LAMONT DOZIER
How sneaky nights at the “No-Tell Motel” fuelled the Motown songmaster’s best ideas, before Berry Gordy turned the heat up too high.
ON THE OUTSKIRTS OF LAS VEGAS, ALL the houses look like they took a vote and decided to be as un-Vegas-like as possible. no neon, no fake eiffel towers, the buildings here are beige with clay roof-tiles, set in tree-lined gated communities with manicured lawns and a backdrop of dust-brown mountains. at the front door of one such house is a trim man of 77, dressed (bar the white trainers) all in black. Lamont Dozier, singer, songwriter and producer, greets MoJo with a firm handshake and a warm smile. if you’re not familiar with the name, you will know his songs. While still in his teens, Dozier was signed by Berry gordy to his new label, Motown records, where Dozier became a chief architect of the Motown sound. You knew the Motown sound when you heard it. upbeat, danceable r&B/soul with gospel harmonies hand-crafted into cross-genre, radio-friendly pop gems. teenage love songs with sophisticated lyrics and a polished production. songs like reach out i’ll Be there; Where Did our Love go; You keep Me hangin’ on; Baby Love; nowhere to run; You Can’t hurry Love; i hear a symphony; Bernadette; this old heart of Mine; how sweet it is to Be Loved By You; and stop! in the name of Love. these being some of the 75 top 10s and 54 number 1s in a 10-year period that Dozier, as part of the holland-Dozier-holland hit-making machine, wrote and produced. “i’m not taking credit for this,” says Dozier. “i always say that i was chosen by the Master Muse – that’s what i call god – to be one of his representatives.” We’re sitting in a large, white-walled room. at one end there’s a small recording studio set-up, a synthesizer and a piano stacked with dozens of unlabelled cassette tapes, works in progress. at the other end there’s a kitchen. Dozier loves to cook. “i was the oldest of five kids and my mother was gone from six o’clock in the morning to six o’clock at night, cleaning houses and cooking for people, and she didn’t want to have to do it when she came home. so she taught me how to cook enough to feed the rest of the kids. then i got into it and i got this reputation as being a pretty good soul food cooker.” sometimes after work, everyone would go back to his place for ‘food parties’, where he’d cook and workshop songs at the same time. that was in Detroit, where Dozier was born and raised. he moved to Los angeles in the ’70s. then, two years ago, their three kids now grown up and gone, he and his wife moved here. he loves how quiet it is. it’s good for work, he says, and he’s always working: “the phone has never stopped ringing.” right now he’s working on a musical theatre project and children’s plays – and getting a band together for his february 2019 uk tour.
What are your earliest musical memories?
Music was always there in my family, all the time. My Aunt Eula was studying to be a classical pianist and when she practised she let me sit on her lap. Chopin, Paganini, I was six or seven and I soaked
it all up. She had a teacher, Mr Shaw, who used to crack her hands if she hit a wrong chord. I remembered that, so I would never take piano lessons. I just picked it up, like my uncle, Clifford Dozier. He played boogie woogie, but he didn’t read music, he played it by ear. I don’t read music either.
Did the church play a part in your musical upbringing?
Oh yes. My grandmother directed the church choir. She forced us to be there on Sunday and on Thursday for choir rehearsals. I was in the young people’s choir, being nine and 10. My grandmother taught me about enunciation by making me listen to how Nat King Cole would sing the words.
You saw Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughan when you were six?
At the Paradise Theatre, they had these “Cavalcade of Stars” with Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan, Billy Eckstine, Duke Ellington, all on one show. Everyone would save up their money for months and go. I remember being way up in the nosebleed section with my dad, looking down at the stage, and watching these people stomping and clapping and seeing how the music affected them, dancing in the aisle or crying. It was amazing to me how music makes people react like that, and I tried to figure it out.
Did you figure it out?
My English teacher in elementary school when I was about 10 had all of the kids write poems, and she would put the best on the blackboard. I wrote a poem called “A Song” – it was the only thing I knew to write about – and how a song affects people. She put it on the blackboard and kept it there for at least six weeks. Doing that, she opened a whole new door for me, of determination and drive, because I just wanted to please her.
Do you remember the poem?
(Laughs) God, no. I remember I wrote it on a brown shopping bag. We didn’t have much money, so I used to cut up all these shopping bags and make a stack of paper to write my ideas on.
What was it like growing up in the projects in Detroit?
The projects were housing for people on the poor side of town. We lived in the Jeffries Projects. So did Little Willie John and his sister Mabel. Willie could sing like crazy; he was an R&B star at the age of 11. I learned a lot from listening to Willie sing. A lot of people in the project had talent. There was a big congregating place in the middle of the buildings where all the singers and the doo-woppers would get together. Smokey Robinson – he didn’t live in the projects but he had friends there – would hang out with us. It was like one big school. A musical training ground.
