Lamont Dozier Passes Away

RIP. Great talent!

As profound an impact on popular music as anyone.

Nerds who routinely read the fine print under the song titles of their 45s, who care about music, know who he was.  Everyone else; not so much.

Very unfortunate.

They can't write them like that anymore. RIP

WOW, what a flock of memories flew through my brain as I was reading through the list of songs he contributed to, actually played a few last night that were covered by Jr. Walker and the All Stars. A few are staples as I put my grand kids to bed as we sing them together. R.I.P.

It’s ridiculous.

And that above list are just the bigguns.

As consequential as Goffin/King, Lennon/McCartney, Smokey Robinson, Ashford/Simpson, Leiber/Stoller, Gamble/Huff, and Stevie Wonder, when you stack up the numbers like that.

Wow what a loss to the music world. Growing up thru the early 60’s I can’t imagine that my love for music would be the same with out this Trio of writers, Lamont Dozier may not have been actively writing In his senior years, but has left a legacy.

My sympathies to his family and partners.

Songwriters of Lamont’s talent are few and far between. Writing a song is a very different thing from singing it or playing it, and very few bands had/have a songwriter with Lamont’s songwriting talent and skill.

The Band recorded "Don’t Do It" (originally recorded by Marvin Gaye) and put it on the B-side of their "Rag Mama Rag" 45 RPM single (for years the only place you could hear their studio recording of the song), and is the opening track on their Rock Of Ages live album. They also perform it in The Last Waltz, with a horn section playing charts written by Allen Toussaint, which will make the hair on your head stand straight up. Magnificent!

@bdp24 Allen Toussaint is another unheralded songwriter that gave us many great songs.

As we all know, as preposterous as the list of undeniably great songs/tracks produced by the Motown label is (preposterous in its combination of quantity and quality) this enterprise didn’t start producing undeniably Great Albums (we could all nitpick some ‘60s exceptions - I know I have mine) until the likes of Marvin Gaye and Stevie Wonder wrested creative control from Berry Gordy to further build on the idea of the Musical Auteur.

While the sound quality is inconsistent (My Marvin Gaye one sounds good, my Jackson 5 one is passable, the others can be less-than-stellar) those 3-disc Motown Anthology sets of their top artists that Motown released in the ‘70s are uniformly superb in not only packaging, but, most gratifying to me, their song selections.  Those 3-disc sets provide the listener with the perfect compilation of that particular artist’s songs.  
When the vast majority of those ‘60s Motown artists created mountains of world-beating singles, they also predominantly produced albums where filler was prominent after 3-to-4 songs.  Nothing abnormal there; that’s how the era was for most artists (we know which artists started making Classic Albums then)

This makes the 3-disc Motown Anthology such a great way to enjoy those artists’ best work in an analogue format.  No filler, just some 35-40 of their best songs.  They were so good about supplementing the singles with the best non-singles.  This, as we know, is not common with many compilations.  If one is an Analogue Head, while going and trying to score the best pressings of each artist’s individual albums, filler and all, is one’s prerogative, it is completely sensible to grab one of these 3-disc Anthologies and be set.  If the sound quality is good (or good enough) you’re set.

One ‘60s Motown LP that is excellent front-to-back, and is just loaded with Holland-Dozier-Holland-at-their-best is Reach Out by the Four Tops.

From Holland-Dozier-Holland on that LP:

”Reach Out (I’ll Be There)” - one of my all-time faves since I was a little kid

”7 Rooms of Gloom” - THIS one knocked me the eff out the first time I heard it. Wow!  I was very pleased when the great Paul Thomas Anderson used it in his excellent 2021 film Licorice Pizza.  Paul knows what’s up.

”Bernadette” - no words necessary 

“Standing in the Shadows of Love” - ditto

With interesting choices of covers (unsurprisingly, brilliantly executed) of “Walk Away Renee” by The Left Banke, “Cherish” by Terry Kirkman (The Association hit) and “If I Were a Carpenter” by Tim Hardin, it’s rounded out by a knockout Smokey Robinson song (imagine such a thing) “Wonderful Baby” and then probably the best version of “I’m a Believer” you’ll ever hear (however far that gets ya), one more pretty-good Holland-Dozier-Holland track, “I’ll Turn to Stone,” and an excellent Stevie Wonder/Clarence Paul/Morris Broadnax composition in, “What Else Is There To Do (But Think About You).”

My original vinyl sounds great. That’s one ‘60s LP you can dig top-to-bottom.

Btw, my “imagine such a thing” comment on Smokey was completely sarcastic.

The guy’s a titan.

The greatest pop music ever.  I have most of it, but the sound quality makes it hard to listen to a lot of it,  which I consider criminal.  And I am not an Audiophile.

