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Tamla T 54091 (A), January 1964
b/w Goddess Of Love
(Written by Smokey Robinson)
Stateside SS 273 (A) – March 1964
b/w Goddess Of Love
(Released in the UK under license through EMI / Stateside Records)
In many ways, this is the starkest illustration yet that the Marvelettes, Motown’s first great girl group, had lost their way. I don’t say they’d gone off the boil – there were plenty of excellent Marvelettes records being made – just that there was no sense of direction about their career any more, no ultimate goal.
This is the biggest what-the-hell moment in the Marvelettes’ canon, and a good candidate for silliest Motown single of 1964 (if not ever). It’s another attempt to reignite the girls’ chart fortunes courtesy of Smokey Robinson, whose previous attempt at the task (the last Marvelettes single, the unpopular As Long As I Know He’s Mine) hadn’t pulled up any trees. Here, Smokey lajunches the girls into a sassy, rollicking girl group clap-along stomper; derivative and dated but wholly charming as it builds to what’s set to be an unstoppable chorus, Gladys Horton on top form once she takes up the lead vocal, leading her cohorts up the scale with a mix of pleasing lightness and military precision, her friends gathered with her for once instead of against her, and it’s an intoxicating mix. “Some girls say he’s so bad / But I can’t agree / ‘Cos if he makes them sad / He’s still sweet to me”, sings Gladys, with utter sincerity and belief, she and the other Marvelettes climbing and soaring towards the inevitable chorus climax, and…
…and…
…And the chorus, I’m not making this up, is Charlie Had A Pigeon. Seriously. Note for note.
(Alright, technically it’s Oh Du Lieber Augustin, to give it its proper name, but for anyone British between the ages of 21 and 70, you’ll instead be instantly brought up short by memories of school coach trips and Charlie had a pigeon, a pigeon, a pigeon / Charlie had a pigeon, a pigeon that flew / It flew in the day, it flew in the night / And when it came back it was covered in / CHARLIE had a pigeon, a pigeon, a pigeon… Americans, I’m informed, know this tune in a similar context as I’m A Little Dutch Girl. It says here.)
Really, I’m not making this up. It lurches from an irresistible 4/4 Brill Building girl group sass-fest to a 3/4 schoolyard clapping game, and with totally straight faces all around, as though Smokey and the girls all thought we wouldn’t bloody notice or something. What on God’s earth anyone involved was thinking, I’ll never know.
A crunching change of momentum, tempo and reality, it doesn’t completely trash the song – the verses are strong enough to withstand the initial WTF moment, and the sentiments actually being expressed lyrically during those very silly choruses are far less incongruous than the music they’re being set to (even if the girls do trip over the word “faithful” at one stage, half of them apparently singing “grateful” instead), while the verses and sax breaks are worth applause of their own. What it does do is turn it from a patchy but passingly-splendid good-time Marvelettes single to a merely interesting (or intriguing) one, a curiosity rather than the reasonable hit we were initially promised.
Like I say each time this sort of thing happens (a potentially great song being held back by some minor error of judgement, I mean, not someone lifting entire chunks of Oh du lieber Augustin into the middle of a record – that’s new), it’s a real pity. In this case, Smokey seems to have deliberately clipped the wings of hs own song, and I still don’t understand why.
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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LOL! In the US, it’s:
Did you ever see a lassie,
A lassie, a lassie?
Did you ever see a lassie,
Go this way and that?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Did_You_Ever_See_a_Lassie%3F
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I was still at school when I first heard this, so the “Oh Du Lieber Augustin” break sounded cute, clever and not at all out-of -place. It still works for me; I like this record a lot, and I’d score it 8/10.
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Perhaps my differing opinion is influenced by the fact that although I went on numerous school coach trips in the 50s and 60s, we never sang “Charlie Had A Pigeon”, which I’ve never heard of until now despite knowing the tune.
It reminds me of when my nephew heard “Land of Hope And Glory” for the first time he couldn’t understand why anyone would write a hymn to the tune of “We Hate Nottingham Forest”.
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Ha ha… Frasier flashback ahoy. As for Charlie, I honestly thought it was a universal British thing – I can imagine it not bringing listeners up quite so short if one didn’t know it that way. Still baffled why seemingly no reviewers mention the interpolation though.
