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Gordy G 7039 (A), February 1965
b/w Motoring
(Written by Brian Holland, Lamont Dozier and Edward Holland Jr.)
Tamla Motown TMG 502 (A), March 1965
b/w Motoring
(Released in the UK under license through EMI/Tamla Motown)
BOM-BA-DA-DOM-BOM, DOM-BOM, DOM-BOM! Like the world’s about to end. Now we’re cooking.
One of the all-time great intros, but then the ’65-model Vandellas were already past masters at this sort of grand opening. I’ll Have To Let Him Go, Come And Get These Memories, Heat Wave, Dancing In The Street… big, attention-grabbing overtures were their “thing” by now. And this is the best one yet.
That Nowhere To Run announces itself in such a blazing, apocalyptic fashion is absolutely appropriate. February 1965, already a whole month into the year which would end up defining Motown forever, and almost none of the big players – on either side of the glass – have made an entrance up to now. I like the idea of the Holland-Dozier-Holland trio watching with wry smiles as Motown stuffed January’s release schedules with weird curios and never-to-be-released flotsam; they’d politely applaud their peers, wait a moment, and then, BAM, unleash not one but two of their best singles, for two of the label’s best artists, one right after the other, a devastating one-two punch that must have left the competition reeling.
Here’s the first of them.
NOWHERE TO HIDE
Martha and the Vandellas were affected by the sudden, unexpected rise of the Supremes in more ways than one. Always an earthier, more soulful group than the Supremes, the latter’s rise not only eclipsed them in Motown’s pecking order, it also served to push the Vandellas further along the soulful path. As the Supremes cultivated a classy, immaculate pop sound, well, rather than compete on the same kind of turf, instead the Vandellas were getting noisier, more fluid, more brash, more exciting.
The theme of Motown 1965, a theme I’ll be coming back to time and again as we cover this busiest and most epic of Motown years, is reinvention, and Martha and the Vandellas – pushed off their perch as top dogs in the Motown stable (ooh, how many more animal metaphors can I fit in this sentence, do you reckon?) – had to do it more than most. Already they’d found a new sound – a brand new beat, if you like – with Dancing In The Street. While I don’t adore it as the timeless classic it’s sometimes painted as, it’s still become known as their defining record, and it was certainly the record which should have propelled them to bigger and better things, commercially and artistically, battling the Supremes throughout the mid- to late-Sixties for the title of Motown’s top girl group.
But that never really happened. Martha and the Vandellas, wracked by internal difficulties (culminating in a line-up change), worn out by endless touring (building the group’s name, but at the expense of new material, not to mention their health), stymied by Motown’s internal politics (seeing a great new Holland-Dozier-Holland song, Jimmy Mack, a Supremes-style 4/4 stomp imbued with the Vandellas’ unique attitude, rejected out of hand by Quality Control and consigned to the ashcan for three years), ended up losing all the momentum their new sound had generated.
Instead, they – or rather Motown – failed to strike while the iron was hot, not issuing a follow-up to their summer party anthem until soundalike Wild One nearly five months later, during the cold, slushy early winter. When Wild One, rather good but hardly game-changing, limped into the pop charts and stalled outside the Top 30, it was time for Martha and the Vandellas to go back to the drawing board and start all over again.
The change in the Motown landscape since we last saw the Vandellas swinging for the fences had another, more direct effect, too. The Holland-Dozier-Holland team, reunited with Martha & Co. for the first time in months, had played a vital role in Vandellas history. It was they who’d given Martha and the girls classics like Come And Get These Memories and Heat Wave, plus plenty of LP cuts to bulk out the Vandellas’ first album, but “HDH” (as they’re universally known) were now in very high demand, and the majority of their time was allocated by Motown to the label’s two biggest projects, the Four Tops and the Supremes. The Vandellas still managed the occasional look in during 1964, but the rejection of Jimmy Mack, held back for three unfathomable years, may have capped things off on that front; HDH had cut their teeth on the Vandellas, but now they’d found more obliging blank canvases. Henceforth, collaborations between Holland-Dozier-Holland and the Vandellas would be few and far between.
