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.Gordy would claim that, for the next Supremes single, [w]e wereforced to go back to the can, coming up with the HDH ForeverCame Today, which he said had been cut a year before. Yet on the2000 box-set The Supremes, Harry Weinger lists the session dates forthe song as December 20, 1967, and January 1, 1968.That would indi-cate HDH were on the job, not on strike.As well, Eddie Holland callsthe tune one of my favorites, which seems to suggest that Gordywho later used the strike against HDH in years of legal warfare mayhave overstated just how crippling their work stoppage was.Even so, Forever Came Today is something of a riddle.Sessionsheets for the song seem not to have been kept.Weinger specified nostudio locale for it, though it has that non-Detroit, L.A. feel as wellas a very strange coronet-piccolo intro that sounds like a riff from Wag-ner s Bridal Chorus. Stranger still, perhaps, is that the lyrics are prob-ably the most optimistic love song Eddie Holland ever penned, sans theusual emotional tug of war When you walked into my life / Youmade my lonely life a paradise, Diana joyfully trilled.Whatever its origins, it is clear that the backing vocalists were notWilson and Birdsong but the Andantes.That trio had been called in tospruce up Flo s flat background line on In and Out of Love, but from Forever on, Wilson and Birdsong were Supremes merely for appear-ance s sake.The reason was simple, and cold: Gordy was now activelytrying to bring forth a record that would mark Diana s solo breakout,and of course no other Supremes members could be in its grooves.Thebeauty of it for Gordy was that even on tracks he determined to be 0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:06 AM Page 318318 THE SUPREMESmore appropriately Supremes singles which was the case with all sin-gles chosen for the next year no one would know the difference any-way, as the Andantes were that good.Gordy had a more tactful way of putting it that Mary and Cindy,by remarkable coincidence, always seemed to be unavailable or, morepreposterously, out of town when Supremes sessions went down.(Amazingly, Ross was always available.) However, never truer than nowwas Shelly Berger s observation that the Supremes were for all practicalpurposes Diana Ross and two who-cares backup vocalists.The bummer was that Forever Came Today came and went with-out a ripple after it was released on February 29 with an aptly titledB-side, Time Changes Things. The Motown promotion machineplied its trade, but neither that effort nor even the tune s debut by theSupremes on the March 24 episode of The Ed Sullivan Show couldmove it higher than No.28 on the pop charts and 17 on the R&B.But while the Supremes crashing chart fortunes could have been aproblem for HDH as well, they decided to put everything on the linewith Gordy.By no coincidence, they extended their own feelers toother record companies, one of which, Capitol, assured them theycould run their own subsidy label if they jumped ship.In late spring,Eddie Holland strode into Gordy s office with an ultimatum.His previ-ous demands for a cut of publishing royalties and stock equity havingbeen rebuffed, his new and last demand was for a $100,000 interest-free loan for the trio so that they could incorporate the HDH brandinto a business entity, with private office space and the freedom tobring in their own acts while still working at Motown; if they didn t getthe money and the autonomy, Holland said, they were gone.The terms of the ultimatum sounded nothing but dangerous toGordy.He could imagine his authority being whittled away, and thathe d be in effect financing an independent label under his own roofthat would someday become a competitor.Trying to put them off with-out saying no, he launched into the Berry rap, reminding them againthat he had bankrolled their rise to fame, with the hundreds of thou-sands of dollars in advances and the millions in writers royalties thathe d invested in them.(Pulling out a file, he put the exact figure at$2,235,155.) They were set for life, many times over.And all that stoodbetween them now was a measly hundred grand?After listening to the twenty-minute rap, Eddie stood up. So Iguess that s a no, then? he said drily.Weeks later, HDH were gone, even though they all had contractsthrough the end of the decade with Motown.Although Gordy contin- 0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:06 AM Page 319FOREVER CAME TODAY 319ued to hope they would come to their senses and get to work, newssoon broke that Capitol had announced the formation of InvictusRecords, to be operated in Detroit with full autonomy by Holland-Dozier-Holland.Gordy, so out of touch with his own company as to be stunned that his three sons would leave him, was close to full