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Pop Rock Nation

Tag: Motown

  • Harvey Fuqua 1929-2010, Last of the Moonglows

    I’d never heard of Harvey Fuqua when I picked up that Moonglows 45 from the Goodwill store where I worked when I was in college. I’d never even heard of The Moonglows really, although, by then, they’d already been inducted into the Rock N Roll Hall of Fame. The reason I bought the single: the label, of course. It was on Chess Records. It looked like it was in good, playable shape, and even if it wasn’t, it was only going to cost me the price of a soda. If nothing else, with that elegant blue and silver label and its stately chess piece logo, it would look cool hanging on a wall, or from the ceiling of my dorm room. Of course, that 45 never had a chance to become such an ornament. I fell too hard in love with both sides of it. I didn’t know which was the “plug” side and which was the “b”. Frankly, I still don’t. They’re both just that great. On one side was “Over and Over Again”, an almost comical recounting of one man’s woeful inability to learn from his romantic miscalculations, delivered with full-throated devotion by Bobby Lester, Harvey’s singing partner since their high school days; on the other side was the quirky love-at-first-sight doo-wop testimonial “I Knew From the Start”.

    “Over and Over Again”

    “I Knew From the Start”

    As it turns out, neither side was much of a hit, although they were both featured in a 1956 movie put together by a rising-star DJ named Alan Freed who had been the Moonglows’ manager and earliest champion, a movie called Rock, Rock, Rock, starring Tuesday Weld which also featured performances by The Flamingoes, Chuck Berry, and Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers. I’d never heard of it either. But when the soundtrack album was re-mastered and reissued on CD a couple of years ago in conjunction with the 50th Anniversary of rock ‘n’ roll’s ascendance, I was very quick to snatch up a copy. Of course, I didn’t wait that long to expand my Moonglows collection. Shortly after I picked up that 45, I was eager to hear more of the group, and special-ordered a 2-CD anthology of the group that had, at the time, just been released via MCA.

    It was from that collection that I learned who Harvey Fuqua was, and learned not just the pivotal role the Moonglows played in bridging the gaps between rock ‘n’ roll, the dramatic vocal pop of their forebears the Ink Spots (Harvey’s Uncle Charlie was a member), and their contemporaries The Platters, and what would soon be called soul music (Marvin Gaye’s first recorded lead vocal was on a Moonglows single); but also the role Fuqua would play in the formative success of the Motown label as a songwriter, producer and A&R man working with the Spinners and Shorty Long (both of whom migrated with Fuqua to Motown after recording for Fuqua’s own Harvey and Tri-Phi labels), along with Marvin Gaye and Tami Terrell on songs like “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough”. (He also married Berry Gordy’s sister.) Even after leaving Motown in the early 70s, Fuqua went on to some of his greatest successes, producing one of the most iconic singles of the disco era in the form of Sylvester’s “(You Make Me Feel) Mighty Real”; and in 1982, closing a 25-year career circle by collaborating with Marvin Gaye on his final album Midnight Love. Few people know his name, but there’s no question that Harvey Fuqua had a direct hand in some of the most enduring music of the last 60 years. He was the last remaining Moonglow when he passed away on July 6, 2010, just a couple weeks shy of his 81st birthday.

    Here’s the song that put The Moonglows on the map, the Fuqua-penned 1954 hit “Sincerely” (which, yes, appeared in Goodfellas – what an awesome soundtrack that is!).

  • The New Music Files 12/9/08: Common, Maroon 5 & More

    Common Universal Mind Control
    The rapper formerly known as Common Sense is used to being one of the most critically acclaimed emcees by the music press. That apparently has stopped with Universal Mind Control. The Chicago wordsmith’s eighth album has been panned by just about every publication I’ve laid my eyes on. Common has forgone his usual soulful, thoughtful raps for a more danceable, electronic style-apparently inspired by an experience at a club in Europe where he apparently got upset because none of his songs were being played. Hey, man…not all good music is danceable. The jury’s out on this, but I’m prepared to be disappointed.

