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Motown M 1051 (A), October 1963
b/w Standing At The Crossroads Of Love
(Written by Brian Holland, Lamont Dozier and Edward Holland Jr.)
Stateside SS 257 (A), January 1964
b/w Standing At The Crossroads Of Love
(Released in the UK under license through EMI / Stateside Records)
The long, laboured rise to stardom of the Supremes is a well-known story, and it’s been entertaining to tell it. Many Supremes fans will have been reading with increasing impatience through our reviews of their six Motown singles to date (the spellbinding I Want A Guy, the horrible Buttered Popcorn, the very pretty Your Heart Belongs To Me, the messily mediocre Let Me Go The Right Way, the misjudged country pastiche My Heart Can’t Take It No More and the passable A Breath Taking Guy). These releases were of varying quality, but all flopped on the charts, none reaching the top seventy. You’d think, then, that reaching this one – their first Top 30 hit – ought to provide a cathartic release, as the group finally break through into the big time. But hold the phone, Supremes lovers, we’re not done with that “rise to fame” story just yet. This isn’t the real breakthrough. It’s a false start, a diversion, a dead end.
Oh, this is still one of the most significant of all Motown singles, there’s no doubt about that. Marking as it does the beginning of one of the most successful writer/artist combinations in the entire history of popular music, this has to be seen as a turning point, the start of a shift in the balance of power not just at Motown but in all of American culture.
For once, I’m not over-selling this: for all the success various Brill Building-style girl groups had had prior to 1964, people had never seen anything quite like the Supremes before they arrived on the charts, and their impact was such that – even today, 48 years on – the very mention of their name conjures up an image of three ladies in slinky gowns and synchronised dance moves, even for those who’ve never consciously set out to listen to any of their records.
The synergy between the Holland-Dozier-Holland team and the Supremes is one of those very rare occasions when all the hype turns out to be justified, where the weight of expectation and reputation doesn’t crush the poor mortal artist when you finally get to hear the records. Whatever you think about Diana Ross, or Berry Gordy, or Motown, it doesn’t matter – when the Supremes are at the top of their game, there’s not a single person in the world who professes to care about pop music, not one, who can resist.
But they’re not quite there yet. Almost (almost!)… but not quite.
(I feel like a stressed-out parent on a long road trip, having promised the kids we can all stop at the next gas station, 20 miles to go, 10 miles to go, 5 miles to go, 1 mile to go, look, there it is on the horizon… and then driving past it with the weak justification that the next one’s much nicer, and it’s only another 40 miles. Ah, it’ll be over before you know it! Why not pass the time counting the other cars, or try to get some sleep?)
The Supremes’ exceptional dĂ©but Motown single, I Want A Guy – man, that (10), the first one I ever gave out, feels a long, long time ago now – and indeed the group’s whole body of work in the 1960-1963 period in general, doesn’t get a lot of exposure (or regard) nowadays, not even among Motown fans. The Supremes’ dĂ©but LP, Meet The Supremes, a grab-bag release anthologising their material up to 1962, remains a perennially poor seller, then as now. I feel quite confident in stating that for a majority of Supremes fans, all those records leading up to this one – which is to say, all of the Supremes records we’ve covered so far on Motown Junkies – are a footnote, interesting as historical background but of little relevance as pop music.
The reason for that, I’m also pretty sure I know: they don’t really sound like Supremes records. Obviously, this is mainly because nobody at Motown, not even the Supremes themselves, knew what a typical Supremes record might sound like, and so we end up with a shapeless melange of attempts to market the group in different ways, those six singles all sounding like they were made by five or six different groups, and none of those groups the ones who’d shortly be conquering the world.
I’m still proud of describing I Want A Guy as bearing the same relationship to the Supremes’ mid-Sixties triumphs as the Beatles’ Love Me Do does to Revolver or Sgt Pepper, because that pretty much sums it up for me; those early records are all good and everything, sometimes exceptionally special, but they don’t sound like the stuff the group became famous for. (If anything, the comparison is even more pointed in the case of the Supremes, because (a) I Want A Guy didn’t get re-released and storm to the top of the US charts once they got famous, and (b) their early records just don’t attract the same scrutiny as the Beatles’ comparable efforts do – there’s a lengthy discussion to be had there on racism, sexism and the cult of the singer-songwriter which will have to wait for another day, because this is already going to be the longest thing I’ve yet written for this site.) But that comparison starts to falter when we stop talking about the artistic relationship between early efforts and mid-career peaks, and instead talk about what gets listened to today.
