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Tamla T 54099 (A), July 1964
b/w Sad Song
(Written by Ed Cobb)
So often, growing up long after the fact and lacking reference points, I’ve made the mistake of confusing a record’s obvious quality with its likely fame, or its commercial success. It then comes as a considerable shock to the system to read that an excellent single was met with indifference on original release, crawling into the shadowy lower reaches of the charts rather than blazing a trail to the top twenty. The Supremes’ Run, Run, Run (Number 94 with a bullet) is one such example; I’ll Always Love You (a scarcely-better Number 60) is another. What were people thinking?
This was LA girl Brenda Holloway’s second Motown release. The first, the excellent Every Little Bit Hurts, had flirted with the Top Ten and officially confirmed Brenda as a hot prospect, One To Watch, earning her a place on Dick Clark’s Caravan of Stars tour. For the follow-up, Motown tried to retrace their steps as closely as possible; I’ll Always Love You shares the same writer, same producers, same LA studio and (probably) same LA musicians as Every Little Bit Hurts, and it’s no surprise that the result is a very similar song.
A slow-paced, beautiful, overstated ballad, the middle instalment of a glorious mid-Sixties triptych of these for Brenda, it’s essentially a reworking of her début – the difference is that this time everything is viewed through a prism of joy rather than despair. It’s something Motown writers would do many times in the mid-Sixties, turning one song into two by simply changing the vantage point and observing how everything else seems to change in line with it: not just a “soundalike sequel”, but more of a “mirror sequel”. This is Every Little Bit Hurts – The Happy Version.
It’s also really, really good.
The huge, crashing piano chords that open the record provide an ominous beginning, a signifier that this is a “prestige” single, perhaps, as well as a possible portent of more anguish to come for those who’d been expecting something along the wounded lines of Every Little Bit Hurts. But from there, the woodwind section strikes up a lovely 3/4 waltz, and the rest of the record just revels in its own beauty.
Two sides of the same coin the two songs may be, but Brenda shows quickly that she can do happy every bit as well as sad; she takes both songs seriously, but where Every Little Bit Hurts was full of anguish after a horrible breakup, I’ll Always Love You is full of love and devotion in the middle of a wonderful relationship.
Vocally, as both a singer and an actress, Brenda is on brilliant form here, and again there are multiple highlights. I’m especially fond of the little changes she throws the listener when the song’s repetitive structure keeps pushing her through the same line three times in a row – an opening riff of Your kiss, your kiss, your kiss is obvious bait for bad karaoke, in that you can easily imagine some Midwestern office supplies saleswoman stepping up to the mic and delivering the line straight, three identical times – and it’d be both awful and boring.
Instead, listen really closely to Brenda’s little breaths, gasps, giggles and audible smiles between the syllables; she’s a woman in the throes of real love, truly, madly and deeply, and it’s wonderful to hear her singing like this to us – for us.
The other vocal highlight is when the strings and piano swoon upward to lift us to the chorus and Brenda kicks up her delivery a gear or three, soaring as high as she ever did on Every Little Bit Hurts, and it’s a giddy thrill – but then she pulls right back for the breathy, almost matter-of-fact recitation of the title, both underlining the sentiment and giving herself room to really belt those words out again during the song’s looping coda. It really is splendid.
I don’t know why the American public didn’t take to this. (In Britain, it wasn’t even released at all, likely a reaction to the lukewarm reception the record received back in the US.) Everything that was good about Every Little Bit Hurts is here, but even better, and the change of emphasis makes it different enough to more than hold its own. If ever a follow-up single sounded like a surefire bet for continued chart success – Top 50, at the very least, surely! – it’s this one.
But the sad reality was that, somewhat unbelievably, the career of Brenda Holloway – in commercial terms at least – had already peaked. There would be a few more hits, but her time as the Next Big Thing was over.
The question I can’t answer is why that should be the case. Brenda’s output over the next three years would be of such quality that her oeuvre could proudly sit alongside any of Motown’s more famous big guns, often coming out on top – so it’s not as if she wasn’t coming up with the goods. (If there are any doubters out there, check out her Motown Anthology and the virtual album’s worth of killer unreleased material spread across the four volumes of the Cellarful of Motown series – I personally guarantee you won’t be disappointed.) Brenda herself blamed a lack of promotional effort from Motown, stemming from her reluctance to relocate from Los Angeles to Detroit (ironic given what would happen a few years down the line!), for putting the kibosh on her career – but even if that were the case later on, the label surely weren’t holding back here, with a promising new star to promote?
