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Gordy G 7018 (A), May 1963
b/w Pushing Up Daisies
(Written by Harry Boorosa and Lewis Colombo)
Typical – a few days away from the blog, and some cheeky prankster has apparently replaced my Complete Motown Singles: Volume 3 CDs with Scraping The Barrel XII: A Twelfth Incredible Collection of Squeaky-Clean Tedious White Vocal Groups of 1955. At least, I assume that’s what’s happened, as that’s the only rational explanation for this staggering commercial misjudgement.
No? This actually was released in 1963? By Motown? Seriously? Blimey.
This really is some spectacular crap. The Stylers were a Fifties doo-wop group who, at the tail end of their career, had the incredible good fortune to find themselves caught in the gravitational pull of Berry Gordy’s inexplicable yen for signing bog-standard white artists in the hope of crossing over. This was a silly and outdated idea, which may explain why it was put so readily on to the back burner; the clunky, cheesy pop acts that made up the bulk of early Motown’s white contingent received little promotional push from the company, because young white audiences were already starting to purchase Motown records – Motown records made by black artists – by the crateload.
The business model had been sound enough a musical generation ago. The Crew Cuts, a mid-Fifties Canadian white doo-wop ensemble who racked up millions of sales in the US by peddling safe, sanded-off, watered-down versions of black hits to white teens whose racist parents wouldn’t let them buy “race records”, painted a clear path; the Stylers, their contemporaries, seem to have taken the Crew Cuts’ woeful blandness as a challenge, and set out to be somehow even blander.
Mission accomplished; this horrid, syrupy confection, a preppy and wince-inducing approximation of street corner doo-wop from eight years before, is perhaps the wettest thing Motown ever released.
Everything about this record just screams “tacky”. Very obviously the work of a bunch of middle-aged, middle-class white men, Going Steady Anniversary – a form letter (dictated, but not read) of polite, chaste appreciation by the narrator to his high-school girlfriend, even though the narrator sounds like he’s in his late thirties – has no trace of passion about it, either musically or lyrically.
The liner notes to The Complete Motown Singles: Volume 3 use the word “sanitised”, and it’s apt; this has had almost every trace of emotion, controversy or excitement scrubbed out in case of controversy. All that’s left over is flaccid garbage.
From the overly-precise diction and awful scansion (the My love, my love, my-y-y-love bit at fifty seconds in is a particular lowlight)…
…to the pervading cultural atmosphere which treats romance as a mechanical progression (boy and girl share first dance, one year later engagement, one year later marriage)…
…to the casual misogyny which doesn’t give the girl a say in the matter (Tonight and forever more you belong to me), because the very notion of this not being some lucky gal’s one and only dream in life would baffle and confuse the narrator…
…to the genuinely godawful spoken-word bit in the middle (where the lead Styler, sounding like an orthodontist explaining a procedure, reads from a page with absolutely no feeling at all, about as filled with joy as if he were reading out a list of some new spoons in a kitchenware catalogue – although he does attempt to make himself sound a bit more hip by abbreviating darling to darlin’, in a hilariously self-conscious manner)…
…to the fact that it’s exactly two minutes long… Honestly, it’s just terrible.
It’s a pop record in name only; this is schlocky, absurdly-wet MOR bollocks, and it’s awful. The only possible rationale behind its release was as a naked cash-in catering to the few thousand remaining white Bible Belt teens whose parents still wouldn’t let them have anything stronger than Pat Boone records. Even then, it failed miserably; Berry Gordy should have known that anyone that thick probably wouldn’t allow their little darlings to shop in record stores that carried black-owned labels’ product (or possibly in record stores full stop).
Already an artefact from a bygone age in 1963, this is positively an ancient relic now. Embarrassing, depressing, soulless drivel with no redeeming features whatsoever.
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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I remember reading Smokey addressing this issue once, maybe in one of the booklets to his group’s multi-disc sets, that white kids often had to ‘hide’ their Miracles sides from their parents.
I never experienced that.
I wouldn’t want to suggest that my family were especially enlightened in the 1960s, and I heard plenty of ‘turn that the hell down,’ but I never heard ignorant comments about the content of the music I chose. With Chubby Checker and Gary U.S. Bonds, I was already gravitating to black artists and ready when Motown got its shoes on.
Our poor mother. I’m happy to say she’s alive and sane still today, but my sister and I gave her her paces back in those days. Day and night my sister’s bedroom sounded like Liverpool, and Dave’s sounded like a Detroit taproom.
I’m very glad I’ve never heard this loser. It makes shutter just to think it shared the same beautiful, sacred label that gave me
Whenever I’m with him, something inside,
starts to burning, and I’m filled with desire…
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There was a doowop group called the Stylers in the fifties – more than one actually – but I have my doubts that this Stylers has any connection. You’ll see that it was produced by Al Klein who was Motown’s promotion man for the southern states. I wonder is this Stylers was a group he managed in whatever spare time he had and that the record got issued to keep him happy. I doubt anybody in Detroit ever expected it to sell – and they weren’t wrong.