(Case in point: When it appeared, Nowhere To Run sauntered into the Top Ten. In 1963, Motown house etiquette stated a writer-producer scoring a big hit on an artist would automatically get the chance to do the follow-up, and if that was a hit then they’d do the next one, and so on. But things had changed, and instead, HDH would cut just one more new Vandellas single during Martha’s entire remaining time at Motown, and not for almost two years at that.)
With their run of three awesome Number One hits for the Supremes at the tail-end of 1964 (Where Did Our Love Go, Baby Love, Come See About Me) selling scads of copies all over the world, Holland-Dozier-Holland had become Motown’s top creative team. Already transitioning from hitmakers to kingmakers, tasked (like Smokey Robinson) by Motown to provide hits and kudos for any struggling act on the books – but only provided it didn’t interfere with their work pumping out new material for the A-listers – any act in 1965 who found themselves in a studio with HDH knew they had to make it count.
Galling though it must have been for Martha Reeves to find herself grouped in with the also-rans so soon after being the queen bee, she was smart enough to know those rules applied to her group too. You may have made these boys’ names, but now you’ve got to wait in line with every other schmuck, and God knows when you’ll get the chance again. Make it count.
Oh, wow, did they make it count.
SO HIGH, I CAN’T GET OVER IT
When I started this blog, Motown Junkies time was moving way, way faster than Motown time proper, but things have slowed down so much that we’re actually now moving more slowly. For example, I managed to cover the whole of 1959 in three days, but 1964 took me almost sixteen months. For Martha and the Vandellas, who hit their greatest heights to date in 1963, that feels like a very long time.
Having been bowled over by Come And Get These Memories, an emotional juggernaut, and then blown away by Heat Wave, the group’s exuberant atomic zero hour, it’s been taken as read here on Motown Junkies that I hoped to approve of each subsequent Vandellas single, that they were likely to be good. And they are, by and large; we’ve never had a bad one so far. But moments of true, genuine magic have been in short supply – I always felt a bit left out because I’ve never truly loved Dancing In The Street, and beyond that, the pickings get slimmer. Quicksand, Live Wire, In My Lonely Room… they’re all good, sometimes rather better than that, but they’re not masterpieces, they’re not amazing.
The effect of coming across Nowhere To Run, then, which is amazing, is akin to suddenly rediscovering the taste of a long-forgotten ice cream (or the scent of a book) you loved as a child: the feeling of hearing a Vandellas single and realising that once again, they’re the best group in the world. I’ve missed that feeling.
Damn, this is a good record.
I wonder if Vandellas fans back in 1965 felt the same way? Certainly this is a massive kick on from where the group has previously gone; if Heat Wave was primarily a band record, Nowhere To Run is a group record, the gigantic drums and bass (and snow chains) deployed in the service of the girls’ vocals, serving as an extension of the group themselves rather than a spotlight cameo even as they’re perhaps the record’s defining feature. Now, this is partly because the Funk Brothers had honed their craft so well in the last few months; the cuts laid down in the autumn and winter of 1964 are leaps and bounds ahead of those from eighteen, twelve, or even six months earlier, but it feels like the development of yet another new Motown sound.
EVERY STEP I TAKE, YOU TAKE WITH ME
When we talk of “the Motown sound”, it’s a misnomer, not because I’m somehow trying to pretend that Motown didn’t operate to a formula, but rather because there were so many “Motown sounds” throughout the history of the label. At any given time, you can readily identify a family tree of similar-sounding records, from the midtempo calypso of the Mary Wells/Smokey Robinson heyday of the early Sixties, the rash of rollicking Phil Spector pastiches in 1963, the steady 4/4 stomps of the Supremes in 1964, the ten-minute wah-wah psychedelic soul of Norman Whitfield in the late Sixties and early Seventies… and now, here’s another one for you. A kind of storming, barrelling, loud R&B romp, crackling with energy, call-and-response harmonies and beautiful voices lashed together and harnessed for the power of the song; pop music, but with a tougher, sharper edge than what had gone before, the spirit of the blues riding high.
The two great vectors of this new sound were Holland-Dozier-Holland, as ever, and Norman Whitfield, who between them turned this into an art.