panic mode.Bristlingabout HDH s departure and the flop of Forever Came Today, hefished for a quick Supremes song to put out as soon as possible.TheHDH shelves were so depleted that he had the girls cover of Whatthe World Needs Now Is Love from Reflections readied as a single, butthought the better of it and instead went to Motown s newest writing-producing team Nick Ashford and Valerie Simpson, a young blackduo who had met in a Harlem church choir, sang briefly as an act, thenwrote for, among others, Ray Charles, Aretha Franklin, and the Shirellesbefore being signed by Gordy.With the first of their five Top Ten Mar-vin Gaye Tammi Terrell hits, Ain t No Mountain High Enough, justhitting the charts, they were handed the world s top female act.The hip young team s stock in trade was funky, soulful wailing, butGordy told them he wanted a song with an HDH feel. The result was Some Things You Never Get Used To, which came out as strainedbig-band pop with an even more quirky intro of castanets chatteringvery much like the intro of the surf-rock Wipe Out and HDH-stylelyrics about love that is never found.On the upside, it had a wonder-fully wild James Jamerson bass line.But what it didn t have was the sig-nature HDH kick to the solar plexus.And its release on May 21, with You ve Been So Wonderful to Me on the flip, was an instant misfire.If Gordy felt personally tarred by Forever Came Today, SomeThings was even worse such a titanic failure that, after just threeweeks on the chart and a late-July peak at No.30, a good many peoplenever heard it or knew it had ever existed.For that, at least, he couldbe thankful.But what now? The Supremes had flourished as a two-headedmonster the rock group hit-makers and the regal, show-tune-crooning night club act.For the time being, at least, their club andhotel gigs were not imperiled by a couple of lackluster singles, norwere their whitebread TV gigs the latest being a January 1968 shoton the campy Tarzan, playing, of all things, three nuns and singing Michael Row the Boat Ashore and The Lord Helps Those Who 0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:06 AM Page 320320 THE SUPREMESHelp Themselves. (The episode was the most-watched of the seasonfor the popular series another mainstream notch for Gordy, whothrew his weight around on the set, barking orders to the crew andactors [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
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.Gordy would claim that, for the next Supremes single, [w]e wereforced to go back to the can, coming up with the HDH ForeverCame Today, which he said had been cut a year before. Yet on the2000 box-set The Supremes, Harry Weinger lists the session dates forthe song as December 20, 1967, and January 1, 1968.That would indi-cate HDH were on the job, not on strike.As well, Eddie Holland callsthe tune one of my favorites, which seems to suggest that Gordywho later used the strike against HDH in years of legal warfare mayhave overstated just how crippling their work stoppage was.Even so, Forever Came Today is something of a riddle.Sessionsheets for the song seem not to have been kept.Weinger specified nostudio locale for it, though it has that non-Detroit, L.A. feel as wellas a very strange coronet-piccolo intro that sounds like a riff from Wag-ner s Bridal Chorus. Stranger still, perhaps, is that the lyrics are prob-ably the most optimistic love song Eddie Holland ever penned, sans theusual emotional tug of war When you walked into my life / Youmade my lonely life a paradise, Diana joyfully trilled.Whatever its origins, it is clear that the backing vocalists were notWilson and Birdsong but the Andantes.That trio had been called in tospruce up Flo s flat background line on In and Out of Love, but from Forever on, Wilson and Birdsong were Supremes merely for appear-ance s sake.The reason was simple, and cold: Gordy was now activelytrying to bring forth a record that would mark Diana s solo breakout,and of course no other Supremes members could be in its grooves.Thebeauty of it for Gordy was that even on tracks he determined to be 0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:06 AM Page 318318 THE SUPREMESmore appropriately Supremes singles which was the case with all sin-gles chosen for the next year no one would know the difference any-way, as the Andantes were that good.Gordy had a more tactful way of putting it that Mary and Cindy,by remarkable coincidence, always seemed to be unavailable or, morepreposterously, out of town when Supremes sessions went down.