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Tamla T 54125 (A), January 1966
b/w Sad Song
(Written by Frank Wilson)
Tamla Motown TMG 556 (A), March 1966
b/w Sad Song
(Released in the UK under license through EMI / Tamla Motown)
Of all the questions prompted by Motown’s sudden and meteoric rise to something approaching omnipresence in 1965, I doubt “so, what’s next for Brenda Holloway?” was near the top of anyone’s list of burning issues. The erstwhile Next Big Thing had suffered badly during the course of the preceding year, wrongfooted by a misguided corporate decision to saddle her with a job lot of Mary Wells’ hand-me-downs and then stymied by a lack of promotional clout when she cut material better suited to her own voice. Her last single (back in August), the magnificent once-in-a-lifetime You Can Cry On My Shoulder, had missed the Hot 100 (indeed, it barely scraped the Hot, um, 120); six months on and Together ‘Til The End Of Time suffered the same commercial fate, and by then, nobody was really talking about Brenda any more.
This isn’t quite the sound of Motown washing its hands of their one-time brightest new hope, but it doesn’t exactly smack of confidence either (no more direct involvement from the big names, a track recorded not in Detroit but Brenda’s native Los Angeles courtesy of Motown’s already-deprecated West Coast office, saddled with a re-used two-year-old archive cut, Sad Song, on the B-side); Brenda and Motown weren’t through with each other just yet, but her shot at the really big time, the one-name superstar diva territory she’d once looked destined to achieve, had pretty much officially come and gone.
But here begins the strange second act of Brenda’s Motown life, a life from now on mostly lived out of the spotlight. On my radio show, I’ve christened her the Queen of Unreleased Motown, because while there were a lot of artists who toiled largely in the dark at Hitsville stockpiling new music, precious little of which ever saw the light of day, Brenda remains a case apart: from here through her eventual walkout in 1968, during which time she troubled the Top 40 chart compilers just once more, the tracks we’ll cover on Motown Junkies represent only the tip of a particularly hefty iceberg. There are absolutely dozens more Brenda Holloway cuts under the surface, cuts which had to wait for the CD era to be heard – indeed, cuts which are still waiting, fifty years later – and, crucially, cuts which under different circumstances could, just feasibly, have been enduring hits.
This isn’t really one of them, and if I’m being honest, nor is it one of her very best – but as well as being really rather lovely, it’s an important step towards her finding that elusive voice of her own. Together with her previous effort’s flip, How Many Times Did You Mean It, it marks a restatement of values, a kind of reboot. Away from the crowds, Brenda quietly finds a thread long abandoned, a thread that ran through her mesmerising debut Every Little Bit Hurts and its beguiling sequel I’ll Always Love You; now that nobody’s really watching, left to her own devices, she picks that thread back up again, and it’ll take her somewhere new and unexpected, somewhere difficult but occasionally very rewarding. We follow, with caution.
Mind you, that caution is well justified, I think. We’re in the middle of the greatest sustained run of glorious artistic and commercial success Motown had ever achieved (arguably, that they would ever achieve), and absent the artificial dividing line of the new year (which severs the thread if you’re playing The Complete Motown Singles: Volume 5 and then have to pause to get Volume 6 down from the shelf to continue the story), listening to December ’65 and January ’66 as a continuous and contiguous whole really makes Together ‘Til The End Of Time stick out, and not necessarily in a good way.
There’s always been more than a touch of MOR about Brenda’s work at Motown so far, and that’s including the very best of it; even her catalogue of Mary Wells covers seems to have acquired a showbiz sheen that wasn’t really there when Miss Wells was singing those same songs, so it’s probably safe to say the unifying factor in that ever-so-slight drift cheesewards was Miss Holloway herself. That whitebread tendency is only underlined by her propensity for gussying up a plain passage with a much bigger performance, pumping the throttle in a way that’s often a thrill but which also risks sacrificing meaning and nuance. Keep on determinedly ironing out the underlying emotions in a song in order to show off what a good voice you’ve got, and you might well end up with something that sounds like it’s been ironed: smooth and crisp and flat. Or, to put it more simply, bigger isn’t always better, and not everything is a show tune or torch song.