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I can remember a contemporary review describing it as something like “an amusing break into “Little German Band”.
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Amusing is right – this made me burst out laughing the first time I heard it, it was so jarring. But that quote you’ve provided is quite literally the only time I’ve heard of a reviewer picking up on it, which has always confused me. (Both TCMS 4 and Terry Wilson don’t seem to realise it’s not Smokey’s own tune, for instance, praising him for his inventiveness in including a chorus in a totally different time signature to the rest of the song.)
As I said in the review, once the shock’s worn off a bit, I find the choruses quite sweet (especially the middle one, coming after the “lazy boyfriend” verse – I never saw a guy as ambitious as my guy / Never saw a guy as ambitious as he one, a strangely appropriate sing-song way of Gladys politely telling her parents to shut up because they don’t know what they’re talking about.)
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Well, if we wonder how high a grade this one gets from Motown itself, we need only notice it never saw any album release until 11 years later in the “Anthology” set, 1975, a half-decade after the group itself was disbanded.
Frankly, I’ve always found the lyrics little more sophisticated than a jump rope chant. I agree it does not show new direction for the group (though that’s coming soon enough with the next one). Like the previous Marvelettes record, its message is “he’s my guy no matter what anybody says about him”. We’ve been here before, and the same man who gave us the cleverness of I’ll Try Something New, Everybody’s Got To Pay Some Dues, and The Way You Do The Things You Do, you won’t convince me stayed up long sweaty nights wringing this one out.
What saves it, and makes it fully worthy of the grade you award is the performance of The Marvelettes. Publicly, Juanita was out of the group at this point, but possibly still on recordings. But whether it’s five girls or four, all are working like 10 men to make a silk purse of an almost-sow’s ear, and they succeed more than they fail. Their confidence in their ability has come a long way, and it shows. After watching the Vandellas get the far more mature material of the Memories/Heat Wave/Quicksand/Live Wire-arc, they had to be asking themselves “when are we going to be allowed to grow up too…?”
Knowing now that the fantastic Knock On My Door was in the can as of 12/30/63, and beginning a 22+ years, dust-collecting idleness, I would love to know the opinion of any surviving Marvelette about He’s A Good Guy getting the single release nod instead.
Though this represents the group running in place, so to speak, it’s not a bad record and, wisely, Motown paired it with another jewel from the “Playboy” LP, a fine Holland-Dozier-Gorman nugget and a winsome Wanda inviting us on her flight of romantic fantasy. Thus, no one’s getting their paws on my copy of Tamla 54091, until it’s time divvy up my estate.
🙂
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Dave, your remark about the ‘jump rope chant’ got me thinking. This is Smokey experimenting, and even though we agree the results here are less than satisfying , it’s this kind of gesture which will blossom into the magnificent carousel sounds which introduce and permeate ‘The Tears of a Clown’ . The incursion of deliberately incongruous elements – in this case, precisely, a jump-rope sort of sound. Here it’s simply too incongruous to work, but it’s perhaps the grand-daddy of the masterfully incongruous carousel gesture in the later song.
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A fine theory, but Smokey didn’t write the music for “The Tears of a Clown” – that was Stevie Wonder (according to accounts by both men), who’d written a “circus style” piece of music in 1966, recorded it with Hank Cosby arranging, but then gave it to Smokey because Wonder didn’t know what to do with it. Robinson’s contributions were the lyrics and the unexpected vocal melody (which, if you listen to the song, isn’t at all suggested by the raw music track). But that’s a story for another day!
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Tears of a Clown is fascinating; it also contains the melody of the Westminster Chime!
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For once, I rate a Marvelettes song lower than you do. For me, the Augustin/Lassie/Pigeon business renders the song almost unendurable. And I don’t get the sheer joyful lift out of this one that ‘As Long as I Know He’s Mine’ (still a favourite) invariably provides. But this is the bottom of the trough, I think – co-equal with ‘My Daddy Knows Best’ for their worst A-side ever – and a whole string of inspired triumphs (perhaps not always chart triumphs, but certainly musico-lyrical ones) is just around the corner.
