Adventures in Crate-Digging: The Temptations & Stevie Wonder

Stumbling upon two key artefacts from Motown circa 1966

Before I share this edition’s essay, I wanted to take a moment to thank everyone who liked, shared or was in touch about my recent three-part essay on Laura Nyro. The many kind comments meant more to me than words can say. I was especially delighted the multiple times someone shared that reading my work on her inspired them to check out her music. Right on! More of this, please! And who knows, depending on how things go, I may, just may, be one day embarking on an even more extensive writing project on Laura Nyro. Fingers and toes remain tightly crossed.

If you haven’t had a chance to read my Laura essay, here are the links to part one, part two and part three. I also wanted to thank my colleague here Wayne Robins for pointing me to his interview with her from 1993 (read it here). If you aren’t subscribed to Wayne’s Substack, you should be!

As well, I recently had a chance to chat with Matty C for his Six Questions with Matty C podcast and answer his music questionnaire. Matty made me feel right at home and it was great to talk with her about some of my biggest musical heroes (and yes, the conversation included some evangelizing on Laura!). Listen to it here.

Below is a fun essay on crate-digging and finding two gems from the Motown catalogue from 1966. I hope you enjoy it!

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Adventures in Crate-Digging: The Temptations & Stevie Wonder
By: Robert C. Gilbert

Crate-digging is a combination of luck, time and the sense to know when opportunity is knocking and that it may never knock again. That’s a lesson, like all good lessons, that is learned the hard way. I still remember putting back a copy of the Impressions’ People Get Ready in the stacks one day. I’m not sure why did but it definitely wasn’t that it cost a lot. As of yet, I’ve never found it again the wild.

Oh sure, I could head over to eBay and by the time I finish typing this sentence, have a copy on its way to me. But how fun is that? Where is the tease of the hunt, the chase, the dopamine hit when elusive treasure is finally found? Now, don’t get me wrong, I have turned to eBay and other online sources occasionally and now I have, for a few examples, a copy of David Stoughton’s deliriously strange Transformer as well as the Analog Spark reissues of Laura Nyro’s Eli and the Thirteenth Confession and New York Tendaberry in my collection but still, I reman a crate-digger principally and on principle.

Each collector I think hones a method and a rhythm to shopping for records. Mine is more sporadic these days, a necessity driven by the fact that I have precious little space for them (one reason that my focus has switched to cassettes—these I have some space for). What I like is to do is to thumb through stacks which have not been sorted by genre or alphabetically or grouped in any way except perhaps by price—that meaning, used LPs that are relatively cheap.

Here, the hunt is at its purest. There’s no telling what can be found. That’s why I loved Vortex Records, a gloriously dusty institution just north of Yonge and Eglinton in mid-town Toronto and have mourned its closure since the end of the 2015. You’d go up the hard-worn stairs to enter its narrow sanctuary and squeeze sideways past the counter to flip through the milk crates, never knowing what might be there. I still recall the finds: reissued Original Jazz Classics series albums, Sinatra on Reprise, pre-outlaw Waylon Jennings, cheap copies of Cream’s Wheels of Fire and the first Crosby, Stills & Nash album, the Buddy Rich Big Band on Pacific Jazz, Don Ellis at Fillmore as well as his Tears of Joy, the Everly Brothers on Warner Bros., Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Rodgers and Hart Songbook and many, many more.

Keeping the spirit of Vortex alive is Kops Records with two locations in my hometown, Toronto, as well as one where I currently reside, Oshawa, right in the heart of its gritty, rough-hewn downtown—a reminder that suburbia isn’t all picket fences and boredom and praise be for that. Kops is cleaner than Vortex was but it’s just as scrappy beyond the shiny floors and bright lighting.

Kops has space dedicated to what it calls “Vintage Vinyl,” analog originals of the time when music came out on records first and foremost.

