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UNRELEASED: scheduled for
Motown M 1061 (A), July 1964
b/w Guarantee (For A Lifetime)
(Written by Smokey Robinson)
According to the studio papers unearthed by the compilers of The Complete Motown Singles: Volume 4, this was the very last thing Mary Wells ever recorded at Motown. She served a writ on the company two days after cutting When I’m Gone, already scheduled as her follow-up hit to My Guy and assigned both a catalogue number and a release date.
As discussed at some length when talking about My Guy, Mary leaving Motown was a public humiliation for the company and a personal slap in the face for Berry Gordy, just at the very moment he and his little black-owned independent label had finally been invited to the music industry’s top table, acknowledged as a relevant commercial force. To have his biggest star – and let’s not forget that’s exactly what Mary was once My Guy started to build towards a million copies – walk out on him (and to an established showbiz brand like 20th Century Fox, exactly the kind of organisation Gordy seemingly dreamed of owning one day) wasn’t pleasant; he took the insult exactly as you’d expect.
That Mary Wells had no more Motown singles despite leaving ample material in the can seems something of a surprise, given Gordy’s eternal predilection for latching on to a trend, and his supreme talent for “creatively” marketing old or irrelevant material if an artist suddenly got hot overnight. Sure, the legal wranglings might have meant Motown were barred (on paper) from putting out any more Wells singles until the court case was untangled, but Mary was the biggest and most famous star the company had ever had on its books and it seems very unlikely Gordy would have let legal uncertainty stop him following up a record-busting Number One smash hit. Hell, momentum alone could have shifted fifty thousand units before the lawyers caught up with what was happening.
But then you actually listen to this, and realise that there was just no way Motown could have released When I’m Gone when they were supposed to. What are you gonna do when I’m gone?, she asks in the song’s very first line – surely with provocative glee, given she must have known what she was about to do when she recorded it – and hence the reason Motown squashed the record.
We were happy in the public eye
They think you’re such a wonderful guy
But they don’t know how much you can lie…
People would have laughed, and not kindly. The kitchen towel that could remove that much egg from Berry Gordy’s face hadn’t yet been invented.
All of which is a real pity, because this is another excellent record from Motown’s first great summer. The irony in the title aside – and even if Mary knew what was up her sleeve, there’s no way writer-producer Smokey Robinson (who again gives this his very best shot) could have foreseen the out-of-nowhere self-destruction that would render this unusable – this is a perfect follow-up to My Guy.
As with Brenda Holloway’s I’ll Always Love You, this is another example of the newest Motown fad, the “mirror sequel”; where I’ll Always Love You was the “happy version” of Every Little Bit Hurts, so When I’m Gone is the “bitter version” of My Guy.
The tune isn’t as effortlessly perfect as the super-hit (how could it be?), but Mary is on splendid form as she tells her on-again, off-again boyfriend that she’s come to the end of her road. Smokey delivers one of his best lyrics to date, confrontational and wronged while still giving Mary enough material to work the vulnerable aspect of her acting repertoire by harking back to past memories – not just the bare facts, but the emotions Mary’s narrator was feeling at the time.
I comfort you whenever you’re low
And you don’t have no place you can go
You put your head on my shoulder to cry
And then you turn around and tell me a lie
And I just can’t take it…
It’s another super vocal performance; two highlights for me are the staccato delivery of You made some people / Think-that-you-loved-me-a-lot, and her beautiful, breathy, semi-whispered coda which harks back to the glory of My Guy. But this is no mere retread of the earlier hit; both Smokey and Mary clearly worked hard on this, even if one of them knew she was about to consign that work to the dustbin. The bright, twangy guitar, and the long, cooing organ and backing vocal passages that buffet Mary’s voice along throughout the song, are brand new, and quite magical to boot.
This is a really good, sweet-sounding pop record, a matter-of-fact account of a small-scale breakup, an act of revenge without the vengeance set to a riveting, bouncy new tune. For want of a better word, it’s sophisticated, in pretty much every sense. Mary, having come of age, delivers the first great single of her new career as one of America’s top stars – and nobody got to hear it for two years.
It’s a matter of public record now that Mary never had another big hit. The walkout and move to Fox turned out to be Mary signing the death warrant for her own career; whether it was isolation from Smokey and the Funk Brothers, dark pressure from Motown to crush her Fox singles, or the crucial delay in mid/late 1964 caused by the court case and a debilitating bout of TB, there would be no “proper” follow-up to My Guy, artistically or commercially.