Whitfield had different ideas to most Motown producers, even at this early stage, and that extended to the band, the rhythm section in particular. What he did with the Velvelettes, and then the Temptations, in late 1964 reverberated through Motown in 1965, and its echo is felt most keenly right here. The Funk Brothers had several run-ins with producers during their time at Motown, the hardened and seasoned jazz cats bristling at being ordered around by high-handed producers who were barely out of high school. In the early days, they’d particularly scoffed at Holland-Dozier-Holland’s airy, half-formed ideas, their inexperience, and their lack of hands-on knowledge. Nelson George’s Where Did Our Love Go is full of anecdotes of clashes between HDH and the musicians: a story of grudging respect at best and open hostility at worst.
Norman Whitfield wasn’t like that. An intensely moody character, probably the most demanding of Motown’s taskmasters, a hawkeyed observer who’d initially been content to sit silently for hours watching how everyone else did things, he was also an outspoken loudmouth when it came to telling other people how they should be doing their jobs. That lip sometimes got him into trouble – but he was funny too, cracking wise and sharing his cigarettes with the tambourine shakers (and more importantly, sharing his money, cutting them in on bonuses when he scored a hit), and he knew what he was doing. As a result, Whitfield and Clarence Paul were the only non-players to be invited to the musicians’ inner circle (and their after-hours party nights). Whitfield then started to get the very best out of the rhythm section, in a way that no other producer had yet managed, bringing some of the muscular, menacing sneer of the bar-room to Motown. The Sound of Young America staying out late.
If Whitfield pioneered getting that sound on record, Holland-Dozier-Holland were right on top of this new development. The Velvelettes, Whit’s pet project, had two remarkable singles in ’64 to prove the point, Needle In A Haystack and the peerless He Was Really Sayin’ Somethin’, the latter co-written by Eddie Holland – not to mention the Temptations’ roughly contemporary Girl (Why You Wanna Make Me Blue), another Whitfield/Holland co-write. And right in the middle of all of those, another obvious cousin: Nowhere To Run.
HDH must have been delighted to be working with the Vandellas again, just to be able to make a record like this one. It must have been exciting for everyone involved, since Martha and co. were made to do this sort of thing; good though Jimmy Mack is, this is more like “well, we’ve tried doing the Supremes thing, and it got us nowhere; let’s do something they can’t do.” The desire to explore new territory, new sounds, results in one of Motown’s best singles so far; it’s magnificent.
SO DEEP, SO DEEP
Almost everything about this record proclaims its makers, on both sides of the glass, to be Motown royalty, and so it’s unusual to remember that the career trajectories of Holland-Dozier-Holland and Martha & the Vandellas were headed in opposite directions after this. But we can’t be sad for too long over the string of brilliant records which should have followed this one, records that were never to be, simply because this one is so good.
It just sounds so strong, in every sense; it’s a song of torment and pain, and Martha sells it quite brilliantly. Some reviewers have called her a passenger, praising the band and producer for raising up her performance, but this works because she’s a star again. She’s angry and defiant, making this sound like a powerful, even menacing statement of independence when it’s actually a song of involuntary devotion – the narrator is furious things are panning out this way, even though she’s ultimately going to acquiesce to the feelings she doesn’t want (How can I fight a love that shouldn’t be?), making for a character every bit as richly realised as the narrator from Come And Get These Memories.
From that blazing opening, this is just a full-on assault of a record, big and brash and textured. The sound is remarkable. Many people know the story of Ivy Jo Hunter dragging a snow chain into the Motown studio and slamming it on the floor until his hands were bleeding, all to provide a unique percussion effect, something like a thousand tambourines in the background. Stories are jumbled as to whether that first happened on Dancing In The Street or here on Nowhere To Run, but what is clear is that the percussion here is just out of this world, a barrelling, slamming groove (always slower on vinyl than it is in my head), anchored by that chain, pulling jagged bass and horns and drums behind it (all three played by people having career days here) and dragging huge great furrows in the earth.
