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Soul S 35014 (B), September 1965
B-side of I Can’t Help Myself (Sugar Pie, Honey Bunch)
(Written by Brian Holland, Lamont Dozier and Edward Holland Jr.)
Tamla Motown TMG 814 (B), May 1972
B-side of I Can’t Help Myself (Sugar Pie, Honey Bunch)
(Released in the UK under license through EMI / Tamla Motown)
It’s doubtful whether Motown bandleader Earl Van Dyke had ever even heard of Blackpool, Lancashire, and its Tower Ballroom; if he had, it might have given him and his fellow musicians some idea as to what’s wrong with records like How Sweet It Is. Take a good backing track, scrub off the vocals, add three minutes of jaunty organ trilling; this is only a recipe for success if you were hoping to call to mind windswept seaside holidays, donkey rides and Come Dancing.
(I don’t know what the American equivalent would be – someone in an earlier comments thread talked about a small-town skating rink – but suffice to say, it’s the complete antithesis of cool.)
My conclusion is simple enough: I just don’t like organ music. Or, more accurately, I don’t like lightweight pop music played on an organ.
It’s something of a sobering experience, really; Earl Van Dyke seems to have been an all-round great guy, a gentle giant, the glue in the Motown band as well as an absolute demon on the keys. But whichever bright spark decided that the best way to show off his unique talent was to greenlight what effectively amounts to a series of solo organ covers of pop hits, flirting dangerously (and what’s worse, obliviously) with easy listening territory?
Perhaps it’s just another cultural thing; maybe American listeners don’t have the same kind of reaction to this kind of melodic, parping pap. It’s interesting to note that while the British Tamla Motown label had shown real faith in Earl and the Funk (Soul) Brothers’ previous single, All For You even though the parent company had cancelled the original US release (and thus creating the first British-only Motown 45), no more of the band’s singles as a headline act would ever get a contemporary release in Britain. This one, for instance, didn’t appear on UK shores until 1972 – that’s not a typo up there. I can’t help but wonder if the reason was the same thing that turns me right off this: it’s just too damned cheesy.
Long-time readers will remember that I found Marvin Gaye’s original version of How Sweet… to be rather too cheesy, too close to the MOR bone for comfort, in the first place – and so replacing Marvin with that echoey, rollicking organ doesn’t help matters at all. (In fact, and I’ve only just noticed this, to add insult to injury, the blues piano part from the original – a blues piano part probably played by Earl himself, I’m guessing? – has been excised here as well, which is fairly unforgiveable.)
Now, things aren’t as horrific as they might have been, and we don’t end up in the same sort of ghastly territory as Earl saw fit to take us with his cover of the Marvelettes’ Too Many Fish In The Sea; contrary to the impression I’ve probably given so far, there are actually a few things to like about this version. Most noticeably, there’s a twangy, squalling new guitar part here which would actually have been an improvement on the original cut (and which seems to be unique to this version, among the many, many different Motown variations of How Sweet It Is that exist – the Isley Brothers’ version is very similar to this one, possibly even being sung over an alternate take of the Earl Van Dyke version, but the guitar part is missing there, replaced by a vocal riff instead.)
The guitar part is by far the best thing about this, and it sounds great, enough to give this a nudge away from the middle of the road and towards the swinging section. Not a massive nudge, but a nudge nonetheless. The whole thing still adds up to a bit of a mess, but when Earl himself gets into the spirit, spending more time at the top of his instrument’s register (or, even better, when he’s entirely absent from the track – sorry, Earl!), it gets better.
Still, though, the question that keeps coming up every time we meet one of these things remains the same: why? Who is this for? Who is it meant to satisfy? It’s neither pop nor jazz; it’s not edgy enough to please either the musicians or their intended audience of hardened hep cats, it’s not fluffy enough to please pop-loving tweens or their parents, and it’s not got Marvin Gaye on it, which was the only thing that kept the corny song afloat the first time round. It’s not a disaster, but – as appealing as that guitar is – I can’t really imagine myself ever going back to play this again.
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:
- Marvin Gaye (November 1964)
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 Earl Van Dyke or the Funk Brothers? Click for more.)
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| Earl Van Dyke & the Soul Brothers “I Can’t Help Myself (Sugar Pie, Honey Bunch)” |
The Supremes “I Hear A Symphony” |
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As a Booker T. (and Jimmy Smith) fan, I’m not sure how to take your dislike of organ. We may be blood enemies. Then again, I haven’t heard a classic-era Motown instrumental featuring organ by Earl Van Dyke that I thought much of, either. I still would rather hear the man pound a piano.
