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Motown M 1030 (A), May 1962
b/w What About Me
(Written by Andre Williams*, George Gordy and Mickey Stevenson)s
Edward Holland Jr.’s fourth Motown single release came barely a month after his third. As soon as the snarky-but-passingly-brilliant You Deserve What You Got was supposedly hitting the stores, Eddie was back in the studio recording this pseudo-novelty, a rare Eddie A-side not featuring a writing credit for either himself or his brother Brian.
For its own reasons, Motown latched on to this new recording and decided it had to be released right away, notwithstanding the small matter of there already being a brand-new Eddie Holland single on general release. So, the promotion of You Deserve What You Got was quietly dropped, and in its place came this, complete with swanky picture sleeve; from studio to store in less than three weeks flat.
The reasoning, as always, appears to have come down to opportunistic greed. The much-delayed Liz Taylor/Richard Burton Cleopatra film was finally about to be released to cinemas the following month, and it seems Berry Gordy realised there might be some airplay to be had once the film hit the screens if he put out a Cleopatra record right now. It’s perhaps symptomatic of the chaotic nature of the early Motown setup that things played out this way; I don’t know whether the Cleopatra edict came down from on high and Eddie was the only singer available for the job of recording the song at such short notice, or whether it was already recorded as a topical novelty and caught Berry Gordy’s ear. The truth is probably somewhere in the middle; the unusual writing credits for an Eddie Holland A-side (no Hollands and the first appearance of Berry’s brother George Gordy) suggest a rush spec job done before an artist was selected, but it’s hard to draw any further inferences.
The liner notes to The Complete Motown Singles: Volume 2 describe it as a simple case of this being “a much stronger song” than You Deserve What You Got. It isn’t “much stronger”, though. In fact, despite some great moments, it’s actually the first of Eddie Holland’s Motown singles which is – on balance – weaker than its immediate predecessor.
Indeed, the whole first minute of this record is just terrible; opening with a cheesy burst of cod-Egyptian piano followed by a bland, buttery-sounding orchestra flourish straight off one of Bing Crosby’s Forties records. Then, we launch into a horrible middle-class approximation of the calypso-influenced sound Motown had been experimenting with on Mary Wells’ The One Who Really Loves You and the Miracles’ I’ll Try Something New, but it’s a safe, soulless pastiche of that sound, as though the band were under strict orders not to let things get too exciting. They don’t even carry off that undemanding brief properly, lurching amateurishly between bars, while there’s a nasty noise that crops up every now and again sounding like a half-hearted güiro part that got forgotten in the mix.
And then there’s Eddie himself, back firmly in Jackie Wilson territory, enunciating the lyrics in an irritating sing-song half-spoken fashion. (The lyrical conceit here, by the way, would have been better titled Cleopatra took a chance – why can’t you? – the parentheses in the title don’t actually appear on the label, but were added later to avoid confusion.) The lyrics don’t even scan properly – there’s an unbelievably uncomfortable, juddering bit after the opening couplets where Eddie, the band and the whole song just completely lose direction – In the history books, you’ll find / Kingdoms have been took / Lives… have been lo-o-st / Wars have been fough-t / Joy has been bought… – and the whole thing sounds as though it’s going to break down, to the extent I half expected to hear the producer’s voice asking everyone to stop and announcing they would do another take. Maybe there just wasn’t time.
It’s awful, and by this point you’re probably reaching for the stop button, perhaps angry and baffled as to why this would ever be considered worthy of release as a throwaway B-side or “end of side one” album track, never mind a big-ticket single from a supposed chart act.
Things improve slightly when Eddie lets his strong tenor soar at the end of the verse – “If queens can fall in love, then why can’t you?”, a great delivery reminding us all he wasn’t just a low-rent Jackie Wilson impersonator, but it’s still hardly compelling stuff.
But then, with very little warning, at 1:03, the song changes tack dramatically. The band drop the schmaltzy calypso-jazz schtick in favour of a much tighter performance; Eddie swaps his precise, semi-spoken diction for unashamed passionate abandon; and the tune becomes roughly 800% more interesting, swooping in for just over forty seconds of an arresting R&B march-waltz-torch ballad that’s among the best work done so far by Eddie.