But what shouldn’t be overlooked is that this is a Holland-Dozier-Holland tune, and as such there’s a killer melody to go with the groove, stuffed full of hooks and stitched together with immaculate precision. I mentioned when reviewing Marvin Gaye’s startling Baby Don’t You Do It that there aren’t many mid-Sixties Golden Age Motown singles I’d be keen to hear doubled in length, stretched out as a storming 12″ mix, but this is definitely one of them – you get the feeling this groove could just carry on forever. And it’s insanely catchy, not to mention its uncanny ability to get you moving.
Because it’s not got a surprising or beautiful tune (and because, let’s be fair, it’s not by the Supremes), Nowhere To Run has perhaps been overlooked as being among some of Holland-Dozier-Holland’s very best work, while the Vandellas were already buckling themselves in for a bumpy ride throughout the rest of the Sixties. If the Vandellas’ career yielded up several more classic records even after Motown had decided Martha and HDH should go their separate ways, it’s almost maddening there weren’t any more of these to savour. But stick the record on, and all of that stuff melts away; it’s damn near perfect, and I love it.
If I haven’t gone into the usual amount of in-depth analysis I normally break out for my favourites, it’s because this is perhaps the most primal, the most direct of my fifty top Motown tunes, the anointed few to get ten out of ten: if it’s also the most musically complicated in terms of the work everyone’s having to do to make this come off, nonetheless everything’s right up front for the listener to enjoy, in what’s maybe the clearest Motown statement of intent we’ve yet experienced. It’s Nowhere To Run, it kicks arse, it’s getting a ten.
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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Martha & the Vandellas “Motoring” |
DISCOVERING MOTOWN |
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Sonic eric said:
My favorite Vandellas song and one of my favorite review. Merci Monsieur !
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BILLY RICHARDSON said:
My fave vandellas record hands down and one of the best songs Motown ever put out. When they were on the British tv special Sound of Motown and after Dusty Springfield introduced them and came out and did Nowhere to Run I was just floored. I already had the song,but seeing them do it up like that was and still is mesmerizing.
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Bill Hales said:
Totally agree your giving this a 10, and really enjoy your informative and insightful comments. Each time I redo my Motown playlists I’m casting my mind back to what might (should) have been regarding Martha and the Vandellas. Even so, they are still THE top slot Motown act to me, and Nowhere To Run is a Top 10 Motown hit.
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MichaelS said:
Another excellent analysis showing why this tune is so deserving of a “10.” A true Motown classic! And here’s a link to a “double length” version of “Nowhere To Run” that I think Mr. Nixon (and many others) will enjoy:
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Mark V said:
A truly gorgeous record, and a wonderful review. Particularly like your discussion of Whitfield’s growing influence and Martha’s turn toward more soulful records, with or without H-D-H.
Holland-Dozier produced what may have been a follow-up to this one several months later: “Can’t Break the Habit,” which had some of the dynamics of “Nowhere to Run” but not so much of the inspiration and definitely none of the impact. If it was ever in contention as a single, it was beat out by the much superior “You’ve Been in Love Too Long.” (“Habit” is included on the vinyl release of 1986 “Never-Before-Released Masters” and the UK CD release of the “Dance Party” and “Watchout!” LPs.)
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144man said:
I voted Nowhere To Run the best record of the year in the 1965 Tamla Motown Appreciation Society Poll. This week in the Motown Treasures Year By Year Motown Poll I again voted this the best record of 1965 47 years later. 10/10.
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Dave L said:
Heartily agree.
If the I Hear A Symphony, At The Copa, Rogers & Hart and Temptations In A Mellow Mood albums were about winning over the parents, this single had so such ambitions. This one was just for us restless youth.
With the corporate indifference that’s about to face the Vandellas from Motown, I still managed to stay brand-loyal for years to come. I think “Sweet Darlin'” is the first single I miss in its own time, but even then I’d soon catch up with strays that got away. When the HDH walkout comes in 1968, even the Supremes would waver, the Tops would struggle for hits again that only came intermittently, but the Vandellas would never recover. But, best not to look ahead in this most happy year.
“Nowhere To Run” is among the best Motown records ever. Like “My Guy,” “My Girl” and “Where Did Our Love Go,” and if you were lucky enough to be there when they were new, peels the years away and takes you right back to who you were then. It hasn’t lost a scintilla of its power and it never will. That the record still draws a “10” from folks born in the 70s is proof enough for me.
