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Motown M 1058 (A), April 1964
b/w Last Night I Had A Vision
(Written by Brian Holland, Lamont Dozier and Edward Holland Jr.)
Before I get to talking about this record, a quick aside: Motown Junkies has been shortlisted for the “Best Music & Entertainment Blog” category at the 2011 Wales Blog Awards, an unexpected but very pleasant surprise. Thanks everyone!
And now, back to Eddie Holland.
Eddie’s performing career was almost over – this was his penultimate Motown single before he retired to concentrate full-time on songwriting. It’s often cited as one of the great Motown ironies, Eddie giving up as a singer just as his records were starting to make waves on the singles charts again. But he never enjoyed performing, and Motown had no shortage of young would-be stars queueing up behind him, all jockeying for limited space on the release schedules. He only seems to have kept going for as long as he did out of a grim determination to prove he could do the business as a singer; once he’d finally managed to follow up 1961’s Jamie with another smattering of hit records, his work on this side of the glass was done.
Still, before he quit, he left us Just Ain’t Enough Love, and I’m certainly glad of it. This is Eddie’s best solo record, a key piece of both the Holland-Dozier-Holland story and the quest for the mythical “Motown Sound”, as well as a corking pop single in its own right.
This is in many ways the first recognisably HDH production, the sound that would become the bread and butter of Motown’s Golden Age, the time between 1964 and 1967 when you could instantly identify a Motown record. One of the earliest appearances of the trademark 4/4 pop beat, accented by handclaps, guitar and piano, all underpinned by horns, thudding bass and the cooing backing vocals of the Andantes… it’s all here.
That Golden Age sound – now so familiar as to be called “the Motown Sound” without further explanation – gave Motown’s writers, producers, musicians and artists a kind of iconography to work with, a structure that everyone understood without ever seeing the formal rules written down. All of Motown’s mid-Sixties pop records would be defined by this standard structure, whether they followed it, found new ways to work within it, or outright rebelled against it. But its presence was impossible to ignore, always there in the background. You could pick up a Motown record without ever hearing it, and just know you were likely going to get something pretty good.
That’s a double-edged sword, of course – there have always been those who criticise Motown’s mid-Sixties pop output as being too samey or safe (Phil Spector going as far as accusing Motown of releasing the same record each week with slightly different EQ levels), and it’s true that there’s not a lot to distinguish the best Motown productions of mid- to late-1964 from those of two and a half years later. But for me, that’s one of the joys of Motown, and one of the reasons I started doing this blog; the productions are related, rather than identical. The basic blocks are there, but they’re just the foundations, it still takes some special magic to build a great single atop those foundations, and in the mid-Sixties, Motown had that magic in spades.
Sure, there are set parameters to work within, but that makes it all about the song, all about the performances; like an exercise in seeing just what you can do with the same few basic ingredients, the focus moves to the chefs and the diners, not the guy who delivered the vegetables. And the results are extraordinary, such that you can’t help but be struck by the astonishing quality threshold of mid-Sixties Motown. There’s just an incredible body of work, a massive canon of classic pop songs, a well of new stuff to discover which never seems to be in danger of running dry (even now, getting on for fifty years later, there are still previously-unheard tapes and acetates being unearthed which could have rocked the Top Ten had they been released back in the day). If you don’t thrill to Golden Age Motown, then the chances are you just don’t like pop music all that much.
Here, Eddie Holland and his partners seem to have almost stumbled upon the secret by accident. Recorded less than three weeks before it was released, this is another step forward from Smokey’s My Guy in establishing those parameters. Eddie’s previous single, the pounding Leaving Here, had been an attempt to write a frantic dance hit, but it owed more to early-Sixties rock and electric blues sounds than to anything from the pop world, and its approach to creating an energetic, high-tempo attack – rooted in the raw, masculine tropes of hard blues, Stax-esque proto-soul and bar-room rock – marked it out as being a product of its time.
Eddie had disliked the speed of Leaving Here, jokingly chiding Lamont Dozier for scuppering the single’s chances of climbing the charts by doing it all too fast, but the truth is that Leaving Here is immediately identifiable as a number from a time when all cuts could be categorised into “sweet” or “hot”, and ultimately it wasn’t pop enough to make the grade in the weird atmosphere that prevailed in the winter of 1963. Just Ain’t Enough Love, on the other hand, is noticeably different; straight away, we know this is something new. Slower but more energetic, smoother but more urgent, softer but more danceable, somehow both sweeter and hotter.
The difference is all about approach. My Guy is quieter and more gentle than Leaving Here, but it’s twice as powerful; HDH, who never let a good idea get past them, must have been paying attention, and here they set about adapting that power for their own purposes. By stirring up a heady stew of musical elements – crotchet notes, steady 4/4 beat, rich horns, lush female BVs, gospel touches, semi-improvised basslines, lead vocals allowed to roam free off the beat – the record (any record) ends up with a relentless, unstoppable rhythm, almost regardless of tempo. Give it a strong tune with a killer hook like this one, and bingo! – you’ve got yourself a Motown single.