(In fact, not just by Eddie, but by any Motown act. Yes, it’s that good. It’s just a shame it doesn’t last – the sluggish intro section comes back in at 1:40, meaning the really great middle bit is bookended by two sections of sugary, irritating crap, dragging the whole down to less than the sum of its parts).
It is brilliant, though. The Andantes, the uncredited unsung singing heroines of hundreds of Motown recordings, provide perfect backing here (the liner notes to Volume 2 give a great backhanded compliment, saying they “fill out the sound quite adequately”, but I find their performance charming) and Eddie nails a superb, touching vocal (“River of tears / Mountains of trouble / Is my proof that this is so”), before launching into a spectacular staccato “list” section (“The rich / The poor / The bad / The good / The best / And the better… down this road, they’ll have to go”) which immediately calls to mind the best moments of Scott Walker.
It can’t last, and at 1:40 Eddie gives us a brief warning (“And I’m here to tell you…”) before the rubbish intro section comes back. It’s not as awful the second time round, but it’s still not good, throwing away a potentially great record. A pity.
This wasn’t a hit – maybe the time frame was just too short and condensed to get promotion properly behind the rushed release, or maybe DJs simply never bothered to listen past the ghastly first minute of the record, but either way it flopped. It’s definitely worth listening to for that excellent middle section, but the massive drag factor of the terrible two minutes either side of the really good bit mean the quality of the whole thing is brought crashing downwards.
* Andre Williams later transferred his writing credit on this song to his ex-girlfriend Fay Hale, but I’ve never understood the predominantly American practice of a song’s creative attribution somehow being able to transfer from person to person; surely either a song was written by someone, or it wasn’t, regardless of what the law says. If I spend six hundred million pounds bribing Brian Wilson until he puts my name on the song instead, I still won’t have written Good Vibrations. So I’m sticking with listing Williams as one of this song’s writers, while noting that technically it was “co-written” by Fay Hale here in this footnote. Up yours, The Law.**
**(NB: I am in fact a lawyer).
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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Eddie Holland “What About Me” |
Motown Junkies 
American song credits are a funny business. I don’t think Alan Freed had much to do with writing “Maybellene” and the list goes on. It is usually a white guy putting his name on a black guy’s song too. To paraphrase Ray Davies: “They don’t know the words, don’t know the tune, and don’t give a damn” and John Fogerty: “Zanz can’t dance but he’ll steal all your money”.
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Most of Beyonce’s songs were written by others and then credit assigned to her. For some songwriters its the only way to get the song heard. Take a flat fee and keep moving.
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It’s an interesting one, isn’t it? Ne-Yo, now Motown’s senior VP (hey, look, relevance!) talked about this a couple of years ago – he made an analogy about giving a star writing credit for recording your song being similar to you getting a lift in someone’s car and chipping in with gas money, because they’re helping get you where you want to go – but he had some specific comments about songs he’d written appearing credited to Beyoncé:
“Here’s my thing, when I write a song for an artist I want that artist to take that song and make it their own. If you listen to my version of “Irreplaceable” and listen to Beyonce’s version of “Irreplaceable”, its two damn totally different songs with all the harmonies and extra stuff she put in there. So yea, I gave her her writer’s credit because that counts. That’s writing. That harmony that you put right there. That little background part, I didn’t write that originally. You put that in there, so for her to take the song and make it her’s, I didn’t mind her saying ‘I wrote this song for my girls’ at a concert or whatever the case may be. Because in a way, technically, she did put her spin on it. If you gonna do it the exact same way I did it, you might as well let me keep it.”
Very similar to the old adage, isn’t it – “change a word, claim a third”. But not exactly the kind of underhand dealing or outright plagiarism she (and Janet Jackson, and many other female pop stars – and it overwhelmingly *is* female singers who get this kind of accusation levelled at them, I wonder why that is?) have been accused of.
In any case, there’s a slight difference between the problem of dubiously assigned and/or stolen writing credits (which is not to say that’s not a big problem) and the practice of songwriting credits being retroactively reassigned to random third parties, which is another entire extra level of crazy.
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That retroactive thing—-that never really bothered me. In a few cases certain artists who had full or partial writers credits (like Little Richard for example) would fall on hard times and sell a piece of the song to random people for cash money. Or in the case of Charlie Parker trade a copyright or writers credits to a pusher in exchange for drugs.