    Maroon 5 Call & Response: The Remix Album
    The remix album is a phenomenon that’s kinda fallen by the wayside in recent years, and probably with good reason-anyone remember Limp Bizkit’s attempt at one? At any rate, Maroon 5’s album contains reworkings by the likes of DJ Premier, Jazzy Jeff and ?uestlove of The Roots, as well as some more club-conscious remixes by some of today’s hottest electronic producers. I’d trust Adam Levine and the boys to make my body rock a little more than Common does. Just sayin’.

    Brandy Human
    It’s Moesha, y’all!! The former teen idol is now pushing 30, and has a great deal of life experience behind her. She suffered the indignity of a lie she told the public about getting married blowing up in her face, and she was involved in a car accident a couple years back that killed a woman. So, we’re looking at a new, thoughtful Brandy. So if you’re one of those folks who was bopping to The Boy is Mine back in the day, you can welcome your girl home.

    Musiq Soulchild OnMyRadio
    I like Musiq Soulchild, despite the fact that he’s essentially made the exact same album four times in a row. I’m not expecting #5 to be any different, so I’m on the fence about getting this. The current single, “Ifyouleave” (cut it out already with the stupid song titles), features Mary J. Blige and is a pleasant enough song. Just not sure if it’s good enough to make me part with my eleven dollars.

    Avant     Avant
    The only thing notable about Avant is that he sounds like R. Kelly. Well, there’s also the fact that people seem to buy his records for some odd reason. This is, if I’m not mistaken, his fifth album. And apparently, there’s a duet with R. Kelly on it! Ha! I get it!

    As you can tell, this Tuesday is a heavily R&B and hip hop-centric release date, so it’s up to Thrice to represent for all the rock folks out there. Live at the House of Blues is a 3-CD set which should appeal to diehard fans of the band (whoever they are). In the “Where Are They Now?” department, the first solo effort from Ken Block, the lead singer of rootsy-rock band Sister Hazel, is hitting stores today as well.In the re-issue department, a couple of classic albums have been expanded and re-released: Jimi Hendrix‘s Electric Ladyland and Pavement‘s alt-rock classic Brighten the Corners. Finally, Motown #1s is a multi-CD box set that collects every single #1 record in the U.S. or the U.K. from the legendary label. So you not only get the best of The Supremes, Tempts and Tops, but you get Seventies Classics from Stevie and Marvin, some 80s flavor from DeBarge and Lionel Richie, and a little bit of Nineties courtesy of Boyz II Men. If you’ve got the scratch and a jones to hear these classic tunes (or know someone who does), this would make a very nice stocking stuffer!

    A full list of this week’s releases can be found here.

  • Just Ask the Lonely: Why I Love Levi Stubbs

    I’ve had a crush on Levi Stubbs for just about as long as I can remember. Of course, when I first developed my crush, I was far too young to realize it was a crush. And well, at 6 or 7 or 8 years old, the idea that I might have a crush on anyone other than Mrs. Simon was so crushingly impossible that it would have been absurd to even consider it. But there it was, and there it grew. And there it still is, even though the man himself is now gone. Because there’s nothing more alive sounding, nothing more urgent, nothing as feral, nothing as sexy, nothing as primal and, quite frankly, necessary as the sound of Levi Stubbs shouting out to “reach on out for me!”

    My parents generally listened to oldies stations when I was growing up, and while I grew to love the music of the 50s and 60s while working in a pizza kitchen my senior year in high school, there was nothing I loved less when I was little than to suffer through a car-ride listening to moldies about cars and girls and surfing. But “Reach Out… I’ll Be There” was one of the songs that cut through my crap. Sure, it probably had something to do with the supernaturally gorgeous music of the song, the haunted fairytale woodwinds, and a bass-line that sounded as much like distant tribal drums – it was like something out of the Arabian Nights.