You and Aretha Franklin went to the same school there?
Yes, Hutchins Junior High. She was a year younger than me. I didn’t know Aretha sang. One day, I was about 14, one of the kids said, “We’re going to go and see Aretha at her father’s church.” I said, “See Aretha about what?” He said, “Aretha sings, man.” I said, “I don’t believe that,” and he said, “You’d better come along.” That Sunday I went to her father’s church. Her father said, “And now we have Sister Ree” – that’s what he called her – “to bless us with a number.” And this unassuming, quiet girl just came out and sat down at the piano and – bam! Everybody was jumping up and down and she was screaming and singing and I’m going, “What the hell? This is not my grandmother’s church!” She brought down the house. I became a fan like everybody else and I would go every Sunday just to watch her perform. She was just a genius – selftaught piano player, and her singing! I was flabbergasted. And so enamoured by her power. She started making records shortly thereafter with Columbia Records and touring with Sam Cooke and she just kept getting better. Watching her do all of those things was a big inspiration to me to do the same. I formed my own little doo-wop group, The Romeos, four or five of us from the projects, 14, 15 years old.
And by the time you were 16 you had a record out?
A guy called George Braxton, who wanted to get into the music business, asked Don Davenport if he knew any guys he could make a record with, and Don came to me, because I was the lead singer in the group and the writer. We recorded three or four songs. The first song they put out on Braxton’s little label [Fox], nothing happened, but the second, Fine Fine Baby, was a local hit. Atlantic Records heard about it and Braxton sold us to Atlantic. But the group only lasted two years. Some of the guys wanted to be in it to get girls and I was more serious about it.
Where did you go from there?
There was a group in Detroit, The Voice Masters – pretty well-known, but they’d broken up because two of the guys got drafted into the army. They were owned by Anna Records, Gwen Gordy’s label. She was on the radio asking for people to audition and I called in and I passed the audition. They were looking for one more singer, so I got my friend in from The Romeos, Tyrone Hunter. They liked him so much better that they recorded him separate from the group, a song called Everything About You that was a pretty big hit. I was still waiting around to do my thing, mopping floors as the janitor there, to earn a little few bucks for a car, then suddenly I got my chance at getting my record out. It was called Popeye and it shot up. But the people that owned the name ‘Popeye’ sent letters saying, “You can’t use the name.” “But we’ve
got a big record! We’ll give you all the royalties!” That’s what I was thinking. But the label said, “We can’t stand no lawsuit.”
How did you meet Gwen’s brother, Berry?
He was somewhat known for writing songs for Jackie Wilson with Gwen, but he didn’t come into prominence until he started his label. Berry came over one day with a song called Money that he had written [with Janie Bradford] that he was fascinated with. He said, “What do you think about it?” I said, “Sounds like a hit to me,” and it was. At that time Berry was starting out with Motown, and that hit opened a lot of doors. Gwen’s label Anna was breaking up, so Berry said, “Lamont, do you want to join Motown? It’s going to be a big company.” He signed me to a recording contract and a songwriters contract and a producers contract, all of them. You can’t do that today, it’s against the law. I made a record, Dearest One, that he put out on his other label, on Mel-o-dy, but he didn’t really do anything to push it. He had all the artists that he could use. What he needed was songwriters and producers.
How exactly did Holland-Dozier-Holland come about?
Brian Holland was part of the team that wrote Please Mr Postman. He was already there as a producer and writer when Berry brought me over. Brian and I got together on the song Forever that we did for Marvin Gaye, who had joined the company too. Things started to move, and Eddie, Brian’s older brother, joined the team. Eddie was a singer with a hit called Jamie, but he didn’t like to sing or perform. He figured he could write lyrics if given a chance and said, “Give me a shot at doing this. While you and Brian are in the studio doing the music for the tracks, give me the ideas for the stories and I can finish them off and work with the acts while you’re in the studio.” So that’s what we did. Holland-Dozier-Holland became a factory within a factory. We could get out more records and more songs and beat the rest of the producers to the punch.
Did it operate like a factory?
Yes. Berry worked for the Ford factory and it was the only way he knew how to run a company. We had to punch the clock. We had to punch in at nine o’clock and punch out at five, and on Fridays we would have quality control. What was quality control?