Ten years ago, pre-Wikipedia (and, heck, pre-Motown Junkies), I’d have wagered that a majority of music fans, when asked to identify the Supremes’ dĂ©but single, wouldn’t have plumped for I Want A Guy. (Strictly speaking, even that could be considered the wrong answer – the group had released an earlier record as the Primettes – but let’s not muddy the waters any further.) Here’s the thing, though: I’d also bet that not many people would choose When The Lovelight Starts Shining Through His Eyes either. Like Wade Jones’ I Can’t Concentrate back in 1959, When The Lovelight Starts Shining Through His Eyes (not one of Motown’s snappier titles, that, now that I come to notice it) sort of makes sense as an “origin myth” for those looking to dig further back than Where Did Our Love Go, more sense than I Want A Guy at any rate, but it isn’t really any kind of marker for the future.
Because nothing on this record would go on to influence all those later HDH/Supremes smash hits. This isn’t the starting point anyone’s looking for. Even in commercial terms, whilst this was very definitely a hit – number 23 pop, as any historian knows, finally dispelling that “no-hit Supremes” tag – it wasn’t a huge seller, and the follow-up release a few months later bombed. So it’s a breakthrough of sorts, but not the sort of thing to propel the group into the national and international consciousness, not a ticket to the very top table. The snide nickname was dispelled, but only temporarily; the difference between the no-hit Supremes and the one-hit Supremes wasn’t enough. It still remained to be seen if they could repeat the feat and get back into the Top 30; with their Motown labelmates racking up ever bigger hits with increasing regularity, even that might not be enough to vaporise that nickname forever.
Musically, too, it’s not the herald of a new era that it’s sometimes painted as. The HDH trio had the Midas touch by the time 1963 rolled around to autumn; if there had been any doubts over the three youngsters’ place in the Motown creative hierarchy, then writing and producing a big Top Ten hit record for none other than Smokey Robinson, the company’s acknowledged top writer and producer, would have gone a long way towards silencing any doubters. As flavour of the month, that they’d be tasked with writing for the Supremes was pretty much inevitable (just a year later and they’d be seen as too important to waste good material on a no-hit group, so the timing was right for all involved), but the resulting record isn’t a sign of things to come.
Rather, it’s an illustration of just where HDH were at at the time; successful, and on the verge of a stardom seldom granted to writers and producers, but still looking for that magical missing ingredient, that “X factor” to define their individual sound. In the meantime, they were pursuing what turned out to be a dead end, albeit a highly entertaining one which resulted in several fine records.
(Including this one, obviously. I haven’t talked about this record very much yet, I know, but it’s good. I just thought I’d slip that in there. Anyway. I digress.)
The direction HDH were briefly following in the autumn of 1963 led to Phil Spector and the looming spectre (!) of the Brill Building. That big hit they’d cut on Smokey Robinson was Mickey’s Monkey, with its Spectorisms and Bo Diddley riff rhythms; they’d since made an out-and-out pastiche of Spector’s then-current hit, the Crystals’ Then He Kissed Me, in the form of the Darnells’ similarly lengthily-titled Too Hurt To Cry, Too Much In Love To Say Goodbye. (There’s also the small matter of Holland-Dozier’s Lead Me And Guide Me as featured on A Cellarful of Motown, Volume 4.)
Given the job of reviving the commercial fortunes of the Supremes (who’d recently lost their grip on even the very modest levels of success they’d managed to previously achieve in cracking the lower reaches of the Hot 100 with a brace of non-charting singles), HDH continued in the same vein. First up, they supplied a storming re-imagining of another Crystals smash, Da Doo Ron Ron, titled Run, Run, Run, and then – before that could be placed before Quality Control for evaluation as a potential single – they added a significant dollop of their best song to date, Martha and the Vandellas’ Heat Wave, and turned in another, less blatant but still fairly blatant Spector soundalike song. This song.
So, however much history and the narrative of the Motown Story require it to be, this isn’t a precursor to Where Did Our Love Go on any level other than the fact its significant, if not spectacular, success got HDH assigned to the Supremes gig long enough to change the course of history. Rather, Motown likely saw this as just another pop trend cash-in, the Supremes now packaged as just another girl group, unknown in the marketplace, obscure enough to be marketed as a new act, to sit alongside the Darnells in the racks in the hope of catching a lucky break and picking up a surprise hit.