History gives us a different perspective on this record than would have been apparent at the time; listening to Just Ain’t Enough Love through the filter of a hundred classic Motown hits, it’s those later hits we hear, and not the various influences that led to this point. For an audience in April 1964, without any knowledge of what was going to happen next, perhaps the differences between this and, say, Come And Get These Memories wouldn’t have seemed so pronounced; or perhaps they’d have seemed even greater.
Historical significance, historical schmignificance. What’s it like? It’s splendid. Eddie, who always seemed too dapper, too polite to be a hip-shaking R&B star, is in his element in these more refined surroundings, his mannered diction and unusual phrasing carried by that non-stop backbeat and those gliding horns, his little acts of rebellion in the form of vocal jazz stylings (THESE are the words my baby spoke… SO SURE this would satisfy!) carried by the Andantes’ beautiful rolling oooohs and their rougher, earthier call-and-response chants of Just ain’t enough love!, sharply punctuating any left-over preciousness. The whole mix suits Eddie’s voice and delivery better than anything he’d ever done before; by the time we get to the second chorus and Eddie abandons the main vocal line entirely, freestyling muttered asides as the Andantes carry the tune, we know he’s enjoying himself, and that’s always fun to hear – as with several of Eddie’s best cuts, you can actually hear the smile on his face.
It’s a nice lyric, too, Eddie recounting how his girlfriend left him because their relationship just wasn’t right, accepting his fate rather than moping – not in public, anyway – but providing the whole thing as a cautionary tale should any foolish lovers be taking their partners for granted. As with so many of HDH’s mid-Sixties pop masterworks, the anguish of the lyric plays against the bouncy, upbeat rhythms of the music, a trick which increases rather than diminishes the impact, with the indefinable sense of longing in the tune forming a kind of bond between the two.
It’s really just a lovely record, and it was a deserved hit, albeit a minor one (just missing the R&B Top 30 and the pop Top 50 respectively); a few more of these and Eddie would be set, if not as a superstar then at least as a respectable performer with a decent fanbase, healthy sales and the potential for a lifetime of oldies shows. But it wasn’t what he wanted, and it wasn’t what he was best at.
This song would have worked just as well for the Temptations, or the Four Tops, or Marvin Gaye (or, indeed, the Isley Brothers, as we’ll see at a later date); oh, make no mistake, Eddie does very well with it, but my point is that Motown already had several guys who could sing a few more of these, while guys who could write some more of these were in short supply. And, of course, guys who could write were paid better than guys who could sing.
Eddie was one of the sharpest and shrewdest of Motown’s cast of behind-the-scenes genii – he’d originally wheedled his way into the writing team set up by his brother Brian and his friend Lamont Dozier with their friend Freddie Gorman precisely because he’d worked out where the bigger numbers on the royalty cheques were going – and he had no wish to try and combine the two sides of his career as Smokey Robinson had managed. As a result, Just Ain’t Enough Love stands alone as a reminder of something that might have been, a songwriting milestone rather than the beginning of a string of classics for Eddie Holland the performer. There wasn’t even a new B-side to go with this one, Motown instead going to Eddie’s back catalogue and making the baffling selection of Last Night I Had A Vision, a two-year-old MOR ballad, to back it up.
But don’t let that take away from how good this is. Short and sweet (just over two minutes), this is nonetheless as perfect an encapsulation of everything Motown had been working towards all of these years as we’ve yet seen, and more importantly it just happens to be a great pop single to boot. The best thing Eddie Holland ever recorded as a performer, even if he understandably never tried to better it.
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 Eddie Holland? Click for more.)
Marvin Gaye & Mary Wells “What’s The Matter With You Baby” |
The Temptations “I’ll Be In Trouble” |
DISCOVERING MOTOWN |
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144man said:
This song really suits Eddie’s voice, so much so that I believe every single word he says. It’s a real quality record, and there’s not much to choose between this and “Candy to Me”.
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BILLY RICHARDSON said:
This song IS MOTOWN at its very level best on all counts. An outstanding record and as much as I love my “girls” (supremes), this is my favorite Motown record of all time, most definitely. I have danced drenched with sweat at each playing of it, even today all 63 years of me on the “flo” cutting a rug off this relentless beat of a record!
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MIchaelS said:
Most deserving of a “9,” this recording contains excellent performances by Eddie Holland, the Funk Brothers and the Andantes (the girls really shine on this one).
And, Mr. Nixon, this essay is, arguably, one of your very best. Congratulations on
your nomination and keep on writing!
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dvlaries said:
Wholehearted agreement from me too. đŸ™‚ This one plain kicks ass and belongs in any 1964 Motown mix, standing proudly alongside all the juicy HDH material so far: the Vandellas five in a row, “Sweetest Boy,” “Witness,” “Wonderful One,” “Dance To Keep From Crying,” “Knock On My Door” …all of them.
I don’t think it was until the mid 70s that I finally got the 45, but I’ve two of them now and take good care of them. Eddie really deserved one more album in the 60s that gathered this, “Leaving Here,” and “Candy To Me” – all fine dance records.