In this way, up until now Brenda has shown how easily she could become a victim of her own vocal prowess; in common with many of her labelmates, she seems to have been someone who grew up listening to a lot of standards, but crucially she didn’t then follow up that Broadway love by hanging out with a load of hardened jazz cats and blues heads, her physical isolation out in her native California unavoidably cutting her off from developments in Detroit to an extent. Hence, it’s possible that Brenda’s apparent natural tendency towards the poppy and the splashy, a tendency which for me has undermined what could have been some exceptional records so far, might have been some kind of defensive mechanism in the face of Motown’s unending pressure to deliver. Patience was famously short around Hitsville, and the expectation for Brenda to both get with the program and show what made her so special at the same time resulted in a good many OTT vocal performances, treating each track like some kind of final audition.
The effect on the worst offenders is ironic: Brenda, an articulate, loquacious and intelligent woman with a largely-hidden knack for songwriting and musical theory, gives the impression she either doesn’t understand or doesn’t care what she’s singing about.
But what if the song you’re singing actually turns that into an asset, rather than a liability? What if it gives you something to really get your teeth into and make your own? That’s when Brenda comes into her element, and that’s the Brenda Holloway I know and love. We saw the results on her aforementioned first two Motown singles, which together with You Can Cry On My Shoulder form a kind of trilogy of imposing, suffocating hyper-ballads; when you don’t give in to the schmaltzy impulses but instead turn them to your advantage, you can weaponise that voice and those Broadway instincts for the purposes of good, like a female take on Marvin Gaye suddenly realising you don’t get to be Nat King Cole just by singing a load of the same songs he sang.
What am I waffling on about? The magic and the artistry of Brenda Holloway, who’s getting better and better even as the sales taper off, and who – after this record crashes and burns on the charts – will barely put a foot wrong. I’d say it was one of the more surprising late-career Motown rebirths, right up there with the Marvelettes and Contours, except that what I love about Brenda was there right from the beginning, only needing someone to focus her attention on it – and unlike so many of the other great Motown artists, she had no mentor, no Svengali writer-producer to help her through, she had to find the answer within on her own.
She works at it, she puts her head down, she bats aside the troublesome internal questions about how she went from supporting the Beatles at Shea Stadium to being a nearly-unknown has-been at the age of 19, and she carves out her own niche. It’s all starting to work, and it works because – and I don’t think this is an over-simplification – she’s finally finding herself.
We saw it on How Many Times Did You Mean It: despite that song’s exaggerated, blaring chorus, there was a real sense of a light clicking on somewhere in Brenda’s mind, a tiny spark that flared up just for a few moments; now, Together ‘Til The End Of Time is her scrabbling around in the dark, searching for the source of that light. So when she turns in a song that sounds like a Barbara McNair outtake, right in the middle of a slew of great R&B-pop numbers from almost every other artist in the Motown stable (many of them manifestly less vocally talented than Brenda), the initial disappointment at the hokey deployment is tempered with two things – one, the feeling that Brenda was starting to work out what made her special and to play up to it, as everything that made that monumental trilogy of singles great is here again in full effect. And, two, it’s actually a really pretty song.
Every Little Bit Hurts had been a mournful, mopey sort of song, I’ll Always Love You the tale of a blissfully happy narrator, and then You Can Cry On My Shoulder combined the two to create a genuinely arresting picture of a woman with nothing else to live for putting herself through complete self-effacing subservience to create something end-of-the-world melodramatic.
