BEFORE: Mick Jagger carries over from "Shine a Light", via archive footage, but that's OK, because it highlights my reasoning behind scheduling things this way - the Rolling Stones were known early on for doing covers of (ripping off, some would say) Motown songs like "Ain't Too Proud to Beg", "Just My Imagination" and "My Girl", so I'm using that as a sort of point of connection. The Beatles, meanwhile, had covered "Please Mr. Postman", "You Really Got a Hold on Me", and "Money (That's What I Want)".
Turnabout is fair play, though, and when the Beatles and Stones had hit big with songs they wrote themselves, eventually the Motown artists did their own versions of Beatles songs, that much I can confirm, because for a long while I collected covers of rock songs, mostly Beatles, and those Lennon/McCartney songs were covered in every genre, from R&B to country to classical to heavy metal. Then there were the downright weird covers, I've got those too.
I've got a few albums with cover versions of Rolling Stones songs, too - artists like Otis Redding ("Satisfaction"), Aretha Franklin ("You Can't Always Get What You Want"), Ike & Tina Turner ("Under My Thumb") and Little Richard ("Brown Sugar") doing Stones songs. That seems only fair, right?
Another connection, the Rolling Stones had a song called "Have You Seen Your Mother, Baby, Standing in the Shadow?" - which seems to tie right in with the title of today's film. Well, that's how my mind works when it makes up the schedule.
FOLLOW-UP TO: "The Wrecking Crew!" (Movie #3,030)
THE PLOT: Documentary about the Funk Brothers, a group of Detroit musicians who backed up dozens of Motown artists.
AFTER: This edition of Today in Music History focuses on James Jamerson, who died on August 2, 1983. Jamerson was one of the Funk Brothers, played on hundreds of hits like "You Can't Hurry Love", "My Girl" and "Dancing in the Streets". And what's the first thing you hear in the song "I Heard it Through the Grapevine"? (Either version - Gladys Knight's or Marvin Gaye's) Yep, that's James Jamerson on the bass. Jamerson played bass on 23 number one hits, which is only topped by Paul McCartney. And the biography of Jamerson was part of the book that inspired this whole film.
This film was released in 2002, so it might have been the trendsetter, I'm not sure - since it combines a straight documentary format with a special concert featuring the Funk Brothers teaming act with some of today's musical artists to create a new hybrid thing. I mean, the concert's a hybrid but the film is also a hybrid, because clearly somebody either felt that nobody watches documentaries any more, or they saw an opportunity to let the Funk Brothers re-unite and play again, and that was just too good to pass up. And then this set off a wave of documentaries about music that tried to copy the same format - "Sound City" and "Echo in the Canyon" are the ones from recent memory, but I have a feeling there are probably others. The theory probably goes that anybody can make a "talking heads" style doc, but if you can give the audience something new, something they can't see in any other documentary, maybe your film has added value and can stand out from the pack.
I'm sure those in the know on docs will regard this as a glaring omission, the fact that I didn't watch this film two years ago when I was covering similar topics, yet I found time to watch "The Wrecking Crew!", which is just the white classic-rock version of the same story, and "20 Feet from Stardom", which was the back-up singer version of the same story. So there's something fundamental about the story here, which is that industry-wide, there's a problem with session people getting credited for their contributions to music. And it's not (just) a racial thing - it would be very easy to tell this story if it were only white people profiting from the work of black musicians, but that doesn't seem to fully cover it, and therefore the story becomes more complicated. Motown was a record label founded by an African-American man, Berry Gordy, so this then falls under the heading of black-on-black crime, right?
Don't get me wrong, as mentioned above rock musicians have been stealing moves and riffs from black musicians since the days of Elvis Presley and probably even before that, so I guess in a sense that set the tone, the standard rules created regarding royalties and credits were designed from the start to screw the little guy, regardless of color. That sounds incredibly unfair, but do we take some small solace in the fact that some of the people who got screwed over the years, some of the Funk Brothers even, were in fact white? The industry turned out to be fair in its unfairness, some kind of equal opportunity destroyer.
But while we're on the subject of being fair, with all the inequities and unfair business practices that I'm guessing took place at ALL the record companies, not just Motown, I'd like to look at this for just one minute from the record executive's point of view. To start with, the goal was to run a business, and that means turning a profit. That means making a hit record as cheaply as possible, getting the songs recorded quickly and easily and into the record stores quickly, before the last hit can start falling down the charts. And fighting that battle every day, every week, means there are going to be casualties, especially in the trenches. What was a higher priority, making sure that every single musician got credited for their work, or getting the vinyl pressed and on to the trucks for delivery to the record stores?
As far as I can tell, these musicians all got paid, plus some of them went out on tour with Marvin Gaye or as part of the famous Motortown Revue. And the re-enactments shown and stories told here seem to imply they were having a pretty good time. So where's the harm? I guess in the fact that very few people knew who they were? Well, that's the difference between being a headliner and a back-up or studio musician, isn't it? It's Marvin Gaye's recording of "What's Going On", not "Marvin Gaye and the Funk Brothers with James Jamerson on bass with a special performance by Eli Fontaine on the soprano sax" - that would never fit on the album's liner notes, let alone that tiny circle space in the middle of the record. So let's face it, the game was rigged from the start here.