A 9 it truly is and (!) congratulations on the much deserved recognition for this wonderful site. đŸ™‚ đŸ™‚ đŸ™‚
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Michael said:
Great review and couldn’t agree more. Definately a 9. Congratulations on your nomination. Much deserved.
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John Plant said:
I haven’t HEARD this yet, so I can’t assent or dissent.. but I am about to fork out 99 cents to itunes, as I’ve done so often after reading your analysis… One of the wonderful things about this site is that I can almost unfailingly tell when I’m going to like a song I haven’t heard – not merely because of the rating, but because you give such a vivid picture of what the song is like. So I’ve downloaded some 5s and 6s on the strengths of your description… and made some wonderful discoveries (of course, when you give a 9 or a 10 to a song I haven’t heard, I download it without hesitation – and I’ve only been disappointed once – (you know which one!) – and even that disappointment is provisional! – I may yet ‘hear’ the light! – Congratulations on the richly deserved recognition of this gloriously well-named site, which has certainly created a dependence in this reader’s psyche. Can’t wait for tomorrow!
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The Nixon Administration said:
I’m actually on commission from Apple, and this whole site has been a complicated ploy to get you to buy more downloads.
The name is a jokey reference to an early Manic Street Preachers song called Motown Junk, the product of a young band looking for notoriety, most notable for the line “I laughed when Lennon got shot”; lead singer (not songwriter) James Dean Bradfield, who’s quoted as someone who enjoys a lot of Motown and Northern Soul (always fun watching him tie himself in knots trying to reconcile that with the sentiment of the song), used to open Motown Junk at live shows by interpolating the opening lines of Baby Love, as in that video. He’s stopped doing it the last couple of times I’ve seen them.
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treborij said:
I’m going to dissent on this one a little bit. I like it enough. Never heard it at the time of the release and didn’t hear until I got TCMS 64. But every time I listen to it I can’t help but wish they had given this tune to Marvin rather than Eddie Holland singing it.
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Landini said:
Hey Gang! I had to comment. The Isley Bros version of this is playing right now on my computer. They do a smokin version of this tune! Surprised no one has mentioned it. I guess it will coming up in time right Nix?
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144man said:
You’ll have to wait until March 1967 for that one.
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Landini said:
Yeah. It is funny you mention that because my favorite Motown period is 1967-1968. That was when I actually starting hearing & buying Motown songs new. I started buying pop/soul records at the tender age of 9! Have a great day!
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bogart4017 said:
I thought this would be lopw-rated but i’m glad i was proven wrong. One of the best releases of ’64, this one should have been much bigger. Again it was probably a case of “we only have so many top 40 slots” so maybe it was a matter of timing.
Even though the Isleys recorded a version, Eddie’s is much better (and i am a huge Isleys fan). I can hear Levi and the Tops doing it though.
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Kevin Moore said:
This whole track is built on a pedal tone (only one main bass pitch) – I’m trying to think of pop music examples of that prior to 1964.
Also, highly ironic that a guy with such a fabulous voice has stage fright while so many born performers have such intonation problems.
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Robb Klein said:
I like this song a lot, but I don’t think it measures up to other Motown “9s”. I’d give it a “7.8”.
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Don't Mess With Will said:
I agree that this is a sure 9 and Eddie’s best. I really like your characterization of HDH’s songwriting style. I’ve tried to hear the common elements that run through their best records. But the one I can most easily pick out is the “sweet and hot” sound. A crisp, well-executed composition that carries that anguished, electric energy even on a slower, seemingly more low-key number like this.
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Abbott Cooper said:
I wholeheartedly agree with Nixon that this song is Eddie’s best, but I take issue with his suggested list of the roots of “Leaving Here.” As I see it, or hear it, the impetus for “Leaving Here” is the music of the African American church, as subtly modified by HDH. I got to hear a lot of those Gospel songs by leaving my radio tuned to R&B stations on Saturday nights and waking up to church services or church songs Sunday mornings when I flicked the dial to the “on” position again. And what did I hear? A few dozen facsimiles of “Leaving Here” with different melodies and Godly lyrics.
Now back to today’s song. When I first heard it as a 17-year-old in 1964, I knew not of the Andantes. I had thought, based on hearing Martha & the Vandellas backing Marvin Gaye on several of his recordings and the Supremes supporting Mary Wells and others, that Motown regularly used their high level talent on all backups. This led me to believe that the Supremes were doing the “ooohs” behind Eddie. Wrong again. Anyway, a top notch record by Mr. Holland, and deserving of one of my rare “10”s.
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Greg Kipp said:
Like Abbott, I have had the experience of tuning in R&B stations on Saturday night only wake up to hearing a church service and/or church music on a Sunday morning. Therefore, I feel his observations about “Leaving Here” are rather astute and right on the money. Like both Abbott and Nixon; I feel that this the best record that Eddie Holland ever made back in the days when he was a singer as well. Hands Down, “Just Ain’t Enough Love” is an absolute “10” because- if it isn’t -then I don’t know what is!!!!
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