Lamont Dozier: There Are Songs Everywhere

According to Lamont Dozier, songwriting isn’t that hard, really. “Songs are all around us,” the middle partner in Motown’s famed Holland-Dozier-Holland team explained, speaking by telephone from his home in Los Angeles. “If you’re willing to take the time to listen and see what’s happening, what the world is saying, and keep your ears open, they’ll come to you, these ideas. They’re all around.”

“Everybody has a song to write - if they want to,” he said. “You just have to take the time to do it.”

That’s easy for Dozier to say, of course. With brothers Brian and Eddie Holland, to whom he was introduced by Motown founder Berry Gordy Jr., Dozier created one of the richest song catalogs in popular-music history. The trio was responsible for a wealth of hits, including 10 No. 1 singles for the Supremes plus favourites for the Four Tops, Martha and the Vandellas, the Marvelettes, Marvin Gaye, Mary Welles, the Isley Brothers, Freda Payne and many others.

The lyricist also stepped out as an artist himself, with a number of singles and albums - including a new one, Reimagination, on which, as the title suggests, he’s crafted new versions of some of his older material. “A lot of these songs are the way we wrote them in the first place, as ballads,” Dozier said of the 13-track collection. “The Supremes’

Everybody has a song to write - if they want to. You just have to take the time to do it.” Lamont Dozier

Where Did Our Love Go (1964) or Baby Love (1964) started out in ballad form and then, when we got into the studio, we just counted them off at a faster tempo.

“You just go with the times,” he said, “and during those days that was what was happening. We just figured that at some other time, a later date, maybe we’d get to do them (as ballads). That’s what my thought was - I don’t know what the Hollands were thinking in that respect. I figured we could always dress them up and present them in a different form.”

Getting into songwriting

There was nothing wrong with the originals, of course.

A singer before he began writing songs for others, Dozier took many of his songwriting ideas from what he called “eavesdropping” on the world around him.

“I would listen in restaurants or in my grandmother’s home beauty shop,” he recalled, “to women talking about their plights in life or their disagreements or the anguish that they were having with their husbands or boyfriends and whatnot. And I stored them away in the back of my mind and brought them out when we were in the studio.”

Sometimes they hit closer to home. The Supremes’ Stop!

in the Name of Love (1965), for instance, was inspired when one of Dozier’s girlfriends found him at a “no-tell motel” in Detroit with another woman. Trying to mollify her rage, Dozier told her “Stop! Stop in the name of love ... ,” then stopped himself when he realised what he was saying.

“I said, ‘Wait a minute - did you hear that cash register?’” Dozier said. “And she stopped and said, ‘That’s not funny,’ because I was laughing about it, still trying to diffuse the situation. When I got to the studio, later on that day, Brian was at the piano plunking out notes and I said, ‘Man, I got the right title for that song!’ Bam! I said, ‘Keep playing it’ and just started singing, ‘Stop, in the name of love ... ‘”

Sleight of hand

The Four Tops’ Sugar Pie,

Honey Bunch (1965) came directly from his grandfather.

“When people would come to have their hair done,” Dozier recalled, “he used to greet them - ’Good morning, honey bunch.’ ‘How are you, sugar pie?’ I was a young teenager then, but I remember my grandfather flirting with the people and, when I was sitting at the piano at Motown, it just popped out. That’s how the creative process worked.”

There was a bit of musical sleight of hand to these cheerful pop hits, however. “The idea was that, although the songs had this happy, optimistic feeling, they started out being torch songs,” Dozier said, “and a lot of the lyrics are kind of sad and dark when you listen to them.”

The approach worked, however: From 1962 to 1967 Holland-Dozier-Holland which has been inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and the Soul Music Hall of Fame - was Motown’s dominant songwriting team, to the point at which their peers often complained to Gordy.

“A lot of the producers there didn’t like the idea that we were getting a good 90% of the releases at one time,” Dozier recalled. “They didn’t feel it was right and blah, blah, blah ... just jealousy. But Berry told them, ‘When you guys start coming up with the goods like these guys are coming up with, then talk to me about it. But right now they’re keeping the doors open here.’”

The three eventually walked out the Motown door in 1968 over a contract dispute with Gordy, starting their own Invictus Records and Hot Wax labels. Ultimately their quarrel with Motown was settled out of court. Dozier left the trio in 1973 to resume his performing career and start a production company, and also to co-write such songs as Phil Collins’ hit

Two Hearts (1988). These days he seldom sees the Hollands, except at events such as awards ceremonies and the premieres of Motown the Musical. Dozier has ambivalent feelings about the musical, which ran on Broadway from 2013 to 2015, returned briefly in 2016 and is currently on a national tour, with a separate production playing in London.

“I thought it could have been better,” he said, “but it was good to have it done, the story told. I just thought it could have been a little more detailed.” A separate HollandDozier-Holland musical has been broached several times, but “for one reason or another it’s never materialised,” Dozier said. Instead he’s working on a memoir called Thanks for

the Challenge, which will offer more insights into his craft, thoughts on his most famous songs and memories of the glory days at Motown.

“It was sort of surprising to all of us,” Dozier admitted, “because we had no idea that these songs would be around 50 years later. We thought they were going to be in and out, according to what the situation and timing is. But we were blessed to be in the right place at the right time and have this vehicle, Motown, to get them out and make them big hits and, in a lot of instances, iconic in so many ways, all around the world. We’ll always be grateful for that.” Gary Graff, The New York Times Syndicate