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Tamla T 54124 (A), November 1965
b/w Purple Rain Drops
(Written by Henry (Hank) Cosby, Sylvia Moy and Stevie Wonder)
Tamla Motown TMG 545 (A), January 1966
b/w Purple Rain Drops
(Released in the UK under license through EMI/Tamla Motown)
Whoa, wow, hold on. What is this? Who is this guy?
It’s unbelievable to even think it now, but Stevie Wonder – if you believe the stories – was supposedly on his last legs at Motown as the golden year of 1965 drew to a close. As his labelmates racked up big hits and all-time classics, as Motown became the year’s biggest-selling singles label in America, Stevie was an irrelevance; yesterday’s man, musically and artistically, he simply had no place in the new order.
Motown had money tied up in him, and so even though there’d been no hits since his thunderclap live jam Fingertips had unexpectedly shot to the very top back in early ’63 – and even though former stragglers who’d been bottom of the bill that day were now regularly landing in the pop top ten while Stevie struggled to get any traction at all – the label kept on dutifully cutting new singles on him, talking him up as a bona fide new star rather than a one-hit wonder whose light had faded, launching leftfield PR stunt after leftfield PR stunt to try and keep him in the public eye.
But the act was wearing thin. “Little Stevie”, the one-time adorable blind tween with his novelty harmonica dance jams, was gone, and in his place had come… nothing much, really. I’ve said before that Berry Gordy was fiercely loyal to those who’d cut Motown hits before the rise of the Supremes, and that commercial struggles alone wouldn’t necessarily have been enough to drop the struggling Wonder – but the real threat was that Stevie’s whole act was gone, the Little Stevie schtick lost to puberty and changing times.
With no obvious next step – and, thus far, no evidence that Stevie had the ideas or the talent to take that step even if it had been obvious – I’m certain Motown had no idea what they had on their hands, or how to encourage his development. Not for nothing did Nelson George pick out Stevie’s 1963-65 singles as the worst run of material any Motown A-list star was ever saddled with, and rumours began to grow that he was finished. Certainly, if Motown had pulled the trigger and cut their losses, dumping Stevie back on the scrapheap of history, well, it would have been understandable. Boneheaded, in hindsight, but understandable.
Still, Motown, like a sports team carrying a struggling, once-promising draft pick in the fourth year of his contract who suddenly shows up for training rejuvenated and full of fire, had plenty good cause to be grateful they’d not acted impetuously and cut him loose. Here, out of nowhere, Stevie Wonder finally joins the Motown story proper, vaulting in one leap to the front of the pack. This is no novelty act or pity case; this is a Motown single through and through, and it’s thrilling.
YESTER-ME
The Motown story so far, as told through the company’s 45 RPM catalogue and chronicled here on Motown Junkies, has been the story of how individual artists and individual achievements all interlock into one grander narrative – but there are recurring themes among those individual artists’ stories too. While some acts seem to appear on the Motown stage fully formed, in either artistic or commercial terms – or, in especially lucky cases, both – well, others struggle to find their voice, their identity in the pack.
Arguably the two biggest names we’ve seen to date, the Supremes and the Temptations, arrived on our scene strangely half-formed and then had to wade through three years’ worth of weird curios, non-hits forever destined to be consigned to compilations called things like The Early Years and Before They Were Famous. In both those cases, it’s tempting to consider their respective breakthroughs – Where Did Our Love Go and The Way You Do The Things You Do – as their real Motown début singles, the end of their prefaces, the start of their stories as we understand them.
And so it goes with Stevie Wonder and Uptight; what’s gone before informs this record, for sure, but it feels like we’re meeting this guy for the first time, that everything that’s gone before has been preliminary, a diversion, a prologue. If you were telling the story of Stevie Wonder – the Stevie Wonder we know, that is – through singles, Uptight makes a great starting point, since it’s effectively a rebirth, a new beginning.
JOURNEY THROUGH THE SECRET LIFE
It opens with a battered drumbeat, an insistent 4/4 pounding, tambourine dragged in its wake, and appropriately enough it feels like a door being kicked open; Stevie’s career to this point had been grasping along a darkened corridor, on a straight line course to obscurity, and yet suddenly all kinds of possibilities reveal themselves, a Technicolor future flooding in, blasting away two years’ worth of shoddy novelty records.
One of the best things about Uptight, quite apart from the killer hook (slick and impossibly cool and yet somehow at the same time made for beery dancefloor bellowing) and that irresistible beat, is how it immediately positions Stevie in the Motown story, not just to answer the critics, not just as someone who can keep up, but as someone who – unexpectedly – turns out to be leading the way.
