Motown “Grammy Celebration” a Disappointment

Too Many Song Snippets by Barely Identified Artists, and Too Much Whitewashing

by MARK GABRISH CONLAN

Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Our “feature” for last night was the long-awaited and heavily hyped Motown 60: A Grammy Celebration on CBS, which turned out to be a horrendous disappointment, mainly because instead of the way the previous Grammy tributes to the Beatles, Elton John and Stevie Wonder  (who, as one of the few survivors from Motown’s glory days, was prominently featured last night) have done — both veterans and modern singers doing complete songs from the artists being paid tribute to — the show was co-hosted by Smokey Robinson and the thoroughly repulsive piece of garbage known as “Cedric the Entertainer,” whose attempts to pose as a D.J. in various historical eras of Motown music were disgusting and took the edge off the show.

It opened magnificently with Wonder leading the house band in a performance of his beautiful song “Sir Duke,” in which one of the great Black musical geniuses of the 20^th century paid tribute to another, Duke Ellington, reflecting a sense of history that got lost in the relentless “first-itis” (my term for the tendency of biographers in any medium claiming that the person, people or institution they’re biographing were the first to do a particular thing, when there are plenty of other people who did it before them) of this program. The main problem with Motown 60: A Grammy Celebration was that all too many of the songs and singers were reduced to mere snippets — among the first numbers was a weird round-robin in which some white women singers with long blonde hair were given bits of Motown songs to warble, but no one bothered to provide anything more than a quickly barked announcement of who any of these people were.

After “Sir Duke” the show introduced Smokey Robinson and Motown founder Berry Gordy, who was prominently featured throughout the program. Not surprisingly, he’s so old he seemed like an éminence noir haunting the show, and of course his presence ensured that the show wouldn’t cover some of the darker aspects of the Motown legacy and the extent to which Motown sometimes seemed like an ante-bellum plantation whose evils were onmy mitigated by the plantation owner’s being the same color as his sharecroppers. One case in point is the abruptness with which he relocated the company from Detroit to Los Angeles in the early 1970’s without any notice to the members of his staff, including the Funk Brothers, the great backing band that had played on virtually all Motown’s great early records. They suddenly found themselves out of work and reduced to scuffling in jazz clubs, playing the sorts of gigs that had more or less supported them before Berry Gordy founded his label in 1959.

Robinson and Gordy did a reproduction of the scene in which Robinson demonstrated the song “Shop Around,” Motown’s first hit, to Gordy — who released the record and then, after it was already on the market, demanded that the song be redone so he’d have a tighter master that would have a better shot at becoming a hit. Then we got Robinson doing a complete version of “Shop Around,” and after that a great film clip from the August 25, 1966 Ed Sullivan Show featuring Diana Ross and the Supremes doing “You Can’t Hurry Love.” Unfortunately, they cut away from that clip to a modern-day blonde-haired white singer doing the same song, followed by other mediocre modern would-be divas doing “Ain’t Nothin’ Like the Real Thing” (a title almost too ironic in this context!) and “Please, Mr. Postman.”

Then another singer whose name sounded like “Fontane Bell” in the quickly barked-out intro did a nice version of Mary Wells’ hit “My Guy.” Wells had one of the saddest stories of any of the Motown pioneers. After “My Guy,” the biggest hit of her career, she abruptly left Motown and signed with 20^th Century-Fox Records, which had absolutely no idea of how to record or promote a Black singer, and her career plummeted before she got deathly ill and died way too soon. The medley ended with Thelma Houston, who at least got the dignity of a proper introduction and the opportunity to perform a complete song, doing her 1977 hit “Don’t Leave Me This Way” — which I couldn’t help but joke to Charles, “A song from that brief period in which disco was actually good.”

After that John Legend was brought on to do two songs from Marvin Gaye’s classic 1970 album What’s Going On, the first time anyone at Motown had performed socially conscious material on record. Legend’s voice has seemed awfully anemic to me in other contexts but here he rose to the material, doing heartfelt versions of “Mercy Mercy Me (The Ecology)” and “What’s Going On” that were better than almost anyone else currently alive could have done. That was the good part; the bad part was the rank example of first-itis in which he introduced the songs by saying that nobody else before Gaye had combined music and activism.

With my usual snottiness, I yelled at the TV, “Does the name ‘Woody Guthrie’ mean anything to you?” — and Charles followed me by naming other Black performers who had combined music and activism, including Billie Holiday and Nina Simone. (We could also have mentioned Black jazz musicians Charles Mingus and Max Roach — in 1960 Roach and his then-wife Abbey Lincoln collaborated on the album We Insist! Freedom Now Suite, a Black concept album about civil rights and liberation a decade before What’s Going On.) Then a heavy-set older Black woman whom I presumed was Gladys Knight was pulled out of the audience to sing “I Heard It Through the Grapevine” and an old Black guy was put on stage to do the Temptations’ big hit, “My Girl.”