They’d eventually get those things, but not until the summer of 1964. It didn’t happen earlier because as good as this is, it’s not an overlooked masterpiece or a crucial “lost” Supremes single, and certainly not a criminally-ignored “should-have-been” alternate universe Number One.
All of which is fine and dandy, but I guess I’ve spent enough time discussing what When The Lovelight Starts Shining Through His Eyes isn’t. Let’s instead now celebrate what it is: it’s a strong, very likeable pop record and a fully deserving Top 30 hit single, a great hook and an instantly appealing sound that demands you listen to it right now. It doesn’t really sound much like the Supremes, but it’s a lot of fun in its own right, a headlong rush of the joys of new love: muddled but somehow uncomplicated, incoherent yet somehow totally relatable.
Reduced to its bare elements, it seems almost mechanical, an equation (Phil Spector + Mickey’s Monkey + (Too Hurt To Cry, Too Much In Love To Say Goodbye x Heat Wave) = When The Lovelight Starts Shining Through His Eyes, QED) – but throughout their three years of being unceremoniously shuffled around various writer/producer combos, the Supremes hadn’t ever had the chance to cut anything like this before, an uptempo Brill Building girl group stomp-along pop record, and they grab the chance to be that kind of group as if their lives depended on it. (Which in a way they did, I suppose.) That gleeful abandon, coupled with more than a hint of desperation, lends the track both an intensity and an almost tangible freshness, like opening a window in a dusty room on a crisp spring day.
It’s a girl group record in the lyrical sense, too: no country and western pastiches or stories about banjo-toting boyfriends here. Instead, there’s something of the naive charm of the Shirelles and the Chiffons in the atmosphere here, the images of sweaters and class rings and holding hands and stolen kisses conjured up by the words here given added impetus by Diana Ross’ high, piping, girlish delivery; there’s an illicit thrill of transgression in those stolen kisses that only works precisely because the character painted by the lyrics lives in a society that’s so very chaste and proper.
The story features the narrator, in successive verses, meeting and then dating a guy who doesn’t say much but shows how he feels when the when the titular “lovelight” starts… well, you can guess the rest. The story doesn’t actually make any sense, and the lyrics are full of holes. There’s dodgy scansion (including a habit – in the chorus especially – of using three syllables for a lot of two-syllable words, suggesting an intentional gimmick rather than an inexplicable lapse of concentration by the hitherto ultra-professional HDH team – WHE-EN the lovelight starts / SHI-I-NING through his eyes / MA-A-ADE me realise / how HE-E felt inside / and when he placed a kiss / U-U-UPON my face…), and a maddening shift in tense, the whole song being narrated in the past tense but then having the present-tense title crowbarred in, so Diana has to sing “starts” rather than “started”.
Though I can’t quibble too much, as it makes for a better, more quotable title for sure, aiming for quotable rather than cheesy and getting pretty close; Oh, when the lovelight starts shining through his eyes, complete with wistful reverie. Diana is telling her schoolfriends a story, breathless with excitement, and so it’s okay if she trips over her words in her dizzy haste – it’s like (He’s) Seventeen, only done competently this time.
That just drives the point home, I guess. It’s a teenage record, quite unlike the grown-up baroque intensity of the Supremes’ later run of famous mid-Sixties hits, instead harking back to I Want A Guy and its flip, Never Again for the first time since those records were released – but with angst and doubt replaced by a huge smile and a giddy celebration of good fortune.
The effect is amplified by Diana’s delivery, such that she sounds younger than she actually was when she recorded this. She was actually 19, but sounds maybe 5 years younger here – compare and contrast Carolyn Crawford’s Devil In His Heart, featuring a girl who really was 14 years old but who sounds so much more mature. (Similarly so Cal Gill of the Velvelettes, or even Mary Wells.) The Supremes were unique, and perhaps uniquely prescient, in going for an aura of youth rather than maturity to tap into a carefree teenage girl group vibe (and market!) It all lends …Lovelight an innocence that really sells both the lyric and the song as a whole, a kind of wide-eyed naĂ¯vetĂ© which adds to the story rather than detracting from it.