The 4/4 beat harks back to 1964, to the dawn of a Motown Golden Age which had largely passed Stevie by untouched. At the same time, the sheer energy, even violence of that beat, with its metallic echo of tambourine, horns blaring at all angles with no regard to who gets hit on the way, seams beginning to show amid the previously-seamless pop production… all of that will find its fullest expression in 1966, when the Supremes, Temptations and Tops all embrace variations on that theme. And here’s Stevie Wonder, somehow already ahead of the curve.
And even then, even when you’re tempted to talk down the triumph this record represents – yeah, but Stevie didn’t produce this, only copped a co-write credit with Henry Cosby and Sylvia Moy, it could have been anyone doing the song… – Stevie proves he can be a star performer too. This is his show from start to finish, Stevie taking the song in the palm of his hand, turning loose his natural boyish charm (nothing to do with his actual youth – he still has that impish spark in his voice even now, in his sixties) and fine-tuning it to create a wholly likeable character, an underdog made good who makes us smile, a guy we’re rooting for even as he (essentially) spends the entire record boasting of his amazing luck. In fact, it’s so well done it makes Stevie’s real-life return to success – and, gratifyingly, the business end of the pop and R&B charts – all the more heartwarming, as if we were always rooting for him to turn this thing around, the whole time.
It’s well-sung, too, something which Stevie’s track record thus far hadn’t exactly guaranteed. The Ray Charles schtick which had seemed so forced on earlier Stevie cuts (not helped by Motown’s cack-handed marketing efforts which tried to posit a link between two entirely unrelated blind African-American R&B performers) is just amazing here, Stevie’s delivery crackling with energy, his asides – Ah ha ha ha ha-ha, YEAH – buzzing out of the speakers.
If he’s not yet strengthened his voice to the technical level he’ll reach in a couple of years’ time, he’s grasped how to use what he’s got – his diction reminds me of Diana Ross, another “underpowered” Motown star vocalist (though it’s a surprise to find the Supremes’ cover of this comes across too stilted and mannered to really connect its punches).
But back to Stevie. From a losing position, a position of almost being written off – or, worse, patronised – by Motown, he’d never be left out of the top-table conversation again. For sure, it ended any question of him being allowed to slip through the label’s fingers; it’s an indelible, barrelling powerhouse of a record, a stew of tension released to vivid and unforgettable effect, channelled in exactly the right direction by its mad scientist of a ringmaster, fifteen years old and already smarter than any of us will ever be.
Back in 1962, Motown had marketed Stevie as “the 12 Year Old Genius”. Uptight marks one of those rare occasions where the marketeers – probably by accident, but still – turned out to have been right all along.
MOTOWN JUNKIES VERDICT
(I’ve had MY say, now it’s your turn. Agree? Disagree? Leave a comment, or click the thumbs at the bottom there. Dissent is encouraged!)
You’re reading Motown Junkies, an attempt to review every Motown A- and B-side ever released. Click on the “previous” and “next” buttons below to go back and forth through the catalogue, or visit the Master Index for a full list of reviews so far.
(Or maybe you’re only interested in Stevie Wonder? Click for more.)
The Supremes “Twinkle Twinkle Little Me” |
Stevie Wonder “Purple Rain Drops” |
DISCOVERING MOTOWN |
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Sam McKeown said:
…And so begins one of longest runs of great singles and albums of all time by any artist. Forget Fingertips. (as cool a track as it is) This is Stevie’s career really starts!
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Rhine Ruder said:
no longer “little”, stevie fires it up, at last! what a killer cut. pure rock and soul … “uptight” sounds as hip and muscular as a single by the rolling stones. there’s no stopping him now! easily a ten, but a nine is fine!!
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Charles said:
The Funk Brothers called the 4/4 beat “four on the floor”. A reference to the slang term for a stick shift automobile. That beat was also being used by country/rock singer Roy Orbison on “Pretty Woman”.
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Coustouge11220 said:
I am the same age as Stevie Wonder and while I was aware of Fingertips and other earlier Stevie singles, nothing had grabbed my attention…until Uptight. It was new, fresh, danceable, sing-a-long-able and just brilliant. My friends and I played it over and over again thrilling at it time after time. We waited with bated breath for Stevie’s first appearance on Top of the Pops – and Motown dressed him in a dinner suit! The image was all wrong; the connection between Stevie’s ‘grown up’ image and the ‘street cred’ expectations of his British peers (at that time, his audience) was wobbly. Nonetheless, the music won through and Stevie had his first big UK hit. I find it hard not to give this a 10, but with so much good Motown coming along at this time, one has to differentiate or there’d be no way of putting a little space between Uptight and Stevie’s next bolt out of the blue, his huge hit during 1967’s Summer of Love. So, I’ll go with your 9.
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MichaelS said:
Great essay, as always, Mr. Nixon. I appreciate you approaching your work with an historical perspective, thus making each entry much more than a mere music review.
I recently “rediscovered” Stevie’s follow up to this hit. It will be interesting to read your take on it!