What’s really clever about this one is that it combines all of those things to really show off every facet of what Brenda can do, or rather has already done: an on-vinyl highlight reel. So, the first verse is all doom and gloom, Miss Holloway balefully singing of “a world filled with so much sorrow” where “no-one really seems to care”, and the song weights itself (and Brenda’s poor heart) with not only loneliness but complete remoteness from the entire rest of the human race:
It’s so easy to be lost in a land
Where no one wants to help you, no one understands
But then the chorus kicks in, and it turns out we’ve all fallen for a classic bait-and-swithch: this is a song of loving devotion after all. Oh, the narrator may be decrying this as an unfair, crapsack world when it comes to romance – but not for her, and boy, is she grateful for that. The entire tone of the song is changed by the new vantage point, as she marvels that given all the problems of the world, given just how small and alone you can feel in a city of millions like Los Angeles, things have still worked out for her.
And so, having shown off the pain of Every Little Bit Hurts, the song turns on a sixpence and continues Brenda’s Greatest Hits tour with the satisfied smile of I’ll Always Love You, while also bringing in more than a touch of the ever-so-noble self-sacrifice from You Can Cry On My Shoulder, as she tells us she’ll:
… make you happy when you’re feeling blue
Should you ever have to leave me, I’ll be waiting for you
And so when we get into the second chorus, the emphasis has changed; it’s valedictory rather than unexpected, and if the note of triumph doesn’t approach the heights of that devastating key change from You Can Cry On My Shoulder to really drive it into your heart and propel the song to greatness, it’s nonetheless understandable why I like it so much; as a summary of what was good about her vocals on my three favourite Brenda records so far, it’s just about the best CV she could have put together.
That chorus is just lovely – “But we’ll hold hands… to-GETHER! And we’ll make our plans… for-EVER!”, one of Frank Wilson’s prettiest melodic figures, safe in Brenda’s hands as we ramp up for the coming refrain. We prepare ourselves for her to do what she so often does: engage the clutch, bring her foot down, let go of her inhibitions, tear off up the stave and do it loud… it’ll sound good but probably lose some of the fragile beauty of the song and the lyrics. Right?
But no, not this time. In fact, Brenda actually steps away from the mic and almost whispers the title phrase, letting the backing singers handle the operatic stuff before she repeats their echo back at them, like an underline: ‘Till the END of time!. The narrator gave it serious consideration, while they went straight for the flashy home-run ball; only then did she feel confident enough in herself to sign her name to such a bold statement, Brenda in one stroke not only selling the song but also fixing everything that was previously “wrong” with her old approach. She’s such a star.
Even then, Frank Wilson can’t resist an instrumental break, and unexpectedly it’s handed to a mournful Western harmonica which has been crying almost unnoticed in the background, hitherto tucked away along with some soft and unobtrusive strings. When the harmonica takes up the refrain, like some forgotten 40s movie soundtracking a hardworking cowboy returning to the ranch at sundown, it’s hard not to visualise Brenda and her beau on a big screen, staring wordlessly into each other’s eyes in black and white.
Now, this all sounds very laudatory, I know, when in fact I don’t actually love it that much. It’s still not perfect – it’s something of a trifle, I find I need to be in the mood to appreciate it (a mood not really created by the various uptempo or soul-searching masterpieces stacking up all around this), we’ve already had my favourite of Brenda’s cuts in the same vein, and even after all my fine words those MOR and unnecessarily showy tendencies haven’t quite yet been put back on the shelf.
Nonetheless, in keeping with the overall theme so far of Motown’s most spectacular winter, this is yet another established Motown artist subtly raising their game to a whole new level, even if it’s by cutting back on previous lows rather than stretching for new highs. If, this time, it’s more about the anticipation of what it means for future records than the one we’re listening to right now, this is still awfully nice, and I can’t begrudge it another big green number. Don’t worry, we’re not running out of them any time soon.
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 Brenda Holloway? Click for more.)