Which is a pity, because this could easily have been it, if only Motown hadn’t been backed into a corner, forced into a position where swallowing their pride and releasing a fine record like this would have made them a laughing stock, a loss of face that would have been poison for the burgeoning label’s business reputation. Instead, embarrassed, Motown shelved When I’m Gone, reusing the track for Brenda Holloway in short order, but keeping Mary’s version under wraps until the Christmas 1966 compilation LP Vintage Stock, a weird hybrid of greatest hits and rarities anthology that failed to find an audience.
The world’s loss, as well as Motown’s; the label missed out on what I’d say was easily a Top Ten hit, but everyone missed out on another great Mary Wells single (something which would be in increasingly short supply throughout the Sixties). But, ironic hindsight aside, there’s almost nothing wrong with this at all.
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!)
COVERWATCH
Motown Junkies has reviewed other Motown versions of this song:
- Brenda Holloway (February 1965)
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 Mary Wells? Click for more.)
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| Brenda Holloway “Sad Song” |
Mary Wells “Guarantee (For A Lifetime)” |
DISCOVERING MOTOWN |
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Motown Junkies 
Following Brenda Holloway’s allegations of dark forces surrounding the Supremes having contrived to hobble her Motown career, the TCMS 4 liner notes contain some more after-the-fact reasoning, this time concerning Mary’s departure from Motown, which once again I’ve declined to put in the actual review.
Joyce Moore, Mary’s publicist in later years, tells a different story. “As I understand it, she wanted to be released when she realised that the million dollars or better that the company made off My Guy and her hits went into Diana Ross, [with whom] Berry by that time was having a relationship.”
Convincing, certainly; I’m sure Ms Moore totally believed it, and it’s something that’s been repeated an awful lot over the years… but ultimately, I have to call bollocks.
Mary filed suit to leave Motown on May 13th, 1964, her 21st birthday, the central plank of her lawsuit being that she was underage when she signed her original Motown contract and therefore it was null and void, and she could tear it up when she reached majority. “Where Did Our Love Go” was released on June 17th, more than a month after Mary’s walkout. Now, it’s possible Gordy already had big plans for Diana in the run-up to release, and that Motown was already diverting “My Guy” money (the stuff about “other hits” is a red herring, Mary hadn’t been in the Top Ten solo for over a year and if any of that money had found its way to the Supremes, the #94 placing for their previous single “Run Run Run” suggests it wasn’t particularly well-spent) to make sure the Supremes got their hit and Gordy’s pet project got her face known – but there are three problems with that.
(a) “My Guy” hit Number One just a few days after she filed suit, so it’s difficult to know what “millions” Mary felt were being misdirected…
(b)… or how Motown were disadvantaging her with their marketing spending, given her record kept selling and selling and selling, even as she was openly flipping Motown off in public – what was the issue? Did she want ITMI to get her better gigs than supporting the Beatles in Europe? Was she supposedly angry because the record didn’t get to two million…?
(b) …but even if Motown WERE stacking the deck in the Supremes’ favour, and Mary felt she’d never get a fair crack of the whip again… well, so what if they were? The Supremes ended up with twelve – repeat that to yourself, twelve – Number One singles in six years. 20th Century Fox, not known for being short of cash, couldn’t get any of Mary’s subsequent singles into the Top Ten. Regardless of what you think of the Supremes, and regardless of whether you believe Gordy really was motivated by baser instincts, I believe you’d be very hard-pressed to make the case that Motown didn’t back the right horse.
I don’t believe the Supremes had anything to do with Mary Wells leaving Motown, is what I’m saying.
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Perhaps it ‘s because I heard Brenda Holloway’s version first, I’ve always thought the backing track on this version of “When I’m Gone” is a little “sparse,” almost as if this were a “demo” or initial take.
In addition Mary just doesn’t seem to be giving this her “all” perhaps because of the forces outside the studio impinging on her at this time.
It will be interesting to see how the “hit version” is rated when we get to 1965!
Great work as always, Mr. Nixon.
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Without wanting to spoil too much, the sparseness – or rather, the economy – of this version is one of the things I really like about it compared to Brenda’s cut. But that’s a story for another day!
