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Miracle MIR-10 (A), November 1961
b/w I’ll Call You
(Written by Mickey Stevenson)
The end of the line for Miracle Records, which went out with its tail between its legs, releasing one final dispiriting flop. The label’s closing tally stood at 12 single releases and precisely one hit – the Valadiers’ Greetings (This Is Uncle Sam), a No.89 pop smash.
Miracle didn’t go out on much of an artistic high, that’s for sure. Don McKenzie is an obscure figure, who (according to the liner notes to The Complete Motown Singles: Volume 1) came to Motown having apparently cut a 7″ for Ridge Records (the label who also had some unspecified connection to both Berry Gordy Jr (sometimes described as its owner, other times as an investor) and to Nick & the Jaguars, the first white group to release a record on a Motown label).
That Ridge single (Beauty b/w Hava Nagila) apparently isn’t available for listening anywhere, but Youtube provides a different Don McKenzie record, Heart Breaking Lover on Circus, which is obviously sung – quite badly – by the same guy. The writing credit on that song, “D. Myers”, matches the credit listed on the peerless Don’t Forget The Motor City discography for “Beauty”. Perhaps “D Myers” was Don McKenzie? If anyone can help further identifying who these people were, please leave a comment!
Anyway. The record. It’s not fantastic. Mickey Stevenson’s reputation as a first-rank Motown songwriter was continuing to grow (though Mary Wells’ majestic Strange Love had been an unexpected chart flop, he’d been responsible for many fine and successful records already), but this has to go down as one of his weaker efforts.
A light bit of mainstream turn-of-the-decade pop fluff aimed squarely at white radio, it’s an uptempo number which tries to come over as energetic and youthful, but simply ends up sounding tired. Apparently trying to pick up a bit of the R&B flavour of Eddie Holland’s recent hit Jamie, another Stevenson co-write, it falls badly flat; its tune is wholly forgettable, and unlike Holland’s hit, its singer is deeply uncharismatic.
Because Don McKenzie was never going to be a star, not on this evidence. McKenzie’s voice, a high, reedy tenor, is weak, and his delivery unfortunately bland; the resulting record sounds dated and uninspiring, tailor-made for white radio at the end of the Fifties, and it just doesn’t pass muster here. Certainly the comparison drawn in the liner notes to Gene Pitney is one that considerably flatters McKenzie; they’re scarcely in the same league. He definitely doesn’t lack commitment, and gives it his all – but sadly it’s just not enough.
The backing isn’t entirely impressive either. Layers of strings attempt to add a touch of class to proceedings, but fail to elevate the record beyond the utterly commonplace. It’s as though McKenzie’s lack of oomph somehow transmitted itself to the band; the whole thing is underpowered, a would-be dance record that never once makes you want to get up and dance.
As with both sides of Bob Kayli’s then-current Tamla single, Small Sad Sam and Tie Me Tight, the young Supremes – in the absence of any hit records of their own – are drafted in to supply backing vocals. They don’t do a particularly good job, shrill and distracting, but it’s at least enough to call to mind the likes of the Shirelles and the Chiffons, and wonder whether this song might have been better suited to a girl group in the first place.
If the anachronistic bobby soxers that this record seems to have been aimed at were still out there buying records in 1961, they didn’t fall for it; the record stiffed on release, concluding the brief and unsuccessful history of Miracle Records in fitting style.
This was Don McKenzie’s one and only single for any Motown label, although he apparently recorded enough material for an album before leaving the company. Needless to say, the LP remains in the vaults. When the new Gordy label was started up in 1962, effectively replacing the Miracle imprint, Motown neglected to invite McKenzie along for the ride. The music business seems to have lost track of him thereafter; he’s now as forgotten as the label he recorded for.
MOTOWN JUNKIES VERDICT
(I’ve had MY say, now it’s your turn. Agree? Disagree? Leave a comment, or click the thumbs at the bottom there. Dissent is encouraged!)
