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Tamla T 54056 (B), February 1962
B-side of Your Baby’s Back
(Written by Johnny Dawson)
The first Motown appearance (and last for a few years) for the Downbeats, the male vocal group who would later morph into mid-Sixties Motown hitmakers the Elgins (nothing to do with the Temptations, who were also confusingly once called “the Elgins”, but had to change their name because there was another group already called “the Elgins”, who in turn had nothing at all to do with the Downbeats who later became known as “the Elgins”… is anyone following this?) featured a song by label boss Berry Gordy Jr., on the A-side, Your Baby’s Back, but this B-side was given over to a number written by the group’s lead singer Johnny Dawson.
Refreshingly, while the A-side had been a sparse, plaintive, lugubrious doo-wop ballad, the B-side is a jaunty, uptempo rock-‘n’-roll flavoured R&B romp, and infinitely more fun.
Opening with a slam of drums and an unexpected minor-key piano hammering away, and slathered in horns and guitars, it sounds hot and frothy and energetic, and (more importantly) really good. Dawson seems to be more in his element, his baritone voice delivering a strong performance with an audible smile on his face that can’t help but get you smiling along with him. He’s certainly more comfortable here than on the A-side; describing his performance, the liner notes to The Complete Motown Singles: Volume 2 explicitly name-check Sam Cooke, and they’re not wrong.
Despite the subject matter apparently being the aftermath of a messy break-up, the lyrics are giddy-with-love, head-over-heels stuff, matching perfectly with the bouncy, uninhibited music; Dawson’s narrator spends the entire song declaring to the object of his affections that he doesn’t want various kinds of material wealth, he just wants her to come back to him. (The title is never mentioned or explained; the gently self-mocking subtext is that our hero knows he’s unlikely to get his wish, but is asking anyway.)
Just about the most out-and-out enjoyable number out of the eight sides Motown had released in 1962 so far, my gut feeling is that this would have made a far better single than Your Baby’s Back, perhaps leading to more Downbeats singles in the three-year interval between this record and the Elgins’ Darling Baby in December of 1965. Instead, the single flopped, and the Downbeats went to being the forgotten men of Motown.
THE GRACENOTE CD DATABASE: A RANT
For some reason, this song has been incorrectly tagged as having the title “Request Of A Fool (a.k.a. I Wanna Know Why)” in the Gracenote CD database – the thing which names tracks when you use a media player to rip a CD to mp3 – meaning the same erroneous title has spread to last.fm and all across the Internet. This is a mistake, made by the first user to submit the data to the database and never corrected. The song isn’t called “I Wanna Know Why”, as far as I can tell; the lyrics don’t feature its real title, but it doesn’t feature those words either (in the first verse he says he “wants a note” from his departed girl saying she’s coming home, and in the second chorus he does indeed ask why she left a message saying she was leaving, but that’s as close as it comes). There’s nothing at all in the liner notes to The Complete Motown Singles: Volume 2 to suggest this was an alternate or working title, but even if it was, that’s clearly as far as it went, and no more accurate than (for instance) calling the Supremes’ Love Is Here And Now You’re Gone “a.k.a. Number One”; it’s a mistake.
The Gracenote database is full of similar tagging mistakes with regard to The Complete Motown Singles and other Motown CDs (for instance, on this same volume, the Pirates’ Mind Over Matter is mistakenly credited to British rockers Johnny Kidd & the Pirates, but this is flat-out wrong, an error made by someone trying to be clever and getting muddled; the Motown “Pirates” were actually none other than the Temptations, recording under a pseudonym.)
I wish people would bear this sort of thing in mind when citing the fact that certain duets appear to be credited to “Marvin Gaye and Valerie Simpson” as conclusive proof of conspiracy theories (of which more later; much, much later)… Basically, don’t believe what your computer tells you; automatically-recovered tag information is no more “official” than if you’d read it on Wikipedia, and much less likely to be accurate. It’s certainly not the word of God, as some people seem to believe.
We now return you to your scheduled programming.
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 the Elgins? Click for more.)
The Downbeats “Your Baby’s Back” |
Singin’ Sammy Ward “Big Joe Moe” |
Mary Magaldo said:
One wonders what Quality Control was thinking back then!
Clearly Request of a Fool was the better side! I love this record! By 1962 music was moving in a different direction and QC should have known this. Shame on them for a missed opportunity! They had a real rocker and blew it!
Mary Magaldo
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nixonradio said:
I know what you mean. This is actually one of my favourite tracks of 1962; I think it’s that barrelling, unexpected-chord opening that wins me over every time.