Of course the show didn’t mention that Marvin Gaye had had to fight with Berry Gordy to be allowed to make What’s Goin’ On and it was only the huge success of his version of “Grapevine” — he released the biggest hit of his career just when his Motown contract was expiring — that enabled Gaye to overcome Gordy’s prejudice against political material. Coming off the huge success of “Grapevine.” Gaye was able to give Gordy an ultimatum: “If you want me to stay on the label, What’s Goin’ On is my next record.” Following those two odd bits, the show did a tribute to Motown’s previous TV specials, highlighted by a weird clip of Diana Ross in drag as Charlie Chaplin in a rather lame tribute to silent-movie comedy.

Then the show moved on to Motown in the 1970’s and did something surprisingly creative — a modern woman singer named Sierra got to do a cover of Rick James’ “Super Freak” — it’s still not a great song but it takes on a quite different, and more liberating, affect when sung by a woman! Then Smokey Robinson did a medley of some of his hits that began with one of the show’s most moving moments — a chorus of “Tracks of My Tears” backed only by a softly played electric guitar — and while the rest of the medley (“Ooh, Baby, Baby,” “Tears of a Clown” and “Just to See Her”) didn’t sustain the intimate mood it was still quite capable singing from a veteran whose voice has held up remarkably well.

After that they did an expanded version of Jennifer Lopez’s God-awful tribute to Motown from the last Grammy Awards show, which was criticized at the time because the Latina Lopez was performing songs created and introduced by African-Americans. That didn’t bother me as much as the whole ultra-sexual context of Lopez’s act. Motown’s own performers had moved in tight, respectable moves worked out by veteran Black tap dancer “Honi” Coles, but they hadn’t dressed in spangled street-hooker outfits and shaken their asses at the audience the way Lopez did.

Then there was a tribute to Motown’s great songwriters — Eddie and Brian Holland, Lamont Dozier, Valerie Simpson, Mickey Stevenson — and after that the show reached higher ground with Stevie Wonder singing a great version of “Higher Ground.” (His voice has deteriorated more than Robinson’s has but he’s still a great performer with enough vocal chops to put over his classics.) He followed it with “Never Thought You’d Leave in Summer,” the song he wrote for his first wife, Syreeta Wright, who died young of cancer just as her own career was taking off. Wonder’s song to his late wife was followed by an “In Memoriam” segment that rather gave short shrift to the Funk Brothers (especially James Jamerson, whose famous hesitation bass beat basically was the Motown sound) and oddly showed Michael Jackson via a Bad-era picture with his face bleached a ghostly white (how did he do that?). “Couldn’t they have found a more Black-looking photo of him?” I asked, and Charles agreed.

After that Ne-Yo, the surprisingly good retro-soul singer (from his stage name I expected him to be a rapper, but blessedly he isn’t), did a medley of miscellaneous Motown hits including “I Need You,” the Jackson 5’s “I’ll Be There” and Lionel Richie’s “All Night Long.” (I’m still bitter that Richie won the 1984 Grammy Album of the Year award over the year’s two towering masterpieces, Bruce Springsteen’s Born in the U.S.A. and Prince’s Purple Rain.)

Then came Diana Ross’s segment, which featured songs from the two movies she made under Motown’s auspices — her botched Billie Holiday biopic Lady Sings the Blues (I can barely type out a reference to that film without wanting to barf!) and Mahogany, the latter directed by Berry Gordy himself and a lousy but delightfully campy film best remembered as a 90-minute music video for one of Ross’s greatest post-Supremes records, “Do You Know Where You’re Going To?” That’s the song she led off with last night, following it with two Billie Holiday covers — “Good Morning, Heartache” and “My Man” — that showed off both her strengths (a basically attractive voice that has survived the years remarkably well) and her weaknesses (almost no instinct for phrasing — at which Billie was, of course, the Master — and a tendency for just the sort of overwrought melodrama Billie eschewed).

Of course, on “My Man” she’s competing not only with Billie Holiday (whose first recording from 1937 features a different, less abject lyric on the verse and an altogether tougher attitude than her two remakes from 1948 and 1952) but with Fanny Brice (who first introduced this song, originally a French piece called “Mon Homme,” to American audiences in 1920), Alice Faye (who sang it surprisingly movingly in the unofficial Brice biopic Rose of Washington Square in 1939) and Barbra Streisand (who sang it in the official Brice biopic Funny Girl in 1968).

Then there was a speech by Berry Gordy in which he said, “Motown made music for all people” — which has become the company’s party-line response to the criticism they and the Grammy organization got for picking Lopez instead of an African-American artist for the Grammy Awards’ Motown tribute, but which has a great deal of truth. Berry Gordy famously turned down Aretha Franklin as “too rough” — the same words a previous Black record entrepreneur, W. C. Handy, had used in turning down Bessie Smith — meaning he didn’t think Aretha’s voice would appeal to white audiences. It eventually did, but as I wrote in my obituary for Aretha it’s certainly arguable that white listeners needed to be acclimated to Black music via the pop-soul of Motown before they could accept the unvarnished soul of Aretha in 1967.

The show went out on a high note with a finale led by Stevie Wonder doing the great song “Signed, Sealed, Delivered (I’m Yours)” — a great ending to a show that missed as many points as it made, and would have been considerably better if they’d treated both the material and the artists with more respect.