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.. but why TCF?? a company who made most of their money during the Christmas season with the Little Drummer Boy.. I mean had it been Atlantic [where she eventually went] or Chess or the soon-to-self-destruct Vee Jay, at least she COULD have made it but then maybe not or had she tried Decca, Liberty, MGM , or even OKEH..but then when you think about it — she did slap MOTOWN in the face [as basketball player LeBron James did when he left Cleveland for Miami-but I ain’t goin’ there!!]. It’s sad to think one of your family would do that but you’ve got to admit that she left when things were starting to look up for her at Motown.
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Easy enough to answer, for once! Fox offered Mary a massive signing bonus of $500,000 and a shot at a movie career; those other labels you mentioned couldn’t match that.
The LeBron analogy is appropriate (for British viewers, read Sol Campbell), in terms of being a great big “up yours” to the people who put you where you are, but at least James and Campbell moved to new organisations with a shot at winning things; Wells essentially moved to the Nets (or Portsmouth) and then spent a year on the bench before failing to score in her first seventeen games and being released.
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I always said I’d never mix Motown with football, but since you brought up Sol Campbell, let me just say that his walking out on Spurs was not just a slap in the face but a stab in the back too. In the weeks leading up to his departure, he consistently said that there was an unbreakable bond between him and Spurs fans, all the while negotiating a deal to move to Arsenal. Well, he was the one who broke that bond and he is the only one to blame for the constant verbal abuse he gets whenever he comes up against his old club. If you think ‘hell hath no fury like a woman scorned’, it is nothing compared to what Spurs fans think of Sol Campbell.
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I could write a whole essay here –
I still find it hard not to wince when I think about Campbell’s ultimate betrayal, and even now, ten years later, when – arguably for the first time since – we’re showing the kind of form and ambition he tried to justify the walkout by saying we’d never achieve, it STILL rankles when some commentator tries to pardon him by saying Sol was right because he had to think of his career and Arsenal had a squad packed with world stars while Spurs had Gary Doherty and wouldn’t we all do the same if we were offered lots more money and it’s been so long now, can’t people move on and blah blah blah fuck off fuck off fuck off. I support the club I’ve supported all my life, not an individual player’s career prospects. If you’re suggesting for a second you wouldn’t feel the same, for ever, then you’ve no business calling yourself a football supporter, and you might as well go and buy a different season ticket, limited edition replica shirt and Kraken Opus for whoever’s won the European Cup that particular year –
– but yeah.
(Apologies to Americans who have no idea who Sol Campbell is. Think Brett Favre joining the Vikings times, like, a million. Maybe if Jason Varitek had walked out on the Red Sox in 2003 to join the Yankees, on the grounds that the Red Sox were never going to win anything. Or – to hammer the point home – Mary Wells walking out on Motown.)
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If Americans don’t know who Sol Campbell, try looking him up in the dictionary – it’s under Judas. Or Scumbag.
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Yes, Motown 653, Vintage Stock, I distinctly remember seeing in the record racks for Christmas shopping in Lit Brothers department store, Philadelphia, when I was 12. Right next to it, released at the same time, was Motown 654, Four Tops Live. And check out that calculated album cover: “Yeah, go ahead and package up that old shit, maybe it’ll make a few dollars, but we don’t have to help them remember her face.”
🙂 I agree with the ‘8,’ and I agree this would have sailed easily into the Top Ten for Mary, with no small help from the momentum of “My Guy.” It’s one of the best that’s-it-I’m-outta-here songs penned by Smokey or any Motown writer. I like it by Mary, I love it by Brenda, and I could even hear Gladys Horton, Kim Weston or Martha Reeves doing justice by it too. Though I think each could approach it with competence, it would be at odds with Ross’s newly-found coquette persona or the seductress Wanda Young is about to become also.
Even if this didn’t exist, given the sales of “My Guy” there can be little doubt the next Wells single would have been some Smokey composition/production, leaving the next obvious candidate “He’s The One I Love” from the My Guy album, and not an insubstantial song itself.
Still my dream Wells single for the summer of ’64 remains William Stevenson’s breezy and engulfing “Does He Love Me,” again from the My Guy album, coupled with HDH’s head-bangin’ good “One Block From Heaven.” At least all of these songs got made available while I was still a teenager and didn’t wait till 32(!) to get them like the Marvelettes’ “Knock On My Door.”