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Dave L said:
Don’t worry too much either about the pace of the blog slowing as you go through the Golden Age of Motown. Your essays are bound to stand for years as the definitive Last Word of intelligent insight of these deathless classics. You are reviewing the musical equivalents of the Grand Canyon, the Aurora Borealis, Mt. Everest and Victoria Falls. No true Motown lover dreams of hurrying you. 🙂
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treborij said:
I suspect you’re not going to find many disagreements on this one. I love this record. A 10 in my book and it’s probably in my top ten Motown tracks. I remember there was a Murray the K special on TV when it was out and it was the first time I saw the famous Martha & Vandellas rocking on the assembly line video. (They were a rarity in those days.) I thought it was the coolest thing. I love this record.
I might add I never really thought about the Norman Whitfield influence on this track but you’re right. He brought the edge to the Velvelettes. HDH heard it and knew they couldn’t do it with the Supremes (although they came close a little later with Love Is Like An Itching In My Heart). But it sounds like this song was written for Martha and her posse. Did I mention I love this record?
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Mickey The Twistin' Playboy said:
All has been said.. Rating: 10/10
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Mary Plant said:
As I was reading your wonderful review, I was afraid you were leading up (down?) to something less than the ten this song most assuredly deserves – so glad I was mistaken! I’m writing this listening to the clip provided my MichaelS above – so glad I’ll be singing it all day! Thanks Nixon for a great review and to all at Motown for such an amazing song. Takes me right back to sophomore year in South Jersey!
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John Plant said:
Mary and I are four years apart – so I was at college, also a sophomore – where (if my memory neurons are firing with any degree of reliability) this glorious song shared jukebox space in the snack bar with songs like Wilson Pickett’s ‘634-5789’- a golden age indeed. Wandering into the Crest Room bleary-eyed after a night’s studying (or perhaps dissipation!) this song compensated a hundredfold for any sleep deprivation…and at night, how much Dionysian abandon, how much adrenalin it injected into our dancing souls! This song vibrated as powerfully and explosively in the firmament in 1965 as it does now. Just THINKING about it makes me want to dance.
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Randy Brown said:
Never mind that the Pickett tune is a blatant rip of the Marvelettes’ “Beechwood 4-5789” (which translates to 234-5789)…
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Nick in Pasadena said:
Great assessment of a fantastic record. If I’m ever on life support, all the doctors will have to do is play the intro to “Nowhere to Run” and I’ll be instantly on my feet.
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cat said:
Excellent song by Martha and The Vandellas
The thing I love about this song is how errie and dark it is ….You feel the confusion and urgency in Martha’s voice very brilliant
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Damecia said:
Agree!
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mary magaldo said:
I find this song groundbreaking as it clearly is speaking of a psychologicand possibly physically abusive relationship at a time whwn people did not talk about such things!
the driving intensity of the music makes the relationship fatalistic. I love this song and it is my favorite of martha’s songs. Everytime I play this I hit the repeat button on my CD player!
mary magaldo
marymagaldo@basicisp.net
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Dave L said:
If I may drop this in again, Marvin Gaye singling out his labelmates and their work at this time time in Motown history. From “Divided Soul: The Life of Marvin Gaye,” 1985:
>>“ Earlier in the year [1965], another death got to me,” Marvin recalled. “Malcolm X. I loved Malcolm’s strength and truth-telling. When they cut him down, I felt the loss inside my soul, and I knew that an age of terrible violence and suffering had just begun. I knew what my people were feeling – all the pent-up rage and anger. I felt it, too. I loved Dr. King for his idealism and courage. He did it the way Jesus would have done it, without sticks, guns or bombs. But I also knew what happened to Jesus would happen to Dr. King. Maybe that’s why I stayed away from the area of direct involvement. I wasn’t ready to sacrifice my life for a cause. I’d rather give some money and sing some benefits. Berry also contributed. He even issued some of Dr. King’s speeches as records, but, like the man says, the show must go on.
