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Workshop Jazz 2001 (B), May 1962
B-side of Exodus
(Written by Victor Schertzinger and Johnny Mercer)
The first ever release on Motown’s new specialist jazz subsidiary, Workshop Jazz Records, was parked firmly in the middle of the road. The A-side, Exodus, for all intents and purposes a Pat Boone cover, had hardly set the hep cats abuzz with excitement, and this B-side – another supposedly “jazz” cover of a whitebread standard, this time a song from the 1942 film The Fleet’s In where it had been sung by Dorothy Lamour – is even wetter.
Save a bit of supper-club piano at the start, and a very understated sax break two thirds of the way through, there’s really not a lot of jazz happening here at all, truth be told. It’s a nice easy listening production, handled well by Mickey Stevenson, but – as with the A-side – it was surely a decidedly dangerous tactic, releasing MOR fluff aimed at middle-class whites to launch a new credible jazz offshoot.
The liner notes to The Complete Motown Singles: Volume 2 describe this as “lightly swinging… a fine idea”, but I can only really agree with the first of those assertions. It does swing, very lightly; Hank and Carol give a pleasant dual-handed Forties-inflected vocal delivery, save for a horribly jarring bum note at the end, and the band’s performance is smooth and practised enough that if you close your eyes, you could be back at a supper club somewhere on the Atlantic seaboard circa 1954; but I’d be hard pushed to say how it was a “fine idea”. Indeed, given the panning I handed out to Marvin Gaye’s similarly cheesy Mr Sandman, I can’t in good conscience give any kind of thumbs up to this.
Hank and Carol Diamond supposedly recorded an entire album’s worth of this sort of vaguely not-really-jazz MOR easy listening stuff, but this single was their one and only release of any kind.
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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| Hank & Carol Diamond “Exodus” |
Earl Washington All Stars “Opus No. 3” |
Motown Junkies 
– it was surely a decidedly dangerous tactic, releasing MOR fluff aimed at middle-class whites to launch a new credible jazz offshoot.
This MOR “fluff” , only a month later, would transform into a pop-country standard in the hands of OZ-BRIT crooner/yodeler Frank Ifield. Causing VEE-JAY records to invest in other English talent. However, the only other one available to them was these four guys with funny haircuts–oh what was their name again????? LOL–bit I digress
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So this was the same song that Frank Ifield recorded? I have to confess that I love Frank Ifield’s version! An oldies station in Washington, DC used to play Ifield’s song a lot in the early 70s. Didn’t Vee Jay go broke as a result of the whole Beatles debacle? Re. Motown & Jazz, of course they kept their hand in over the years. They had Grover Washington/the Crusaders for awhile both of whom I like. They also released a pretty good album of smooth fusion in the early 80s by a group called Dr. Strut. I also have some of the later MoJazz releases which are pretty good. I have a strange theory about smooth jazz – that it is basically a very mellow version of the Motown sound – hence it appeals to yuppies who grow up with Motown. Also, many Motown songs translate well over to smooth jazz. Okay I’ll shut up now! LOL
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. Didn’t Vee Jay go broke as a result of the whole Beatles debacle?
NO there was dissent in the company long before the Beatles.
TRIVIA NOTE: Motown briefly had control of the VEE JAY masters and issued several CD’s of Vee Jay material in 1986.
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Hey my man, you are right. Now I remember reading that Vee Jay was already in trouble before the Beatles thing. The whole Beatles/Vee Jay thing is an interesting footnote in the Beatles’ American crossover history. It must have pretty crazy in 1964 with records by the Beatles on all manner of labels (Capitol, VeeJay/Tollie, MGM, Atco, Swan etc) all clogging up the Top 100. Knowing Motown’s propensity to sign oddball acts even through 1963, wouldn’t that have been strange if Motown had picked up the Beatles early recordings. Getting back to Motown (oh yeah that’s what this site is all about!) didn’t one of the VeeJay execs move over to Motown somewhere along the line. Of course, another Vee Jay – Motown cross pollination is the fact that both the 4 Seasons & Jerry Butler (as I’m sure you already know) recorded for Motown in the 70s.