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Dave L said:
By mid-December 1965, me and all my friends had a trio of shiny new globe&record Tamla singles: this, “Bill” and “Go-Go.” It was incredible how fast they came.
“Uptight” moved like a runaway train, and there’s was no questioning your instant attachment to it, no second-guessing “is it really good?” Stevie’s line doesn’t stop being good after this one, even if not every one of them is a milestone.
These were the days when my sister and I would spend Saturdays at the 25th and Cambria (see map link in “I Hear A Symphony” comment) movie theater watching double (typically scary) features: King Kong vs. Godzilla, The Creeping Hand, The Alligator People, Day Of The Triffids, The Tingler …and so forth. Before the films rolled, the PA system played -for some reason- the b-sides of then current Motown stuff. So we got “Purple Rain Drops,” “Anything You Wanna Do,” “Choosy Beggar,” “Who Could Ever Doubt My Love,” Don’t Compare Me With Her,” and all the others that were out about then. But I knew them well.
“Uptight” readily passes that test that makes it a Motown classic: it isn’t new anymore, and yet it hasn’t lost any freshness. When it starts up, it immediately takes me back to who I was when it was new. It always will. A 9? Of course. Even a 10 wouldn’t have shocked me.
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Rhine Ruder said:
is “nothing’s too good for my baby” next up for stevie? if it is, it is a great one, two punch not unlike “reach out” and “standing in the shadows”.
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Robb Klein said:
I liked this one very much. But not enough for a 10. I’d give it an 8 and a half.
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Lord Baltimore said:
This is a 10 for me. As has already been said, the freshness remains after all this time, and this beat is as “Muscular” as any Motown record I’ve ever heard. Listening to this record is like holding on to a Live Wire for three minutes minus the pain. The notion of hearing Motown records in Discotheques in the ’60s is a thrilling one; Hearing “Uptight” in the club to me would sound like the Genesis of Disco itself – If the “4 on the floor” beat wasn’t a Motown creation (I prefer to call it the “Every Beat Snare”), Benny Benjamin surely took it to the next level. And what’s more, I think the Motown Sound truly solidified with this very record. When I was younger, I kind of wished I was 10 years older so that I could view this era from a different perspective, but I’ve reconciled with my fate; being in first grade back then is good enough. At least I witnessed it in the first person at all.
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Lord Baltimore said:
For the “Double-up” Extra Helping version; http://youtu.be/QeULODEQ9Lw
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Nick in Pasadena said:
This indelible, enduring classic sounds every bit as exciting and fresh today as it did in 1965. When it first came along I’d been so spoiled by Motown, constantly expecting boundary-pushing soul-pop with every release, that the brilliance of this one didn’t immediately register. I was like, “Great stuff! But what else would you expect?”
I’ve always thought it strange, however, that the title word–used here to mean “everything’s alright”–went on to mean the exact opposite: tense, nervous, intransigent, repressed.
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Dave L said:
Exactly. At this point, all of us who were there when the run was first happening, were far more spoiled than we ever realized. We knew all the ‘Motown people’ by then, and expected it as our entitlement that there would be an at least interesting -if not chart topping- single release by every one of them, every three months.
Why shouldn’t it go on forever? We had no notion that discontent was brewing in Motown, and the musical banquet we’d become accustomed to was in for some nasty jostling. In retrospect, the tale of Mary Wells shouldn’t have been perceived as a stand-alone chapter, but instead, foretelling.
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nafalmat said:
Without doubt one of the most ‘alive’ records ever produced. It’s absolutely loaded with excitement and vibrancy it simply never let’s up from beginning to end. Delightful listening even after 48 years. Marvelous!!!!
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John Plant said:
The exuberance and high-voltage enthusiasm that carried Stevie through even his weakest moments have been channeled into something volcanic here. If the lyrics are just an extended riff on his good fortune, the explosive zest with which he rejoices in it is irresistible. One stroke of genius is the way the two-syllable title is prepared by those wonderful punchy two-syllable outbursts which precede it: ‘ – ‘OUTSIDE – because my love is true..’ ‘NO ONE is better than I…’ There’s a real generosity in this joyful outflowing.. and when Stevie sings ‘I KNOW I’m just an average guy…’ well, he brings a democratic and irrepressible vibrance to the world ‘average’ which reminds me of Walt Whitman. Another guy who couldn’t contain his joy… and who redefined the word ‘average!’ I suspect, Steve, that your 9 reflects the 9 you gave ‘Ooo Baby Baby’ – a sort of honorary ten, coupled (in this case) with a recognition that there’s even better to come – though I think we have to wait for ‘I Was Made to Love Her’ before Stevie matches this one.
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Rhine Ruder said:
oh, i don’t have to wait until “i was made to love her”! “sho- be-do-be-do-dah-day” & ” you met your match” are coming up!
