Album of the Week
Later covered by those well-known Motown fans the Beatles, the
Marvelettes' single "Please Mr. Postman" reached No. 1 on both the pop
and R&B charts in 1961, and put Berry Gordy's empire-to-be in the
game. Motown's first major girl group would never attain such rarified
heights again, though they recorded for Gordy's Tamla imprint through
1969. Their decline to second-string status, after a handful of top 10
R&B hits, coincided with the ascent of Motown's primo female act,
the Supremes.
The Marvelettes' slow fade at Hitsville U.S.A. may
be explained by several factors. Unlike the homegrown Detroit talent at
Motown, they haled from the sticks -- rural Inkster, Michigan -- and
were likely viewed as rubes and lucky outsiders by their peers. (At
least that's what singer Gladys Horton has claimed.) Their lineup was
in flux for the first two years of their career; they recorded as a
quintet and quartet before solidifying as the trio of Horton, Wanda
Young and Katherine Anderson. And their records, many of them made
before Motown's potent house sound was formularized, suffered from
spotty production; they also didn't always benefit from the cream of
the company's in-house songwriting crop.
The three-CD, 87-track Forever brings together the Marvelettes' first six LPs on Motown's Tamla
imprint and a wealth of uncollected material. It may be the only
compilation to date that considers a Motown act from the vantage point
of their album output, and it supplies a unique perspective on both the
group and their progress at the label, as their fortunes waned and
Motown's waxed.
The Please Mr. Postman album was
hurriedly released in late 1961 to capitalize on the titular single,
co-written by founding Marvelette Georgia Dobbins and William Garrett
and polished by the Motown staff. That exclamatory Shirelles-styled
number was authored at the instigation of Gordy, who labored mightily
to fabricate a follow-up, writing or co-writing seven of the LP's other
tracks. A hit was not forthcoming. The album is a rickety,
bizarre-sounding concoction sabotaged by intrusive overuse of the
keening electronic keyboard known as an ondioline.
LP number two, The Marvelettes Smash Hits of '62,
is strictly from hunger. Save the inane "Postman" follow-up "Twistin'
Postman" (an inexplicable No. 13 R&B single, and one of three
tracks that cash in on the contemporaneous Twist craze), the album
comprises uninspired covers of then-current hits by performers as
varied as Elvis Presley, Clyde McPhatter, Bruce Chanel and Roy Orbison.
A nadir is reached on a version of Sam Cooke's "Twistin' the Night
Away," in which the band and the group audibly struggle with the
changes.
Happily, both the Marvelettes and the Motown organization
gained their footing on the next two albums, Playboy (1962) and The
Marvelous Marvelettes (1963). For the first, Gladys Horton brought in
the cautionary hit "Playboy," while the label's staff contributed the
come-hither "Beachwood 4-5789" and the wonderful ballad "Forever." The
latter album included a solid Eddie Holland-Lamont Dozier-Brian Holland
number, "Locking Up My Heart," and several contributions by a new
Motown player, songwriter-producer Norman Whitfield. The production, by
William "Mickey" Stevenson, was fuller, and the singing was more
assured.
The typically rough-sounding concert platter On Stage:
Recorded Live was issued in July 1963. Not long thereafter, the trio
fatefully passed on a Holland-Dozier-Holland song called "Where Did Our
Love Go." That tune put the Supremes over the top in 1964, and may have
buried the Marvelettes at Motown in the same stroke. It is a measure of
their diminished stock, with listeners and at the company, that it took
three years for the label to release the next Marvelettes album, the
obligatory Greatest Hits.
The album contained the sassy
Whitfield-produced "Too Many Fish in the Sea," a '64 hit. The other
three tracks then previously heard only as singles -- including the
sultry "Don't Mess With Bill," a No. 3 R&B entry in 1966 -- were
written by Smokey Robinson, who was intent on making Wanda Young, the
wife of his Miracles bandmate Bobby Rogers, the lead voice in the
group. Unsurprisingly, Horton jumped ship in 1967.
There's lots
of splendid uncollected stuff on Forever, including "Too Hurt to Cry,"
a faux-Spector 1963 single recorded by Horton and Motown's house vocal
unit the Andantes as the Darnells. But the totality of the package,
which surveys a key group's problematic tenure at the Motor City's hit
factory, conjures up something one doesn't usually associate with
Gordy's celebrated career: a failure of vision.