While I agree no record company did or could fit Wells as perfectly as Motown, nor any writers or production hands serve her as consistently well as Smokey, HDH and Stevenson, I’m less certain about the imagined, ‘what if she stayed’ future. There are simply too many tales of frustration by too many female Motown artists, reduced to handmaiden status with the ascension of Queen Ross to feel assured that the glory Wells knew in the spring of 1964 was poised to be repeated over and over again.
She’s gone, Motown isn’t Berry’s Detroit company anymore; we’ll never know for sure and can only speculate till we exhaust ourselves.
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I agree about the futility of speculation. If Mary Wells had recorded “When Someone’s Good to You” or “Looking For the Right Guy”, as she almost certainly would have if she hadn’t left the label, would she on the strength of being an established Motown star have had the hits with them that eluded Carolyn Crawford and Kim Weston? It’s fun to ask the questions, but ultimately pointless.
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It is one of the more interesting Motown what-ifs, though. The company never replaced her, and all the female solo artists that might conceivably have done it – Kim, Tammi, Brenda, Barbara, Syreeta, and any number of others – weren’t in the same commercial league. Even Diana Ross initially struggled to get off the ground as a solo act, and it’s arguable that beyond a handful of sporadic “pockets” of big hits, Motown never really got the marketing right there either. Martha Reeves and Gladys Knight, two more obvious Seventies candidates for glittering solo careers, were treated so badly as to be effectively forced out of the company.
Whether Mary would have done better with the same material than any of these can only ever be conjecture. Of all her post-Motown material, all of it, there’s maybe four songs I’d pick when compiling an all-time Mary Wells best-of list, and one of those is pushing it. On the other hand, while this and Whisper You Love Me Boy – already scheduled as the follow-up to When I’m Gone! – are excellent, I’ve often wondered about the other songs that would have supposedly found their way to Mary in 1964/5. “Looking For The Right Guy” – as we’ll see in a couple of months’ time! – makes me wonder whether it was actually written for Mary, or whether it was actually an attempt to cast someone (Kim Weston in this case) as Motown’s “new Mary”. We’ll never know, of course.
As Dave said above, it’s likely that Smokey would have kept the Wells job until the hits dried up. I like to think he’d probably have written some new songs for her (as a writing-to-order job as per standard Motown practice), songs that never actually got written; this always felt better to me than the guessing game of whether every Motown song before 1966 with a female vocalist had originally been intended for Mary Wells. But, again – as you say – it’s pointless to try and find answers.
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Regardless of the quality of the music inside, I’m really curious why Motown released Vintage Stock, a collection of hits and older unreleased songs by an artist who’d left the label two and a half years earlier. Music was changing very quickly in the mid sixties, Motown itself changed enormously from mid-1964 to December 1966. Why put out an album of like this for an artist who was already ancient history?
I could understand a desire at Motown to make a few more bucks off Mary, but this release doesn’t seem to have been planned with sales in mind. Mary’s name is smaller than the album title, and the hits song titles don’t exactly leap off the cover. More importantly, the cover picture tells us nothing about the music, couldn’t have been intended to be intriguing to anyone but a oenophile interested in what’s in those bottles, and would have been overwhelmed in the shop displays next to the other albums released for Christmas 1966.
For this to have sold anything, a fair amount of promotional muscle would have had to have been applied, and that surely wasn’t going to happen. To say that Motown had these songs sitting in the vault and they needed to generate a little income surely can’t be correct, given the depths of the Motown vaults at the time, not to speak of the huge success the company was already enjoying. The Vintage Stock album can’t have been anything more than a distraction and/or an irritant to the promotional staff at Motown. And imagine how artists who were being ignored by Motown must have felt at the sight of an album release by someone who’d left the label years earlier.
My conclusion is that since Mary’s career had nosedived, Vintage Stock could only be a vindictive attempt to humiliate her one last time.
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It’s likely more prosaic than that. By the end of 1966, Mary had been released from her Fox contract – having been a big money flop for the label – and was now signed to Atco, scoring a minor hit with Dear Lover. Her first Atco LP, Two Sides of Mary Wells [featuring a cover of the Supremes’ My World Is Empty Without You], was in stores and accompanied by Atlantic’s own promotional efforts; it made sense for Motown to try and steal some of that action for themselves – at very little cost, as you say.
