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Troy
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Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Sunday, May 11, 2003 - 09:01 pm: | 
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Speaking of Funk:
Have you seen this CD:
Standing In The Shadows of Motown
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B00008J2HC/aalbccom-20
It is really very good. Here is the description from Amazon:
Description
Detroit, Michigan, 1959. Berry Gordy gathers the best musicians from the city's thriving jazz and blues scene for his new record company: Motown. For the next 14 years these players are the heartbeat on "My Girl," "Baby Love," "Ooo Baby Baby," "Bernadette," "I Was Made To Love Her," "I Heard It Through The Grapevine," "Dancing In The Street," and every other hit from Motown's Detroit era. By the end of their phenomenal run, the unheralded group of musicians plays on more Number One hits than the Beach Boys, the Rolling Stones, Elvis Presley, and The Beatles combined, making them the greatest hit machine in the history of popular music. They call themselves the Funk Brothers. But no one knows their names...this is their story.
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Chris Hayden
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Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Monday, May 19, 2003 - 10:47 am: |
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Troy:
I saw this movie over the weekend. I would recommend it for all. |
Anonymous
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Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Wednesday, May 28, 2003 - 08:20 am: |
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And here is a review/background info of the film:
Robert White was sitting in a restaurant one day in the 1980s when the opening guitar notes of the Temptations' My Girl floated through the air. "Hey," he said, looking up at the waiter, "you know, you know..." He had a sudden urge to tell somebody - in fact, the nearest available person - that he had been the one who had thought up and played the ascending six-note phrase that forms the introduction to that classic record. But instead he fell silent and looked down at the menu. "I'll take the barbecued chicken," he said. Later he told a friend: "I didn't want him to think I was some tired old fool."
White, who died almost 10 years ago, was one of the small group of musicians who created the Motown sound in Detroit and then found themselves stranded when Berry Gordy shifted his operation lock, stock and barrel to Los Angeles, leaving behind only memories and a museum. The guitarist's poignant story is one of several contained in Standing in the Shadows of Motown, a new documentary profiling the musicians - informally known as the Funk Brothers - whose uncredited work made possible the hits and the careers of the Miracles, Marvin Gaye, the Supremes, Mary Wells, the Marvellettes, the Four Tops, Stevie Wonder, Jimmy Ruffin, Martha and the Vandellas and many others.
Insiders and collectors know their names well enough: Benny Benjamin, the drummer who created the legendary Motown backbeat; James Jamerson, whose imagination and facility enabled him to revolutionise the role of the bass guitar; Earl Van Dyke, whose keyboard playing added an edge of blues or gospel to the poppiest song; and Jack Ashford, who took the tambourine out of the black church and used it to get the world's teenagers dancing.
Motown's ability to crank out hits by the dozen was founded on the abilities of these men and a dozen or so colleagues. When Berry Gordy Jr adapted the techniques of Detroit's automobile production lines to the manufacture of pop records, he depended not just on the talents of his young singers, songwriters and producers, but on the inspiration and reliability of a bunch of musicians plucked from jazz clubs and touring R&B bands. Their quality was as much a key to the Motown sound as Ross's breathless charisma, Gaye's soulful pleading, Smokey Robinson's artful songs, and the special atmosphere inside Studio A, known as "the Snake Pit", located at the back of Hitsville USA, as the little white-frame house at 2648 West Grand Boulevard became known.
"People always say it was everything but the musicians," Uriel Jones, another of the label's regular drummers, says in the film. "They'd say it was the artists, the producers, the way the building was constructed, the wood on the floor, or maybe even the food. But I'd like to see them take some barbecue ribs or hamburgers and throw them down in the studio and shut the door and count off 'One-two-three-four' and get a hit out of it. The formula was the musicians."
