BRIAN & EDDIE HOLLAND
Two-thirds of Motown’s Holland-Dozier-Holland hit machine on dating Diana Ross, where the money went, and why Levi Stubbs was always cross with them.
It’s a cold, damp November afterNooN iN central london and in a glass-walled library at the offices of omnibus press, eddie and brian Holland are bundled up in their leather jackets, taking the chill off with some spicy spinach soup and explaining to moJo why it’s taken these two legendary songwriters and producers nearly 50 years to commit their story to paper. “Well,” says the 80-year-old eddie, “i never wanted to talk about it before, because i thought it was too personal.”
fifteen years ago, paramount studios approached the brothers with the idea of making a biopic about their time at motown records, as two-thirds (lamont dozier made three) of a peerless songwriting team banging out hit after hit for the four tops, the isley brothers, the marvelettes and the supremes. but the film-makers were more interested in brian’s affair with diana ross, eddie’s gambling, their long-running lawsuit with motown boss berry Gordy, and the collapse of their own label empire in the 1970s, than the era-defining, but also timeless, records they made. so the Hollands turned them down.
the brothers’ own version of their story – published in a new book titled come and Get these memories – actually covers plenty of ground you might think “too personal”, along with insight and detail to delight any motown devotee. “We got to talk about all the things that cultivated us,” says eddie Holland. “our lives, our upbringing, our process of learning.”
Here’s the brothers’ background in blue collar, ’40s-50s detroit, raised by a single mother, evelyn, and their grandmother, mary. there’s the influence of the church, street-corner doo wop groups and their Uncle James, who taught them about music and philosophy. eddie could sing like Jackie Wilson. brian could hit perfect harmonies. but brian was a dreamer, and eddie was the one who started to read his uncle’s philosophy and self-help books, and started to look out for his brother and promote his talent.
inside motown, from the late-’50s on, their relationship remained unique, brian’s singular ability to find a jaw-dropping intro, euphoric melody and perfect production dovetailing with eddie’s knakc of turning the colloquial, aphoristic poetry of the streets and the sheets into yearning, pleading love songs. it’s hard to think of a songwriting team who ever came up with more great records than eddie and brian Holland. “but i was always doing it for brian,” insists eddie, and moJo sees that today. they’re both funny and playful as questions spark reminiscences between themselves and resuscitate ancient jokes. brian is more thoughtful and soft-spoken; eddie talks more, analyses more, and often jumps in and answers brian’s questions for him. but it’s all done with love, and admiration. “i know he’s got my back,” says the 78-year-old younger brother. “i’ve never questioned it. He’s got my back and i trust him.”
What are your earliest musical memories? Eddie: Nat King Cole. Straighten Up And Fly Right. I must’ve been three-and-a-half. Then later,
hearing my brother singing this haunting Christmas tune in the playground sandbox. I asked him about it years later. He said he didn’t remember it. I was just enchanted with that song. But everything musical I learned from my brother. What I don’t understand is how he knew it.
Brian: I can’t answer that. If I hear it and I like it, I just kind of remember it. The earliest song I recall singing was Irving Berlin’s God Bless America. The way it flowed, I thought it was the most pretty and haunting melody. My brain just knew how to break these songs down.
Eddie: Brian had a gift other kids didn’t. For years I asked myself how could he do it and I couldn’t. Brian: And I never thought about it. It was just another one of my senses. But I do recall sitting with my grandmother in church and whenever she went up to sing in the choir, I’d follow her and I’d be up there trying to sing with her. Also, my grandfather played piano in church and I was interested in the keys. I wanted to know why the black keys were different from the white keys.
Eddie: Now me, that wouldn’t even cross my mind. I was one of those kids interested in people. I would study people very closely. By the time I got to be nine years old, I’d go into my uncle’s books – Socrates, Plato – and read them over and over. “Before you know other people, you must first know yourself”: I remember reading that, and said, “Wow. That’s what I have to do. Learn people.” My mother bought me Aesop’s Fables: “Clothes may disguise a fool but it’s words that give him away.” So I started questioning everything. I could find people’s weaknesses, push their buttons, take them apart. At high school, I’d take my breaks in the library and read The Art Of Persuasion, 26 Dishonest Ways To Win An Argument…
Brian, in your book it says that by contrast, you were a daydreamer. Were they musical? Did they help you compose melodies?
Brian: Oh no. Daydreaming was about, How do I get rich? Melodies? I enjoyed melodies so much I didn’t worry about how they worked. No, I daydreamed about making money. I even gave myself a middle name because I knew rich people had middle names: Brian Van Holland. There was a character in the Richie Rich comic, Reggie Van Dough. That’s where I got it from. Brian Van Holland. Berry Gordy called me BVH.