I’m guessing the plan was that punters looking for “the new Mary Wells LP” would be confronted by two albums, one of which had My Guy on it and one of which didn’t. Motown may have been motivated to release Vintage Stock as a middle finger to Mary, but it’s more likely they were simply trying to pick up a few (cheap) sales off the back of someone else’s marketing spend (as they would do time and time again over the next 25 years); targeting fans of Mary’s new material with a Greatest Hits set made sense, putting some unreleased tracks on there to further tempt them.
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As I remember it, part of Mary’s lawsuit against Motown required that they release an album on her. By that time, Mary wanted any royalties money she could get. Motown put little effort into making “Vintage Stock” salable, and didn’t put ANY effort into marketing it. No surprise that it hit the cut-out bins quickly. They should have released “When I’m Gone” (albeit perhaps a year later). “One Block From Heaven”, “Honey Boy”. Whisper You Love Me Boy” and “He’s The One I Love” as singles through 1965 and into 1966.
Clearly, Motown didn’t “finish off” making “When I’m Gone” with completed background tracks, due to the fact that they found out they weren’t going to use it.
Regardless of Berry’s desire for promoting The Supremes, I think that Mary Wells would have continued having great hit recordings with Smokey and HDH, at least into 1968. I like both her 20th century Fox and ATCO recordings a lot (although not nearly as much as most of her Motown material). i liked only “The Doctor” from her Jubilee cuts, and none of her later work. I felt terrible when she left Motown, and also when Joe Hunter left, when Popcorn Wylie and Freddie Gorman, Sonny Sanders and Robert Bateman left, when Carolyn Crawford, Linda Griner, Kim Weston and Mickey Stevenson left, when Brenda Holloway, Gladys Knight and Martha Reeves and The Four Tops left. By the time The Temptations left, I didn’t care.
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Re: Vintage Stock being a contractual obligation thing – I’d be very surprised if that were the case – part of the settlement was that Mary took a substantial lump sum payment in exchange for relinquishing ALL songwriting and artist royalties on her entire Motown catalogue, in perpetuity.
In hindsight a terrible decision – with my lawyer hat on, she must have been badly advised by someone (Herman Griffin, maybe? though this is total speculation on my part!) – but she took the money and forfeited the right to any future income from the work she’d done at Motown. The whole point of the lawsuit, from a legal perspective, was that the original contract she signed – with its supposedly miserly royalty rates – was unenforceable due to her age, meaning she could walk away and sign a new deal with whoever she liked once she reached 21, and the rights issues over everything she’d already done had to be renegotiated from scratch. Motown paid her off knowing it was a scandalously bad deal, Mary took the cash upfront knowing she was mortgaging her future (between Motown’s payoff and Fox’s signing bonus, she made a huge short term gain of around a million dollars). Nobody comes out of it looking particularly good.
That being the case, it would be a real surprise if she also insisted on a clause whereby Motown were contractually obliged to release an album she had no financial interest in, especially if that album might end up competing with future releases that stood to make her a lot of money under the terms of her (on paper) much more lucrative Fox contract. That she would fail so dismally at Fox and end up signing for Atco within a year and a half wouldn’t have been on her radar when the deal was agreed, but them’s the breaks.
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(…that being said, of course, her legal advice seems to have been so inept that she COULD have insisted on the album thing even if it was a stupid idea!)
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I have read several times that Mary’s lawyers insisted that Motown release another album, because she wanted the exposure, thinking it would help her get appearances (and maybe more money for making them?). Artists weren’t getting any money (to speak of) from record sales royalties, in any case. So the lack of monetary interest in Motown’s sales of her records wasn’t a factor. As to whether Motown releases on her would hurt her 20th Century Fox or ATCO sales, I think she thought thatkeeping her name in front of the public was more important, and might help her 20th Cent. sales.
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Back on to Motown matters after my Sol Campbell rant, the other thing about Mary’s move to 20th Century is that had they delivered on all they had promised her, then maybe her career would have turned out differently. It was said they made a verbal promise to get her into films, and when that failed to materialise, the guy who’d done the deal blamed her for not getting it put in writing in the contract. 20th Century would turn out to be a half decent record company, but only when Russ Regan got there and worked his magic on Barry White, Love Unlimited etc, and that wasn’t until the early 1970s. I also don’t believe the talk that says Motown put pressure on radio stations and distributors to stall her career (as is also claimed for Florence Ballard and her solo releases) simply because I don’t think Motown were big enough at the time to have done such a thing. In fact, the only occasion I can recall of a record company flexing its muscles was in the 1980s when Walter Yetnikoff of CBS threatened to pull every video out of MTV if they wouldn’t play Michael Jackson. CBS had the clout (as well as artists such as Bruce Springsteen) to be able to do this; Motown in the 60s didn’t.