But all this analysis of lyrical and vocal moods is as nothing, really, because first and foremost – as with all of Phil Spector’s really big hits – this is a record to get you moving. From the opening salvos of crashing drums and blaring horns, to the almost-constant handclaps and tambourine beats, and the raucous baritone sax (complete with an anguished background yell of YEAAARGHH!! at 1:50, one of the more startling things to crop up on a Motown record so far) and the cooing backing vocals from Florence and Mary, this is a single that sounds so incredibly alive compared to what came before that it’s almost impossible to dislike. If no later Supremes records really sounded much like this one, their pop and vigour – their undeniable energy – was first let loose here; the genie was now out of the bottle and the stopper could only be pushed back in partway.
Too many words; time to wrap this up. The way Diana sings about her boyfriend here actually mirrors the way the song always makes me feel about the Supremes: we have our ups and downs, but man, when HDH give the signal and the chorus rattles along in its awkward, clumsy, totally idiosyncratic but somehow irresistibly charming way…
Then I knew
Oh, then I knew
That he won my heart
Yeah, Diana – I know exactly how you feel.
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.
(Or maybe you’re only interested in The Supremes? Click for more.)
Carolyn Crawford “Devil In His Heart” |
The Supremes “Standing At The Crossroads Of Love” |
DISCOVERING MOTOWN |
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Gordon Frewin said:
Good review… additional (non-Supreme) “voices” in the background too, or is it my imagination that’s playing up again today?
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MotownFan1962 said:
There really are voices on this record that do not belong to The Supremes. The roaring vocals before the insturmental break are provided by The Four Tops and Holland-Dozier-Holland). They also appear on “Run, Run, Run”, practically drowning out Flo and Mary! đŸ˜¦
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Robb Klein said:
I LIKE those added male voices on those two songs. They add a nice contrast, just as Johnny Bristol’s voice did in “Some Day We’ll Be Together”, and Clarence Paul did in some of Stevie’s early songs.
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MotownFan1962 said:
I like them, too, but I like to hear Florence and Mary on The Supremes’ singles. Furthermore, “Lovelight” is one of my favorite Supremes songs because it’s a fun, danceable tune AND because I can hear Flo and Mary’s beautiful voices.
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Dave L said:
We moved around a lot in Philadelphia, where I was born and raised to 15 in 1969.
Each place was nicer than the last and we’d just moved to a big first floor apartment in November of 1963, and it was there, doing my homework in my parents bedroom, which I remember has a sliding door entrance, that I first heard this –any Supremes record- on the little G.E. clock radio I had turned on.
Then and now it was very good, but other than the distinctive sound of the lead girl, one might have guessed this was a mixed-gender group of eight or more. It does not sound like a trio of only three girls. That’s okay too, but it’s also the reason that “Lovelight” was not the song to establish a “Supremes identity.” That would wait till summer, when Diana’s voice was lowered to nearly its speaking sound, and you simply couldn’t resist her hypnotic “baby … baby … baby don’t leave me…” (As Lamont Dozier put it to J. Randy Taraborelli, “She sounded, well, sexy, because she didn’t have to scream.”)
Still, “Lovelight” has its muscularity and strength, and sounds wonderful in any mix of Supremes hits, or alongside “Heat Wave,” “Quicksand,” “Sweetest Boy,” “Witness,” and the other late-’63 HDH material. It had to be the first Christmas for the Supremes that they felt they’d justified a good deal of Motown’s faith and energy in them. By the following Christmas they could rightly feel they were a key item preventing the British wave from owning every slot on the American charts.
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Dave L said:
If we can believe Wikipedia, in addition to Ross, Ballard & Wilson, it’s the Four Tops & Holland-Dozier-Holland themselves. And I know that’s not the first place I’ve read that…
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John Plant said:
Dave – very interesting! -would that the Four Tops then, giving that wonderful energizing roar- to be recycled so beautifully in ‘Reach Out I’ll Be There’??
Nixon, another brilliant fascinating essay, fully justifying its length (some 19th century critic spoke of Schubert’s ‘heavenly lengths’ – there you are, Franz.) Thanks again!
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Dave L said:
Thanks to the CD set, “Live Wire: The Singles,” we know have confirmed also that it’s the Tops behind Martha Reeves on “My Baby Loves Me,” something I should have wondered about way earlier than I did, because there are unmistakable male voices on that one.
Also, if you’ve never heard Stevie’s “Uptight” album, he’s actually doing a duet with Levi Stubbs on “Teach Me Tonight.” Motown kept this a surprise till you heard the album, because nowhere is it mentioned on the label or jacket. đŸ™‚
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John Plant said:
Wow, I’d completely forgotten that- I owned the Uptight album when it was new, but it must have slipped through my fingers during one of my multiple moves… but I can hear that duet now, though I never thought to connect it with Levi. Just beginning to realize to what extent all these interpenetrating voices are part of the glory of Motown (Martha and the Vandellas on early Marvin Gaye, Diana with Mary Wells,
etc.)