Every Friday the producers had to bring all these songs in and play what they had recorded in the week. And they had people with a piece of paper, employees, who would say yay or nay. Berry had the ears, basically, but he let everybody else put their two cents in and say what they thought, and that was quality control. Sometimes he’d overrule them. Like with Jimmy Mack, everyone kept saying no but Berry said, “Put it out, it’s a Top 10 song.” He knew. Sometimes he would come in at an early stage of a song and say, “Work on it some more. I don’t know what but it needs something.” A lot of the other producers and writers got really pissed because it seemed to them that we were Berry’s fair-haired boys, getting all the attention. Berry would tell them, “You’re pissed off with them when they’re coming up with the stuff that’s keeping the company going? When you guys start doing what Holland-Dozier-Holland are doing, then you’ll get the chance.”
What would a fly on the wall have seen when Holland-Dozier-Holland were working on a song – say, Reach Out I’ll Be There?
Brian and I were working on it at the piano – a lot of the time we would be sitting on the same stool. Brian would always start his [musical] ideas slow – he had this melancholy thing about him, he didn’t play things jumping – and he’s playing the introduction over and over. I said, “That’s nice, it sounds like a Russian chant.” He said, “I’m stuck. I don’t know where to go with it.” I told him to keep playing it. Then I said, “Stop!” and I came in with “If you feel like you can’t go on…”, my gospel thing. We had great chemistry that way, feeling each other out.
You wrote a lot of songs aimed at women or for women singers at Motown.
We were writing for a lot of girls because girls bought the records more so than guys did in those days. And I was good with the story ideas, because I was always the one listening for what girls had to say about what they were going through. I always considered myself an advocate for the woman’s plight in their love life. A lot of the ideas for those songs came from listening to women at my grandmother’s beauty shop. They’d come in and they would ask her for advice about unrequited love, and I’m sweeping up the hair in the place, learning how women were being mistreated by their boyfriends and husbands.
“In elementary school I wrote a poem called ‘A Song’ – it was the only thing I knew to write about.”
Wasn’t “Stop in the name of love” something you came up with when your girlfriend caught you cheating?
(Laughs) I call it my infidelity song. I was actually fooling around with a couple of girls and she heard about me being with one of them at the no-tell motel. So she came down about two o’clock in the morning. She was known to be a hell-raiser, a real menace to society, so these little girls that I would be sneaking around with from time to time didn’t like the idea of getting caught. She was outside banging on the door, scaring everybody in the motel – everyone was looking out the window, thinking that they got caught. The girl I was with was petrified and she climbed out the bathroom window. I finally opened the door, acting like I was sleeping, and trying to calm her down. “You’ve got to stop acting like this,” I said. “Please, stop, in the name of love.” Then I said, “Did you hear what I just said? Can you hear the cash registers?” She said, “That’s not funny.” We went home together and the next day I was sitting at the piano playing the melody. A couple of days we cut it with The Supremes and it was another hit.
Tell me about working with The Supremes.
I was talking to Mary Wilson, I said, “I’ve got this song I wrote especially for The Supremes – Where Did Our Love Go.” She said, “Is that the song The Marvelettes turned down?” It was, but I figured The Supremes couldn’t refuse me because they needed something bad. (Laughs) ‘The No-Hit Supremes’ they used to tease them, because they were the only group in the company that nothing would ever happen for. Finally, we talked them into the studio and got it down on tape, but Diana [Ross] was so pissed off she went and complained to Berry, “They gave us this song! Listen to this crap they’re doing,” da da da. She was always complaining to Berry about who wasn’t treating her right. So he said, “Let me hear it.” He came to the studio and we played it. I did it in Gladys Horton of The Marvelettes’ key, which was much lower than Diana’s, but it was just the right tempo and pitch for her voice to get this kind of sultry sound that became her sound. Berry said, “Man, I think you kids have come up with something. Get this ready to go out.” And she’s all upset, saying, “Are you serious? You’re going to put this out?” “Yes.” We put it out a week later and it was Number 1 across the country and everywhere. By the time The Supremes had all those hits, they were telling everyone that we were their personal writers and producers (laughs). We had 13 consecutive Number 1s with them. Same thing with The Four Tops, seven Number 1s.
You didn’t work with The Temptations?
Otis Williams [Temptations founder] and I went to Hutchins Junior High together and he was, “When are you going to write me something? I’m your buddy, man! You write for everybody else but me.” I said, “Man, Berry is cracking a whip and keeping us in the studio.” He said, “At least you could throw me something, a few crumbs or something.” Norman Whitfield, who was doing production, would come to Eddie [Holland] sometimes and ask him if he could write him a lyric for a song, which was fine with us. We couldn’t do everything. We only had so much time. Sometimes we worked ’til three or four o’clock in the morning, sitting there drinking Cold Duck, cheap wine, and eating barbecue while doing these songs, singing and
“I was always the one listening for what girls had to say about what they were going through.”
making a party out of it. It was the only way we could get all of this stuff done.