“I remember I was listening to a tune of mine playing on the radio, ‘Pretty Little Baby,’ when the announcer interrupted with the news about the Watts riots. My stomach got real tight and my heart started beating like crazy. I wanted to throw the radio down and burn all the bullshit songs I’d been singing and get out there with the rest of the brothers. I knew they were going about it wrong, I knew they weren’t thinking, but I understood anger that builds up over years – shit, over centuries – and I felt myself exploding. Why didn’t our music have anything to do with this? Wasn’t music supposed to express feelings? No, according to BG, music’s supposed to sell. That’s his trip. And it was mine.
“Funny, but of all the acts back then, I thought Martha and the Vandellas came closest to really saying something. It wasn’t a conscious thing, but when they sang numbers like ‘Quicksand’ or ‘Wild One’ or ‘Nowhere to Run’ or ‘Dancing In The Street’ they captured a spirit that felt political. I liked that. I wondered to myself, with the world exploding around me, how am I supposed to keep singing love songs?”<<
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Mary Plant said:
Dave L, I bet I speak for everyone when I say please drop in as often as you like! You always add so much to this wonderful blog! I can’t remember if you still live in or around Philly, but hope you made it through Sandy okay.
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Damecia said:
Great excerpt! Marvin was right about Martha & the Vandellas. It’s funny because everytime I do hear one of their records I think about the civil rights movement and I wasn’t even born then.
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Damecia said:
“Every step I take, you’re there with me” that’s my favorite line/part of the song. For some reason I’ve never thought that this was a Martha and the Vandellas song. In fact, I didn’t think it was a Motown song. Everything about this song is great, but it is almost unrecognizable as a Motown song imo. Not my favorite Martha & the Vandellas track (Heatwave holds that honor) but it definitely deserves a 10/10. Oh I must shoutout the Vandellas. They are killing those backing vocals. Martha might have been.the star on this track but they are the sky (lol I know this is corny and bad, but you Junkies catch my.drift)
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Randy Brown said:
A testament to the awesome power of this song: the cover version in Walter Hill’s infamous gang film “The Warriors” is nearly as good, especially when set against the visuals of the Warriors avoiding Bronx gangs while running to the IRT:
And, of course, Robin Williams, as AFVN deejay Adrian Cronauer, rocking to the original in “Good Morning Vietnam” (which put the thing back onto the charts).
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Randy Brown said:
Q to Nixon: is it better to post video links as “A HREF” tags, or directly as above?
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The Nixon Administration said:
Either is fine, as long as you’re not sharing the actual track under review! I personally prefer direct embeds, but it’s whatever’s easier, really.
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Dave L said:
{{ Dave does happy dance 🙂 🙂 🙂
My Mary Wells biography by Peter Benjaminson arrived today from amazon.com.
And Hurricane Sandy only took the lights in this area of Virginia for five minutes. We were far luckier than folks north of us 😮
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djjackso@stetson.edu said:
That’s great to hear Dave…enjoy your read! I heard it’s a great book.
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Landini said:
Hi Dave L – Glad you survived Sandy! I am in Maryland & fared pretty well too. Didn’t lose power at home but did at the office for a few days. Glad you are okay.
Oh yeah, we were talking about “Nowhere to Run”. This is a great record. This is one of those Motown songs that I can’t imagine any other female artist doing justice to – not even Kim Weston. This song fits Martha’s voice to a T. I know that on the male side – the Isley Bros did a version which is okay but doesn’t match up to the original. I know that those funky white boys, Wild Cherry, did a remake too. I haven’t heard it in a long time so can’t really comment on it.
Regarding my health, I see the doc later today to discuss further treatments, etc. Please keep me in your thoughts/prayers. Thanks gang!
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Michael P. Davis said:
This is my favorite female Motown record of all time and your essay on it articulated in a way I could never do. Thank You!
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Ron Leonard said:
Thanks again for this awesome review on a classic Motown song that helped to define “The Motown Sound”!! For me, this is an 11!! That intro, and yes the snow
chains that helped to enhance the intense music track!!
I first watched “Nowhere To Run” being performed on Television, on my Mom and Dads new Color TV and it was Martha and the Vandellas standing on top of tall
individual columns, gold in color I believe. I’m still trying to remember if it was
“Shindig” or ” Hullabaloo”..
Thank you again for bringing up these great Motown memories!