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144man said:
It was the Bo Diddley beat in the instrumental break that made me sit up and take notice. Soon HDH would borrow another classic R&B riff in Marvin Gaye’s “You’re A Wonderful One”. Because of the high quality of future Supremes’ releases, it’s easy to under-estimate this record.
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Mark said:
I thought Clarence Paul was singing with Stevie Wonder on that song.
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Dave L said:
Clarence is singing with Stevie on “Blowing In The Wind”; Levi with Stevie on “Teach Me Tonight”.
According to Nelson George in Where Did Our Love Go, even though “Blowing” went No. 9 Pop and No. 1 R&B, Clarence took some criticism inside Motown, some seeing his prominent vocal on the song as using his young protĂ©gĂ©e as a means of re-igniting his own singing career.
Concentrating on Motown’s Detroit days, I’ve had the book since 1986, and recommend it all Motown lovers.
đŸ™‚
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Nick in Pasadena said:
It was the growl/roar in the middle that defined this one for me. In 1963 I thought that was the coolest thing ever. I still listen for it in gleeful anticipation. As great as this disc was, I didn’t thirst for more of the Supremes, as I did when their true hit streak began a year later.
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Mary Plant said:
This song will ever be associated with high school freshman dances – loved it then and love it still. At the very least an 8. Dave L and I were probably listening to the same radio station. And thanks for clearingup the mystery of Teach Me Tonight – I still do own that album – barely playable now. I hope my brother doesn’t try to claim that it’s his!
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Steve Robbins said:
Somehow I missed it the first go-around. After learning of it (and Run, Run, Run) on YouTube, I instantly felt they both should have been re-released once the girls had broken gold. The public would have liked them. There was precedent…Way Over There. Lovelight has that HDH energy, Bowles’ sax, Diana’s crisp voice, lovely background girls, and the obligatory clapping. Those are all the ingredients to be found on the string of #1 hits that were to come. 8/10, plus one bonus point for being such a pivotal historic moment in pop music.
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Robb Klein said:
I don’t like The Supremes’ cuts much, compared with the more soulful artists at Motown. But THIS song and “Run, Run, Run” I thought were their best (maybe “Let me Go the Right Way” a little back of them).
Yes, Beans Bowles played the sax on most of the 1959-63 Motown cuts using sax. Mike Terry started with them in late ’63, and was prominent in many of the 1964 cuts.
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Landini said:
Hey again. Did you ever listen to the A GoGo album ? I thought that showed a more soulful side of the group. They manage to rock out pretty well on Money.
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ExGuyParis said:
This song grabbed me the first time I heard it, and never let go. I vividly remember the first time I heard it, on my transistor radio. We were living in upstate NY and I used to listen to Detroit’s CKLW in the evenings. I was hooked, big time, but I didn’t catch who the song was by. Thus began a quest. I wrote down a run of the notes on a scale, so I’d remember the tune. I heard it a few more times before catching the name of the group. I ran to the record store, and said “Supremes, please.” The clerk said “Who?”
A short time later, this situation was resolved. The love affair continues, almost 48 years later! So of course, this song is a 10/10 for me.
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Abbott Cooper said:
“CKLW in the Motor City.” That was the slogan for that station, but it wasn’t in Detroit at all but rather Windsor, Ontario, just across the Detroit River from the big town. By some miracle, I was able to pick it up on my transistor radio in Queens, NYC by placing it on the window sill in my little bedroom. Tommy Shannon, the evening DJ was better than anyone New York’s pop stations had to offer, and Tommy played Motown, Motown, Motown, seemingly 2 of every 3 records, on his show. None of my friends knew or cared who he was.
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Landini said:
I feel like this song sounds more like Heatwave than Quicksand does. I read that Mary Wilson complained that the Supremes were getting tough songs like the Vandellas. Hey Mary this wasn’t exactly Popsicles Icicles! LOL
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Landini said:
Oops. I meant to say weren’t getting tough songs.
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this old heart said:
can’t hear any spector here. there is a whole lotta vandelles sound going on here along with the real help of the tops. not quite sure when the myth of phil started intertwining its way into this song but it is pure early H/D/H to me, and the real beginning of the supremes as we think of them today. the first near “10” for me!