Cheers

Excellent points @tylermunns. I’m of an age where the first music I bought was 7" 45 RPM singles, and my love of 3-minute Pop songs lives on unabated (all hail ABBA ;-). The albums I was first buying were those of Surf bands (The Ventures, The Astronauts out of Denver, The Beach Boys of course---though they weren’t really a Surf band; Surf music is instrumental.), and the pre-Beatles Rock ’n’ Roll of Paul Revere & The Raiders, The Kingsmen, other groups making what Pop music historians now call Frat Rock.

I for some reason also bought a Jimmy Smith organ trio record (I loved the sound of those Hammond organ bass pedals!), and when I joined the Columbia Records Club (paying for it with money from my paper route ;-) my introductory free LP choice was Johnny Horton’s greatest hits. My mom had two albums that I distinctly remember: Johnny Cashes Ring Of Fire (I listened to that LP hundreds of times, laying in front of the Magnavox console with my chin in my hands), and Naughty But Nice by Pearl Bailey. She also liked Elvis, but I don’t remember seeing an Elvis album in the house.

The albums I have of 60’s Soul/R & B/"Urban" Pop (as apposed to Suburban Pop ;-) are greatest hits LP’s, for the very reason you state. Just as with Country artists, it was the hit single that was the focus of the Pop music industry during most of the 60’s. Of course The Beatles (and underground FM radio) changed all that, but it took awhile for the Motown, Tamla, Stax, Atlantic, etc. record companies to start thinking in terms of full albums. The first album by an artist from one of those labels I bought was Stevie Wonder’s Talking Book, which is a really, really good one. No filler, all quality material. And of course the fantastic singing, clavinet playing, and drumming of Stevie. You drummers out there: try playing with your eyes closed ;-) .

In 1971 I joined my first all-original band, and when I moved into the band house that summer the bassist looked through record collection, and said "You have weird music." He had seen my best of/greatest hits albums of The Shirelles (The Beatles didn’t consider them weird, having included "Baby It’s You"---a song written by Hal David and Burt Bacharach---on their debut album), The Platters (The Band included "The Great Pretender" on their Juke Joint album), The Drifters (their "On Broadway"---written by Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil---is an absolute masterpiece), The Coasters (I saw them live in 1966, and they were fantastic. They had a real tight little 3-pc band comprised of white guys ;-), Wilson Pickett (his best music was recorded with backing by The Swampers, as fine a band as I have ever heard. Drumming by the superlative Rogers Hawkins, bass by David Hood, piano by Spooner Oldham), and quite a few others.

The bassist didn’t yet know it (I’m guessing he does by now), but the guy playing electric bass on a lot of 1960’s Soul records was James Jamerson, the player Paul McCartney credits with opening his eyes to the possibilities of the instrument. My favorite bassist, bar none. James plays on "What Becomes Of The Brokenhearted" by Jimmy Ruffin (Joan Osborne does a great version of the song in the documentary film on the Motown house band---The Funk Brothers), one of my three all-time favorite songs (the other two being "God Only Knows", and either "The Weight", "A Whiter Shade Of Pale", "Like A Rolling Stone", or "No Time To Cry" the third). On "WBOTB" James employs the greatest use of inversion I have ever heard. It raises the hair on my head!

@bdp24 A lot of interesting stuff there.

I love James Jamerson.  The way he plays the fifth on so many chords in “What Becomes of the Broken Hearted (just such a great, great song) always bugged me, to be honest.  The fifth note on pop music bass often makes me go, “hey, whaddya doin’? Play the root!” This is not necessarily my feeling as a matter of course, but I remember the first time I heard the song wondering a) was he making a mistake b) why was he ruining this tremendous song?  My feelings have softened on that since.  He’s clearly an all time pop bass player.

I love all of those ‘50s-early ‘60s groups and all those songwriters you mentioned. I’ve got all them groups on wax and those early pressings sound really good.

I loved reading Carole King’s autobiography where she mentioned the time she met the Beatles at a party at the height of Beatlemania. She had heard that Paul and John had said in the press that they wanted to be the British version of Goffin/King.  She said Ringo and George were nice, when she met Paul, he was nice and mentioned how much they loved her songs, even citing specific songs and artists.  She tried to introduce herself to John, surrounded by a gaggle of young ladies, looking stoned.  He was so rude to her she just ended up leaving.

One time I noticed a video rental store some 15 years ago (in the whitest small town you could imagine) had an “urban” section.  When I looked at the movies in the “urban” section, it was all movies like “Friday” or whatever; movies with all-black casts.  I couldn’t believe it.  I didn’t know whether to laugh at the absurdity of the inexplicable racism or complain to the manager.  Ridiculous.