The film industry is really not much different, there are dozens or even hundreds of people who appear in the background crowd scenes of a movie, should every single one get listed in the IMDB? Where do you draw that line? The production companies do their best, but for a big-budget film like "Avengers: Endgame" with a dozen special-effects companies involved, the closing credits takes ten minutes to watch, and who's going to sit there and watch that whole crawl after they've just spent nearly three hours sitting in a theater seat without a bathroom break? When I was a kid I'd sit and watch the ENTIRE credits of a "Star Wars" film, just because I loved the franchise so much, I wanted to read every name and hear all the closing music, and this was BEFORE the trend of putting cut scenes at the very very end to reward the faithful. The ushers in the theater probably thought I was a freak, they just wanted me gone so they could finish sweeping the theater and start seating people for the next show.
Ideally, sure, we should know the name of everyone who made a major contribution to every song and every movie, but what constitutes a "major" contribution? This leads back to that argument that The Band had - if a Band member contributed a riff or a drumbeat, should they get songwriting credit? Or is that more "arranging" than "composing"? I don't have a solid answer here, because there are very gray areas once you get into that sealed-off sound studio. I've done voices myself for animated films, and sometimes I was allowed to play around with the lines or how the lines were said. Does that make me a "writer"? Should I be credited as such? I could raise a fuss over this, but what would be the point? Take a movie like the first "Aladdin" movie from Disney - should Robin Williams get a screenwriting credit if he improvised some of The Genie's lines? It's debatable, but it's also notable that it didn't happen.
So I think most of the decisions that failed to credit the Funk Brothers were business decisions, and those aren't necessarily bad or good, they're the decisions made at the time with an eye on the bottom line. This subject is sort of at the tip of my brain right now because I'm trying to write (and pitch) a book about my years of working at the two big Comic-Cons, in San Diego and New York. This is what sort of puts me in the same boat as the Funk Brothers - I don't really receive credit on a public scale for the work I've done there, but I did get paid, and I felt my work was important on some level. (So where's MY documentary?). As I think back on so many of the decisions, big and little, that were made, so many were motivated by that bottom line - cashing in my SkyMiles every year for a free flight, staying at crappy hostels instead of comfortable hotels, paying for meals myself, shipping out enough merchandise to make money but not so much that we'd have to ship it back. Those decisions were all designed to try to increase the booth's chances of turning a profit. I remember one year where I called it JUST right - my boss took most of the merchandise left in the booth with him up to Portland after, where he was doing a show, leaving me with JUST enough books and DVDs to get through the last day. I think we sold nearly everything except for ONE BOOK, but it was the rarest of times that I could just put the unsold merch into my bag with our booth supplies and just walk away. Legendary.
For the Funk Brothers, things sort of mostly ended when Berry Gordy moved the whole operation from Detroit to Los Angeles in 1972 - a few of those session guys moved out west, but by all accounts, that didn't take, which is where some of the Wrecking Crew members entered the Motown story, and some would say that's when Motown stopped being Motown. Whether you're in the music business, the film business, it doesn't matter, the advice is the same - start saving your money, because you never know when the industry's going to change or go through a technological revolution (or a pandemic's going to hit), and so really, there's no job security anywhere. Sad but true.
This isn't really my kind of music, but then again it kind of is, because these songs got SO ingrained into American culture - so sure, I know most of them, but it's not the music that I tend to gravitate toward or listen to in my spare time. I realize they're important to a lot of people, but I'm more of a classic rock guy, I'll try to not let that impact too much on my rating. Obviously, if you're a big fan of Joan Osborne or Gerald Levert or Bootsy Collins and you want to hear them singing on a classic Motown song backed up by the Funk Brothers, then this will be right up your alley.
Also starring Jack Ashford, Bob Babbitt, Johnny Griffith, Joe Hunter, Uriel Jones, Joe Messina, Eddie Willis, Bootsy Collins (last seen in "Mr. Dynamite: The Rise of James Brown"), Ben Harper, Montell Jordan, Chaka Khan, Gerald Levert, Meshell Ndegeocello, Joan Osborne, Dennis Coffey, Brian Holland, Eddie Holland, Steve Jordan (last seen in "Chuck Berry: Hail! Hail! Rock 'n' Roll"), Martha Reeves, Tom Scott, Alan Slutsky, Don Was, Otis Williams, the voice of Andre Braugher (last seen in "Poseidon")
with archive footage of Richard "Pistol" Allen, Benny "Papa Zita" Benjamin, Eddie "Bongo" Brown, James Jamerson, Earl Van Dyke, Robert White, Florence Ballard, Ruth Brown, Fats Domino (last seen in "Once Were Brothers: Robbie Robertson and The Band"), Dwight Eisenhower (last seen in "Get Me Roger Stone"), Marvin Gaye (last seen in "Michael Jackson's Journey from Motown to Off the Wall"), Berry Gordy (ditto), George Harrison (last seen in "The U.S. vs. John Lennon"), John Lennon (ditto), Paul McCartney (ditto), Ringo Starr (ditto), Billie Holiday (last seen in "No Direction Home: Bob Dylan"), Louis Jordan, Elvis Presley (last seen in "27: Gone Too Soon"), Smokey Robinson, Diana Ross (last seen in "Richard Pryor: Omit the Logic"), Sly Stone, Big Joe Turner, Mary Wilson, Stevie Wonder (also last seen in "The U.S. vs. John Lennon").
RATING: 6 out of 10 guitar pedals
No comments:
Post a Comment