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bogart4017 said:
@Ron—It was surely Shndig but since it was always broadcast in black and white how do you know what color the columns were?
I remember reading once a comment Martha made about this song. She said in reference to the lyrics of the song “I feel a little like that every day…”
Boy do i know that feeling. Especially today.
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Landini said:
INTERESTING — I just saw the movie LOVE & MERCY about Brian Wilson this weekend. IT IS EXCELLENT!!! Some of my favorite scenes were of him in the studio as he was putting together the PET SOUNDS album.
During one scene in the movie – a party at Brian Wilson’s house – “Nowhere to Run” is playing. Thought that was kind of cool!
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billy richardson said:
i love nowhere to run too. it is a classic Motown bumpin song, unfortunately martha and the crew just could not touch diana and the girls. just sayin
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Patrick English said:
Holland Dozier Holland wrote memorable pop songs for the Supremes and classic soul songs for Martha and the Vandellas; “Nowhere to Run” and “Heat Wave” are perfect examples of the latter. Give me the soul songs any day. Couldn’t agree more with the high rating this site has given to “Nowhere to Run.” This song is so funky it’s practically DANGEROUS. Motown at its finest.
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billy richardson said:
i agree Nowhere to Run is one of best songs to come out of Motown period, but we all know The Supremes still reign as Motown’s finest offspring bar none. Holland-Dozier- Holland are the best songwriters probably ever as far as songwriting teams go. I thank God for them, trust me simply because I love music and they made my life quite complete with their songs and gave us and especially me The Supremes.
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Topkat said:
Here are The VANDELLAS (Martha,Betty, and Roz) singing “NOWHERE TO RUN” in , of all places , the Ford Mustang Assembly Line (How’d they work THAT out ??
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billie richardson said:
this was the best Martha and vandellas record hands down. Watching them singing it live years go on London show “READY, STEADY ,GO show with all Motown acts headlined by the Supremes was nothing short of phenomenal.
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Kevin Moore said:
“Martha and the Vandellas – pushed off their perch as top dogs in the Motown stable (ooh, how many more animal metaphors can I fit in this sentence, do you reckon?) –
… had to find a new way to skin the cat in order to maintain their place in the pecking order.
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Kevin Moore said:
Aside from the early use of the iconic bVII-IV-I progression, the part that really knocks me out is at 0:35 – first the chords drop out (“everywhere I go, your face I see”) and then when the harmony comes in (“every step I take, you take with me”) – that just kills me every time. It’s also inarguably the source for Drive My Car (“but I can show you a better time”), later that year – and by extension, this is of course the “Hendrix chord” of Purple Haze and Foxey Lady. Finally, what about that crazy tambourine – the way it kind of rolls into every other backbeat. What a track.
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Don'tMessWithWill said:
A no-brainer 10, my fave Vandellas song and in my Motown top ten.
I’m probably one of the youngest commenters on this site (I’m in my 20s at the time of this post) but I actually have a childhood story about how I first heard Nowhere to Run. I was probably in elementary school and getting driven to school after a morning doctor appointment. My dad had WCBS-FM oldies playing (I live in NJ near NYC) and suddenly this song just jumps out and grabs me! The drums, bass, chains…my heart started pounding. This cold excitement washed over me. The chains and echoey backing vocals really make it sound like Martha is trapped in a deep, dark prison of love. Those chords descending to hell, over and over. And there’s some of the best lyrics HDH ever wrote, “When I look in the mirror to comb my hair / I see your face just a smilin’ there!” Oooooh… But Martha deserves so much credit because if you’ve ever tried to sing this song, it’s much harder than it seems. This song isn’t sung so much as shouted, growled, wailed, whimpered…if it’s not well-acted, the song’s eerie spell is broken.
I’ve noticed, as others have, that Nowhere to Run has been used in a lot of movies. I remember hearing it in “Baby Driver” before a climactic scene – one of the characters even started singing along! It seems that every time a movie scene needs to be made more bada**, this song is added in. All the better – each generation needs to have its collective spine chilled by Nowhere to Run!
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144man said:
The excitement you describe about this record is exactly how I felt about “Heat Wave”. This comes a very close second.
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