Again, the thrill of discovery takes centre stage and combing the stack has unearthed treasures like David Ackles’ one-of-a-kind debut on Elektra, Stoneground’s Family Album, Emitt Rhodes’ Mirror, the Gary Burton Quartet’s Duster, various ECM albums under 15 dollars, vintage Ravi Shanker on World Pacific, Cold Blood and more than a few records from the Motown roster during its halcyon “The Voice of Young America” days.

Those are some of the true gold, important documents of the company’s quick rise from 1963 onwards. Motown then was a singles label. That’s not a knock, considering what was contained within the grooves of those 45s. Tightly coiled pocket masterpieces with the throb of James Jamerson’s bass and the thud of Uriel Jones’ drums that propelled something like the Supremes’ ‘Come See About Me,’ about as perfect a recording from the label’s early years as there was.

If there was an aspect of the assembly line to what Berry Gordy, Jr. and his charges were creating, the method did not obviate the heightened creativity of Hitsville. In fact, it’s what makes exploring Motown during its heydey in LP form so interesting, to hear the canonical hits surrounded by recordings that are marked by their obscurity. So, imagine my glee when I stopped by Kops’ booth at last year’s Canadian National Exhibition, that annual rite of the end of summer in Toronto, and found two Motown albums from 1966, both important documents of artists in transition.

The cover of the Temptations’ Gettin’ Ready has the fellas getting suited up for a show or perhaps a night on the town (maybe both). It was their fourth album, released in June 1966, the group well established as the yin to the Four Tops’ yang who, powered by Levi Stubbs, Jr. and the supporting harmonies of Abdul Fakir, Renaldo Benson and Lawrence Payton, and often sweetened by the Andantes, whipped up such a passionate fervour that even a peppy love song like ‘Something About You’ couldn’t be tamped down too much.

The Temptations operated in that territory too—David Ruffin’s lead on the aching lament of ‘Since I Lost My Baby’ is a prime example. But they could also be playful. Think of ‘The Way You Do The Things You Do’’s suave wordplay gliding along Eddie Kendricks’ falsetto. There were also bold, unironic declarations of love on ‘My Girl’ and ‘My Baby.’ All these were co-written by Smokey Robinson and produced by him as well.

He was the group’s primary songwriter and producer, another part of Motown’s production method in which each group in the label’s staple was assigned a production team.

Robinson’s role was different from say, Brian Holland, Lamont Dozier and Eddie Holland’s was. He was pulling double duty as front man of the Miracles so other producers and songwriters like Mickey Stevenson and Ivy Jo Hunter would often contribute to the Temptations’ music as well. Norman Whitfield did too, including ‘Girl (Why You Wanna Make Me Blue),’ a top-40 hit for the group. It had a motion that mimicked Robinson’s songs with perhaps a more direct harmonic progression.

The two hits from Gettin’ Ready tell of the eclipse of Robinson’s role in the group and how Whitfield took his place.

The album’s title comes from ‘Get Ready,’ a debonair Robinson song that was one of the very best he wrote for the Temptations. It’s packed with hooks, the sly trick of shifting the responses in the verses from “you’re outta sight” to “it’s outta sight” to “be outta sight,” the use of nursery rhymes throughout, a slyly effortless Kendricks’ lead and those group harmonies with Melvin Franklin on the bottom, another element to their sound that distinguished them from the Four Tops.

Franklin is also prominent on the album opener, ‘Say You,’ a tender feature for Ruffin, whose unparalleled ability to vocally set a romantic mood contrasted with a personal life that was deeply turbulent. That notwithstanding, the interplay between him and Franklin as they trade the lines “there’s none sweeter than you” and “let’s make plans for two” is the kind of deep moment that makes digging into albums as opposed to just singles part of what makes recording collecting such a magnificent obsession.

While Ruffin and Kendricks got most of the group’s leads, Paul Williams was an equally expressive lead singer; his most famous showcase with the group was ‘Don’t Look Back’ and illustrative of his balance of grit and smoothness.

