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VIP 25004 (A), February 1964
b/w She’s My Baby
(“Written by Michael Valvano, Andre Williams and Jerome Sims”, it says here)
By 1964, Motown was racking up more and more hits, which meant more and more records filling up the release schedules, which meant more and more hits, and so on. That bumper, ever-increasing crop of releases (this is track 24 on The Complete Motown Singles: Volume 4 and we’re still only up to mid-February) included all manner of curios in amongst the classics, with no small amount of opportunistic bandwagon-jumping – of which this is the most egregious example. (Haven’t we grown out of this sort of demeaning cash-in schtick by now? Well, apparently no, we haven’t.)
Give Me A Kiss is a jokey response to the recent hit success of the Beatles. The Hornets were fronted by Motown studio hand Mike Valvano, formerly of Mike and the Modifiers – those paying attention at the back will remark on this as a wise choice, as Valvano’s only previous Motown release as an artist, I Found Myself A Brand New Baby back in the summer of ’62, had also flirted with the Merseybeat sound.
I say it’s a “response” to the Beatles; it’s actually a note-for-note cover of I Want To Hold Your Hand (with the chorus changed ever so slightly in the foolhardy hope of avoiding another Tomorrow and Always-style copyright infringement scandal – Motown was a lot bigger now, meaning there was a lot more to lose). It’s somewhere between a spoof and a rip-off, an embarrassing ode to kissing which spends its entire duration describing the location of the lips –
Below your eyebrows
And right between your ears
There lies the answer
Where all the red appears
Let’s come to grips
I want your lips…
– sung terribly by Valvano, which is already bad enough, but the record then goes plunging off a cliff face into a whole new canyon of badness.
To wit: The song’s called Give Me A Kiss, right? Except that the Hornets never actually sing the word “kiss” – instead, they leave that word blank (“Come on, give me a…” (PAUSE)), and then fill those spaces with them making kissing noises. Yes, I’m serious.
This is just a stupid, stupid record, daffy in the extreme (“Let’s make this scene for Listerine!… My lips are waiting for smoochy souvenirs!”, not to mention rhyming “They do it in Egypt” with “Don’t want to see me jipped”). It’s much less funny than I’m probably making it sound; a complete insult not only to the Beatles themselves (who probably never even found out about this travesty) but to their fans, of whom Motown clearly thought very little if they envisaged shifting lots of copies of Give Me A Kiss to newly-minted Beatle freaks across America. They won’t notice, they’re just screaming girls, right? They’ll buy any old shit. Which is both condescending and flat out wrong, the complete antithesis of Motown’s usual approach to applying the very highest standards to what other, lesser labels considered to be cheap, disposable pop music.
So bad it’s almost physically painful; scarcely funny even on the level of parody, and perhaps fittingly even the laughs to be had at its expense are cheap and short-lived.
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 can’t be the only visitor you make glad to never have heard of some of these things. The first six months of Beatlemania in America fostered more insanity than just this. Even though only 10 then, I haven’t forgotten.
I remember reading one writer stating that the Fab Four’s first appearance on Ed Sullivan, amounted to a warm signal from British cousins to a grieving America, still reeling from the sudden murder of a beloved president, that we had ‘permission’ to be happy again. I liked that.
You’re right that the Beatles probably never heard this, but even if they had, I think they would have taken even such a brain-dead salute with a chuckle. The mutual affection between the Beatles and Motown was as real as it gets, which I expect you’ll touch on when you come to Mary Wells’ Motown swansong.
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It’s amazing that this was released, yet R Dean Taylor’s superior “My Lady Bug Stay Away from That Beatle” (which is due to be reviewed soon) was not.
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I agree with your grading. But I disagree, in the sense that you believe that Berry Gordy thought he had a chance to make money off The Beatles craze. I don’t think Gordy had any intention of putting almost any money into this record to make it possible for it to turn a profit. There were so few of these pressed up that it was a dead rare record even in mid 1964. Yes, DJ copies were pressed up. But there was never any push from Motown to get it played. I think it was a fun project for Valvano, and maybe Gordy sort of “gave him this little gift”, knowing he’d lose a little money on it.