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Damecia said:
Yay! Finally we have reached “When The Lovelight Starts Shining Through His Eyes”. What a great song! Like you said above this is one of those songs that gets you moving with the opening notes. Diana delivery is great because it holds the tone of excitement and Flo and Mary are killing those “woooooos” in the background. This song really sticks out in the Supremes entire catalog because they never recorded another up-tempo song to match this. Considering their abundance in misses this song is definitely a winner. I love this blog because it really forces you to trace the careers of certain artist. With the Supremes I feel as though I was there during that time because it has been plenty of ups and downs up until this song. Even though I already know their outcome I find myself rooting for them and keeping my fingers crossed that success will come soon. Silly it may sound but it’s true : ). You did a wonderful of acknowledging the importance of this song not on being The Supremes first Top 30 hit, but the union of H-D-H & The Supremes. One (if not the most important) collaborations in history.
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Steve Eaton said:
Because I was exposed to even my favorite
artists back then mainly by Top 40 radio, with very little album contact, there are
many songs I can’t compare. The Supremes,
as a group, were never high on my list.
However, of their tracks I know, “Lovelight”
and “A Breathtaking Guy” are by a wide
margin the best in my opinion. The former
used to carry extra feeling for me, like
Gene Pitney’s “24 Hours From Tulsa”,
because it charted high during the sad
days around the Kennedy assassination,
but I was since pleased to find that without
any of that association, the song is terrific
on its own merit. “Where Did Our Love Go”
a few months later had some appeal at first, but felt too self-consciously contrived as soulful, with the “2”x4″” percussive methodology, and over a short time sounded
like a real disappointment.
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bogart4017 said:
Now that one was a dancer. I remember liking it because it had that cluttered, messy sound and it reminded me a bit of “Mickey’s Monkey”.
Almost a year after its release my sister was still dragging this 45 out to do the Jerk.
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Msongs said:
hi motown fans! in ’64 I was a mere lad living on a US air base at brize norton, all wrapped up in the british groups…you know the ones. I was watching a UK tv show where they had the jukebox jury thing with a panel of teens who voted on records. they played When the lovelight…. and the panel voted and gave it a top score. First time ever hearing the Supremes and I remember it to this very day.
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nafalmat said:
Funnily enough, I remember the same episode of Juke Box Jury, but then I watched virtually every one until it ended sadly in December 1967. This episode was broadcast in January 1964 and I remember thinking at the time ‘who the hell are the Suprermes?’. This was their first release in the UK, and they were unknown to the average Brit pop fan. Little did I know then what a big fan I would become off them and Motown in the next year. I thought this record was so exciting so I went out and bought with my pocket money instead of Cilla Black’s ‘Anyone who had a heart’ which I had intended to buy before I heard this Supremes disc. I remember asking for it in the local record shop and the assistant saying ‘who are the Suprermes?’. I can remember answering and saying ‘ I don’t know, but it’s a damn good record’. I started work shortly after and began buying almost every Motown production on EMI’s Stateside label, and every release on Tamla Motown when EMI introduced the label in March 1965 right through to the end of 1971 after which I began to lose interest in the new releases..
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Abbott Cooper said:
When I played this one from TCMS Vol. 3, Disc 15, Track 9, as the end of the song approached, I held my breath wondering whether the original version with the final chorus would be heard or would I hear the shortened version that so many radio stations had begun playing in 1963 (to save time?) with that extra bar? (my music terminology is limited for lack of education in that area) missing? Even the Sessions 3 LP album “Diana Ross and the Supremes,” which I purchased in lieu of the Supremes Motown anthology because it contained about 6 or 7 Jeanne Terrell led songs, had the short version. But Hooray! The original long version appeared, and I was thrilled to hear the complete song that fully deserves a rating of “9,: Mr. Nixon.
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Slade Barker said:
This record is as good as anything the Supremes — or Motown — ever did. A 10 if there ever was one!!!!
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kevintimba said:
I went through the whole 688 a couple years ago – now I’m doing it again, but side by side with Stax, year by year. To my ear, this song, along with Heat Wave, really leaps out – especially groove-wise – the clave in the snare drum, then a percussion break, then a different groove. Through much of 1963 I was finding much better grooves in Stax, but this is where Motown really steps up its game. Also, HDH seem to be finding their groove in 1963.
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Robb Klein said:
I see that I never rated this. I’d give it a “9”, as 2nd best Supremes’ song.
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