Martha & the Vandellas “Never Leave Your Baby’s Side” |
The Isley Brothers “This Old Heart Of Mine (Is Weak For You)” |
DISCOVERING MOTOWN |
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Motown Junkies presents the finest Motown cuts, big hits and hard to find classics. Listen to all past episodes here. |
benjaminblue said:
wrongfooted by a misguided corporate decision to saddle her with a job lot of Mary Wells’ hand-me-downs and then stymied by a lack of promotional clout when she cut material better suited TO her own voice.
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The Nixon Administration said:
Oops.
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John Plant said:
Well, I just heard the song for the first time (thank you Spotify). The song – like many Motown classics – comes within inches of being unendurable, overproduced, glitzy schmalz – What is it precisely that redeems it? Partly, of course, Brenda’s mighty voice, an unequalled combination of sultriness and power – I remember being overwhelmed by the sheer size of it when I saw her at the Uptown in Philadelphia, probably in 1966 – and partly by the lovely little details of instrumentation and texture, which serve to cleanse the glitz out of the song. Seven seems fair – but an affectionate smiling seven.
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The Nixon Administration said:
Brenda has some nice things to say about Frank Wilson in the liner notes to The Complete Motown Singles: Volume 6, even directly comparing their relationship to that of Mary Wells and Smokey Robinson, so it might be fair to say Wilson comes closest to being the “missing” guru writer-producer I mentioned, and reading this back it does feel a bit mealy-mouthed, as though I sought to downplay his contribution here (which really wasn’t the intention!) – but in terms of Brenda’s career as seen here on this blog through the prism of 45 sides, he barely gets a look in (she won’t release another Wilson-penned single for almost a year and a half).
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Robb Klein said:
I don’t like Frank Wilson’s solo songwriting. I think he and Marc Gordon were a great team. But, on his own Wilson’s songs wander misguidedly, all over the place. This song is a good example of that. Brenda’s great singing job on this recording saves it, and makes it a high 6 or very low 7, depending on mood of the listener.
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Seacow said:
I don’t quite get all the criticisms of Frank Wilson’s writing lacking structure or being directionless or what have you. While I don’t think he has the straightforward directness of, say, Smokey or HDH, I find his melodies to be just as strong, if not a but more adventurous. I think this song is a great example of his adventurous writing, in that he creates tension in the chorus by having it peak at the beginning, and then pulling it back and hanging on that one chord seemingly ’til the end of time. Or at least until Brenda sings that. “You Can Cry on my Shoulder” it isn’t, but Brenda still turns in an excellent performance. A big green 7 for me too.
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144man said:
Yet again the UK single is different from the American [assuming that the correct version was used on TCMS6].
In the US version’s final chorus, after “We’ll hold hands forever”, Brenda sings the expected “and we’ll make our plans together ’til the end of time”. In the UK version she sings “darling forever and ever ’til the end of time”.
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nafalmat said:
I’m quite surprised at some of the comments about this recording. I always assumed this would have been considered a true classic to all Motown, soul fans and come to that anyone who likes a beautifully constructed pop song. However, I seem to be wrong. In my opinion this is Frank Wilson’s finest moment as a composer and one of Hal Davis’s finest moments as a producer and one of Brenda’s finest moments as a vocalist. A truly gorgeous love song that would be a credit to any of the greatest popular song writers yet alone the relatively unknown that Wilson was at that time. I shall continue to get massive enjoyment from it no matter what others think. Perhaps there is someone else out there who agrees with me.9.9 out of 10 from me.
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144man said:
I agree with your comment and your mark, nafaltmat.
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Robb Klein said:
I DO like “Together Til The End of Time” to some degree. But most of my experience with Frank Wilson’s solo written songs were his pre-Motown work, including the awful “Bridge of Love”, “Long, Long Road To happiness”, “When Are You Coming Home”, “Come Back Sandy” he wrote for his cuts as Sonny Daye on Power Records, and those aimless songs he wrote for his A&M Phil Spectorish cuts as Edward Saint Ann. What are Frank Wilson’s best solo-written Motown cuts? As stated above, I’m a GIANT fan of Frank Wilson’s collaboration songs written together with Marc Gordon. They were one of my favourite writing teams. I remember Wilson writing some songs for The Supremes, but most of those I can recall were written together with other writers.
