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Saturday, Jul 11, 2009
A generous documentary spotlights the anonymous hitmakers behind Marvin Gaye and the Supremes but fails to brighten Berry Gordy's dark corners.
Nov 15, 2002 | Twenty-three years ago, Greil Marcus described a compilation album called "The Motown Story" as "the history of James Jamerson's bass playing, on fifty-eight hits." Jamerson, one of the greatest of all rock bassists, was part of the uncredited Motown house band, collectively known as the Funk Brothers, who from the late '50s until the early '70s were responsible for the ineffable sound on records by Smokey Robinson, Diana Ross and the Supremes, the Temptations, Little Stevie Wonder, Marvin Gaye and others. It wasn't until Gaye's 1970 album "What's Going On?" that any of these musicians were actually credited on any Motown recording.
Think about that for a moment. Robert White, the guitarist who played the indelible opening riff of the Temptations' "My Girl" -- a musical phrase so perfect, so sublime, that the late critic Mark Moses once said it was nearly impossible to imagine a time when it didn't exist -- did not receive credit for it. Not long before White died in 1993, he was having dinner with the writer Allan Slutsky in a Los Angeles restaurant when "My Girl" came over the music system. "Hey!" an excited White asked the waiter, "Do you hear that?" "Yeah," answered the waiter, whereupon White suddenly told him to forget it. "You were going to tell him that was you, weren't you?" Slutsky asked. Yes, White answered, adding that the young waiter would probably think he was just some crazy old lying guy.
The obscurity of men who performed some of the most popular and beloved music in the history of pop inspired Slutsky to tell the story of Jamerson in his book "Standing in the Shadows of Motown," also the name of a new documentary partly inspired by the book. The director, Paul Justman, wants to rectify the anonymity of the Funk Brothers. He has gathered together the remaining members -- Jack Ashford, Joe Hunter, Bob Babbitt, Eddie Willis, Joe Messina, Uriel Jones and Johnny Griffith (who, sadly, died this past Sunday in Detroit) -- to reminisce, to recall their lost colleagues (in addition to White and Jamerson, Benny Benjamin, Eddie Brown, Earl Van Dyke and Richard Allen), and to perform their music with a host of newer stars taking over the vocals.
It's a noble undertaking. But why isn't it a better movie? Told in scattered fashion, the movie only intermittently lives up to the stories and faces and music of the men who are its subject. Part of the problem is the narration, written by Walter Dallas and Ntokaze Shange, and delivered by Andre Braugher, which glazes the film in the sort of dumbed-down generalizations you find in any installment of "Biography." "They were the days of American innocence ... a fairyland where dreams came true for the young stars ... timeless classics," are just some of the stale phrases used, so vague and recycled as to be meaningless. (Isn't it time for writers and filmmakers to learn there never was a time of "American innocence"?)
"Standing in the Shadows of Motown"
Directed by Paul Justman
There's also a fair amount of misinformation in the narration as well, starting with that false old chestnut that "white performers" (read: Elvis) simply smoothed out black music for a white audience (a profoundly ignorant claim that takes no note of the culture Elvis came out of or the wide variety of music that influenced him). The narration also claims that black musicians had no success in reaching pop audiences. This is stated over a clip of performers like Jackie Wilson, who hit the Billboard Top 40 chart (not the R&B chart) 20 times from 1958 to 1963, and Ruth Brown, who sold more records for Atlantic than any other performer in the '50s. Justman's filmmaking is only too happy to fall to the level of the narration, for instance cutting away from a performance of "What's Going On?" for a montage of cops beating up civil rights protesters, the March on Washington, combat footage from Vietnam.
Maybe the idea of matching the Funk Brothers with contemporary performers was supposed to make some point -- as if it needed to be made -- about the timelessness of their music. But that music, songs like Martha and the Vandellas' "Heat Wave," Marvin Gaye's "I Heard It Through the Grapevine" and Jimmy Ruffin's majestic "What Becomes of the Broken Hearted" deserve a hell of a lot better than the treatment they are given by mediocrities like Joan Osborne and Ben Harper. "Motown was America's introduction to soul music," says Harper. And you're America's goodbye to it, I felt like saying.
Meshell Ndegeocello at least doesn't stink up the place with "You've Really Got Hold on Me" but her approach has none of the tension of Smokey Robinson's original (or of John Lennon's even better vocal on the Beatles' cover), none of the erotic rising and falling sense of a climax approached and then sublimated. Gerald Levert, whose specialty is slick bedroom-eyes soul, proves himself a lot gruffer than you'd think when he covers the Four Tops' "Reach Out I'll Be There" but the damn fool filmmakers cut away from him (they don't, at least, make a similar mistake when he covers Junior Walker and the All Stars' "Shotgun"), just as they cut away from Montell Jordan and Chaka Khan on "Ain't No Mountain High Enough."
Even at their best, the guest vocals are only adequate, which gives the lie away to one fellow who's interviewed and says that Deputy Dawg could have sung on these songs and made them hits. Uh-uh.