I might grudgingly accord it a 4 – for the exuberance which is undoubtedly there, though her unstinting praise for her boyfriend’s ambition makes the Pigeon reference even more painful… Is she singing about Napoleon??
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This record works until the I never met a guy as ambitious as my guy chant! Its fun to listen to as a fan but as a record buyer its probably a guilty pleasure. There is nothing outstanding about it except the fact that the break sounds like girls singing Miss Mary Mack or a jump rope tune.
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This is definitely a strange one. Much prefer the B side
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I think the “grateful/faithful” snafu here was a crude overdub attempt, since it happens BOTH times. Still, this is one of my favorite Marvellettes tunes, as it maintains the 1963-era Motown exuberance that would soon disappear. A fun song.
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This is one of my favorite Motown Records ever. It’s creative, funny, exuberant, utterly charming, and it swings (including the 3/4 sections). The lyric is great: my take is that Gladys is kind of talking herself into loving this guy- she’s not totally sure herself.
Also the recording quality is a bit better than some of the contemporaneous Motown stuff. It sounds very tight.
10+/10.
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Thank you for FINALLY clearing up the mystery of the melody that makes up the 3/4 waltz-time sections of this song: Charlie Had A Pigeon / Oh Du Lieber Augustin.
I always knew that part of the song came from somewhere- I’d heard the melody and kept coming back to “London Bridge Is Falling Down” but knew that wasn’t it. My thought was how amazing Smokey was to even try something as death-defying as dropping something like that into a Motown song. I had to give him kudos for having guts to try something out of the ordinary.
My first listen to this song- well, it was one of those “O.K. that wasn’t super bad, but it wasn’t super good” moments. But then, oddly that Charlie Had A Pigeon chant kept creeping into my mind at any given moment of a day. I dug out the record and listened again. This is one of those songs that really, really, really worked some kind of spell on me because in time I grew to enjoy it quite a bit.
I won’t say it’s among the best that the group or Smokey came up with, but it’s pure FUN! And sometimes a FUN record beats a “relevant” record by miles. One thing is for sure: only the Marvelettes could have made anything out of the song. I always get the feeling that even with sub-par material, the girls just thought, “Whatever. Let’s just have a good time and sing the hell out of it!”
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Far far far from my favorite. The girls should have been “out of high school” now so to speak. Lyrically and musically. I hated it the first time i heard it and its almost impossible to dance to because its in “cut time”. Luckily some hipped me to the flip side so i purchased a copy. “Goddess of Love” is where they should have been.
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It’s a quirky song, with the tempo changes and silly lyrics, but I like it, nevertheless. I’d give it a “7”. I’m generally not fond of German songs, but that association doesn’t ruin this one.
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I like this one a lot more than most of those whose comments precede mine, excepting the good Governor of Pennsylvania, whose rating exceeds even mine. But the ones who loved it the most were the DJs at station WMCA, (570 on the AM dial), “The Home of the Good Guys” in the early and mid-sixties. They played this record all day, every day. To them, this song was a gift from heaven and a continuous advertisement for their station.
As much as I liked listening to it, dancing to it was another story, considering how we had to break into a waltz at 3 intervals. And the incongruous pigeon song brings to mind the records of Rufus Thomas, the King of Incongruity, whose records opened with anything from “The Wedding March” (on “Walking the Dog”), “Old MacDonald Had a Farm” (“Can Your Monkey Do the Dog”), “Yankee Doodle” (“That’s Really Some Good” with daughter Carla), to a sample from a classical piece whose name escapes me but can be heard on infomercials in the middle of the night (“Little Sally Walker”). These features worked for Rufus just as the pigeons work for the Marvelettes, as long as we don’t take these songs too seriously, and that’s why I seriously award this song “8” pigeons.
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BEST comment. Hands down. To find out WMCA was playing this, and playing it often is wonderful. And yes, I agree- as long as we don’t take songs too seriously, they can be quite enjoyable! I said it before and I’ll say it again: only the Marvelettes could have made this work and make it fun!
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I bought a copy of this, along with two other Marvelettes 45s, at a record show this past weekend. Just listening to them today and this recording stopped me cold. I have to wonder if Smokey Robinson thought it would be lark to throw this familiar piece of cartoon music (where I knew it from) into an otherwise-solid girl group song. It’s definitely different!
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