It was all of these things, of course - perhaps even the food. Motown's dozens of hits could not have been made without the ambience created by Gordy and his family and office co-workers, without Robinson's charming wordplay, without the endless string of hits written and produced by the brothers Eddie and Brian Holland and their collaborator Lamont Dozier - no fewer than 11 consecutive US number ones for the Supremes, for example. But whereas the singers and composers and producers all received royalties and residuals, the musicians were paid a flat fee per song: a mere $5 in the early days for their exclusive services.
There would have been little cause for complaint if all they had done was reproduce a bunch of notes provided by an arranger. But the Motown musicians prided themselves on contributing more than that. Many times a producer would come into Studio A with a song but no idea what to do with it, and leave a few hours later with a million-seller that would still be hummed and whistled around the world 35 years later.
Eddie "Bongo" Brown, whose subtle hand-drumming propelled Motown hits from Mary Wells' Two Lovers to Marvin Gaye's What's Going On, once described the way it worked. The musicians would start jamming on the tune, throwing in their own licks, gradually working towards a master riff that would underpin the song. "The producer would say, 'What's that? Do it again!' " And if it was his lucky day, the riff would be something like those that gave an unshakeable foundation to the Four Tops' I Can't Help Myself or the Miracles' Going to a Go-Go - riffs, and thus records, that will last as long as anyone is still playing pop music.
Musicians who lived through that time remember the hours spent trying to analyse the Motown sound, and its backbeat in particular. There were many theories, and most turned out to be true. Were the electric instruments really plugged directly into the mixing desk, so that the musicians had to depend on a small wall-hung monitor speaker to hear what they were playing? Yes. Did the engineers set up an extra microphone just to pick up the ambience of the Snake Pit? Yes. Had Jamerson's 1962 Fender Precision bass built up deposits of sweat and grime that gave its sound a special patina? You bet.
For some, the story ended in tragedy. Benjamin's heroin habit first made him unreliable and eventually killed him in 1968, when he was in his mid-30s. Jamerson, every bit as much of a genius of the bass as Jimmy Blanton or Charles Mingus, kept his playing immaculate, despite his fondness for Metaxa brandy, until he moved to Hollywood with Motown and started to fall apart. Since his death in 1983, aged 51, his reputation has never ceased to grow.
The film is good on these legendary figures, and on those who survived them, including Richard "Pistol" Allen, another of the drummers, who died earlier this year, and Johnny Griffith, who passed away in Detroit four days ago but whose ominous electric piano chords bestowed immortality on Marvin Gaye's version of I Heard It Through the Grapevine. These two are among the veterans appearing in specially mounted concert footage, in which they perform the old hits with guest singers, including Joan Osborne, Ben Harper, Chaka Khan, Montell Jordan and Gerald Levert, all of whom do justice to the material. In a wonderful sequence, the musicians start Ain't Too Proud to Beg from the drums up in order to show how the sound was created. They tell old jokes and stories, and two of the studio's white musicians - guitarist Joe Messina and bassist Bob Babbitt - speak movingly of a sense of brotherhood that survived even the assassination of Martin Luther King in 1968, when elsewhere black and white musicians were suddenly divided. But the overall mood suggests that when Motown left town, a long winter fell on Detroit.
"There was no warning, no announcement, and no way of preparing for it," says Martha Reeves, who was among those not invited to join the trek west. Also abandoned was Earl Van Dyke, the spiritual father of the Funk Brothers, whose instrumental singles All for You and 6x6 remain firm favourites with northern-soul fans. Van Dyke eventually returned to Detroit's jazz clubs, where most of the musicians had their origins, until his death in 1992.
"The funny thing," he said in an interview recorded five years before his death, "is that we always had the idea it would never end. That it would go on and on. But, as you see, it ended." His old Hammond B3, that infallible dispenser of joy and good grooves, was discovered a few years ago in a junk shop and is now back at Hitsville USA, a silent witness in the reconstructed Snake Pit that forms the centrepiece of the Motown museum. But without the Funk Brothers, they could never reconstruct the sound.
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