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bogart4017 said:
Remember when you could go to a Korvettes or Two Guys or A & S and they would have a record counter with a list of 100 45s? Ok, this was oneof the ones that hovered in the low 90s that i picked up just because it was Brenda Holloway and i had such a crush on her. The song wasnt played on the radio and i didnt see her on tv or on tour promoting it. I loved it. In retrospect though, whats interesting is i’m now realizing that i never shared that song with anyone else. I only really played that record when i was alone. Maybe thats what our host and some commenters mena when they say you have to be “in the mood” for it?
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Landini said:
And hey… about those 3 for $1 45rpm bins. The ones with the holes punched in the label. I got a lot of Motown/Atlantic/Stax singles from those bins! Miss those days!
Re. this record. Not bad – but I have heard better from Miss Holloway.
Cheers all & thanks for your prayers/good wishes for my health. My last Cat Scan showed me to still be cancer free! You might be stuck with me for awhile! LOL!
Best to all!
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Mary Plant said:
Wonderful news, Landini!
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Robb Klein said:
No, I don’t remember Korvettes or Two Guys having a “Top 100” 45s. That must have occurred after I moved to The Netherlands in 1972, and didn’t look for records in my few months visits to USA and Canada after that. But I DO remember 10¢ 45 sales at Woolworths, and 3 for $1 bins in record shops.
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bogart4017 said:
Yeah…i used to try to avoid those 10 cent sales because most of those were returns that were mislabeled or horriblt off-center or defective. But you could also get some really hard to find stuff that was only regionally successful. Think Black Magic, Patti and the Lovelites, J. Hines and the Boys, etc.
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144man said:
When is the next review anticipated?
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The Nixon Administration said:
I’d hope very soon – I’ve been moving house and haven’t had time to set up my PC again yet, so I’ve just been writing in dribs and drabs. Yet again, sorry for the delay, folks 🙂
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Landini said:
We totally understand! There is more to life than just MOTOWN! Hope your move is going well! Best!
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The Nixon Administration said:
Thanks Landini. I’m hoping to have it up by the end of the week (it’s another doorstopper, I’m afraid!) and then get some more writing done now we’re settling.
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nafalmat said:
I’m sure I’m not alone in saying what a great site this is and what a lot of pleasure I have had reading your reviews and the comments of other Motown junkies.
Why are there no new reviews appearing nowadays? I’m sure a lot of us are waiting to read your reviews on the next batch of releases. I appreciate your reviews probably take a lot of time to prepare so please don’t take this comment as a criticism, but if you haven’t yet completed any new reviews would it be possible to simply create the next batch of releases so we can start commenting on them and add your reviews when they are ready? I’m sure I’m not alone in wanting to comment on the next batch of recordings.
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The Nixon Administration said:
Not really – I post new entries when they’re ready, rather than as placeholders for future essays (once they’re posted, they’re posted forever, and it’d rather break the structure of the site where the latest entry goes on the front page etc.) Also, even if I wanted to, it’s not “simple” to create even placeholder pages – I don’t know if you can tell from there by looking at the source etc., but it takes quite a lot of faffing around with code “under the hood” to get the pages to display like this.
Don’t worry, I will be back. My computer isn’t set up yet and I can’t physically get to my writing desk until we unpack some more stuff, which is less straightforward than it sounds with two young children running around. I’ve written most of the next one already, and sketched out the next 20 or so after that offline in varying degrees of completeness – I can see you’re all still visiting the site in your thousands, so I can only beg your patience for a little longer!
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The Nixon Administration said:
(Also, and I’m not sure if this makes things better or worse, the next one is really, really long again)
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Lewis said:
We just want you to know that you are missed. Take your time. I’m sure it will be worth the wait.
