Gettin' It Together

Checking out three sweet new vinyl reissues from the Motown Sound Collection

I am thankful for so many things, not the least of which is the fact that my initial impulse to dig deeper into the music of the 1960s and 70s just so happened to coincide with a time when my hometown of Chicago was filled with incredible thrift shops.

Back in the 1980s, North Clark Street between Lawrence and Bryn Mawr alone had at least half a dozen thrift shops where you could reliably score a decent stack o’ vintage 33 or 45 rpm wax for just a few bucks. Whenever I was back from school for a visit, I would doggedly trudge up and down that mile-long Uptown-to-Andersonville stretch, picking up any old albums or singles that looked even remotely interesting to me. I brought home a lot of stinkers, of course, but exponentially expanded my musical knowledge in the process — and whenever I’d unearth new-to-me treasures like the second Steppenwolf LP for just a buck, or the Shadows of Knight’s “Oh Yeah” 45 for a mere quarter, I felt like Howard Carter discovering King Tut’s tomb.

Original Motown records were pretty common finds in those days, and for a while I grabbed as many as I could. But much as I adored the 1960s singles I found by The Temptations, Four Tops, The Supremes, etc., their albums from the era (outside of “greatest hits” collections) generally left me cold. The two or three actual hits they’d contain would be amazing, of course, but the other cuts were usually Hitsville USA floor sweepings and/or not-as-good renditions of songs that had already been hits for other Motown artists.

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After about a dozen such disappointments — I couldn’t really say I’d been “burned” when I’d only paid a dollar or so for ‘em — I gave up on mining that particular vein, and turned my attention instead to Motown LPs from the 1970s. As the conventional rock-crit wisdom went at the time, the commercial and critical success of Stevie Wonder’s Where I’m Coming From and Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On (both released in the tumultuous spring of 1971) had reoriented the label towards producing albums as artistic statements rather than quick cash-ins, resulting in a higher ratio of memorable songs per album side.

Of course, as the decades have passed, I’ve realized that such generalizations only serve as an impediment to a deeper understanding of Motown’s fascinating (if occasionally frustrating) catalog. I’ve since gone back to Motown’s ‘60s well and found some damn fine LPs down there — The Four Tops’ self-titled 1964 album and their 1967 effort Reach Out, for a couple of examples — just as I’ve found myself pulling up the tone arm from some fairly “meh” long-playing ‘70s Motown product. Which is why it’s been so cool to see Elemental Music reissuing some of the label’s more overlooked albums on 140g vinyl this year as part of their Motown Sound Collection series, and thereby shining a light on some crucial but lesser-known long-players that tend to be forgotten amid all of the label’s “greatest hits” collections and renowned classics.

I recently scored three LPs from this series — Smokey Robinson & The Miracles’ Make It Happen, The Temptations’ Cloud Nine, and The Jackson 5ive’s Get It Together — three very different albums which nonetheless represent important chapters in the histories of these respective acts. All three records sound great, despite the fact that they were almost certainly mastered from digital files, and they all come sturdily packaged in vivid reproductions of their original covers. I was more familiar with the Smokey album than the other two (due to already owning an original stereo copy), so let’s start there…

Smokey Robinson & The Miracles — Make It Happen (1967)

Originally released in August 1967, the Miracles’ tenth studio album features two of the group’s three chart hits from that year — “The Love I Saw in You Was Just a Mirage” and “More Love” — as well as another song, “The Tears of a Clown,” which would become one of the band’s all-time biggest hits upon its re-release in 1970. “Mirage” and “More Love” are two of my all-time favorite Smokey songs; the former’s lyrical dissection of a relationship gone wrong is as devastating as its music is majestic, while the latter remains one of the most heartwarming pledges of devotion ever waxed. There’s also no denying the clockwork brilliance of “Tears of a Clown,” and though I’ve heard the hit version so many times on oldies radio I can scarcely process it anymore, the mono edition of Make It Happen (which Elemental Music has thoughtfully chosen for this reissue) contains an alternate vocal performance of the track that perks my ears right up.

While the sophisticated arrangements of those three cuts make them feel more of a piece with subsequent Miracles hits like “I Second That Emotion,” “If You Can Want” or “Baby, Baby Don’t Cry,” many of Make It Happen’s tracks now sound like throwbacks to the group’s earlier glories; finger-poppers like “The Soulful Shack,” “Dancing’s Alright” and Holland-Dozier-Holland’s “It’s a Good Feeling” could have easily fit on 1965’s Going to a Go-Go or 1966’s Away We Go-Go, and slow-dancers like “My Love For You” and a lovely cover of Little Anthony and the Imperials’ “I’m on the Outside (Looking In)” are the sort of smoochfests the Miracles had been knocking out of the park since their street-corner beginnings.

On the other hand, while “My Love Is Your Love (Forever)” and “After You Put Back the Pieces (I’ll Still Have a Broken Heart)” might not be the greatest songs from the era to bear a Stevie Wonder songwriting credit — the former was written with Ivy Jo Hunter, and the latter with Clarence Paul and Morris Broadnax — they still crackle with the sense of modern possibility, and the sound of Motown’s pop-soul envelope being subtly pushed outward. All twelve tracks are impeccably sung and performed, in any case, and sound nicely warm and punchy in this mono pressing. If Make It Happen is ultimately a transitional Miracles album, it’s still a delightful one.