You’re reading Motown Junkies, an attempt to review every Motown A- and B-side ever released. Click on the “previous” and “next” buttons below to go back and forth through the catalogue, or visit the Master Index for a full list of reviews so far.
(Or maybe you’re only interested in Don McKenzie? Click for more.)
Bob Kayli “Tie Me Tight” |
Don McKenzie “I’ll Call You” |
Robb Klein said:
Don McKenzie was a DJ. Rumour has it that Berry Gordy owed him a favour, and so released a record on him. He did the same for DJ Tom Clay, and a few others. There are some other throw-a-ways that seem to have been made to please others, such as family members, friends and business associates (Al Klein and his Texas White country/novelty artists et al). Otherwise, how could anyone explain the terrible records by The Stylers, Ray Oddis, Chuk-a-Luks, break-in record, ad nausium?
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nixonradio said:
Was he?! I knew that was the case with WXYZ’s Joel Sebastian, which is obviously the only possible explanation for Angel in Blue, but McKenzie had at least two other singles out, and he does at least seem to be more of a “proper” singer (albeit not a terribly good one) rather than an embarrassing dilettante hobbyist; I couldn’t find any information about McKenzie’s radio career anywhere on the web (WXYZ had an Ed McKenzie at the same time Sebastian was there), what was his situation?
I totally disagree about the Tom Clay single, as you know from our previous discussions ( 🙂 ) – I think that was a subtly different situation, in that while it was important for post-relocation Motown to curry favour with LA jocks like Clay, by all accounts “What The World Needs Now Is Love” was self-financed and already picking up buzz before Gordy bought the rights to it. (It was also a mega-selling Top Ten hit, vindicating Gordy taking a commercial punt on it.)
Al Klein and Mel-O-Dy is again a bit different in my eyes – I’ve read two different accounts, one with Klein making the first move and one with Gordy approaching Klein, but either way I thought it was a business decision – one wanted to run a Dallas-based country label, one wanted to break into the country market to pick up currently untapped white sales, so ditching the failed soul and turning Mel-O-Dy into a white-oriented “country and comedy” imprint made sense (a failure in retrospect perhaps, but the reasoning was sound enough, and the later Rare Earth and Melodyland/Hitsville labels – from around or closer to your time at Motown IIRC? – to me stand as proof that Gordy never gave up chasing white audiences outside his core R&B/pop crossover markets). Also, Mel-O-Dy released a lot of product over its three years in Dallas; doing a contact a favour and putting out a vanity single is one thing, but fifteen records?
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Mickey The Twistin' Playboy said:
There was an Ed McKenzie who was a DJ in Detroit. Could you be mixing him up with Don?
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Keith Hughes said:
This was one of our Volume 1 “oopses”. The version on the CD is the promo (white label) version. A commercial version came to light after the CD was released, which contains an entirely different take, with lyric variations. Sadly, it would be misleading to say the cv is in any signficant way an improvement on the promo!
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nixonradio said:
Wow. I never thought to check around for information on variant versions, since the song is so naff, but on closer inspection the commercial version appears, if anything, to be even less good than the version on the CD set:
YouTube link
Thanks for the information (and frankness!)
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John Lester said:
Ooo – so harsh!
I love this song and both versions of it too. I’ve even been known to play the 2 versions successively….and enjoy it! HA-HA
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144man said:
It’s very easy to be over-critical. Remember that this record came out nearly 50 years ago, and if you’d heard it for the first time then, you might have treated it more sympathetically, not being influenced by the changes in musical styles that were yet to happen.
I bought the record in 1971, and found it likeably catchy. I agree with you, however, that the b-side is quite awful.
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nixonradio said:
It is easy to be over-critical – but it’s also lots of fun, a much-needed pressure valve, and sometimes very justified…! If people disagree with anything I’ve written, everyone is free to leave comments disagreeing very vehemently (dissent is encouraged!), or alternatively there’s now the feature whereby people can click the little “thumbs down” icon at the bottom of the review to anonymously register their disapproval. Nobody’s really used it yet, though.