    But more than anything it was that voice. He was telling me to reach out and he’d be there, but by the sound of it, he needed me more. It was as if he’d just been hit by a car, and using every last ounce of life and spirit left in him wanted – needed, more than anything in the world, to reassure me that he would always be a rock in whatever storm might come my way. There have been plenty of storms for me to weather in the 30 years since I first heard his pledge: he’s never failed me yet.

    The irony is that a central part of that pledge – the way his voice came across to me on the radio – was, in fact, a calculated emotional manipulation. Song after song, the songwriting-producing team of Holland-Dozier-Holland strategically miscast Stubbs in songs that took him to upper limits of his singing range and then dared him not to jump off. If it often sounds like Stubbs was in pain singing some of these songs, he may very well have been. If it sounds urgent, it’s because so damn many of those notes were Hail Mary gambles for Stubbs. If it sounds like shouting, that’s because – y’know – it is.  Every time he opened his mouth on these songs, he was taking a risk.  And maybe the risk was just losing his voice, or missing a note, but he made it sound like he was risking his life to get this song out.

    Later on, of course, I would begin to connect the sound of Levi Stubbs with the image of the man, which, predictably, only heightened my crush. Stubbs had none of the diabolical ladies-man smoothness of guys like Smokey and Marvin. Barrel-chested, square-jawed and husky with a no-nonsense mustache, he physically resembled the men that my dad hung out with in the tavern after work in nearly every respect (race, of course, being the most obvious difference). He may have been a singer, but you get a sense that Stubbs considered himself a family man breadwinner more than a pop star.

    His biography, including his nearly 50-year marriage to wife Clineice (how many pop stars of Stubbs’ stature can claim as much?) also seems to speak to a pragmatic, working-man respect for commitment. Where the Temptations became something of a flagship corporate entity for Motown, with a line-up that changed (and continues to change) like the cast of a long-running TV drama series, the Four Tops, from the day they got together in 1954, remained the very same Four Tops for more than four decades, until the late 90s when the successive deaths of Lawrence Payton and Obie Benson, not to mention Stubbs’ own gradually debilitating struggles with cancer and stroke, did the Tops part.

    Stubbs’ commitment to the songs he sang was no less intense, loving, or lasting. From the urgent pleas of “Reach Out – I’ll Be There” to the way he baldly confounds the restraints of a time signature when he shouts out to “Bernadette” at the climactic break of that song. There may be no happier sound in the world than the sound of Levi Stubbs singing “sugar pie, honey bunch, you know that I love you”, and there’s almost certainly nothing more emotionally devastating as when, in the song “Ask the Lonely”, he urges us – “Ask me!” – winding the “ask” around a half dozen quickly dispatched notes, but landing on a single, decisive, howl for the “me”.

    There may be something self-pitying about the moment, but then there’s also something grand, operatic, and selfless about it. When I think of the years after the American Motors plant my dad worked at shut down, and, as a teenager, watching as he was slowly stripped of every shred of his dignity – the early morning repossessions, the foreclosure of the family home, the months spent squatting in a neighbor’s basement or living in a motel while trying to support of family of five kids, nothing feels like a more fitting soundtrack than the voice of Levi Stubbs on “Ask the Lonely”.

    My dad, of course, could never have said out loud what he must have been feeling in those awful years without coming across as, well, sort of a pussy. But there were, and are now, probably a lot of guys like my Dad who have felt or are feeling the same things and can’t say so. Ask the folks in Janesville, Wisconsin who are set to lose their jobs two days before Christmas this year. In this context, “Ask the Lonely” sounds like a three-minute opera for the stoic working class. And Stubbs’ performance of the song – and virtually every song he sang – was audacious in its emotional abandon, its sense that some feelings are too strong and too important to let vulgar pride or fragile dignity get in the way of voicing them.

    As sad as I am to hear of Levi Stubbs’ death, I also know that as long as I’ve got ears to hear, he’ll be there. When my life is filled with much confusion until happiness is just an illusion and my world around is crumblin’ down, he’ll be there. This is more than a crush, really, isn’t it?