Quite pretty, clearly intended as a slowie ballad in the Bad Girl vein, sung in a very high register by young Smokey, who gives it his all, but not really to any particular end. More of an exercise in vocal range than a real song, it’s pretty forgettable, to be honest.
The song doesn’t really go anywhere, there are no real surprises, and although it’s not without its charm, as a single it’s not a patch on Bad Girl. (5)
After the soaring, lovely Bad Girl, this somewhat ill-considered B-side sends the listener crashing back down to earth with a bump. (2)
This is songcraft on quite another level from the workaday R&B and doo-wop that had been Motown’s stock in trade up until now; not even twenty and already a class apart, this is a superb calling card for one of the all-time great songwriters.
It’s not completely impossible to put this alongside something like the Funk Brothers’ Snake Walk and understand they were both released by the same label. It’s still an oddity, though. (5)
More than anything else, it serves to illustrate just how widely Berry Gordy would cast his net if he thought there was a hit to be had out of it. This time, there wasn’t. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this complete commercial curveball baffled black radio, confused consumers, sold bog-all copies and is now one of early Motown’s rarer curios. (4)
It would be at least another two years before Motown consistently delivered singles approaching this level of quality, but this pair of sides is such a major leap forward compared to what went before that Barrett Strong should be considered the first great Motown artist. (8)
The whole thing is just an unstoppable, nasty, mean, sexy groove. Everything on the record just demands attention – the raw-throated, almost-shouted vocals, the thundering bass, the spiky, twanging guitars, everything. And somehow it all works. (9)
If you’d asked anyone at the time whether Tamla Records was going anywhere special, whether people would remember Berry Gordy in fifty years’ time, the answer would most likely have been a polite but firm “no, not really”. The next release would change all that.
It’s a nice enough little song, if still not exactly remarkable. It has to be said, though – and I apologise in advance to any surviving Satintones who happen to come across this – that for a vocal harmony group, they just aren’t very good singers. (4)
After the horrors of the A-side, this is slightly better, but still hardly great; extremely repetitive and almost mindlessly simple, running for less than two minutes, it sounds more than anything else like a Buddy Holly record being played at 33 by mistake.
Motown Junkies 