As for this sounding better in 1961… maybe, but I wasn’t even born until almost twenty years later, and can’t say for sure. More to the point, I’m not prepared to make allowances for that sort of thing – if something’s patently a great song but hampered by poor recording technology, for instance, I’ll say so, but if it just doesn’t hold up to modern listening then I’ll say so too.
I love Motown because the label was responsible for so many great, great records – but I have a tendency to gush wildly about something I love, and the opposite side of that coin is being pretty scathing about records I feel don’t come up to scratch. Or to put it another way, my praise for a great record is diminshed if I’m not correspondingly mean about a bad one.
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144man said:
My point is that the song is very much in line with what was going on at the time, being stylistically similar to Bobby Vee’s “Rubber Ball”. If you don’t like that, you won’t like “Heart”.
Incidentally, I have a commercial copy of the single which seems to be the same version as on TCMS1. Where are the differences most noticeable?
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nixonradio said:
Horses for courses, I guess – I think it’s very poor indeed, and I suppose some of that is to do with “what was going on at the time” in terms of early-Sixties US white radio, which I freely admit I’m neither a particular fan nor an expert. But then, a lot of the fun of focussing on one label like this, release-by-release, means I get to hear (and write about) lots of different genres, rather than if I’d just set out to do a site about early-Sixties R&B records.
The commercial version can be heard (for comparison to the TCMS version) via this YouTube video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XJJvrFeg2C4
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Keith Hughes said:
It’s complicated. Evidently some copies of the commercial pressing have the same version as the promo – the YouTube example is one of them. But other cv’s have a different version.
It’s easy to spot the diiference between the two versions. On the promo at 0:15, Don sings “I would like to tell HIM”, but on the (later pressing?) cv it’s “I would like to tell THEM” – and the him/them difference keeps up for a few more lines. Plus there’s much more reverb on the cv.
The alternate version is available on iTunes, apparently from a CD called “Pop, Bop & Doo-Wop Volume 9”.
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Robb Klein said:
Sorry, I didn’t mean to say that ALL Al Klein’s product was the result of favours. Nor did I mean to imply that Gordy owed Klein a favour, and wasn’t interested in a business relationship with him. On the contrary. I meant that Gordy wanted to get in on the C&W market, and so, made a business agreement with Klein (who I believe, had previously been just Motown’s sales agent in Texas, and part of the South and South Central US). Klein would run Motown’s C&W production. I meant that Gordy and Motown had to accept some “throwaways” (which may have come from favours owed by Klein, along with the marketable C&W (Dorsey Burnette, Bruce Chanel, etc.) that he desired.
Sorry, I may have confused Joel Sebastian with Don McKenzie regarding the DJ favour story.
The Tom Clay favour occurred in 1959. I was referring to Berry writing a song for him that was released on Chart Records. I don’t think, in this case that he thought Clay couldn’t get much sales with it. As to the other case, I assume that he thought Tom Clay’s Mowest recordings were marketable.
“Whose Heart” sounded okay. It sounded a LOT better than either Joel Sebastian cut. I’m not sure that it was as marketable as “Rubber Ball” by Bobby Vee.
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nixonradio said:
Well, now it’s my turn to be sorry: for my part, I never realised the 1959 “Tom Clay and the Rayber Voices” single was the same Tom Clay of LA who did “What The World Needs Now” in the Seventies, which is what I thought you were talking about this whole time. I really need to brush up on my Motown prehistory!
Al Klein did have a couple of Motown producer credits to his name before taking over Mel-o-dy, but yeah, his “day job” was apaprently as a sales guy in Texas.
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Jeff Holland said:
I happened upon this single while I was sampling songs from the Complete Motown Singles, Volume 1. Although cheesy, I actually find this song to be a guilty pleasure and undeserving of the scorn heaped upon it.
