Left to right: Eddie Holland, Lamont Dozier and Brian Holland pose with their stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, which they received in 2015. Phil McCarten (Portal)
On Monday the 8th, Lamont Dozier died in Arizona at the age of 81. I’m afraid only black musicologists will be able to identify him: they know he was one third of Holland-Dozier-Holland, the songwriting-producing team that fueled the rise of Motown Records, one of the rare record labels to be named after him a style of music.
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The Motown sound represented the branch of rhythm and blues that sought a certain sophistication. The fact that it was made in Detroit (the auto city of its name) already hinted at its multiracial ambition, penchant for universality, and professionalism. The stereotype insists that Motown worked like the assembly lines of the auto industry, but reality weakens the metaphor.
Motown might aspire to imitate the methods of Fordism, but in reality it was a clan family where the will of founder Berry Gordy was law. There was no boundary between private life and work. Gordy himself had a plethora of children with various women, as he began a clandestine relationship with Supremes lead singer Diana Ross, which became a prime target for Motown Records. Conversely, Gordy commanded musical direction from Marvin Gaye after marrying his sister, Anna Gordy. As part of the family and subject to their discipline, Berry decided to make him the black version of Frank Sinatra, despite evidence that he was a different breed of artist. Birthdays and other family celebrations used to end in fights.
And it so happened that Berry had the final say in selecting the recordings that Motown promoted (often the songs with the greatest potential were performed by different artists, with – what a coincidence – the recordings being chosen by those with the best had a relationship with the boss).
It wasn’t just a matter of arbitrariness or nepotism. Berry wanted to keep the talent he had hired in check. The Holland-Dozier-Holland case had complications. They were singers and that made them very effective at bringing diverse voices together: the Four Tops, the Elgins, the Isley Brothers, the Marvelettes, Martha and the Vandellas and the aforementioned Supremes all benefited from their psychology to set the emotional tone in their songs to find .
So it’s true: Motown’s monumental influence in the 1960s was due in large part to Holland-Dozier-Holland. As music industry veterans, they wanted some kind of recognition: like a label to release their productions. It wasn’t so strange: the label already had several subsidiary labels. But Gordy clipped their wings: no ego massage. Back then, Holland-Dozier-Holland played their deadliest card outside of the Motown umbrella, launching two of their own labels in 1968.
Gordy claimed they were exclusively signed to Motown. Oh yeah? The trio signed the songs they released on Invictus and Hot Wax under a pseudonym with artists such as Freda Payne, Honeycone or the Chaimen of the Board. No one was fooled: the new productions sounded very similar to those released by Motown. It became one of those legal mazes that feeds battalions of lawyers. Many years later, I asked Elmore Leonard, Detroit crime fiction master and music lover, why he never set any of his plots in or around Motown. He lowered the volume of his voice: “I have a wife and children; I would not have been compensated.”
Lamont Dozier was the first to disembark and record under his name. He had great success with Going Back to My Roots, an affirmation of African American culture, a conscientious song and crowd-pleaser whose authenticity is guaranteed by South African Hugh Masekela.
In the 1980s, Dozier settled in the UK, capitalizing on the British reverence for all that Motown had to offer. He wrote hits for Alison Moyet, Phil Collins, Eric Clapton, Simply Red. In all, he recorded a dozen solo albums, but his career never took off. As Berry Gordy, his old enemy with whom he later reconciled, observed, “When you’re being paid millions of dollars for songs you wrote in the Sixties, you lack the incentive to succeed.” May be.
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