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I agree, Davey. I doubt that these Stylers were the same (Baltimore) group that recorded for Jubilee or Jay Wing, or the Philadelphia group.
Back in the early ’50s I knew a LOT of “White” Kids whose parents wouldn’t let them listen to that “Jigaboo music”.
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Absolutely, and I don’t doubt it – I’ve read some appalling racist nonsense from the time, and some of the comments on this site have opened some interesting discussions on the topic.
(Much as we like to kid ourselves about how much better things are today, it’s easy enough to picture 2013 parents freaking out over whatever the modern equivalent would be – there’s a reason that very few country songs feature stories about openly gay men or are sung by guys called Abdul Al-Khilaiwi, I suppose. But I digress.)
That was the early 50s, though – how about the early 60s?
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I guess every set of parents came along with their pride and prejudices. But I was one lucky guy. My mom (mum?) was a big fan of classical orchestral music and opera. When I was 2, 3, 4 years of age she attempted to indoctrinate me into the world of her favorite music. By the time I was 5, I could recognize which arias belonged to which of her favorite operas. She was so proud me. However, what she failed to notice was that I couldn’t stand that music, and the more she played it, the greater my estrangement from it grew. Now, in the early 50s, most working class homes in the USA contained but one TV. I got to watch my kiddie shows in the late afternoon and early evening, but when prime time came, the grownups took over the box. So what did I do between then and bedtime at the age of 7 in 1953? While my 2nd grade classmates were listening to “Tubby the Tuba,” I had Alan Freed’s Big Beat show on on Grandma’s monstrous radio with a speaker as big as one in a juke box listening to the likes of Sam “The Man” Taylor, LaVern Baker, the Robins and all the other great “bird” groups, Big Joe Turner, Fats Domino, and on and on. Mom and Dad heard it, and never was a complaint registered as long as my homework was completed. Needless to say, when Motown came along 6 years later, all those tremendous sounds were equally welcomed in my apartment, even though I had broken my mother’s heart.
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Wow! We are exactly the same age, and started liking Black American music at about the same time, despite both living in a predominantly White dominated society, with a White- dominated media.
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For me, it was both in my blood and a “burning fire shut up in my bones ” from the moment of birth. I hated those cover songs by the Fontane Sisters, Georgia Gibbs, the McGuire Sisters, etc. But I remained only a listener. I continue to be impressed, Robb, by all you accomplished from your love of this music.
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Isn’t it strange how the Gordy slogan on the DJ copy pictured includes the grammatically correct “counts” rather than the incorrect “count” which is used on commercial copies?
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I thought that too! I’m guessing the original design was a mistake (the later Gordy label “arrow” design has the correct counts, which gave this site its subtitle), and that these promo labels were just ginned together by the printers at ordering time.
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OK, so we are all in agreement that the word “counts” is the proper one because it refers to a singular term, not a plural one. If so, then why do you refer to a band or orchestra as a plural (ie. The band have a good sound.) when a band is a singular term. Whether it has 3 members or 30, it is one singular band. British soccer announcers do this all the time. They’ll say, “Chelsea have a good chance to win this match.” I say, “Equally incorrect,” no matter what its chances are. It’s ONE team consisting of many players.
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It’s WHAT is in the grooves that COUNTS. The singular noun “what” is what the verb “counts” must reflect. However, “what” might be a singular OR plural thing. It is not specified. As I have observed the situation of differences between US and British and Canadian English over my lifetime, I see it this way: British English has generally referred to a collective noun in the plural, while US English has referred to it as a single unit. So a sports team, orchestra, band, union, or a people, should always be referred to by Brits as “they”, while “Americans” (in the narrowest sense – US citizens and residents) should refer to collective nouns as “it”, and use a singular verb form. Candians (for the most part -probably 80% or so) follow the British grammatical form, while being hard to peg (if one is not Canadian), by being similar to The US usage 20% of the time, and not in a way that can be predicted or guessed by Americans. This problem is even made more difficult by the “weirdohs” in British Columbia(a reasonable proportion of that population), who think they are “Americans”, and follow US usage in many instances (and, often in a completely arbitrary way!
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We Brits treat bands, orchestras, sports teams etc. as if they were plural nouns. I *presume* Americans wouldn’t say e.g. “The Red Sox is on a winning streak” or “The Supremes was a great group”. (Correct me if I’m wrong?)
For Brits, when faced with a group of individuals making up a bigger whole (such that if the individuals all left, there wouldn’t be a whole to refer to, unlike companies or countries or whatever), we kind of imbue otherwise-singular nouns with those same plural properties – Chelsea, the London Philharmonic Orchestra, Radiohead, all *always* referred to as if they were plural, and entirely correctly in British English.
