San Diego Union-Tribune (Sunday)
A CRAFTSMAN WHO WROTE HITS WITH HEART, SOUL
Lamont Dozier, who died earlier this month, helped turn Detroit’s Motown Records into a cultural juggernaut
APPRECIATION
Lamont Dozier was in his downstairs home studio, singing “My World Is Empty Without You,” the classic Diana Ross and the Supremes hit he had composed with his Motown partners Eddie and Brian Holland. He was midsong when the unexpected happened.
The legendary songwriter’s voice cracked and he became choked up. Although he had written the song and had sung it himself hundreds of times, he was overcome, so much so that he couldn’t finish.
“The song was just pouring out of me, and then all of a sudden the emotion took over,” Dozier explained during a 1999 interview in his spacious home. “It was overwhelming, and I had to regroup. All these memories just rushed in, of the people and friends who are no longer with us. Marvin Gaye. The late Supreme Florence Ballard. Some of the Temptations. I just had to have the engineer stop the tape.”
At the time, Dozier, who died Aug. 8 at the age of 81, was deep in recording his album “Reflections Of ... . ” Released in 2004, it put Dozier’s own personal stamp on the iconic R&B songs that he and the Holland brothers had written for Gaye, the Supremes, the Four Tops, the Temptations, Martha Reeves & the Vandellas and other top Motown artists. The trio was at the center of turning the Motown label into a cultural juggernaut that would revolutionize American pop music.
And although Dozier in the late 1990s was decades removed from the heyday of Motown and had parted ways with his partners, the eruption of emotion in the making of the project demonstrated his ongoing personal connection with songs such as “Baby Love,” “Where
Did Our Love Go,” “Baby I Need Your Loving,” “You Can’t Hurry Love,” “Reach Out, I’ll Be There,” “How Sweet It Is (to Be Loved by You),” “Stop! In the Name of Love” and many other classics.
Power of music
For people growing up in the ’60s and ’70s, it is impossible to imagine childhood without those tunes pouring out of our transistor radios or watching kids dance to them on “American Bandstand” and other teen shows. Those songs were essentials, transforming those Motown artists into international superstars and national heroes. But it was the craft and genius of the songwriting that made Dozier into one of my heroes.
The power and universal vibrancy of those songs also resonates with today’s musicians. L.a.-based hip-hop artist and spoken-word poet D. Zimm, 33, has listed Dozier alongside RZA, J. Cole,
Gang Starr and Jimi Hendrix as major influences.
D. Zimm said he discovered Dozier while listening to older music on Spotify. “I went through his entire discography for a week, and every track had a section that I would want to chop for a sample. One is my favorite songs is ‘Shine,’ the intro track on his 1974 solo album ‘Black Bach.’ I really appreciate his artistry and thoughtful sound.”
Providing hummable and dancing illustrations of the exhilaration of love was central to the Hollanddozier-holland oeuvre. But their uncanny ability to lay bare the devastation of heartbreak while giving it earworm hooks was their superpower.
“Let me get over you the way you’ve gotten over me,” Ross begs in “You Keep Me Hangin’ On,” punctuating her hurt with a plea: “Go on, get out, get out of my life and let me sleep at night.” The cut is even deeper in the psychedelic-flavored hit “Reflections”: “In you I put all my faith and trust. Right before my eyes, my world has turned to dust.”
One of their most vivid expressions of heartache appeared in the Four Tops’ “7 Rooms of Gloom” when lead singer Levi Stubbs wails, “All the windows are painted black. I’ll wait right here till you come back. I keep waiting waiting, till your face again I see.” I’ve had a few breakups where those lyrics precisely summed up my despair. It’s only common sense that kept me from busting out the black paint.
‘Gift from God’
The power of Dozier’s songwriting carried into his solo career, where he recorded several albums beginning with his 1973 debut album, “Out Here on My Own.”
In the single “All Cried Out,” on “Black Bach,” he taunts a former abusive lover with the news of a new romance: “Since the day you left me, I’ve been on the wagon. The new love I found keeps me braggin’. I’ve got a new way to walk, a new way to talk. A new way to smile. A brand new style.”
He was the writer and producer in 1988 of “Two Hearts,” the smash hit for Phil Collins that appeared in the 1988 movie “Buster,” which won a Grammy and Golden Globe and received an Oscar nomination.
It was that brilliance of Dozier and his accomplishments that led me to his large Encino house in 1999. He was one of several legendary songwriters involved in “Shake, Rattle & Roll,” a CBS miniseries that used the evolution of rock ’n’ roll and the civil rights movement as a backdrop for the love story of a young couple during the 1950s and ’60s.
At the time, he was still embroiled in a bitter and long-standing legal fight with Motown and the company’s founder, Berry Gordy Jr. Dozier and the Hollands maintained they were cheated out of hundreds of millions of dollars because they had not been paid a significant royalty rate for the songs, which had been endlessly repackaged in boxed sets and other compilations. Attorneys for Gordy and Motown called the lawsuits and charges a “farce” and part of a “vindictive campaign of harassment.”
Said Dozier: “It’s been very costly and painful. But I can’t blame the music. A lot of people would have gotten bitter, but I will continue to do the music. It’s a gift from God, and it will always live.”
He had met resistance from major labels who showed more interest in his older work than new material. But he had no interest in being a nostalgia act. He was determined to lay claim to his legacy while also moving forward with new creative endeavors.
Recording the new album, called “Reflections,” would give this music a new face. He wanted to perform the songs to the way he originally conceived them — as love-struck slow ballads.
“Everybody in the business has done these songs at one time or another, but no one has heard how they were originally created,” Dozier said. “Most of them started out as ballads. They will have more of a melancholy feeling, soft and sweet.”