What were your first impressions of Berry Gordy?
Eddie: I was the first one who met Berry. My mother used to send us off to her father to get $5 on the weekend. Brian would come back with no money. I’d always come back with money because I knew I could not back down. I’d stand there. He would walk away, come back, I’m still standing there. I could see it’s getting to him. Then all of a sudden his hand’s in his pocket. Now, getting back to Berry, I was told to go see Berry by Homer Jones. I’d just started singing and he was my manager. He said, “Go to Berry Gordy, he’s got some songs for you.” I went to Berry’s house, knocked on the door, “Mr Jones told me to come here ’cos you had a song for me.” He said, “Son, I don’t have a song for you. We only write for people we manage.” So I stood there… He looked at me, I looked at him. Then all of a sudden I could see the same look my grandfather had. He said, “Who’s your manager?” I knew what he was going to ask me. He said, “Maybe I can work out something managing you myself.” That’s exactly what I wanted him to say. Brian: Eddie told Berry that I knew music. “He hears harmonies” – stuff like that. I never really had any songs at the time but I must have played something that impressed him. [Motown secretary and songwriter] Janie Bradford had written a whole lot of lyrics for him and I think he didn’t want to deal with them all. So he said, “Can you put some melodies to her songs? Why don’t you work on that?” That’s when I started working on melodies.
Eddie: He had a skill. I’d noticed it so strongly it gave me an inferiority complex. We used to have a little group who’d sing on street corners in the neighbourhood. We’d sing The Wind [by Nolan Strong And The Diablos], Brian could do the background part, this haunting falsetto. I was shocked. In awe. I just knew he had it, because I knew I didn’t.
Brian: Berry wanted me working in the studio with him, writing, engineering. Next thing, I started to see these records chart. This song, that song. Regular work.
Your first big hit was Please Mr Postman for The Marvelettes, in 1961. If you’d only ever written that could you have lived happily on the royalties?
Eddie: Not on the money he spent.
Brian: Yeah you could. Absolutely. That thing made a fortune. But listen, I don’t miss it. I guess I’m one of those crazy guys, like Mozart. Mozart didn’t care what happened to his music.
That “Wait!” you put in at the start of Please Mr Postman was something you developed in other songs. The dead stop. Bernadette. Stop! In The Name Of Love…
Brian: Oh yeah! We’d just stop! Boom! Haha. Well I’ll tell you how that happened. I said to Berry, “We’re gonna stop it and then start again and do it off-tempo.” Berry said, and he only said this once, “Man, why you go off-tempo?” I said, “Because I want to surprise people. Catch ’em off guard.” We did that with [1964 Supremes single] Where Did Our Love Go too. Stop! In The Name Of Love? That was the first great intro I wrote. I said, “Listen, can you make the organ go rrrrrraaaAAAAAHHHHHHH!? Like a siren, so it’s enough to get your attention?” Boom! Stop! I mean to me, that was good. We thought about everything. Nowhere To Run? We were trying to figure out these intros with different sounds. So we went in the alley and got some old snow chains for
cars, and just rattled them. We’d stamp on plywood… I tell you man, we did everything. If it worked, it worked. Then they brought in Lamont [Dozier] and I started working with him, and we started producing together as well.
The book doesn’t really touch on your ability as an engineer, but that Motown sound is as much to do with your work behind the desk as your skills as a songwriter.
Brian: I could care less about that. I cut most of all those songs and I didn’t get no credit. Take Jr. Walker’s Shotgun, I helped Lawrence Horn produce that. He gave me a TV but he put his and Berry’s name on as producers. I had a couple of things happen like that. Who cares? I was happy with the sound of them and I was happy with what we were doing. I’m not a greedy guy, you know what I mean?
Eddie, around that time you were still a singer for Motown. Did you learn about the art of lyric writing from being a singer?
Eddie: No. See, when I looked at my brother’s royalty cheque from Please Mr Postman, I figured this singing business was not for me. I had this record out [Jamie, Motown, 1961] – a mild hit. Top 30. I thought I’d make some money from it. But my record statement was all deductions. I said, “Brian, did you make any money?” He said, “Oh yeah!” Nice cheque. We hadn’t seen that much money in our lives. “I said to myself, I’m in the wrong business. I’m going to write songs.” But I had to figure out what made a good song. A friend of mine, Walter Lee, was writing poems. I looked at this poem he wrote and said, “I’ll give you $50 for it.” So I took it away and I studied.
Did any Motown writers influence you?