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John Plant said:
Perhaps my chronology is askew, R.R.! – ‘I thought both those songs came AFTER ‘I was made to love her!’ – Shoo-Be-Doo-Be-Doo-Da-Day is a goosebump-inducing masterpiece!
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Rhine Ruder said:
whoops! i am so wrong … well … “nothing’s to good for my baby” is next (i think)!
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Rupert Kinnard said:
“It’s well-sung, too…”? I think Stevie’
s performance on this song is far beyond merely being “well-sung”. I would say that, from start to finish, it ranks right up there with the best vocals of any 45 single ever released by Motown! I give the song and performance a 10!!!!
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Rupert Kinnard said:
John Plant…the lyrics are: “And it’s all right, what I can’t do,
Out of sight because my heart is true…”
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Landini said:
Hi Gang — I’m a little late for the party so here’s my 2 cents… Agree… Great, great record, though as least to my ears, I feel like young Steven will really hit his stride with “I WAS MADE TO LOVER HER”. Don’t think anyone has mentioned this yet.. I actually got acquainted with “UPTIGHT” through the song “LITTLE OLE MAN” by Bill Cosby which came out in 1967 when I started listening to rock/pop/soul/top40 music. Cosby’s song was bascially a narrative or (maybe an early rap?). The song’s chorus was the chorus from “UPTIGHT” (which was credited on the record label). Though the UPTIGHT part was sung by studio singers, in a way this might be an early example of sampling. It was certainly a creative production. Does anyone remember this song?
Back to Mr. Wonder, I will wait till we get to them but I feel like some of the followups to UPTIGHT were good records but paled significantly to UPTIGHT. My favorite UPTIGHT clone by Stevie was ANGEL BABY which actually was NOT a single though 2 different artists, George Carrow (who I remember hearing back in 67) & Darrell Banks both had singles of that song. I remember ANGEL BABY being out around the same time as LITTLE OLE MAN & the dee jay mentioning the Stevie Wonder connection with both records. At this point, I barely had an idea of who he was but was thinking this Wonder guy must be good! I was 9 years old at the time!
Cheers to all!
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Nick in Pasadena said:
The Bill Cosby disc is practically unlistenable for me. I never could understand its popularity–it followed the real “Uptight” only by a year or so, and, as a supposed comedy record, wasn’t very funny.
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Landini said:
Hi Nick,
Yeah I agree it isn’t that great. I think it was popular with dancers. It was a big song on Teen Dance Shows (where I first heard it). I’m sure the Uptight vibe probably attracted people. Again, I may not have become aware of the original if it hadn’t been for that record. A few years later I went out & bought the original UPTIGHT single as an oldie.
Again, I was 9 year old at the time when I heard the Cosby record.
I think the Cosby record was actually meant to be sort of “serious” in a way. As they used to say on American Bandstand Rate the record “It had a good beat, you could dance to it”! LOL!
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144man said:
THIRTY YEARS LATER…
When Oasis’s album “(What’s the Story) Morning Glory?” was released in 1995, the track “Step Out”, which had been included on promo copies was removed owing to the melody of the chorus being too similar to “Uptight “.
“Step Out” finally appeared as one of the tracks on the “Don’t Look Back In Anger” CD single, where it was credited to Gallagher, Wonder, Cosby, Moy.
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Landini said:
Hey I meant to mention this. I am pretty sure my copy of UPTIGHT listed Stevie Wonder as S. Judkins for composer credits. Unfortunately I do not own that single anymore. Can anyone verify whether some copies came out like that? Robb Klein? Nix? Thanks.
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Mark V said:
That’s how it’s listed on the “Up Tight” LP. I don’t have a copy of the single.
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Landini said:
Cool! I just saw a label scan for Stevie Wonders first Greatest Hits Package & that is how it is listed there.
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bogart4017 said:
Great dance track! I was also stricken by Stevie’s delivery…..its as if there are too many words and he is trying his best to stay in meter. Or, the music track is a runaway train and Stevie is trying to hold on and keep up in order to tell his story.
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Greg Kipp said:
Great Review, Steve!!! In fact, I think this may be the best review I’ve read on this blog since I found it a few weeks ago. Like you, I would rate this record as a “9” as well. Personally, I think the record starts off a little tentative, but once the trumpets chime in on the intro, it’s full steam ahead. Stevie’s singing is excellent and the Funk Brothers are TOTALLY SMOKIN’ HOT on this track. I also find myself somewhat amused by the line in the song where he describes himself as “an average guy”. Since when and in what universe would anybody ever consider THE GREAT STEVIE WONDER to be an average guy?! Not Hardly!!!! 🙂
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Abbott Cooper said:
Said to read of the passing of Sylvia Moy two days ago. A tremendous talent with several Motown Masterpieces on her resume.
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