Did the Quality Control group REALLY think they could get pop DJs to play this? Not a chance! Why, then, was it scheduled for release and given a half-hearted marketing effort, and DJ copies pressed up?-Because Gordy wanted Valvano to have his project.
Did Gordy REALLY believe he had a chance to make money with Al Klein’s Mel-o-dy novelty cuts? (I’m not talking about the Country-Western)-but the Chuck-A-Lucks and Nikiter Armstrong.
No, he didn’t. But Al Klein did a good job distributing Motown records in The South, and Gordy wanted to keep him happy. Wasn’t Haney a DJ? Klein must have owed him a few favours.
I’m not saying that Gordy didn’t make some mistakes. But no one can convince me that he was ignorant enough about the Pop music market to think that some of these atrocities pressed up on Motown labels would be able to make money for him. I suspect that he didn’t lose money on them, however, as he probably wrote off the full standard average industry production cost figure for those “duds”, despite spending a lot less on their production than the legitimate cuts he pushed.
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I meant to reply to this two years ago, so, um, forgive the belated response.
I know what you mean, and the write-off argument is a compelling one (I’d never put it past Berry Gordy to pass up an opportunity to game the system for a few thousand bucks, and I mean that as a compliment.) And if anyone within the organisation was ever “owed” a favour by Motown as a nice gesture, it was surely Mike Valvano.
However, while I wasn’t there and thus can’t comment on any first-hand experience, I’ve read and heard and seen enough about early-’64 Beatlemania in the USA (including a Beatles museum exhibit in Liverpool which had literally hundreds, possibly thousands, of American knock-off tie-in records aping the look, sound or even name of the Beatles) to make it entirely plausible that Motown could have hoped for some kind of piece of that same action. Not that they pushed particularly hard or anything, of course.
My theory on all of these things remains the same, really; Gordy scattered small-denomination chips right across the table, and if one of them bucked the odds and hit, sold a few copies, then hey, fantastic, but if not, well, Motown was big enough to absorb the losses incurred by such a scattergun approach, so much the better if a few backs were scratched along the way.
I don’t think Motown put out some of these weird curios (or the Mel-o-dy C&W records) expecting hits, but nor do I believe they thought they had no chance at all – I just feel that the further away from the label’s home turf you get (in marketing terms), the more guesswork was involved as to what was good, bad, or vaguely likely to be popular. But it’s only a theory.
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Blech! When I first heard this disk I didn’t care that it was a Beatles ripoff, just that it was awful no matter what it aped. I’d rather listen to Freddie and the Dreamers on a continuous loop for a lifetime than hear this single even once more.
These early ’64 disks as a whole seem to compare unfavorably with late ’63 releases. Alas, my oddball favorites aren’t going to be reviewed for awhile yet. Oh, also I second 144man’s R. Dean Taylor comment above. Way better single. Not a favorite of mine, but still a giant leap beyond this.
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You’re right about the overall quality threshold, but remember we’re still only six or seven weeks into the year – there was just so much material on the books now that we’ve had 30-odd tracks at a point where previously we might have had ten, so some dilution was inevitable, I suppose.
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Your idea about these early in the year songs being dumped into the post-Christmas lull is intriguing, as if it’s tryout time. The only practical thing this means is that my Disc 1 is nearly pristine. It didn’t really get played except the first time and again now that you’re reviewing them.
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As someone who’s kinda young and who only discovered this song through the Complete Motown Singles collection and through the Pitchfork review of the 1964 set that also described the song’s badness, I think this is one of those rare “so bad it’s good” songs. I can’t figure out why, except that the lyrics are really, really stupid.
This is a bold title to dub it, but I think “Give me a Kiss” may very well be the “Troll 2” of Motown records.
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Sentences you never thought you’d read, Part 389!
I can see what you mean, and were I feeling more charitable this might have raised a smile through its audacious crapness, but I wasn’t in the mood and this stony-faced review is the result. Sorry, Hornets fans.
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Hornets fans? They exist?
Your review of this record is off the chain!
I can’t wait to hear it for, as you can probably imagine, i missed it the first go-round.
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It has a nice proto-psychedelic chord change in there. Other than that, I gots nothing!
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