(Amazingly, Ross was always available.) However, never truer than nowwas Shelly Berger s observation that the Supremes were for all practicalpurposes Diana Ross and two who-cares backup vocalists.The bummer was that Forever Came Today came and went with-out a ripple after it was released on February 29 with an aptly titledB-side, Time Changes Things. The Motown promotion machineplied its trade, but neither that effort nor even the tune s debut by theSupremes on the March 24 episode of The Ed Sullivan Show couldmove it higher than No.28 on the pop charts and 17 on the R&B.But while the Supremes crashing chart fortunes could have been aproblem for HDH as well, they decided to put everything on the linewith Gordy.By no coincidence, they extended their own feelers toother record companies, one of which, Capitol, assured them theycould run their own subsidy label if they jumped ship.In late spring,Eddie Holland strode into Gordy s office with an ultimatum.His previ-ous demands for a cut of publishing royalties and stock equity havingbeen rebuffed, his new and last demand was for a $100,000 interest-free loan for the trio so that they could incorporate the HDH brandinto a business entity, with private office space and the freedom tobring in their own acts while still working at Motown; if they didn t getthe money and the autonomy, Holland said, they were gone.The terms of the ultimatum sounded nothing but dangerous toGordy.He could imagine his authority being whittled away, and thathe d be in effect financing an independent label under his own roofthat would someday become a competitor.Trying to put them off with-out saying no, he launched into the Berry rap, reminding them againthat he had bankrolled their rise to fame, with the hundreds of thou-sands of dollars in advances and the millions in writers royalties thathe d invested in them.(Pulling out a file, he put the exact figure at$2,235,155.) They were set for life, many times over.And all that stoodbetween them now was a measly hundred grand?After listening to the twenty-minute rap, Eddie stood up. So Iguess that s a no, then? he said drily.Weeks later, HDH were gone, even though they all had contractsthrough the end of the decade with Motown.Although Gordy contin- 0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:06 AM Page 319FOREVER CAME TODAY 319ued to hope they would come to their senses and get to work, newssoon broke that Capitol had announced the formation of InvictusRecords, to be operated in Detroit with full autonomy by Holland-Dozier-Holland.Gordy, so out of touch with his own company as to be stunned that his three sons would leave him, was close to full panic mode.Bristlingabout HDH s departure and the flop of Forever Came Today, hefished for a quick Supremes song to put out as soon as possible.TheHDH shelves were so depleted that he had the girls cover of Whatthe World Needs Now Is Love from Reflections readied as a single, butthought the better of it and instead went to Motown s newest writing-producing team Nick Ashford and Valerie Simpson, a young blackduo who had met in a Harlem church choir, sang briefly as an act, thenwrote for, among others, Ray Charles, Aretha Franklin, and the Shirellesbefore being signed by Gordy.With the first of their five Top Ten Mar-vin Gaye Tammi Terrell hits, Ain t No Mountain High Enough, justhitting the charts, they were handed the world s top female act.The hip young team s stock in trade was funky, soulful wailing, butGordy told them he wanted a song with an HDH feel. The result was Some Things You Never Get Used To, which came out as strainedbig-band pop with an even more quirky intro of castanets chatteringvery much like the intro of the surf-rock Wipe Out and HDH-stylelyrics about love that is never found.On the upside, it had a wonder-fully wild James Jamerson bass line.But what it didn t have was the sig-nature HDH kick to the solar plexus.And its release on May 21, with You ve Been So Wonderful to Me on the flip, was an instant misfire.If Gordy felt personally tarred by Forever Came Today, SomeThings was even worse such a titanic failure that, after just threeweeks on the chart and a late-July peak at No.30, a good many peoplenever heard it or knew it had ever existed.For that, at least, he couldbe thankful.But what now? The Supremes had flourished as a two-headedmonster the rock group hit-makers and the regal, show-tune-crooning night club act.For the time being, at least, their club andhotel gigs were not imperiled by a couple of lackluster singles, norwere their whitebread TV gigs the latest being a January 1968 shoton the campy Tarzan, playing, of all things, three nuns and singing Michael Row the Boat Ashore and The Lord Helps Those Who 0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:06 AM Page 320320 THE SUPREMESHelp Themselves. (The episode was the most-watched of the seasonfor the popular series another mainstream notch for Gordy, whothrew his weight around on the set, barking orders to the crew andactors [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]