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Ewart Abner eventually became President of Motown, if that’s who you’re thinking of. There’s lots of stuff about the demise of Vee-Jay in George Nelson’s Where Did Our Love Go; they were the first really big black-owned label to hit crossover paydirt, and George’s theory is that they had the inventory and contacts (in terms of both distributors and media) to be much bigger, but the bookkeeping just wasn’t in place (a common failing for many Sixties labels, regardless of who owned them), a combination of poor record-keeping and profligate spending leading to cashflow disasters – essentially the only differences between Motown and Vee-Jay were that Berry Gordy had a certain cachet among artists as a hit songwriter in his own right, and he knew the importance of making sure the books were properly kept once the records started selling.
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Yes sir. Abner is the one I was thinking about. On my comment about other artists ie Jerry Butler coming to Motown after success on another labels I think it is interesting they sometimes couldn’t find success there. Same with other artists like Mary Wells going to other labels. Any thoughts ? Cheers.
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Well we all should be able to figure out why Mary Wells didn’t have any hits after Motown..as good as any of her records were..
I’ll give you a hint .. Top DJ gets a call from a sales dept somewhere saying..IF YOU PLAY THE NEW MARY WELLS RELEASE,…WE WON”T BOTHER SENDING YOU ANY MORE SUPREMES 45s…get it??
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Yeah you’re right about Mary Wells. I was actually talking with one of our other buddies on this site about that situation. I did hear that Gordy was strong arming djs not to play Marys records. Still curious about other non Motown acts not making it when they moved over to Motown after success on other labels.
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other non Motown acts not making it when they moved over to Motown after success on other labels.
Many of the artists were past their prime…Tony Martin, Billy Eckstine, Bobby Darin, Pat Boone
Dorsey Burnette–in this case, it didn’t help that he was moonlighting for Herb Alpert at A & M producing the one-shot hit for Lucille Starr “The French Song” –plus the tragic death of brother Johnny in August of ’64 kinda put a halt to any promotion he would or could’ve done
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I’m still thinking about people like Jerry Butler. I mean this was the Iceman dude! On paper it looked like JB and Motown would have been a perfect match.
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Most of the previously successful non-Motown artists brought their own songwriters to Motown, and, really, their material wasn’t all that good. In addition, Motown gave most of them (Chuck Jackson, Terry Johnson, Jerry Butler, Lesley Gore, Frankie Valli (& The Four Seasons), etc.) no real marketing push. Gladys Knight & The Pips were really the only ones who got support, and The Isley Brothers (but, for all intents and purpoes, only for their first release). Literally ALL of them (other than Gladys) said that they were treated as outsiders, probably because they hadn’t been raised in Detroit, and grown up with Motown (e.g. they weren’t one of the family, not having “paid their dues”).
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It’s ironic that Ewart Abner was the bookkeeper and later, accountant and later president of VJ. He had a readymade working system when he took over at Motown, and a boss in Gordy, who always kept an eye on what he was doing. At VJ, Vivian Carter and her husband, Jimmy Bracken had had no business training, were busy with finding and developing artists, and Vivian’s brother, Calvin, head of A&R, was busy recording. So, everything was left to Abner. Getting their crossover sales from The Beatles, Four Seasons and Jerry Butler and Betty Everett in 1964-early ’65 happened too fast for them to handle it, as they didn’t have the cash to supply the enlarging markets they could tap. The expanded anyway, moving their main operations to L.A,, and hiring Pop producer Randy Wood, to run the operation. He spent money like they were a major label, when no sales money was coming in. So, they went bankrupt.
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Motown got control of the VJ masters because VJ partner, Ewart Abner had become president of Motown record Corp.
The main problem with VJ, which led to their demise, was setting up an L.A. office, and leaving its running to someone they didn’t know, who spent tonnes of dollars on “image” and unnecessary luxuries for himself and his staff (acting like VJ was RCA or Columbia, rather than a small business). He also didn’t have the connections to market Soul music, and his choices of Pop music. to record and market, were totally incompetent and about as poor as any could have made, had they tried to sabotage the firm.
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I don’t know, but I kind of fancy this weird little ditty. Yes, it sounds very contrived-like something Jeanette McDonald and Eddy Albert would have recorded, and to be sure, very MOR-ish, definitely not the Motown that we’d come to know and love. I wasn’t a big fan of “Exodus”, but “I Remember You” is on frequent rotation-the swinging little oddity that it is- quirks, swallowed notes and all.
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This was a HORRIBLE choice to debut a new Jazz label. I would have put out a Frank Moreli LP.
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