I was then stunned when Dozier closed his eyes and starting singing: “Baby love, my baby love, I need you, oh, how I need you.” It sounded as if his heart was breaking. Opening his eyes, he smiled and launched into a tempo closer to the Supremes rendition: “Babylove, my Babylove.”
Long before the car crash that led to actor Anne Heche being declared brain-dead at the age of 53, her work on screen was always on the verge of being overshadowed by tabloid interest in her life.
In 1997, she became best known as the girlfriend of comedian Ellen Degeneres, appearing with her on red carpets at a time when open same-sex relationships were still rare in Hollywood. Her name was the butt of countless jokes after a “20/20” interview with Barbara Walters in 2001 in which she revealed that she had concocted a separate world for herself called a “fourth dimension” and a personality named “Celestia.” Never mind the fact that she also told Walters about the horrific sexual abuse she had endured at the hands of her father. She was faced with mockery that followed her for the rest of her career.
But to filmgoers, Heche was an idiosyncratic presence who never quite seemed to fit into cookiecutter blockbusters. Instead, she was brilliantly unnerving and frequently funny, her angular face a disarming mix of intelligence and wiliness that made her the perfect choice to play competent women in extreme situations.
In some ways, she operated in the most mainstream arenas of the entertainment industry. She got her start as a soap opera star on “Another World” and did stints on network dramas like “Ally Mcbeal” and sitcoms like “Save Me” and “The Michael J. Fox Show.” And yet there was a subversiveness to Heche that threaded through her best performances, as well as an ability to laugh at herself that undermined her reputation in the culture at large.
Early in her career, director Nicole Holofcener identified Heche’s capacity for honesty in the 1996 “Walking and Talking” (available to rent on Amazon Prime Video). Heche plays Laura, a therapist-in-training and the longtime best friend of Catherine Keener’s Amelia. Laura is, theoretically, the more together of the two. While Amelia flounders, Laura is on a direct path, engaged to be married to her sweet jewelry-designer boyfriend (Todd Field).
But as Amelia becomes jealous of the certainty in
Laura’s life, doubt creeps into Laura’s psyche. In Heche, you can see Laura bristling at the restraints that come with the comforts of a close friendship and good relationship. As she tries on wedding dresses, Heche’s skin turns flushed amid the layers of tulle. Laura wrestles with the fabric as Amelia lightly paws at it, not helping much, as she describes her date with a man they had both mocked. Laura doesn’t say it, but you can tell she’s thoroughly overwhelmed. She grabs her rear end. “I’m farting,” she says, with resignation. In that little gesture, Heche admits that her body is betraying her before her mind will allow her to say so.
Holofcener’s screenplay allows this easy intimacy between women who have known each other for decades, but in Heche’s hands, Laura’s soul-searching becomes something hilariously palpable. When she and Amelia finally have it out, Heche never allows her character’s exasperation to fade into bitterness. Instead she finds all the wonderful nuances of a disagreement with a confidant, love still the dominant emotion.
Overshadowing herself
In the following year, Hollywood wrestled with how to fit Heche into its formulas. She appeared in four films in 1997, in roles ranging from the frustrated wife of an undercover cop in “Donnie Brasco,” opposite Johnny Depp, to a presidential aide trying to bury a scandal in “Wag the Dog,” opposite Robert De Niro. In teen slasher “I Know What You Did Last Summer,” she’s the sister of a murder victim. She is oddly slotted into the goofy thrills of disaster flick “Volcano,” in which she plays the seismologist who figures out that Los Angeles is about to be overtaken by lava. And yet even in the silliest of blockbusters, spouting ludicrous exposition about just how this geological event is taking place in a major American city, she brings an easy truth to the circumstances that most performers would struggle to achieve. (“Donnie Brasco” is available on Netflix; “I Know What You Did” is on HBO Max; and “Wag” and “Volcano” are on most major platforms.)
She never stopped working, but the Anne Heche off screen soon started to overshadow the Anne Heche on screen. Still, there were artists, like Jonathan Glazer, who recognized what she could bring to a project. He tapped her for a pivotal role in his surreal 2004 film “Birth” (HBO Max), in which Nicole Kidman plays an Upper East Side bride-to-be visited by a young boy who claims to be her dead husband reincarnated. During one of the opening scenes, Heche is disconcertingly on edge, balking before entering a party and instead going to bury her gift in the woods, then rushing to a store to replace what she hid, eyes flooded with guilt. Her character hovers around the action like a threat, until she snaps into focus, the true purpose of her existence floating into her intense gaze.
“Birth” is an otherworldly piece, and it’s almost as if Glazer uses Heche to further unsettle the audience, a task she takes on with vigor. More than 10 years later, Onur Tukel tapped into Heche’s rage in “Catfight” (Netflix), a comedy that cast her as an artist who gets into a vicious punching match with a college friend (Sandra Oh) over resentment and class conflict.
There was a chance that Heche was on the verge of yet another career revival. She had finished a role in the forthcoming HBO series “The Idol,” created by musician The Weeknd, Sam Levinson of “Euphoria” and Reza Fahim. For all the questions about what opportunities she may not have gotten — because of homophobia or ridicule or mental health stigmas — in an interview with Los Angeles magazine around the time of the release of “Birth” she explained, “It’s funny, it’s not necessarily the career I had before, but it’s the life I want.”
It would be easy to let the circumstances of her crash cloud the memory of her artistry, but it’s just as easy to picture her as Laura in “Walking and Talking,” hair full of flowers and heart full of nerves, heading to her wedding with her best friend.
Zuckerman wrote this for The New York Times.