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Hi Nixon,
You have not considered the difference between discussing a sports franchise as an individual business, or referring to the team’s entire staff, as a whole. An American could say: “The Chicago White Sox” HAS sued X party, and be correct in American English, IF they are referring to the individual corporation titled “The Chicago White Sox, Inc.” – assuming THAT were its name (I doubt that THAT is the official name). And yet, an American, would refer to the entire roster of players as The Chicago White Sox, and call those players, together, as “they”. So, maybe using a sports team as an example, is not the best. Take a band, for example. An American could refer to The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band as “it” or “they”, depending upon upon whether they are referring to the business entity or the entire band roster of X number of individuals. Perhaps using a government as an example is better. The Brits would refer to “The US Government as a “they”, and The Americans would refer to it as an “it”. “The Us Government have”…. , vs. “The US Government has…”, I assume that the same is true about a corporation. The Brits would say: “Lever Brothers, Ltd. have issued a statement…”, while The Americans would say: “Lever Brothers Corp. has issued a statement….”
Am I correct? Or should I be a candidate for an appearance on “spot The Looney”? Nudge, Nudge, …say no more…
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I think the reason that the error arose in “It’s what’s in the grooves that count” is the proximity of the word “grooves” to the verb, with the result that “grooves” has been incorrectly taken as the subject instead of the clause “it is what…”.
As far as British usage on collective nouns, certainly in the 1960s we were taught to use the singular in most cases. So we would have said “The Board is issuing a statement”, but “The Board are arguing amongst themselves”.
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Did I ever open a can of worms, or should I say words? Three points. 1. I think Robb makes a valid argument that we don’t really know if WHAT is in the grooves is singular or plural, in which case perhaps “count” or “counts” may be used interchangeably. 2. Regarding musical groups with plural names like the Supremes, I never had a problem saying, “The Supremes were a great group,” but I would not protest if someone who thought of them as a singular group wished to use the word “was” in place of “were.” (Have we beaten this into the ground long enough?) Finally, 3. Nixon, Steve, Whichever: This site is my all-time favorite, and I strongly doubt that this opinion will ever change. Since purchasing all 14 volumes the CMSC in 2015, your scholarly work has been my musical “bible” that I consult as often as ministers or rabbis consult their religious counterparts. I will not play one Motown song, which I am doing chronologically with the contents of my other R&B box sets, without reading your reviews, and the comments of others, from top to bottom, and for no other reasons than the pure joy of doing it and the addicted nature of a Motown Junky.
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Hear! Hear! (or should I say: “Here! Here! – referring to this website – e.g. where to be to discuss Motown recordings (or read the odd dissertation on proper English grammar)! We have great discussions even during our “down time”. Imagine how great this place will be, when we once more have new reviews on which to comment, and to throw laurels and/or rotten tomatoes!
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Good God! Talk about going off on a tangent! I thought the object of this site was to discuss the wonderful sounds of Motown, not the intricacies of the the English language. Now, it would be interesting if someone would point out all the grammar faults I have made in this post!
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This all started with what’s in the grooves: pure Motown.
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The objects of the comments section of this site is whatever we want them to be [Note the deliberate grammatical error here!].
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“Ginned together”? I swear i’ll never get used to this language.
What in the world does that mean?
Is it a hard g or a soft g?
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Soft, like a J, as in The Elgins and the cotton gin (which I think is the etymology of “ginned”): to throw something together, either as a temporary or makeshift measure, or as a solution to a problem at short notice/with limited materials to hand.
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Someone’s posted a dissenting comment on this review, but on another blog (and many months ago, I only found it today because someone else clicked through from a link there!)
Whoever it is (I sincerely hope it’s not our own Ed Pauli, who sometimes signed off his posts here as Rockin’ Ed, or I’ll be disappointed he didn’t feel comfortable posting it here)… it appears we have a disagreement?
http://thatsallritemama.blogspot.co.uk/2012/02/tony-columbo-on-chime.html
Rockin’ Ed, December 24, 2012 at 8:23 PM
“The Motown Junkies guy ought to have his head examined–he hates all white artists on Motown–he also hates the more obscure black artists too!!!”
Absolute US Grade A horseshit. I’d love to hear your opinion on the Stylers 45, whoever you are, but please don’t tar me with any more ill-informed slurs like that behind my back. Cheers.
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I don’t know why there is so much hatred for this recording imbued by the reviewer.
True, this is no classic either as a song or performance thereof, but it’s not that bad and is similar to a lot of other white male doo-wop records that were issued in the US between 1960 and 1963. Yes, it’s souless, but it’s probably not meant to be soulful just straight harmony. The most surprising thing to me is that it was issued on GORDY. As atypical Motown material and being produced by Alan Klein it would have been more appropriate on MELODY particularly as most of the MELODY releases were produced by Klein from then on. I’d give 5 as a harmony pop record.
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Well said. Saw this on eBay, went to UTube for a listen. Made it through about 1:40 before feeling nauseous.
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