HDH Reunite For Broadway

[Emerald City]

Hitmakers Holland-Dozier- Holland reunite for a Broadway musical and
more By Susan Whitall / The Detroit News 8/2/05

Surprising as it was to see Brian and Eddie Holland stand in for their former boss, Berry Gordy, at the funeral of Renaldo "Obie" Benson of the Four Tops last month, it's even more amazing that the Holland brothers and Lamont Dozier have gotten together as Holland-Dozier-Holland again.

The fabled songwriters, who wrote hits for the Supremes, the Four Tops, Marvin Gaye and the Temptations, are not only promoting the new Motown compilation, "Heaven Must Have Sent You: The Holland-Dozier-Holland Collection," but they're writing music together again.

What brought them together after almost 30 years apart is the longtime dream of writing a Broadway musical. Their first effort will be based on the film "The First Wives Club."

"We've gotten back together," Lamont Dozier affirms, speaking from his Los Angeles home. The three men are all living in California now. "We pushed back a lot of the old things, trying to get rid of the negative stuff and look at this as a new day, a refreshing, Reinventing type of thing," says Dozier, 64. "Doing a musical is something that's been in my heart for years. We finally decided to do it together."

"It's a good thing," agrees Eddie Holland of the reunion. "We had all been interested in doing the 'First Wives Club' -- so now we're doing it together." He is the older Holland brother, turning 66 in October; Brian is 64. Musicals take years to produce, and the three men are only at the beginning stages. .

"We've done some little melody lines," Eddie Holland says. "It's a long process." In the meantime, he's produced an album on Detroit artist Paul Hill called "Back Against a Wall," on H-D-H Records(distributed by Warner Bros.). The first single, "Beauty," is just out, and Dozier's album "Ladies Man" is due out later in the year.

H-D-H's last days at Motown and the ensuing years were fraught with bad feelings, starting with their angry departure from the label in 1967 in a dispute over royalties. They launched their own labels, Invictus and Hot Wax, and fought through several decades of lawsuits. Their new labels had hits by Freda Payne and the Chairmen of the Board, but Dozier split in 1972 for Los Angeles and a solo career, leaving the Holland brothers in Detroit to dissolve the labels.

Fortunately, the chart-topping success the three had at Motown is in focus again now that they've mended fences with Gordy and each other. As former Miracle Claudette Robinson remarked at Benson's funeral, "After all, we started out as a family. And we're ending up a family."

The three-CD set, now in stores, starts with Eddie Holland's 1961 Motown hit as a singer, "Jamie," all the way through the storied hits by the Supremes, Four Tops, etc., to some solo Dozier performances. It's the first time H-D-H's Motown productions are on the same disc as their Invictus product.

Formula for success

Back in the early '60s, when all three men wound up at Motown, Eddie Holland suggested to his brother and Dozier that they'd save time if they just wrote the music, and left the lyrics to him. That ended up being their permanent method of composition. They soon became Motown's top hitmakers.

"All three of us just had our eye on what was happening around us, we were very observant to what people were doing in love situations, and what was happening in the world," Dozier says.

Their music is deceptively simple, as all great pop music is. And yet, take the H-D-H classic, Marvin Gaye's "Can I Get a Witness." It's steeped in gospel, complete with Gaye doing a call and response with the backing vocalists.

"Holland-Dozier-Holland were able to package gospel in such a way that it was really camouflaged," says Charles Sykes, an Indiana University music professor. "There was a packaging of those black elements in such a way that they were very pop-oriented, from the tambourine on." Sykes believes it's because of that grounding in black gospel music that Motown always retained its black audience.

Another key to H-D-H's sound was the excitement a bit of tension will create. They would often put the key of the song higher than the singer liked. Most notably, Marvin Gaye would be "forced" into a falsetto on some lines, and David Ruffin of the Temptations would gruffly reach for notes. "It pushed the sound up to the edge and caused a little bit of a strain," Sykes says. "That was part of the (H-D-H) aesthetic, that tension in the sound."

The songs that Holland-Dozier-Holland wrote were often real life stories, some taken from their own lives. Take the Supremes' "Stop! In the Name of Love" "A girlfriend had caught me in a compromising situation with another girl," Dozier says. "In trying to defuse the situation, I said 'please, stop in the name of love,' as corny as that may sound. Then I said 'Wow, did you hear that cash register? That's how things happen, songs come out of nowhere."