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Mm, I think there’s a lot of after-the-fact tittle-tattle regarding Sixties Motown, most of it with little supporting evidence. Some of the stories sound grimly plausible, but others – this one, for instance – feel more like someone’s later interpretation of what they thought must have happened. The bald fact is that, as others have attested in this and other threads, Mary’s post-Motown records just aren’t considered on a par with her Motown material; quality is subjective, of course, but I’ve yet to read anyone claim that e.g. Use Your Head or The Doctor is their favourite Mary Wells single.
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Of the Fox releases, I thought “Ain’t It the Truth” was a great record and was surprised it wasn’t a big hit. I also think “Never Never Leave Me” is on a par with Mary’s output at Motown.
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Mary’s 20th Century Fox material was subpar to anything, and I do mean ANYTHING she did at Motown. I’m not saying she didn’t record good music at 20th Century Fox- “Use Your Head” and a few other things are pretty good- but that’s it: “pretty good.” There is something in Mary’s singing on her post-Motown material that doesn’t measure up to what she did for Berry’s label.
There is a line she sings in “Use Your Head,” and I can’t recall it right now, but I remember thinking it sounded as if she kinda rushed right through the words, not even bothering to focus on enunciating her words with the care and thought she had with her Motown material. 20th Century also didn’t have a particularly good rhythm section either, nor the recording equipment / audio engineers that gave every Motown release that extra sheen and polish. While just about everything at Motown was remixed insane amounts of times to ensure the absolute best results, I listen to the 20th Century material and it just seemed the same amount of care was there in the mix.
Again, I don’t want people to confuse what I’m saying here. Yeah, Mary did some bouncy, nice things at 20th, but that’s all it was: nice. None of it, to my ears, had the panache and let’s shoot-for-the-moon-and-beyond quality that Motown demanded, even before a record went to Quality Control.
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OOPS! The sentence “I listen to the 20th Century material and it just seemed the same amount of care was there in the mix.” was supposed to read “the same amount of care WASN’T there in the mix.”
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Nix…(heh heh heh) I actually thought that Dear Lover was a very nice little record. It is interesting that you refer to the reord as “The world’s loss, as well as Motown’s; the label missed out on what I’d say was easily a Top Ten hit, but everyone missed out on another great Mary Wells single.” I guess I’m just grateful that we don’t get to miss out on a great performance and love it whether it was a top ten single or not.
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Great Smokey composition. As much as I like Brenda’s version, I’ve always loved Mary’s Mae West-like phrasing on this… “and what they see isn’t what we’ve got we’re hap-pee in the public’s eye.” Fun stuff. Rating: 9/10
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Have to agree. After becoming aware of and becoming a huge fan of Brenda Holloway in the last week, I expected that I’d prefer her version, but I prefer Mary Wells’ version. An argument could be made that Holloway is the better singer – but on this one I just prefer Wells’ sultry approach to the slightly bouncy swing feel on Holloway’s.
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What a fascinating read all the way through great to read other peoples views. I am still listening to “Mary Wells: Something New Motown Lost and Found” and wonder if you will be reviewing any of the titles on on this release. Really enjoy reading everything on the site. Keep up the good work. Like you I agree that this would have been a successful follow up to “My Guy” but as you say we will never know what would have happened if she had stayed. Keep up the good work.
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Hi Dave,
Thanks for the kind words. There are no plans to review the Lost & Found tracks on their own (this site’s remit is solely the Motown singles catalogue), but that’s not to say they won’t be referred to when we’re talking about *other* records 🙂
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Yeah the company released “Vintage Stock” and then buried it. I’ve only ever seen inner sleeve ads for the Lp. I had never seen it in any record store.
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It’s not that hard to find on-line. In fact I even have a 7″ reel-to-reel copy of it. Definitely worth picking up a copy.
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I saw lots of “Vintage Stock” Lps in the bargain bins of record shops and Walgreen’s almost immediately after its so-called “release”. I like both Mary’s and Brenda’s versions of “When I’m Gone”, very much. What a great song, written by Smokey!
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