The Temptations — Cloud Nine (1969)

Speaking of transitional albums… coming hot on the heels of 1968’s fun-for-the-whole-family Live at the Copa, 1969’s Cloud Nine was where The Temptations — abetted by recently-added lead singer Dennis Edwards and guided by longtime producer Norman Whitfield — suddenly lifted off into the psychedelic soul stratosphere.

Well, sort of. Side One of Cloud Nine opens with the hit title track, which employed Dennis Coffey’s fuzz guitar, Latin-tinged percussion, Whitfield and Barrett Strong’s unflinching lyrics, and deftly swapped vocal lines from Edwards, Eddie Kendricks and Paul Williams to drag Motown into the age of Sly Stone and Funkadelic. It’s probably hard to appreciate now just how radical the song sounded when it was released in the fall of 1968, or how many listeners were completely freaked out by this album’s extended nine-and-a-half minute version of “Runaway Child, Running Wild,” which had followed “Cloud Nine” up the charts in a truncated single edit. (A nicely funky but hardly essential version of “I Heard It Through the Grapevine” is sandwiched on Side One between “Cloud Nine” and “Runaway Child”.)

No Motown album had featured such a psychedelically elongated track before, but Whitfield’s production on the Cloud Nine version of “Runaway Child” served notice that Motown was now coming for the freaks, heads and get-highs. But this was still Hitsville USA, however, and it would be another year before Berry Gordy allowed Whitfield and The Temptations to take up full-time residence at the Psychedelic Shack; for now, bets had to be hedged, which is why Side Two of Cloud Nine features seven straightforward pop-soul performances, including covers of the 1966 Lou Rawls hit “Love is a Hurtin’ Thing” and Gerry Goffin and Carole King’s “Hey Girl,” which had been a smash for Freddie Scott all the way back in 1963.

Side Two of Cloud Nine is actually a perfectly enjoyable listen in and of itself, but it’s still a serious comedown from Side One’s acid odysseys. If the sides had been flipped, Cloud Nine would have come off as a “Here’s where we’ve been, and here’s where we’re going!” kind of statement; instead, it fairly drips with “Don’t worry, we’re still the same ol’ Temps you know and love!” anxiety. Thankfully, I (and you) can just play Side Two first, and then flip the record and don the headphones for “Cloud Nine” and the extended “Runaway Child,” both of which are truly worth the price of admission.

The Jackson 5ive — Get It Together (1973)

Despite always considering The Jackson 5 (or 5ive, as they’re listed here) a brilliant singles act, I honestly wasn’t expecting to love Get It Together anywhere near as much as I actually do. Produced by Hal Davis, the album made it to #4 on Billboard’s Top Soul Albums chart, but just barely scraped to #100 on the Billboard 200 (or Top LPs and Tape chart, as it was then known), probably because it only produced one middling pop hit — the sassy title track, which hit #2 on the Hot Soul Singles chart but deserved far better than its #28 peak position in the Hot 100.

Therefore, it’s entirely possible that you haven’t heard Get It Together — in which case, you really oughta, er, get it together and score a copy of the new Elemental Music edition, which is pressed on sweet red vinyl and comes housed in a die-cut cover similar to that of the original US release. But even without those attractive incentives, Get It Together would be a joy. Though the group had dabbled in psychedelic funk as far back as 1970’s ABC album (which featured a nifty cover of Funkadelic’s “I’ll Bet You”), Get It Together was the first J5 LP to completely ditch their bubblegum sound in favor of a funkier, tougher and more mature approach.

This was partially motivated by the fact that the voice of 14 year-old Michael Jackson had dropped slightly, but the album was also the group’s first to feature lead vocals for all five brothers. Michael sings lead by himself on “Don’t Say Goodbye Again” (a very close cousin to the group’s 1971 hit “Never Can Say Goodbye”) and “It’s Too Late to Change the Time,” but he’s ably abetted by big brother Jermaine on the title track, as well as on the nicely cooking updates of Diana Ross and the Supremes’ “Reflections” and Gladys Knight and the Pips’”You Need Love Like I Do (Don’t You)” and the disco robot anthem “Dancing Machine” — the latter of which would become a major hit the following year in a much shorter edit.

But best of all are the album’s extended centerpieces — the eight and a half-minute cover of The Temptations’ “Hum Along and Dance” that closes Side One, and the seven-minute cover of The Undisputed Truth’s “Mama, I Got a Brand New Thing (Don’t Say No)” that opens Side Two. Both songs offer up impressive simulacrums of Norman Whitfield’s psychedelic funk excursions with the Temps, complete with five-way vocal trade-offs that include solid contributions from Jackie, Marlon and Tito. The album’s eight tracks are arranged so that they run seamlessly together without any breaks— well, at least until you have to flip the record over — making for a wonderfully immersive listening experience.

There have been eleven Motown Sound Collection albums reissued on vinyl so far this year, with another dozen more to come. I’m already counting the days until Eddie Kendricks’ People… Hold On drops on November 15 — original copies of that 1972 album are highly sought after, and priced accordingly — but I’ll probably try to snag most of ‘em eventually. If you’re looking to expand your Motown vinyl collection in a nicely affordable way, Elemental Music is definitely your ticket to make it happen.

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