[Emerald City]

Reared in the church

Dozier first started writing poems as a boy at Edgar Allan Poe Elementary School in Detroit, just blocks from the projects. Edith Burke, his social studies teacher, thought a poem Dozier wrote called "A Song," about what a song does for the human psyche, how it makes people see each other differently, was profound for an 11-year- old kid.

"She put it up on the school bulletin board, and that gave me such a jump-start toward writing more things," Dozier says. Later he was able to find common ground with the Holland brothers, because they had almost exactly the same kind of Detroit childhood: a church upbringing, lots of music around and a strict grandmother. "Thank God for both our grandmothers, the Hollands' grandmother was very seminal, and mine was the head of the choir at my church," Dozier says. "I had to be at church on Thursday, Saturday and Sundays rehearsing. I couldn't do anything else until I got that business taken care of."

Their grandmothers wouldn't allow anything but church music and classical music at home, so the boys would have to go out to a skating rink, the 20 Grand Club or the Graystone Ballroom to hear any other kind of music. The Holland brothers attended Wilbur Wright High School, Cleveland Intermediate and Davison Elementary, along with music legend "Little" Willie John.

Eddie Holland recalls the vibrant musical culture of the time, when everybody had a vocal group. A particularly tough group of Detroit police officers known as the "Big Four" used to cruise around the neighborhoods at night in an unmarked car.

"The Big Four, they'd always listen to us singing under the light, just having a lot of fun," Holland says. "Sometimes the Big Four would say, after they'd listen after about 20 minutes, 'OK, you've gotta break up.' Sometimes, we'd sing and they'd listen for a long time, then keep driving.

"But it was an interesting time. There were a lot of stage shows in Detroit, a lot of theaters with amateur shows, and you'd go and watch all these different acts."

Giving groups unique sound

Holland-Dozier-Holland's gift was in finding a unique sound for each group they worked with.

The Supremes were a problem at first with Diana singing, Dozier fretted that the sound was too thin. When they were preparing the song "Where Did Our Love Go?" they had to decide. "Diana had a high thin voice that used to annoy me. Eddie too," Dozier says. "We'd say, 'Why don't we let Mary (Wilson) sing the song?' But Brian was adamant, it's got to be Diana. Two against one, but we finally let her sing. We brought the keys down for Diana, to give her a fuller sound."

"I wanted Mary Wilson to do it," Eddie Holland agrees. "I felt her voice was very soft, and I thought anyone who could sing it in a soft, sensuous way, that would be good." But once the key was lowered, Ross' voice was less girlishly strident. "She pulled it off," Dozier says. "It was her voice and that take-no-prisoners attitude when she's onstage, she was just out there, hungry to be the star."

Hearing Marvin Gaye sing "You're a Wonderful One," it may not seem possible that such music didn't just spin effortlessly out of his mouth. But H-D-H went through conniptions with Gaye at times. He objected that they had him singing in too high a key. "He was fussy and very childlike. He'd be a handful," Dozier said. "He'd have you so angry, but then he'd come up and hug you. He was just aggravated and somewhat fearful about the key. But we knew if we made him stretch, he'd have to invent something for the performance, slide off into a little falsetto, and it just worked."

The Four Tops had a strong lead singer in Levi Stubbs, and H-D-H worked with Top Lawrence Payton to round out their sound -- anchored by Stubbs' gritty, powerful voice -- with the high, sweet voices of the Andantes, Motown's female backup group.

The Funk Brothers, Motown's famed backing group of jazz veterans, loved to give the young producers grief. "They were hard on us, because these were jazz guys," Dozier says, laughing. "Earl Van Dyke and Joe Hunter were always on our backs. I'd show them different chord progressions, and they'd say, 'What kind of playing are you doing, man? That's not a C chord.' I'd say, 'Yes, that is a C chord ...when we started getting hits, then they stopped bugging us."

H-D-H preferred to do all their sessions with Funks bass player James Jamerson and drummer Benny Benjamin.

"You can't write all those little nuances, inflections that they'd do," Dozier says. "James and Benny, playing off each other, they'd come up with something ten times better than what you thought you had." Their influence has endured, thanks to the music, as well as the book and film "Standing in the Shadows of Motown."

Dozier relates a recent example. "I was just doing a project down in Nashville, and I told the bass player, 'Your sound, the way you're playing, you sound like James Jamerson.' He was so excited, he said 'Man, I've had three of those books on Jamerson that I wore out, I have to get another.'

"If only James and Benny could have lived to know what influences they were."