This is a great web site–thanks for putting it together!
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The Nixon Administration said:
Thanks Jeff!
Going by yours and the other comments above, this record seems to be one of those occasions where my opinion is out of step with everyone else’s, which I wasn’t really expecting (but then I never am, I suppose!)
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MotownFan1962 said:
I agree this is a fun record. McKenzie is actually a good vocalist. He kinda sounds like some weird combination of Del Shannon and Peter Noone (Herman of Herman’s Hermits). The only bad thing I can say is that The Supremes backing vocals are barely intelligible at some points. I like to be able to know what the background singers are saying.
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Kathy Jordan said:
My dad played bass with the Don McKenzie Trio back in the 60s. I grew up with this record. Listening to it today, I remember Don and his Scottish accent. He could sure play the piano. I remember being at a jam session at his house when I was about 10. Lots of music , singing and laughter. The trio played the Roostertail, Detroit Auto Show, Pier ? In Detroit. And probably more that I don’t remember . This really tugged on some memories. My dad is gone now so I have to rely on my own memories and I was so young at the time.
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Robb Klein said:
Thanks for posting here, Kathy. It’s nice to hear from people who were involved with the artists who made the music. We know that Don McKenzie recorded for Berry Gordy before Tamla Records was started. The 2 songs were released on Ridge Records near the end of 1958. The only other record known on Ridge was by The Biscaynes (Nick and The Jaguars on Tamla). Gordy produced both. and both were published by Berry’ Jobete Music.
Did your father play on those cuts that appeared on Ridge Records? Do you know if Berry Gordy owned that label, or if there was another owner? If your father got a copy of the record, do you have access to it? None of us has ever even seen a scan of its label, let alone the record. For what other label did Don and his trio record?
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mike cassidy said:
Just been listening in Scotland to this track on a “roots of northern soul” compilation.
Fascinating to learn he was actually Scottish. Can I risk the wrath of those who know the minutest detail of all this by wondering if he is the only Scot with a direct link to Motown – or at least its early days.
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Robb Klein said:
I guess Motown’s first professional sound engineer, Mike McLean, is Irish, then, eh?
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Janet LaCroix said:
Hi! I worked fir Don in 1973 when he had his own lounge in Dearborn. I’ve been trying to find out what happened to him.
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Janet Ascione LaCroix said:
I worked for Don McKenzie in 1973 when he owned his own lounge in Westland, Michigan. His trio performed at night. I have been trying to find out what happened to him. Does anyone know?
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Penny Zago said:
I’m trying to find out about Don also. He was a dear friend of my husband and meI. Such great memories! The last time we heard from him was around 2009 or ’10. One of his sons had died. There is another son who was living in California (he had a band but I think he had a day job, too). We’ve wondered if Don and his wife Anne moved to California. As well as his music, Don was an wonderful artist and an excellent golfer (who reminded everyone the Scottish rules!). He is definitely a Scot but I don’t know when he left Scotland. His didn’t have much of a brogue but it was beautifully there when he sang Scottish songs.
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scott mckenzie said:
penny / bless you for your kind words / Don McKenzie is my father and I have great memories of his years as a musician in the Detroit area / his music was loved by many / dad is having some serious health issues right now and I hope to hear from you soon / my e-mail is williamthepleaser@hotmail.com / scott
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Janet LaCroix said:
I have great respect for your father and mother.
I worked at The Carriage House Lounge in Westland in 1973 and loved to hear your dad play the piano and sing at night. He was a great boss. He greatly inspired my own musical career that has lasted many years. A real one of a kind talent, the best I ever heard. I marred a piano player/entertainer just like him!! I would have loved for them to meet.