Now that “change a word, claim a third” is new to me. I’ve never heard it but i always followed Smokey’s example when i was writing. If someone came along a changed a word or more that reshaped the song then i would always file a full 50 percent for them. Made it easier to sleep at night.
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The US version is “change a word, take a third”, but they’re both well worth Googling to see some of the discussions on this very point that come up.
Ne-Yo is a smart guy, and his (and your) attitude to songwriting is certainly one I applaud and identify with – sometimes it’s the smallest things that can make a song, and calling attention to that as something which deserves credit, I approve. Obviously that leaves the decent songwriter open to abuse by unscrupulous arseholes, a commodity where the music industry has never had a shortage, but if all parties are happy with it – whether changing that word, adding that harmony, whatever, really does significantly change the song, or whether it’s a contrivance to further the careers of all involved – then I don’t see the problem.
The retroactive thing doesn’t bother me in the sense of allowing hard-up legends to get paid (or get off their tits, eh Bird?), they’ve earned it – and selling the copyright, the commercial publishing rights to a song, makes perfect sense. But I don’t understand how you can sell whether you wrote a song or not. If I pay the Rembrandt estate enough money, will everyone say I painted The Night Watch? Of course I didn’t, that’s stupid. So why, in theory, if I won the lottery tomorrow and had $X million burning a hole in my pocket, could I quite plausibly be credited for writing Blue Suede Shoes? I don’t get it.
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Its more about future revenue. It would be a good investment for me to buy a piece of Michael jackson’s “Billie Jean” whether i wrote it or not. That song is never going away so i’ll always receive mechanical royalties and/or a certain amount of money per spins. Checks cut quarterly against that particular piece of music are pretty large. Now if i had purchased a piece of “I Can’t Help Myself” from H-D-H back in the 1980’s i would have been jumping for joy everytime a Duncan Hines commercial was aired!!
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Right, absolutely, and this is why publishing houses continue to exist in the age of recorded music – the money to be made from 50 years of royalties usually outweighs even the most generous of one-off advances. Given the choice, you’d probably on balance be better off buying Jobete rather than Motown. But that’s not the same as the actual writing credits.
When Michael Jackson bought the rights to all those Beatles songs, the attribution didn’t suddenly change, nobody started saying that Yesterday or All You Need Is Love were actually written by Michael Jackson. And yet, if that deal had taken place 20 years previously…? There’s something vaguely sinister, Orwellian, about the idea that history itself can be changed.
(I remember a British TV documentary I watched maybe 20 years ago now charting the tangled history of “Why Do Fools Fall In Love” and the fight of Jimmy and Herman from the Teenagers, who actually wrote the song in the first place, to get their names back on the song in place of Morris Levy (via George Goldner before him). They eventually won – I still remember the two old men’s tears of joy as they were filmed watching the official writing credits being manually changed on some ASCAP computer screen, with the guy then telling them they were owed something like $2 million in royalties – only for an appeals court a couple of years later to declare they’d left it too long, and so they were deleted again and Morris Levy’s name reinstated even though nobody is contending for one second that he actually had a hand in writing the song. I don’t understand.)
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Oh boy do i remember that tangled web! The business at that time was simply to make a quick buck by exploiting young talent, i.e. those that didn’t know any better and would sign a contract unread or have their parents (usually inner city underpaid, undereducated people0 sign for them. It went on for years. Jimmy Merchant and Herman Santiago’s names should have been on that label copy for day ONE. Your concern about history being “rewritten” is grounded in truth.
How many times has a scan in one of your entries had to be corrected? What happens when all parties concerned (Jimmy, Herman, Frankie, Sherman, Morris, etc) are deceased and all we have are reissue label copy of bogus writers credits and no one like you is around to set the record straignt? Thank goodness for Motownjunkies!!
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>”but I’ve never understood the predominantly American practice of a song’s creative attribution somehow being able to transfer from person to person”
In Cuba, Arsenio Rodríguez (he was something along the lines of mid-century Cuban music’s equivalent of HDH, Smokey Robinson, Robert Johnson and Stevie Wonder all rolled into one) used to pay his sidemen by giving them songs to take down to the copyright office and publish in their own names.