It all makes no sense, and it’s a real shame if I’ll Always Love You has largely been lost to history. This is among Brenda’s best work, a fantastic record, beautifully made and beautifully sung. So I’ve got to ask again: What were people thinking?
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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Absolutely agree about the quality. I never heard this until I was approaching 20, and at that age there was no missing its magnificence.
But at 10, in the summer of 1964, I might have thought it was too grandiose. It’s a record of unimpeachable quality, but one could wonder how Motown thought the same teenagers then snapping up “Rag Doll,” “A Hard Days Night,” “The Little Old Lady From Pasadena,” “I Get Around,” “Memphis” and “Where Did Our Love Go” would be ready for anything this mature.
I discovered the song about the time Gloria Gaynor was putting over “Never Can Say Goodbye,” the Three Degrees’ “When Will I See You Again,” and Roberta Flack’s “Feelin’ Like Makin’ Love.” Though “Always” is no dance record, it’s quality drama felt right in that company, not something from the days of “My Boy Lollipop.”
Though it didn’t help the record’s success when it needed it, I was grateful to still be discovering 60s Motown gems I’d missed in a time when an occasional break from all the disco was welcome. It was about this same period that I also happened upon
Weston’s equally soaring “A Thrill A Moment,” another record ahead of-, and perhaps too good for its time.
I know what you mean about this being “Every Little Bit Hurts” – The Happy Version. An even more obvious case is “Since I Lost My Baby” being “My Girl” – The Sad Version, and both records beginning their cases addressing climate issues.
Of course, I agree with your ‘9’; back at age 10, I might have said “put on something faster and happy, will ya….?”
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In the liner notes for TCMS 4, Brenda explicitly says it failed because Motown pulled its promotional support “so the Supremes could go to a million”. This sounds like an ex post facto bit of reasoning, quite frankly – there’s no denying Motown treated Brenda incredibly shabbily (and increasingly so as time went by), and so it’s understandable Brenda might attribute this record’s failure to her fractious relationship with the label. But it doesn’t ring true for me. Here in the summer of ’64, having just lost Mary Wells (the source of the money that funded the promotional efforts Brenda was so cross about), and with Brenda about to inherit a whole clutch of Mary’s suddenly-unusable cast-offs, how likely is it that Motown – who had recently mastered the art of selling very large numbers of records – would drop the ball so spectacularly and with such ineptitude when promoting the only proven, viable female solo act on their books?
With that in mind, I’m intrigued by your comments, and those of 144man below, that it was perhaps the style of this record that did for its commercial prospects; I hadn’t really factored that in when writing the review, but the idea that kids stayed away from it because it was too slow or dirgey certainly makes more sense than Motown sabotaging its own repertoire.
(Though the apparent lack of a picture sleeve, something accorded to pretty much *every* big Motown act since that Mary Wells money started coming in, is very interesting! Unless there’s one out there I haven’t got, of course.)
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On the other hand, it’s not a million miles away from “Anyone Who Had A Heart”. In my mind I can hear Dionne Warwick doing a version that would have sounded more commercial than this.
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Wow. Where has this song been all my life? It also reminds me of Bacharach – especially the way the melodic bassline keeps hitting on the weak beat, and especially on “you turned me inside out, you taught me what love was about”. Two things elevate it beyond the palette of “the Great American Songbook”: the bass is free from the tyranny of stating the root of the chord and can play melodically (as with HDH, McCartney, Brian Wilson & Co.); and there’s no trace of cuteness or corniness anywhere in the lyrics or music.
To me, Bacharach is as good as anyone for pure harmonic and melodic originality and inspiration, but I can’t count on his raw emotional core to hit home (sometimes it does in a big way – like Anyone Who Had a Heart, which I agree is a perfect comparison). This song would a 7/10 or 8/10 Bacharach composition but the emotional purity of the performance would easily be a 10/10 in the Bacharach world.