Gettin’ Ready has two notable features for him. Robinson’s ‘Who You Gonna Run To’ and Eddie Holland, Kendricks and Whitfield’s ‘Lonely, Lonely Man Am I’ both have Williams’ full-bodied voice cushioned against the rest of the group. The former has a particularly indelible refrain.

The best-known recording from the album is ‘Ain’t No Proud to Beg.’ Written by Eddie Holland and Whitfield, who produced it as well, it has a swagger and movement into tempo on the verse that brought a toughness that was never Robinson’s forte. Whitfield made a bet with Gordy, Jr. If ‘Ain’t Too Proud to Beg’ climbed further than ‘Get Ready’ on the charts, he could take on the Temptations. It was and Whitfield did.

The recording is an early harbinger of Motown in the late sixties. There was also the heightened intensity of the Four Tops on a trio of hits: ‘Reach Out I’ll Be There,’ ‘Standing in the Shadows of Love’ and ‘Bernadette.’ The tentative dipping into psychedelia that began with the Supremes’ ‘Reflections.’ The grit of Whitfield’s productions on ‘(I Know) I’m Losing You' and ‘All I Need’ for the Temptations.

Another came with a groove tripled on guitar, bass and drums. It’s tight and also tightly wound but soon bursts forth with a shot of glorious brass and a refrain that declares “baby, everything is alright / uptight, outta sight.” There are more punctuations throughout, whether through a drum fill or brass or the Andantes as Stevie Wonder tells of being “a poor man’s son, from across the railroad tracks” wooing “a pearl of a girl … born and raised / in a great big house, full of butlers and maids.”

‘Uptight (Everything’s Alright)’ was written by Wonder (credited as S. Judkins) with Henry Cosby and Sylvia Moy and released in late 1965. It was his biggest hit since his chart-topping ‘Fingertips - Part 2’ two years earlier, one of the least-likely (yet every exciting) number ones in the history of the Billboard Hot 100. It also marked the end of Wonder as a kind of novelty act and the beginning of the one of the most consequential contributions to popular music in the second half of the 20th century.

The recording motors along as only a Detroit recording can. It has maniacally relentless feel that only the Funk Brothers could sustain. That it fades out is the only way a recording like that could end, making it feel as if the groove could on forever.

It closed the first side of Wonder’s Up-Tight, his fifth album and out in May 1966. It starts with ‘Love a Go Go,’ which paraphrases the brass line from ‘Uptight (Everything’s Alright)’ and could be called derivative if the recording wasn’t so in the pocket with a chorus of Wonders, and drum fills and cymbal crashes a’plenty that add to the fervour. Plus, there’s the sudden drop out of the musicians backing Wonder to just a conga drum. ‘Love a Go Go’ is a magnificent deep cut as is ‘Nothing too Good for My Baby’ on which the groove is super-charged. The tempo is supersonic.

‘Hold Me’ is one of four songs Wonder co-wrote on the album and has a harmonically ambiguous ending with Wonder and the Andantes engaging in a brief chorale that comes out of nowhere. The ballad ‘Teach Me Tonight’ is taken at a street beat with Wonder duetting with Stubbs, Jr. and the rest of the Four Tops performing backup vocals.

Besides ‘Uptight (Everything’s Alright),’ the other well-known cut from Up-Tight is Wonder’s hit cover of Dylan’s ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’ with Clarence Paul, part of Motown’s roster of songwriters and producers. egging Wonder on like Lou Rawls did with Sam Cooke on ‘Bring It On Home to Me.’

The album’s second side is not as propulsive, padded out as it is with curiousities like ‘Contract on Love’ from 1962 with the pre-Ruffin Temptations and ‘Pretty Little Angel,’ a single from 1964. But still, that’s part of what listening to vintage albums is all about. Hearing how the music that remains known was packaged when it was new. That never gets old as doesn’t digging in the vinyl crates.