But even over in Her Majesty’s kingdom, producers were allegedly known to buy songs, copyright them in their own names (or shell company pseudonyms) and force them onto the B-sides of hits.
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QUESTION: Is there any anecdotal evidence that Berry Gordy partook in the “change a word, take a third” practice? I’m still not fully convinced that he’s truly, as noted in this site’s (much appreciated) Great Songwriters section “the standard by which all other Motown must be judged”
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Berry Gordy was a pretty decent songwriter before he started Motown (“Reet Petite”, “Lonely Teardrops”, “That’s Why (I Love You So)”, and during Motown’s early existence (“Come To Me”, “I Love The Way You Love”, “Magic Mirror”, “You’ve Got What It Takes”, “Ain’t Gonna Be That Way”, Move Two Mountains”. He probably took partial credit for writing many songs at Motown from 1961-63 that he had little creative part in. But, I doubt that he took partial credit for any songs he didn’t help to write (unlike many label owners like Don Robey (Deadric Malone), The Bihari Brothers (Modern/RPM/Flair/Crown/Kent/Meteor Records), George Golner, Morris Levy, and the worst of all, Alan Freed (ALL of whom probably never wrote a note or a lyric word).
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I think, if there were, we’d have heard about it by now (and he’d have a lot more writing credits to his name – would YOU, in the position to randomly assign yourself some royalties, neglect to put your name on any of the big hits by your top-selling group, the lead singer of whom you were also sleeping with?) As Robb says, Gordy’s pedigree as a songwriter predates Motown; indeed, I’ve argued elsewhere on the site that his creative skill and reputation were what set Motown apart from any number of other tiny underfunded black owned labels in the very early Sixties, a crucial part of getting people to work with him who might not otherwise have given him a chance. And even the people he screwed over haven’t, to my knowledge, made the accusation that he helped himself to copyrights he had no hand in.
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Regarding “Cleopatra”, I think this melodic midtempo cut is quite good. I think rating it at “4” is shortchanging it. I’d give it a “6.5”. But, then, I come from an earlier era, and like the earlier sound. And then, in addition, I am Jewish, and grew up with Middle Eastern music, and then worked in The Middle East (Arab countries) for 17 years +, so. to me, this has kind of a catchy tune. It has that snake charmer flute tune which also was used as the beginning of “I’ve Got Love For My Baby” by The Young Hearts.
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wow, i can’t believe the song has received 13 comments, with only one being about the song itself (well done Robb for breaking the duck) – just want to echo Robb’s thoughts – I think this is a great song, by one of Motown’s finest early voices. I think all three sections work well and gel together. It also has a peculiar campness “if queens can fall in love, then why can’t you”, which appeals. I agree it sounds a bit, well, wonky, at the start, but this just adds to the appeal for me. Classy stuff.
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I like the (awesome) middle part very much, but the start is just a mess (like I said in the review, and I still stand by it, what, five years later? – it sounds really close to everyone abandoning ship and stopping for a fresh take)… and more importantly, for me anyway, I just don’t really *feel* the main melody (not the performance, I mean the acutal tune), there’s a kind of hard-to-define airy aimlessness to it that undercuts the passion in both the lyrics and Eddie’s performance.
It is rather pretty though.
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I love it! I love the Egyptian sound; (flutes,etc.) People that are unfamiliar with the actual “Detroit Sound” expect every song to sound like “My Girl” or Marvin’s “I Heard It Through The Grapevine.” The early stuff (like Eddie’s “Cleopatra”) makes me think of Mary Wells’ in 1962, or even the Vandellas and Marvelettes. Motown didn’t have that “pop””thing then; it was bluesier, more R&B. Even though I love Mr. Holland as a lyricist…I think he could have been a great recording artist. They say he had stage fright…impossible! There is so much passion and confidence in his performance! i’d give Eddie a 10!
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wow, 4 is harsh for this one! i actually really like this and am not so bothered about You deserve what you got, although i mostly like it for the bit between 1:03-1:40 as already mentioned here, but i like the first bit too because i know it is building up for that middle part. i don’t like the rest of the song after 1:40 because i know the best bit is over. The superior middle bit is too short and i just wish the song had stayed with that until the end.
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