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scott mckenzie said:
penny / bless you for your kind words for Don McKenzie / he is my father and I have great memories of his years as a musician in the Detroit area / his music was loved by many / dad is having health problems right now and it would be great to hear from you soon / e-mail is williamthepleaser@hotmail.com / his loving son Scott
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mike cassidy said:
He wasn’t lucky enough to be born a Celt!
http://sitemaker.umich.edu/livingmusic/search_interviews&groupSize=1&recordID=000000000000000000000000000000000000000003161453&mode=single&sortDirection0=Ascending&column0=informantlastname&sortColumn0=informantlastname&comparisonType0=contains+%28text+only%29&value0=mclean#interview
And if Don Mckenzie did some radio djing, his Scottish accent must have sounded ‘different’ on the Detroit airwaves of the time!
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treborij said:
That was a really interesting read; thanks for posting this. Love those “early days of Motown” stories that get posted here
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Robb Klein said:
I knew Mike was born in Detroit, and his grandfather was born and raised in Ontario (of Scottish ancestry). I just thought Don McKenzie was raised in Michigan (even if he was born in Scotland). His singing voice gave away not the slightest trace of a Scots brogue. In any case, as was explained above, Don McKenzie was never a DJ. ED McKenzie was. If Don was born in Scotland, he must have immigrated to USA before the accent gets “frozen (age 12-14). Allen Young (of “Mister Ed” fame, was born and partly raised in Scotland, but has no trace of a Scots brogue in his normal speech. Yet, when he plays a Scotsman in a film or play he can put on a perfectly natural Scots brogue as thick as you can imagine (a la Robby Coltrane). One can speak an almost unlimited number of totally unrelated languages as a native, completely accent free, as long as he or she learned to speak that language before the accent freezing period. I have cousins born and raised in Ruthenia (the crossroads of Eastern Europe), who can speak 9 languages fluently as a native, because the town in which they were raised had speakers of nine different languages residing in it (Hungarian(Standard and Transylvanian), German, Yiddish, Polish (Galizianer), Ukranian, Romanian(Transylvanian), Czech, Slovak (Ruthenian), and Russian). And they could speak Hebrew, with perfect Ashkanazy accent, to boot.
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Robb Klein said:
Upon listening again to both of Don’s Miracle cuts, plus 8 of his non-Motown recordings, I don’t hear even the slightest trace of a Scots accent. All I hear is a southeast Michigan accent.
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mike cassidy said:
Sorry that link went all over the place. It was a link to an interview with Mike McLean in which he said he was born in Detroit in 1940.
Found a publicity photo for The Don McKenzie Trio 1961.
http://outlet.historicimages.com/products/dfpy49975
I wonder if this is the man and the trio mentioned by Kathy Jordan above.
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Penny Zago said:
After reading the post above, I dug out Don’s album. It was produced Al Seput with Lorial Records. At the time, Don’s trio with Paul Ponto and Jerry Parker were playing at the 52nd Show Bar in Detroit. From the cover: “Don was born in Scotland and studied at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music for 10 years. He went to Canada in 1957 where he formed his first trio, and toured there for two years. In 1959 Don came to Detroit…”
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Bill Stanek said:
I just came across an LP by Don McKenzie – The Tender Trap Presents Don McKenzie: The Other Side of the Door. Fascinating reading about him in the posts above. Does anyone know anything about the history of this recording? Good musicians on it, enjoyable. Marty Kallao on Bass guitar and Jim Grabowski on drums.
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Ken said:
Never heard of singer or song before. But – after reading the article and responses – was curious enough to give it a YouTube listen. I thought it was fairly good. Granted, the instrumental accompaniment was on the tinny side and the Supremes performed with that grating “eek-a-mouse” shrillness that marked a lot of their very early work. But the song itself was strong – definitely would have made a good Bobby Vee record in ’61.
As for Don McKenzie, I liked his voice – strong, true and bright. Think – with the right breaks – he could have easily made it as a pop idol in the early 60’s milieu.
Really interesting to read other posters’ personal memories of the man. Sounds like he was a great guy.
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