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Motown M 1053 (A), January 1964
b/w Better Late Than Never
(Written by Berry Gordy)
By the time Bobby Breen arrived at Hitsville, he was in his late thirties and already seen as washed-up. A former child movie star (and a genuine star at that, a top box office draw and one of RKO’s most prized assets), he had the good fortune to be spotted as a passable kid actor with a fine voice just as the Hollywood vogue for sound musicals came into full force. But once puberty kicked in, Bobby’s act was done, and his career with it, Breen having failed to transition to adolescent and adult roles. He made his final movie at the age of 14 before becoming a full-time singer, doing some club work and cutting a few schlocky pseudo-standards in the Fifties before drifting into obscurity. By the time Motown picked him up, he was positively prehistoric; it was already ten long, lean years since he’d appeared on The Comeback Story to talk about the challenges he’d faced moving to a new career and how hard he was finding it to get work.
Still, the lure of signing a white MOR star was too great for Berry Gordy to resist, regardless of whether said star was on the downswing of his career, and so it came to pass that in mid-December of 1963, Bobby Breen arrived at Hitsville to try and revive his flagging fortunes.
Berry badly wanted Bobby to succeed, too; the boss dusted off an old Marv Johnson number he’d written for Marv over at United Artists, a complex story of a bittersweet love triangle, and then took charge of Bobby’s first Hitsville recording session, which resulted in this single. Bobby was Motown’s first white male crooner signing since Don McKenzie back in 1961; sadly, he was almost as ill-fated.
Perhaps it was just that his time had already passed; the fortuitous timing of his birth which led to his first career also meant he was too late for what could easily have been his second. A voice from another age, an age of innocence when Italian crooners dominated the airwaves and the pop charts, and quite at odds with the fashions of 1964.
Instead, in these surroundings, Breen sounds a bit like Roy Orbison drowning in a bathtub of fondue, his precise and mannered diction redolent of Eddie Holland’s most irritatingly precious moments. His performance is wedded to an already wandering song that’s been given a particularly cheesy new arrangement, practically wallowing in misery and self-pity.
Worse, it doesn’t even make sense. Marv Johnson’s original version cuts straight into the main refrain of the chorus – a pair of clandestine lovers trying to work out how to break the news to the woman’s current boyfriend, who also happens to be the man’s best friend – before Marv reveals he’s not the cheating friend but the current boyfriend who’s overheard all of this, and he feels bad for them having to tiptoe around. Not the clearest of scenarios, and for Bobby’s version, things are rewritten, moving the explanation right to the start of the song. Rather than have Bobby sing the lines, Gordy instead demands an ultra-naff spoken-word intro to provide context:
My true love, and my best friend
I love them both ’til the very end
Though they hurt me – how they hurt me!
They made me die within!
When I heard them say…
…resulting in some (ironically) poor acting and convoluted songwriting twists, all apparently in order to distance wholesome, clean-cut Bobby from the distasteful idea of considering shacking up with another man’s wife, no matter how momentarily the listener would be under this impression. Instead, the lyrical swap-around changes the focus of the song, casting him from the very start as the moping, cuckolded third party and sacrificing the ambiguity of the original’s clever (if confusing) twist. It’s a miscalculation, because after a couple of minutes of this, you’re positively rooting for the illicit lovers rather than our Bobby – certainly I feel like breaking up with him by the end.
There are a few nice chord changes amid the MOR gloop, and Bobby is at least trying, so it’s not getting a 1 – but it’s still a pretty poor start, all told.
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!)
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Bobby Breen “Better Late Than Never” |
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Thanks for the SENSATIONAL link. And a tip of the hat to Bobby Breen – who, Wikipedia tells us, is now running a talent agency in Florida. He must have raked in a lot of fine karma with that moment. When I was a kid in a mostly unintegrated south Jersey town, our minister wanted to shake things up a bit by arranging exchange visits of our choir with the superb choir of a black church nearby. We had a boy soprano with a similarly angelic voice, and I can tell you that he got the reception of a lifetime when we visited the black church. I hope those ‘Hallelujahs’ and ‘Praise Gods’ are still resonating in his memory – and I hope the same for Bobby Breen.
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I wonder how many people bought Bobby Breen’s “When the Lights Go Out” thinking it was a Motown record because it was on Fontana. This Bobby Breen was a black jazz singer who sang with Tubby Hayes’ band.
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Berry was equally fascinated with Doris Day. In his mid-90s autobiography, “To Be Loved,” there’s an affectionate picture of Gordy presenting a tearful, elderly Day with the song “You Are You,” which he long earlier had written for her.
Gordy’s idea of what constituted glamour in female stars quite clearly comes from the Hollywood of Day’s greatest working years, and certainly shows in the way Gordy presented his own, real female stars. This is readily apparent in many a live performance today preserved by YouTube. Perhaps unlike the wishful thinking behind the signing of Breen, in this case Gordy’s good judgment has stood test of time. At a moment in rock and roll history, when many female acts were starting to ‘let it all hang out,’ or some even appear slovenly, Motown’s women were epitomizing -in dress and behavior- all the upscale sophistication Gordy could layer on. Some of those young women singers at the time might have thought it corny or even sell-out, but I suspect they all bless him for that “old-fashioned” thinking today.
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Three great comments there – thanks, everyone!
John: Bobby had the good fortune to have his moments of vocal triumph recorded for posterity, and I’m sure he received ample tokens and mementoes of his glory days (as well as plenty of money!) to deservedly look back on with fondness.
144man: Indeed! There’s a similar comment made in the TCMS liner notes about (I think) Gene Henslee, or some other Mel-o-dy C&W stalwart, who recorded something for a soul label (Fortune?) in the mid-Sixties, and people buying it imagining it would be an R&B number. In this instance, I think fans of Motown buying that Fontana platter in search of “our” Bobby might have had an unexpected treat getting Tubby’s Bobby instead…
Dave: Couldn’t agree more. There are whole volumes to be written about the psychology behind this, but it’s undeniable that Gordy’s aspirations toward being “classy” served his artists brilliantly in the Sixties. It was often said that Maxine Powell was grooming Motown’s artists to play only two venues – the White House and Buckingham Palace – and there’s no telling what sort of impact that insistence on proper presentation had in an industry (and to an extent, a society) that was still only just moving away from fundamentally racist principles.
You have no idea how much I’ve had to sit on my hands these last couple of days to avoid spoiling the surprise (for those who’ve not heard it) that the B-side is actually rather lovely. And Motown – and therefore Motown Junkies – isn’t done with Bobby just yet. There’s even a picture sleeve coming up!
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I will often wonder whether this was a clever update and re-write or just another way to clean up a dirty little ghetto soap. “Shacking/cheating” songs back then were the things the hardcore blues guitarist would sing about.
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Like the other side of this disc, the deeply sad lyric is ideally suited to the singer’s weak and warbling vocal. He really did have most peculiar voice. Still a quality song, but not as good a song as the other side. On the fade his voice becomes even more absurd and the high note he hits at the end of the fade is most unnerving. To some this record up in one word, I would say ‘weird’!
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