One evening recently, while the Good Wife was away
helping her mother celebrate 89 years on Planet Rock, I took the opportunity to
air a guilty pleasure. Michael McDonald's Motown.
There, the cat's out of the bag. Not that I've anything really to be ashamed
about: he sounds like a very decent, modest individual, who's tickled to death
by younger generations' re-discovery of what has been dubbed 'yacht rock'. That
is: something soft, slick and redolent of the '70s and '80s.
The voice is a slight bone of contention in this
household. My wife thinks that there's something too knowingly crowd-pleasing
about old McDonald's voice – in a kind of X-Factor
way. In other words, she contends, he knows that he's got a great voice and
milks it too self-consciously. She's got a point, so I don't foist it upon her.
But a great voice is a gift that can't be helped. Besides, voices are a very
personal thing, and personally his voice – knowing or not – still delivers a
frisson. I've been listening to it since the early days of Steely Dan. Before
he joined the Doobies, I thought the 'Brothers' were to be lumped with the
ludicrous Lynyrd Skynyrd and other purveyors of greasy, long-haired, oily
denim-ed American. Yes, one could argue that 'Minute By Minute' and all those
songs that transformed the Doobies could be classified as music for the
yachting fraternity, but let's not forget 'Ya Mo Be There' with James Ingram in
the days when Quincy Jones was the producer of choice. Not to
mention a ridiculously funky version of Stevie Wonder's 'Higher Ground'.
On Motown, moreover,
he has the good taste to cover at least five Marvin Gaye numbers, possibly the
greatest come-to-bed voice in anyone's lifetime. But it's his lovely version of
'Stop, Look, Listen (To Your Heart)' that got me really excited – and homing in
on my only (treasured) Stylistics' album. In fact, the song shouldn't be on Motown,
since it's one of any number of brilliant melodies by the great song-writing
team of Thom Bell and Linda Creed supplied to the likes of the Stylistics, the
Delfonics and the Detroit Spinners. And none of them, if you ignore the
Spinners' early days, were Motown artists.
I should at this point
issue a government health warning. The Best Of album is not to be
confused with Volume 2, by which time Thom Bell had taken off and the
Stylistics became mere puppets of the Hugo & Luigi production team that
happened to own the Avco label. Whereas this was the era of the album, all
those black vocal groups – add to that previous bunch the Dells, the Detroit
Emeralds, the Chi-Lites (and maybe a few more) – were primarily purveyors of
singles. Which is probably my way of arguing for the occasional greatest hits
collection in my vie en albums.
There was a time in
my life, foolish youth, when I ridiculed the Stylistics each time they appeared
on Top of the Pops. No doubt today's fans of gangsta rap and death metal
would also sneer at the seersucker frock coats, the oversized bow ties, the ruffled
shirt fronts, the cheesy dance routines and that dangerously high falsetto of
Russell Thompkins jr. I was wrong.
By the time I was
holding down a regular job – and after seeing the light cast by What's Going
On? – I learnt to love the Stylistics (or maybe in truth the songs of Bell
and Creed). I remember taking a train trip one day from Brighton to nearby
Haywards Heath. In my capacity as training officer, I was to deliver startling
news of some new rule or regulation about unemployment benefit to the
manageress of the small office in that dormitory Sussex town.
We sat in her
backroom office, away from the gaze of 'The Great Unwashed' – as one
troublesome member of staff used to refer to the unemployed – and we talked
turkey. It wasn't very interesting and for some reason the conversation drifted
onto the topic of the Stylistics. We discovered a shared passion (the holy
grail of influencing skills) and pretty soon we were singing their greatest
hits with gusto. God knows what the staff and their probably well-scrubbed
clients thought on the other side of the door. So that's what civil servants
do all day... taxpayers' money... pampered menials...
But who could blame
us really? Benefits were boring, and what songs they are. Apart from their
first hit, the rather ingenuous 'You're a Big Girl Now', and the slightly saccharine
'Let's Put It All Together', all of the other eight songs are Bell and Creed
songs. And all bar the self-consciously jaunty 'Rockin' Roll Baby' (which does
boast the gloriously daft couplet, 'Got a funky walk/In his little orthopaedic
shoes') shimmer with the kind of sublime soaring melodies that Burt Bacharach
used to write for Dionne Warwick. They kick off with 'You Make Me Feel Brand
New', and that wonderful moment when Russell Thompkins nudges Airrion Love out
of the lead-vocal spot ('Only you/Came when I needed a friend/Believed in me
through thick and thin'), and they end with arguably the best of the lot – and certainly
in terms of social commentaries almost the equal of Marvin Gaye's 'Inner City
Blues' – the moody, magnificent 'People Make the World Go Round'.
In between, there's
hit after hit: 'Betcha By Golly, Wow', 'Break Up to Make Up', 'I'm Stone in
Love with You', 'Let's Put it All Together', 'You Are Everything' and 'Stop,
Look, Listen...' I rest my case – and bring us back to Michael McDonald. He and
Russell are about the same age. A little older than the Good Wife and me. When
she gets back, I'll re-file the former
but give her a taste of the latter. We'll be up all night, singing love songs.
