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Motown M 1045 (B), June 1963
B-side of What Goes Up, Must Come Down
(Written by Brian Holland, Lamont Dozier and Edward Holland Jr. with Janie Bradford)
Somehow, Come On Home – the B-side of Brian Holland and Lamont Dozier’s only Motown single as a performing duo – turns out to be even more ephemeral and baffling than the A-side.
It’s so inconsequential that there’s almost nothing to it. Two minutes of instrumental blues piano tinkling, drums, horns and handclaps, a bit of organ, and that’s your lot. A pretty enough two minutes, sure, but (as with the A-side) it’s really just the same few bars repeated over and over again. It sounds like the backing track for a long-forgotten Marvin Gaye B-side, but the music doesn’t do anything particularly interesting to compensate for the lack of vocals.
What’s most unusual is just what Holland and Dozier did to be credited as the “artist” on this track – if one of them played piano, or organ, or something else, it isn’t mentioned in the liner notes to The Complete Motown Singles: Volume 3, which give individual credits for pretty much every audible instrument on this record, none of them played by Brian or Lamont; the notes then muddy the waters further by noting Holland-Dozier were dubbed in over the prerecorded track at a later date. Dubbed in doing what, exactly?! Infuriating.
A couple of months later, Come On Home would be exhumed and pressed into service as the B-side of the one and only single by a made-up girl group called “The Darnells”, whereupon some (extremely perfunctory) vocals were eventually pasted over the top of this – but that’s a story for another day.
VERDICT
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3 / 10
(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!)
COVERWATCH
Motown Junkies has reviewed other Motown versions of this song:
- The Darnells (October 1963)
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 Holland-Dozier as artists, or the Holland-Dozier-Holland songwriting team? Click for more.)
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| Holland-Dozier “What Goes Up, Must Come Down” |
Mable John “Who Wouldn’t Love A Man Like That (version 2)” |
DISCOVERING MOTOWN |
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DISCOVERING MOTOWN |
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Like the blog? Listen to our radio show! |
| Motown Junkies presents the finest Motown cuts, big hits and hard to find classics. Listen to all past episodes here. |
Motown Junkies 
It’s also weird that the song was apparently written by “Holland-Dozier-Holland.” Since Eddie Holland was their lyricist, how did it take the three of them to write this?
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Indeed, as with the A-side which Lamont supposedly ad-libbed on the spot. Two theories: Eddie was there while the trio was working on something else when this was written and it was too hard to start apportioning credits, or HDH had a Lennon/McCartney style arrangement whereby anything they did ended up under the same publishing deal?
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It was common practice for the artist on the A-side to be credited with instrumental B-sides on which they did not appear [cf. the Crystals and the Ronettes]. One of the most blatant cases was the RicTic hit instrumental “You’ve Got to Pay the Price”, originally the B-side of an Al Kent vocal, and credited to him when the record was flipped.
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Indeed, and we’ve had some egregious Motown examples with Little Iva and Haney & Armstrong – but the paperwork for this one specifically states a dub-in date for Holland-Dozier after the track was cut, which is perplexing.
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Thats true especially on singles from 1980 on where the B side was more commonly an instrumental of the A side
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Clearly, Brian Holland and Lamont Dozier produced these two background tracks, expected to be used later with vocals. Why Motown pressed them both onto a 45 to try to sell is beyond me. But, they never put any money into pressing it up or distributing it, or trying to get DJs to play it. It ended up in the thrift stores and cut-out bins in record shops. I bet no copy ever sold for more than 3-for a Dollar. I never saw store stock in the retail shelves of a shop.
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