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Tamla T 54058 (A), March 1962
b/w Baby I Need You
(Written by Charles Colbert, Eugene Dixon, Earl Edwards and Bernice Williams)
Oh good, another “answer record”.
This is a follow-up / homage / rip-off (delete as appropriate) to Gene Chandler’s Duke of Earl, a Number One mega-hit which had risen quickly to the top of the charts; this Motown riposte, one of a whole clutch of “me-too” efforts saturating the market, appeared less than a month later.
Pretty much every review of The Complete Motown Singles: Volume 2 out there singled this track out for special mention, held up as an example of Motown (now well into its fourth year) still putting out shoddy product in the hope of making a quick buck off the back of another record’s success, a habit Berry Gordy Jr. should really have grown out of by this stage.
And, well, maybe that’s true. However, it should be noted that this wasn’t a Hitsville production; “Little Otis” was no Motown artiste, but rather one Otis Hayes, a Chicago songwriter and occasional novelty turn (though he didn’t have a hand in writing this song, the liner notes to The Complete Motown Singles: Volume 2 note his association with various brilliantly-named, idiosyncratically-punctuated indie labels of the Sixties, including One-derful!, M-Pac! and Mar-V-Lus).
This record – originally titled “I Out-Duked The Duke Of Earl” (see the promo label scan, left), before someone in marketing decided that was a bit too on the nose – was given to Motown as a finished master, already recorded and mixed, ready to go; hard to blame Berry Gordy for taking a chance on a cheap and cheerful answer record if one quite literally landed on his doorstep.
It is fairly shoddy, though, there’s no real arguing with that. Opening with a wince-inducing, off-key burst of the main melody from Duke of Earl itself, it very quickly settles into a wearisome pattern of “Little Otis” bragging about how he “stopped the Duke” (a direct response to Chandler’s repeated line “Nothing can stop me now” from the original), mainly focussed on crude physical violence, interspersed with a really forced “Whoa-OH!” before every chorus, over some pedestrian music.
It’s probably supposed to be a laugh-along riot, but it’s not witty or charming enough – it ends up just being boring, a diatribe about our Otis beating up a fictional character for no explained reason. His vocals are grating and tuneless, and the “story” wears thin very quickly indeed, far too quickly for you to get any real enjoyment out of it.
A historical artefact and nothing more, then; not worth seeking out unless you really, really like Duke Of Earl, and even then it’ll probably just annoy you. Two out of ten, and that’s only because the sun is shining and I’ve had a good day; it’d be getting one star if I was feeling less generous (and only then because the system doesn’t go down to zero). Next!
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.
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| Debbie Dean “I Cried All Night” |
Little Otis “Baby I Need You” |
I never could figure out why Berry Gordy would lease a master from another company at that point in Motown’ s development. He had already had some hits, and had quite a lot of hitmaking talent working for him as artists and in writing and production. If he WERE to make the decision to go outside, why would he pick such a “loser”. I could have told him he wouldn’t make any money on that.
I wonder what he would have done about promoting Little Otis IF the record had taken off. Would he have tried to buy out his contract from The Leaner Bros.? Would history have been different, and Otis Hayes would have been a super writer producer on a Motown production team from 1963-67?
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It’s a confusing one when you put it like that. I suspect the truth is that it was simply Berry Gordy being opportunistic; I’m guessing (and this is just conjecture) that Motown didn’t already have a “Duke of Earl” knock-off in development, and may have been considering it when the “Little Otis” record became available for a presumably-generous lease arrangement (maybe even a flat fee) and pressing costs; Gordy and his sales department probably did some quick calculations that the potential returns on an unexpected novelty hit, or even a few sporadic novelty sales scattered around the country, still outweighed the costs of releasing the record (which by this point in their development they could well afford) and saved them the trouble and expense of writing and recording an “Earl” soundalike themselves.
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