Heaven Must Have Sent You –
The
Holland/Dozier/Holland Story (3 CD
Set)
Sound: B-
Music: A-
One of the most prolific and important music teams in all
of music is the trio of Edward Holland, Lamont Dozier and Brian Holland. They are best known as one of the great
teams that put the Motown Records label literally on the map, but their music
exceeded their time, music genres like R&B and Pop and is so significant,
that on many levels, music still has not caught up to some of their most
important innovations. Heaven Must
Have Sent You is a new set that dares to attempt to capture their legacy in
three CDs. In real life, this is
impossible, but this is still a significant enough collection to recommend it
for content.
The first CD covers their early years, starting with Eddie
Holland’s hit Jamie (1961), which sounds more typical of the 1950s era
of stand-off soul/blues songs than the sound they would invent and cultivate
into one of the most significant evolutions of music ever produced. That song was actually written by Barrett
Strong and William “Mickey” Stevenson, but the vocal shows Eddie’s total grasp
of the state of the genre at that time.
Of the 26 songs here, Martha & The Vandellas’ (Love Is Like A)
Heat Wave (1963) was a huge early classic and shows the trio had found
their positioning early. Spare but
effective songs like The Miracles’ Mickey’s Monkey, Marvin Gaye’s Can
I Get A Witness, The Four Tops’ Baby, I Need Your Loving and their
amazing string of Supremes’ #1 hits were definitive versions of their work off
the bat. The best evolution here is
from the “baby, baby” syndrome of the early Supreme songs to their thoughtful
and mature I Hear A Symphony. It
also showed that when they decided to leave the Gospel, harder R&B and even
expected Pop conventions behind, they could take music into a new area of
self-reflectiveness atypical of music until The Beatles and Bob Dylan showed
up.
CD 2 shows some of the peak of their work, starting with
The Supremes’ My World Is Empty Without You, which is almost Science
Fiction in its isolated distress of connection, location and identity
lost. They still pulled off the upbeat,
unbeatable R&B classics like The Isley Brothers’ This Old Heart Of Mine
and Jr. Walker & The All-Stars’ (I’m A Road Runner), but the
material continued to become more profound with lyrics that were like nothing
anyone else could write, even in the late 1960s. They had that great knack of expressing a ton of emotion in so
few words that you had to pay attention to what the singer was vocalizing, then
be stunned by its impact. The Four
Tops’ Reach Out I’ll Be There proves they could do this for males, as
well as females, with that song in particular being one of the great male vocal
performances in all of music history by the late, great Levi Stubbs. Diana Ross & The Supremes’ Reflections
was outright Science Fiction and Psychedelic, but the plight of Ross’ character
is pure HDH. Martha & The
Vandellas’ Jimmy Mack proved they could work the female position the
other way, a great record about a woman’s explicitly strong love of another man
with a great build.
Eventually, HDH left Motown and worked at other great
labels like Invictus and Hot Wax.
Despite the fact that it was written by Ron Dunbar and Edythe Wayne,
Freda Payne’s Band Of Gold (1970) in many ways is the final culmination
of the HDH sound, from its backup to build-up.
The woman in plight is stronger here, but still suffering, yet this is
the kind of song that made the transition of black female singer into the Disco
era possible, as that was the next logical step after a song like this. Ross had gone solo by then, some other
Motown acts were leaving or about to leave the label and the big labels were
about to crush the small R&B gems like Invictus and Hot Wax for political
reasons, so this song more than just about any other in the 1970s was the last
of its kind before Roberta Flack brought in a new era of women singers and
R&B even Ross could not escape. Band
Of Gold is the brilliant coda to that 1960s style and type of singer and
song much more than Diana Ross & The Supremes’ Someday We’ll Be Together
because that was atypical of HDH and most of the R&B (or even Supremes)
hits that had come before. This
extended to the male sensibility, which was altered by the rise of more
individualistic landmark work by Stevie Wonder, Marvin Gaye and the
singer/songwriter movement.
That brings us to the final CD, which brought HDH to
performing and producing their own hit records again. Songs like Don’t Leave Me Starvin’ For Your Love, Why
Can’t We Be Lovers, Where Did We Go Wrong and Lamont Dozier’s solo
hits show continuous ambition and a new direction that has a more naturalistic
direction typical of the time. What is
amazing is that these songs are not better known, making this the surprise
section of the set. They were far from
finished being innovative and creative, but commercial success was not what it
should have been, though the R&B charting was more successful. Just A Little Bit Of You was a
Hollands solo hot for a younger Michael Jackson, while The Jackson Five (or is
that 5ive) had one of their last hits at Motown with a strange remake of the
very last hit Diana Ross & The Supremes’ ever had on an HDH song: Forever
Came Today, a song that laid the groundwork for their non-HDH megahit Love
Child. The final tracks show their
influence extending to Shalamar, The Doobie Brothers (apparent in Michael
McDonald’s two Motown cover albums most recently) and Simply Red. Sure, there is much more to be played and
said, while the covers of all these hits, often for the worse, could cover at
least three more CDs, but Heaven Must Have Sent You is a handy set that
is a great place to start to appreciate the trios lasting contribution to
music. The foldout DigiPak and booklet
included are nicely manufactured.
The PCM 2.0 16Bit/44.1 kHz sound is not bad, but the
results are mixed overall on the first two CDs as some of the copies used for
the set are not the best Hip-O and Universal could have applied to these
disc. Again, we turn to The Supremes to
explain. Believe it or not, there are
three sets of their songs circulating on various CDs. First, there are the older copies that have the authentic Motown Sound
those hit records are known for. They
have proper stereo separation and are the kind reserved for the 20th
Century Masters series. The only
downside is that they have some distortion and warping at times, which is
actually rather odd. Then there are the
newer audio transfers that sometimes yield alternate track, extended track
versions close to ones practically similar to the hit versions that you would
find in the 20th Century Masters series. Found on a collection like Diana Ross
& The Supremes – The #1s (reviewed elsewhere on this site), they also
have stereo separation that is good, better bass and more fullness, but The
Motown Sound has been lost to a noticeable extent (they sound too new) and even
sound slightly compressed. That
compression is no match for many of the tracks in this HDH set, which are
transfers from the Polygram era that have the stereo sound rebalanced so much
that stereo separation is lost. I
thought Universal locked these copies away for good!
The result is a hit or miss proposition that hurts this
set in playback form. However, the
other tracks often sound just fine and it is going to take SACD or DVD-Audio to
really get the best out of these songs, so I would only be so fazed by
this. You could even pick up several
versions to compare and hear what you think yourself. At these prices, why not?
Be sure to catch Heaven Must Have Sent You for the history and
great music.
- Nicholas Sheffo