It was non-stop?
Constant. Obsessive. Brian started having little anxiety bouts and then I started, because we wasn’t getting enough rest. Berry came in, “Lamont, can you and Brian give me something for Marvin [Gaye]? He’s going out on tour and he has nothing left in the can to release so we need to get him in the studio and come up with enough songs to sustain the marketplace while he’s gone.” I remember having this song in my back pocket – every now and then I would put something aside for myself for my planned comeback as a singer – and I kept my mouth shut. But Berry kept coming back. “I need something by tomorrow.” So I sang him the song that I was saving for myself, How Sweet It Is To Be Loved By You. He said, “That’s it!” and we gave it to Marvin. We would try to keep up with the quota and keep the ideas and the songs coming and we were cutting all the time. It was very, very stressful.
Was that the reason you left Motown?
Well, yeah. But really it got to the point where we wanted them to give us a label of our own. We thought we deserved it. We had sold hundreds of millions of albums around the world. We started talking to the company in ’68 about having a subsidiary label and a few acts of our own. But they figured that if we worked with our acts, we wouldn’t put that same attention on the rest of them. That was not the case at all. We weren’t going to let what we had built go down. We argued about it. They’d tell us, maybe so, maybe no. Finally, we just stopped working for them and went on strike. Because first of all we don’t have our own publishing, they had the publishing. We got some writing and production money, but the company owns the songs. When we left we had a big lawsuit. But at the end of the day we were giving so much money to the lawyers that it didn’t make sense to go on. We just said goodbye and formed our own label.
How would you define the Motown sound that H-D-H played a major part in creating?
I don’t know what it was. It was a feeling. A feeling that transported itself to the three of us, and if something was missing, one of the other three of us would pick up the slack. It was uncanny, our collaboration. To get all those songs in those 10 years together. We were just so in tune with each other.
Then why did the Holland-Dozier-Holland team break up?
I’d decided that I wanted to go back to singing. I had this song that I wrote, Why Can’t We Be Lovers, and we put it out as our new label’s first venture. Then ABC Dunhill heard about it and wanted to sign me just as a singer and artist. So [the Hollands] got all pissed off, “We’ve got contracts!” It got ugly. So we went our separate ways.
After having big hit albums as a singer in the ’70s, we didn’t hear much from you in the ’80s.
That’s when I moved to London. I had been living in Los Angeles and there was a knock at the door. It was [UK record producer and songwriter] Pete Waterman. He wanted me to move to England and work with all these artists. The first one was Alison Moyet – Invisible – then Boy George, Simply Red, a ton of people. And Phil Collins. We had a great success with our songs, the main one being Two Hearts. And then I started working with Eric Clapton; we did some beautiful songs on the August album.
Clapton and Phil Collins worshipped Motown and black American music.
They knew more about my life than I know myself. That made it easier. England has always been a second home, a good luck place for me, because all of the English acts gave me so much respect, and love. We bought a flat and I worked there on and off for about 10 years. When we got back to America, my oldest son, people would go, “Where are you from?” because he had a big Cockney accent, because he went to school there. When in England, you do like the English (laughs). He kept it for a good two years after we came back.
What would you say was Motown’s lasting contribution to music and culture? Is there an equivalent today?
What Motown did mostly was it brought people together. Because those were really troubling times in the ’60s and people were at odds with each other. Music, it’s a cure for a lot of the ills and prejudices and all that stuff. Can it happen today? Well it’s changed, it’s a whole new thing now. But the music is always there, lurking in the background, and music always has that healing thing. When everything seems lost you can put on a melody or song. Doctor Music, I call it.
Of all the songs you’ve written in your life, is there one that means more to you than any other?
There’s so many songs, they’re like kids, you become so attached to them, and even the ones that I didn’t think would be hits turned out to be big hits. But I think it would be I Hear A Symphony. When I was a kid, I loved to go to the movies and I would sit up in the front row so that I felt like I was in the movie with the people. I used to love musicals – My Fair Lady, Brigadoon and all those things – because of the classical music that my Aunt would play. And I noticed how the stars in the musical had their own theme song. Whenever they would come on, they each had a particular song or melody that would follow them around. And that’s how I came up with this line. (Sings) “Whenever you’re near I hear a symphony.” And that really sums up my writing and my feeling for music and what it does to me and how it affects people. I think everybody feels the same. When music is in the equation, they start to feel things and remembering things. So I Hear A Symphony sums up what I’m about.
Lamont Dozier tours the UK in February 2019 supported by Jo Harman.