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Landini said:
Not really Motown, but I am assuming people have heard the sad news of the death of Percy Sledge. I thought he was a fine singer but his signature hit “When A Man Loves A Woman” wasn’t my favorite by him. I preferred “Warm & Tender Love” “Ir Tears Me Up” & “Take Time To Know Her”. Sort of Motown related, Mr. Sledge did a nice remake of “I Wish It Would Rain” in the mid-90s – managing to turn it into a country-soul ballad. Sometimes, having a huge hit like “When A…” can hurt an artist as people get all excited about the hit but ignore the artist’s other fine work. Of course, I am happy for Mr. Sledge for his success with the song & the well deserved accolades he recieved. RIP & condolences to his loved ones! PS – “When a Man…” was the first southern soul record to top the pop charts! And yes, the horns are slightly out of tune!
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johnplant2015 said:
A favourite Percy Sledge moment is ‘so far away from YOU – and all your charms (unforgettable melisma) in ‘Just Out of Reach’ – he was an authentic artist whose voice distilled pure emotion. Irreplaceable and unique. And by the way, I think the out-of-tune horns are an integral and irreplaceable part of the song’s fascination. Never heard his ‘I wish it would rain’ – you’ve whetted my appetite! I share your love for ‘Warm and Tender Love’ – it doesn’t get simpler (or warmer) than that….
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Landini said:
Interesting — Just saw a clip from American Bandstand with Miss Holloway performing “Just Look What You Have Done”. There is a quick “interview” where Dick Clark asks her some questions including “Is there a place you would like to travel to?”. Miss Holloway replied “Israel – because I have read about it in the Bible.” I thought that was a very interesting & intelligent answer – shows some real depth.
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Landini said:
One more thing — Apparently, Brenda Holloway was a favorite of Dick Clark’s. He actually was very interested in having her on his Caravan of Stars tour & begrudgingly said he would also allow the then No-Hit Supremes to join the tour as well. LOL!
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rupegroup1 said:
Why hasn’t there been any activity on this for weeks? Anyone?
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The Nixon Administration said:
Because I first moved house, and then have since been very busy with other work and family stuff. It’ll be back soon (the next entry has been mostly finished for months now) but I haven’t had any time to do any music writing.
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rupegroup1 said:
Whew…I am just glad to know that you’re OK!
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Landini said:
Amen to that! You take all the time you need my friend!!!!
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rupegroup1 said:
I know moving can be traumatic. I hope all went well!!!
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jackevans1996 said:
I would just like to say I hope you are doing ok and I am looking forward to the next post as This Old Heart of Mine
PS Has anyone noticed the fact you can’t buy complete motown singles on digital download in Britain
Thanks for your hard work Mr Deveraux
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The Nixon Administration said:
I’m fine, thank you! Just taking a long time to get set up and settled down for writing more blog posts… I’m aiming to have this place back up and running with new entries in July.
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nafalmat said:
Some interesting footage of Brenda has recently been added on Youtube. These are 2 complete shows of SHEBANG from spring ’67. Both feature Brenda singning ‘Just look what you have done’, ‘When I’m Gone’ along with interviews with the host of the show. One interview also includes Brenda playimg the intro to My Girl on her violin. The clip of ‘Just look what you have done’ from the Motown Special show has been on youtube before, but I have never seen the version from the Anahiem Stadium show before or the interviews. These may be familiar to older US citizens but us Brits never saw this show, so these clips are fantastic to folk like me. I particularly like the interviews as it’s interesting to see and hear how the artists presented themselves while not performing their music. Brenda seemed like a real charmer. Which is more than can be said about Vandella Rosalind Ashford. The Vandellas are also featured on the Anahein Stadium show. There is an interview of the Vandellas from a Canadian 1967 pop show also on youtube where Rosalind doesn’t seem to be very articulate. The same goes on this show, when asked for her opinion by the host on a particular subject, she basically ignores him and he has to move on to the other Vandella Betty Kelly who would be leaving the group a few months later. rosalind Ashford seemed to have very little personality.
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