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Mm, that was a badly worded sentence on my part. The truth of it is that I can recognise Booker and Jimmy (whose organ-led records I love – see also a lot of Jamaican artists!) are doing something different to what Earl is doing on these sort-of-solo overdub hack jobs, but I can’t really quantify what that difference is beyond the fact that I like one and not the other. Hence the Blackpool comment, I suppose – a highly personal frame of reference. I can imagine late middle aged couples in floofy shirts and spangly waistcoats dancing to this on a mid-evening light entertainment TV special ten years later, whereas Booker T. would always have been closer to the Mecca than the Tower Ballroom.
(Oh, and Earl doesn’t seem to have played Blackpool when the Tamla Motown Revue ended up in Britain; the closest he got were dates in Wigan and Manchester. Yes, I did look it up.)
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In anticipation of the next long-awaited review – I found this in a John Updike essay, quoted in ‘The New Oxford Book of English Prose’ (terrific WC reading): ”Oh, those glorious piping sugar-harmonied Supremes records before Diana Ross became a law unto herself!….Popular music is always there, flavoring our American lives, keeping our mortal beat, a murmuring subconscious sneaking up out of the car radio with some abrupt sliding phrase that hooks us into jubilation, into aspiration…Long ago, driving to school with my father on cold winter mornings, I would lean into the feeble glow of the radio dial as if into warmth: this was me, this yearniness canned in New York and beamed from Philadelphia, beamed through the air to guide me, somehow, toward a wonderful life.’
Haven’t heard the cut under discussion, but the ‘organ question’ is an interesting one. I hazard a sense that there is something inherently ‘cheesy’ in the sound of a Hammond (or whatever) poporgan – and that part of the thrill of listening to Booker T and the many other glorious soul organists (as on early Percy Sledge) – is partly how that inherently intolerable sound somehow asserts its way into something transcendent. How the transformation is achieved I have no idea, but it must have something to do with soul!
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Because I’m so pain-in-the-ass persnickety when it comes to electronics equipment, I was allowed to pick out my own Christmas present in 1989 when I sought a really good boom box. I ended up with a Panasonic XBS model that holds up to this day.
While in whatever large chain retailer it was, and fiddling with one of the demonstrator models, on comes the true and implacable 45 version of Motown 1083. You and I can put it on anytime at home, but there’s something about being caught by it -or any Motown masterpiece- in circumstances and environment we have no control over.
I crouched down on my haunches in front of the unit, didn’t actually sing along but ‘performed’ along silently mouthing the words, start to finish, eyes closed, and not giving a single damn if all or anyone noticed. The record was then 24 years old, I was 35, and it had lost no power to demand my surrender like it could when I was 11.
I’m as eager as you John, and know the coming examination is in the hands of a Motown Einstein. 🙂
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A particular organ sound is all in the drawbars.
See this wikipedia article http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hammond_organ
They even have instructions on how to sound like Jimmy Smith!
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The more you know! Thanks Canyelles, I’m always keen to learn new things.
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I’m glad someone pointed this out. Electric organ tones can vary greatly. The sound that Van Dyke produces on this record is one that I find irritating, but Jimmy Smith and some of his peers in the jazz world derived much more pleasant sounds, IMO, from their instruments.
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Always, ALWAYS remember how important instrumentals were to US Top 40 soul radio back in the day. Soul wasn’t as tightly-formatted as its pop counterpart; therefore, there frequently was extra time before the news at the top or bottom of the hour. Too much time for the DJ to fill with patter, but not enough for a chart record. So the space was plugged by whatever instrumental the jock had at hand. Sometimes those cuts became chart hits themselves, even if only regionally. It’s likely that the EVD tracks got airplay somewhere.
Here in Baltimore, we often were subjected to records by local combo Mickey and his Mice (on Samar and Marti). They had a local hit in late 1968 with a nice cover of “Little Green Apples,” which doesn’t seem to be o YouTube; instead I offer this James Brown “Popcorn Canon” cash-in, circa 1970.
Mickey and his Mice – “Cracker Jack”
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Apologies for not closing the HREF tag properly…
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Hey Dude,
You from Baltimore? I grew up in Fairfax, VA just outside of DC. I vaguely remember hearing Cracker Jack on one of the DC soul stations (I would have been about 12 yrs old at the time). Just listened to it on youtube. Cool song. Didn’t realize Mickey Fields was such a celebrity around Baltimore. Peace.
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That’s alright, we can fix these things 🙂
New entry is on its way folks!
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Yes, “back in the day”, shambolic things like that never happen on soul radio now, as anyone who hears my own show will attest. I run an incredibly tight ship.
(/whistles nonchalantly, deletes link to last week’s show before anyone sees what complete amateurs we are)
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Once again cheesy organ music=roller rink music. See Dave “Baby” Cortez and “The Happy Organ” circa 1959. P.S. The Isley Brothers version is suuuu-perior!
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The American equivalent is, indeed, the local skating rink. In fact, this kind of playing is (or was — it’s extinct now here) known as “roller rink organ.” Completely the wrong thing to plaster over these backing tracks, which shouldn’t have been used in the first place, as you have noted.
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