To take another stab at the comparison, Bacharach is often mind-blowingly creative, but I always feel like I never know when something corny or shallow is going to create a distraction. With Brenda Holloway, there’s no fear of that – the depth and honesty of emotion is consistently grounded and resonant.
I’m now reviewing Every Little Bit Hurts, which I loved on first hearing, but now, having had time to “grow on me” for a week, it’s really hitting me hard. I’m also suddenly hearing that Tina Turner’s “What’s Love Got To Do With It” contains an key quotation (I’ll add a comment about that in the Every Little Bit Hurts section). I can’t wait to hear Part 3 of the triptych.
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I think the best word to describe Brenda Holloway’s performance on this recording is “sublime.” A “9” is certainly what this deserves as well as a much higher position on the charts.
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I think it’s fascinating that the writer of this beautiful song (and “Every Little Bit Hurts”) is Ed Cobb, one of the Four Preps quartet from the Fifties, best known for their slightly gimmicky hit, “26 Miles.” He also wrote the very different garage anthem “Dirty Water,” recorded in its hit version by The Standells. I saw the latest iteration of The Four Preps earlier this year in Palm Springs, California. They were amazingly good, but there was only one original member and no mention of Ed.
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Just because Ed Cobb wrote “Dirty Water”, and sang folk songs doesn’t mean he was a stranger to Soul music. He wrote and produced “Heartbeat” by Gloria Jones and other songs by her, including the original version of “Tainted Love”, and he worked on other Soul Music produced by Jobete Music’s LA office in 1963-64. He left Motown in a dispute over producer pay and credits on Brenda Holloway’s first 2 records. Had he stayed, we might have had several more Motown gems come out of LA.
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Classy, powerful, dramatic, heartfelt, delivered like she meant it… incredibly sexy (makes for a fine slow dance). I love this!
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Oh dear, I find the song itself a bit of a dirge. I’d rate it as high as 8, but I feel that Brenda and the musicians have made a silk purse out of a sow’s ear. At the time, I bought this record for its exquisite B-side.
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Heres the deal. Teens in ’64 rarely purchased Billboard or Cashbox so the trades were rarely selling records to teens. There existed teen magazines since the ’50s but considering Brenda’s very VERY mature look they probably werent carrying her. This left 3 other outlets. Tv, radio and word-of mouth.
Brenda had made some TV appearances behind “Every Little Bit Hurts” (God was she beautiful), but i don’t recall her on the tube behind this one. It may be because she was touring or whatever. I didn’t hear this song on the radio so maybe the jocks werent being served because everyone i knew (including myself) picked up on it word-of mouth—usually at the platter parties we used to have so frequently. By the time we picked up on it, it was sliding off the charts. Thats the American version of the story. I don’t know about the rest of the world. The only other reason i can think of to explain the short shelf life is i think some people thought that if you had “Every Little Bit Hurts” you didnt need “I’ll Always Love You” since they were one and the same.
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Just my opinion but “I’ll Always Love You” was the worst possible choice for a followup to “Every Little Bit Hurts” that Motown could have released as a single. Yeah, it was kinda like “Every Little Bit Hurts” but it also reminded me of some of the records that the underrated Mitty Collier was making for Chess Records in the early and mid 1960s such as “Gotta Get Away From It All”, “I Had A Talk With My Man”, and “No Faith, No Love”. All of these records were far more daring and more adult than “I’ll Always Love You”. If memory serves me, “I Had A Talk With My Man” and “I’ll Always Love You” were released around the same time in 1964 and Mitty’s record was ranked higher on the charts than Brenda’s “I’ll Always Love You”. As far as I’m concerned, “I Had A Talk with My Man” has a better set of lyrics than “I’ll Always Love You” which despite being somewhat repetitive in some places barely mentions the title of the song “Ill Always Love You” until near the end of the recording. Another thing “I Had A Talk With My Man” has going for it is a beautiful arrangement expertly played by the Chess Records house band. All in all, “I Had A Talk With My Man” is simply a better record than “I’ll Always Loves You” thus deserving to be the bigger hit in my opinion. Pure and Simple, Motown deservedly got beat by it’s competitors for a change and Berry Gordy learned a learn or two in the process. If I had to give this record a rating, I would rate it as being a number 4 but only because Brenda’s vocals are pleasant and professional sounding.
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