far-off look back in his eye, a good hour after he’d said it the first time, “Diana was very pretty.”

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one

THREE GIRLS

FROM THE

PROJECTS

As we look back through the funnel cloud of time, it is clear that the only common ground other than their legacy that the three Supremes ever really shared was a fifteen-block grid of south-eastern Detroit framed by the massive Cadillac plant within the Hamtramck Street beltway to the north, Hastings and Woodward Avenues to the west, St. Aubin and Dequindre Streets to the east, and the wide expanse of Warren Avenue to the south. This teeming concrete landscape bore the name of the Brewster-Douglass housing development, one of the first of its kind built in the bowels of America’s inner cities, a prototypical sprawl of apartment homes, gardens, parks, and parking lots, all visible from a distance only through a dusky curtain of smoke belched from the rooftop smoke stacks.

The Brewster-Douglass Homes—known otherwise as Brewster-Douglass, BD, or, in the most frequently used shorthand, “the projects”—were home to all three Supremes-to-be in the mid-’50s, when they were junior high school girls. But had they never been thrown together by Fate, they might not have spoken to each other for the rest of their lives. As it was, they barely knew one another beyond a timid wave and an inner thought of: Gee, I wonder what that girl’s name is.

Such was life in the projects, where the crush of so many people—

15,000 at its apogee—brought so much turnover that in this great bustle of nameless faces and faceless names, one’s next-door neighbors could be total strangers.

Diana Ross, Mary Wilson, and Florence Ballard lived in separate divisions of the projects, which were like different cities. Which is why, 7

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as every few years one building or another has been blasted into rubble as part of some sort of city urban renewal plan, the overall identity of the projects has remained intact and seemingly immune to any real change, even as they have visibly decayed. These days, off to the south-west, the “new Detroit” is taking shape, most notably in the parabolic dome of Ford Field and the adjoining Comerica Park, and the glass palaces of the Renaissance Center down near the Detroit River. But if you tip a glance anywhere beyond these cosmetic bandages, the red-brick cadaver of the projects creeps into view; a closer look reveals the boarded windows and abandoned, scarified skeletal remains of other downtown buildings evoking bombed-out Beirut.