Eddie: Smokey Robinson was amazing. Shop Around? You Beat Me To The Punch? I studied them and I came to this conclusion: I do not have his ability. I have to come up with another technique. Studying composition in school I learned something called repeatformation. With each verse you’re saying the same thing, just phrased a little differently: “Haven’t I been good to you? Haven’t I been sweet to you?” You incorporate colloquialisms and you make them relate to love and you make them central to the idea of the song. And stay on the rhythm.
Were there mistakes that you learned from?
Brian: The songs I thought were very strong, I never knew why they didn’t do well. After [The Four Tops’] Baby I Need Your Loving we wrote Without The One You Love (Life’s Not Worth While). Why that wasn’t a hit, I have no idea. Shake Me, Wake Me? I thought that was a Number 1 record. But you didn’t stop to think about it. You just got on with doing the next job. You didn’t stop.
You were both good-looking guys dating a lot of women. Do you think that made you better songwriters?
Eddie: Absolutely! I could never have written those songs if I hadn’t had all those relationships. That’s what I was writing about. I remember [The Four Tops’ 1967 hit] Bernadette. I worked on it, worked on it. Something was missing. Then this girl called me up over the phone. She said, “You know what? People have gone their whole life through and never found the love we had.”
A bell rang. I said, “Talk to you later.” That line was the whole trigger for Bernadette.
What about you, Brian?
Brian: No, no, no. I had a lot of girlfriends. Too many. If I called one up and she was busy I’d call the next. I had a list of about eight or nine. It was crazy, though. I started having anxieties about it because I felt I was wrong. It made me so ill that it had to stop. The songwriting always had to come first.
The pop landscape changed with the arrival of The Beatles on Ed Sullivan in 1964. Did The Beatles’ style of songwriting affect yours in any way?
Brian: Oh no, no, no. They occupied a completely different world. But Lennon and McCartney were two artists whose style of playing I found very haunting. Just exceptional.
Eddie: Which one did you think was the better songwriter?
Brian: John Lennon had a different style of writing that I love, but Paul was the better writer, pound for pound.
At what point did you start writing for individual voices? I can’t imagine anyone other than [The Four Tops’] Levi Stubbs singing Reach Out… or Standing In The Shadows Of Love. There’s something in Levi’s voice, an urgency, a pleading…
“Brian had a gift the other kids didn’t. For years I asked myself how could he do it and I couldn’t.” Eddie Holland
“I could never have written those songs if I hadn’t had all those relationships. That’s what I was writing about.” Eddie Holland
Brian: Oh, well we did that on purpose. Eddie: For years Levi complained that I wrote the songs in keys that were too high for him. At first he thought it was my fault. He said, “I’m just tired of singing like that.” Then he figured it out. “That boy knows exactly what he’s doing.” We defined that quality people think of when they hear Levi Stubbs’s voice. But I knew he was pissed off. He never complimented me except one time. We were playing poker in the Motown basement. We’d just done Bernadette and someone said, “Levi! That song you did! Wow.” And he just kind of glanced over at me and said, “I had a good teacher.” The first and only compliment he ever paid me.
Brian: It was a factory. We were working in a factory. That’s why people didn’t go around all the time saying, “Great song, man. I love you.” Eddie: Well, you really hit on something there. We worked them so damn hard that it didn’t necessarily always mean they was happy when they left that studio. Just like Diana Ross when I wanted her to sing Where Did Our Love Go all lost and innocent. She wanted to do the complete opposite. She was pissed as hell, so she deliberately sang it without expression. Deadpan. She said, sarcastically, “Is that what you want?” It was perfect.
Brian, you were married then but you were dating Diana Ross. Then, after you broke up with her, she started dating Berry Gordy. Did situations like that ever create tensions in the studio?
Brian: Oh no. Listen. When we broke up, I said, “Diane, we can’t do this no more, I’m married with kids.” She started crying. I called Berry. I said, “Berry, you need to call Diane and talk to her because she’s crying, crying.” But man, she’d call me even after she started seeing
Berry. It was terrible. But it didn’t ever affect the music.
Brian, your wife Sharon was bi-polar. Lamont Dozier suffered from depression. You both had trials in your own lives around this time. What were the songs that came out of those dark times?
Brian: Well, Lamont suffered because he drank a lot. But I couldn’t function like that. Didn’t want to neither. But Lamont would do his best work when he got like that. I’m Just Trying To Hold On To My Woman, which he released after he left Motown, but wrote with us, that came out of real darkness.
Eddie, in your book you say that the lyrics you were writing around this time were “my own life stories” yet Berry Gordy insisted on calling you King Ditty. That must have hurt.