It’s hard to criticise QC too much, as what they did pass for release often resulted in massive hits (even when they initially sat on them for years – cf Jimmy Mack, I Heard It Through The Grapevine et seq), but the wealth of truly great material on the Cellarful series, and the quality of some of the best B-sides and cancelled singles, sometimes makes me wonder if they weren’t just hitting themselves in the face with shovels all day or something.
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Steve Robbins said:
I think SHE DON’T LOVE YOU by Mary Wells was a major missed opportunity by not putting it on a single.
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Kevin Moore said:
REQUEST: Can you give us a quick overview of this Cellarful series?
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The Nixon Administration said:
There are 4 volumes, all containing previously unreleased material from the Motown vaults. The first two are exceptional, the third maybe slightly less so but still eye opening; the fourth is more hit and miss but the liner notes are more comprehensive than the other volumes and there are still enough gems to make all four essential purchases for Motown junkies!
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Kevin Moore said:
Thanks – I’ve already ordered the first one. Are you planning on covering it in the way you’re covering TCMS? Also, I just got the 14-CD HDH post-Motown collection – I won’t really listen til I’ve finished going through all your reviews here, but I’m a bit surprised at how few of the songs are actually written by HDH. Any thoughts on that one?
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The Nixon Administration said:
Ah, but they are! Edith Wayne is a pseudonym for the trio, adopted because they were officially on gardening leave from Motown while the court case was being settled.
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Kevin Moore said:
>Edith Wayne is a pseudonym for the trio
!! What about “R. Dunbar” – he’s the composer or co-composer on a huge number of tracks. Another oddity is that when I put the 14 discs into the program I use to transfer them to MP3 – it kept fetching the track names such that tracks 1 & 2 had the same title, then 3 & 4, 5& 6 etc. But the way the set is really laid out is that all the odd numbered CDs are A-sides and the even numbered CDs are the corresponding B-sides – kind of an interesting idea. But was there a previous pressing that went ABABABAB?
I really hope you give these other sets the same type of track-by-track treatment once you finish TCMS.
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The Nixon Administration said:
That’s the idea, but at this rate it’ll be somewhere around 2026…
Ronald Dunbar was a real person and even has a couple of Motown credits, I believe he was known to HDH as a studio hand or even janitor. Whether he actually wrote the songs that were attributed to him or whether he was a convenient flesh and blood person to collect the trio’s royalty cheques, is a question that’s never been satisfactorily answered.
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Robb Klein said:
I know some people that were friendly with Ron. He was a member of The Peps (Fabulous Peps), who recorded with Mike Hanks’ D-Town Records. Ron Dunbar was also “Ronnie Love”. He had writing credits as far back as 1962, long before he hung out at Motown, and worked with HDH. His comments and comments of HDH, themselves, stated that Dunbar was an integral part of their Invictus/Hot Wax operations. It is my understanding, that only “Edith Wayne” was the credits placeholder for HDH, and that Dunbar took part in the writing of every song on which his name appears. Dunbar’s name appears as a writer on several Gold Forever records that Edith Wayne’s does not. Lamont said that Dunbar was HDH’s “right hand man”, and assistant producer on many of their releases. He wasn’t just a janitor. He was a veteran of the music business by 1969, and well known in Detroit. The Peps were a cult item in Detroit, due to their fabulous choreography. They were like The Vibrations and Contours. Their dancing was a big part of their appeal. They were local legends, who often “dueled” with such heavy groups as The Temptations.
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Robb Klein said:
I don’t think EITHER side of this record got any push from Motown. It was a nice cut, but Motown had lots of other records and acts to concentrate on at this time. I never heard it on radio in Chicago or Detroit. It probably was only played by a couple DJs in Detroit a few times and dropped out of site forever. I’ll bet it didn’t reach the radio anywhere else. I found it for 10¢ in a bargain bin just a few months after its release.
As to the alternate title: I spent a fair amount of time looking through The Motown Vaults during the 1970s, and NEVER saw that alternate title on any vinyl record, acetate, tape title bar, record list, recording log or any other document. I suspect that is a complete error, and never existed as an alternate title.
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nixonradio said:
Ha, I knew that alternate title was an error. Bloody Gracenote.
As always, Robb, thanks for your scholarship and input, here and on the other entries – it’s much appreciated.
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Benjamin H. Shulman said:
Always loved this tune, definitely way better than the “A”-side,
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Ricky said:
Johnny does sound like he doing San Cooke’s vocal licks like vol 2 said not a bad song verdict earned
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