Eddie: Well, how that came about is that he asked me can I finish some song in two or three days because Diana was coming in to record? And I said, “No, it takes me two or three weeks.” And he said, “Two or three weeks? I can see how Smokey takes two or three weeks, but them ditties?” But then he came back to me and told me, “Now I see what you’re doing when you write. You are a psychological writer.” I was surprised he said that. Because that’s exactly what I was. It was all done by design for psychological and emotional effect, to pull you in. Make you relate. And he picked up on it, which was amazing.
Around 1967, Motown’s hit ratio started to falter and they never got it back. Do you think anything could have saved Motown at that point?
Eddie: I don’t think the problem was with the product so much as the financial structure. If it had been structured the way a major label was structured? Heck yeah. But their singles-toalbum ratio was too low. If the marketing ability of those albums had been kicked up by even 50 per cent, it would have been almost impossible for them to go out of business. If all we had come up with was two or three singles and a concept album that would have made sales last longer… It no longer had to be pow pow pow.
But that never happened because you got into a legal dispute with Berry Gordy.
Eddie: It was a conflict between Berry and my brother. I just said, “Berry, you should pay my brother more. Why does he have to be working at a two per cent producer’s royalty? That’s super-low. Raise it to four per cent.” He didn’t want to do that. So I said, “Well, give us a label. Just three artists. That would make up for it.” He didn’t want to do that. It wasn’t for me. I was doing it for Brian. Berry had worked out a deal with me where I made more than all of them. He gave me three per cent of everybody’s product. My plans? We’ll run this company. Never happened.
Instead you moved to Capitol to set up the Invictus and Hot Wax labels. You released an incredible run of singles and albums but never saw the sales. Why was that?
Eddie: Capitol thought they were buying a hit machine to replace The Beatles. But they were not set up to market or sell our product in black areas. I had to spend $250,000 a year out of my own pocket to do that. When they found out about it they said, “What you’ve been doing is phenomenal. We want you to stay and we’ll change the system.” But it was too late. I was off to work with Clive Davis at Columbia.
Davis had also just signed the black proto-punk band, Death, to Columbia. Things were changing. Then almost immediately afterwards, he was fired by the label...
Eddie: So now we were tied to a label who didn’t know who we were. Invictus under Clive would’ve made a ton of money. Columbia’s marketing was so powerful and so strong. Then they brought the auditors in, then Lamont left us. The lawsuit with Motown dragged on.
Brian: I carried on. My whole thing was the songs. Period. I was not involved in the business part like Eddie was. I just wanted to write songs.
Eddie: Barney Ales [Berry Gordy’s right-hand man] came to me around this time. He said, “Why didn’t you call me? I’d have made you a big man.” Fifteen years later he said the same thing. I wanted to tell him, Barney, why didn’t you ever come to see me?
Moving to the present day, you recently got caught up in serious tax troubles. Is that all sorted now?
Eddie: It is, but it’s still existing. What was the cause of it? Me and my personality. To me, life means adventure. And I’ve got gambling blood and a philosophy I learned a long time ago: you take success and you take failure and you look at them two imposters as the same. Let me ask you. Financially, was Motown a success?
Well, are you asking the right question? Motown is a success regardless of money because nearly everyone in the world knows what Motown is or knows a Motown song…
Brian: You’re absolutely right.
Eddie: And that’s why it’s a success.
Brian: But financially? No. It could have been so much bigger.
With that in mind, what do you hope you’ll be remembered for?
Brian: Well, first of all, I hope I’ll be remembered by this book, because that’s our life beyond the records. But I hope we’ll be remembered as two of the greatest songwriters and producers in the history of the music.
And if it had to be for one song?
Eddie: (long pause) Bernadette.
Brian: Good choice. That song is unique. For me, it’s Stop! In The Name Of Love. There was something magical about that song. Also, when I first came to California, I was in a Howard Johnson’s on Sunset Boulevard and Burt Bacharach was in there and he stopped me and he said, “Man, the best song you’ve got is Stop! In The Name Of Love.”
Eddie: Burt Bacharach told you that? You never told me that. You know, it was just four years we had writing those songs and in those four years we did so much. At a radio station we were at earlier today, they played them again. I can’t believe how great they still sound. The rest of that stuff? Doesn’t mean a Goddamn thing. Them songs are going to live longer than us, and make more money than us.
Come And Get These Memories: The Story Of Holland-Dozier-Holland, Motown’s Incomparable Songwriters, by Brian And Eddie Holland with Dave Thompson, is published by Omnibus; The Holland-Dozier-Holland Invictus/Hot Wax back catalogue is being reissued on 180gm vinyl by Demon Records.