Lamont Dozier: 'The songs just kept coming'

This article is more than 8 years old

One of the legendary songwriting team of Holland-Dozier-Holland on the early days of Motown, Detroit in the 1960s, and how to write a hit song

Hi Lamont! All those Holland-Dozier-Holland songs on Motown (1) are still classics five decades later. Could you have imagined that when you were creating them as young men?
Never in a million years. We were all very young. I was the youngest. I still am! The songs just kept coming. It was like a blessing from God, but there was a lot of hard work involved.

What took you to Motown in the first place?
[Motown boss] Berry Gordy first approached me when I was with a group called the Romeos, but I was 16 years old and wasn’t sure. Funnily enough, I ended up signed to his sister’s label, Anna Records, but when that company folded, I made the natural move to Berry. He had a group called the Matadors, who became the Miracles, and when Shop Around and [the Marvelettes’] Please Mr Postman were big hits, Motown just took off. I found myself talking to him about being a producer, writer, artist, you name it.

What was Berry like?
One of the guys, like a kid in a lot of ways, but very ambitious, and he taught us to never stop in our pursuit of writing the hit song. That’s how we became the main writers at Motown, because we were relentless, like he was.

What was the atmosphere like in Motown at that time?
A lot of people waiting for songs. That’s primarily why he wanted me there, because he knew I was the writer-producer-singer for the Romeos. Motown had a lot of artists, but not a lot of songwriters or producers. I met Brian and Eddie Holland there and we pooled our resources and ideas to become this writing-producing team. We were as surprised as anybody else when we came up with so many songs.

How did you write?
We’d get there at 9am and we would sometimes work until 3am. It was blood, sweat and tears. We pounded on the piano and put our ideas down on a little recorder and just worked and worked them out until we came up with things.

What usually came first?
Sometimes a basic melody, or a title. I was considered the ideas man. Like, I had a bassline for [the Four Tops’] I Can’t Help Myself. That phrase “Sugar pie, honey bunch” was something my grandfather used to say when I was a kid, and it just stayed with me and went in the song. Lots of childhood memories came back to me and I started using them as song titles.

Did you really come up with Nowhere to Run for Martha and the Vandellas after seeing tanks in the street?
Yeah, but it was a lot of stuff. There were riots at the time in Detroit in the 1960s. I remember meeting a little kid who was on his way to Vietnam. He was frightened. Oh God, he must have been about 19. His friends asked if I would throw a party for him at my house before he was shipped out. We had the party, but he was very solemn, just sitting with his girlfriend. He had a premonition that he wouldn’t be coming back. I told him to be positive, but he was adamant. I found myself thinking about how he was feeling trapped – nowhere to run. Sure enough, two months later they shipped his body back. I think he stepped on a landmine. Nineteen years old.

Those sort of tracks seem to capture the turbulent undercurrent of 1960s America without being that specific. Was that deliberate?
Yes. We realised quite early that we wrote mostly love songs or songs about unrequited love, mostly for women, and their plight with boyfriends. It was beginning to sound a bit moody, so we decided to add a feelgood thing. We got with the band and really made them play things that were up. We were determined to make it feel optimistic, in spite of the story in the song. So we ended up with quite dark lyrics and uplifting, cheerful music, and that became our style: making lemonade out of lemons. I think that’s why the songs have lasted, all around the world.

As young men, how were you able to write with such empathy for women?
Women bought the records, to put it bluntly. They wanted music that talked about their feelings, but also … women raised me. My father wasn’t around and I was brought up by my grandmother. I trusted women, and I still do. I have women running my business.

Did you, Brian and Eddie have a special chemistry?
I dunno. Brian and I had a close feeling together. We both liked classical music and we both went to churches, as demanded by our grandparents. We could almost think what our next move would be. When one of us stopped thinking, the other would pick up the thought and keep it rolling. That’s how we wrote.

And then Eddie would come up with the lyrics?
Yeah. I’d have a lyric line, and he’d say, “Man, give me a title or something,” and take the idea and run with it. [The Supremes’] I Hear a Symphony came from something I used to say about a girl called Bernadette (2). It was a feeling I had as a kid. Whenever she was around, I felt uplifted. You know in the movies, if the main character had some music or theme, you would hear this when they came on the screen. So the idea was when the main person in your life comes along, you would hear this melody. That’s basically where the idea came from, watching heroes in movies.

What would you do when a song wasn’t working out?
I’d always think: What if? What would happen if I did it this way and not that way? That’s basically the essence of every idea I came up with. Some songs you can write in 15 minutes and the next can take 15 days. I had a theme song that I sang every morning to wake me up and get me going at 9am. “This old heart of mine, been broke a thousand times …” I’d bang that on the piano to start my day, and eventually I gave that to the Isley Brothers.

How did you come up with Reach Out (I’ll Be There) for the Four Tops?
Brian and I just plunking at the piano. Brian had that der-der-der introductory melody, but he didn’t have another part. I jumped in with: “If you feel like you can’t go on …”

How did you know which song was right for, say, Marvin Gaye, or the Supremes?
We all went to the same churches and sang in the same choirs, so we knew each other from way back. When we were all kids, everyone in Detroit had a vocal group and was trying to make it, but there’s an art in giving the song to the right singer. So many people could sing, but the right person would have to know how to interpret the lyric and the feeling of the song. It’s up to the producer and the songwriter to get them to do that.

Listening to those records now, they capture the times while not sounding remotely like anything else that was happening in music, whether it was the Beatles or Jimi Hendrix.
[Laughs] The Funk Brothers [Motown session musicians] would say, “What is this shit, man? This ain’t rock’n’roll.” Who said anything about rock’n’roll? To me, rock’n’roll was mumbo jumbo. We were trying to create R&B pop. I grew up with Rodgers and Hammerstein and the musicals of the 50s, and pop radio. Sinatra and Nat King Cole influenced me … My grandmother said, “If you’re going to write a song, make sure people can understand it.” There weren’t any books to tell us this stuff. We had to learn it. Nobody was doing what the three of us and Smokey Robinson were doing. John and Paul were coming up with amazing stuff in Liverpool, but different. They used to do the same thing we did: come up with ideas and stay in the studio until something happened. Trial and error.

How did you get the Motown sound?
The control room was a small room in Berry’s house, where he had a pool table. It surprised a lot of people who came to see it later. They’d say, “Where’s the room that you made the records?” I’d go, “This is it!” We mostly used four tracks; sometimes eight, but eight confused the issue.

Did you use many studio effects?
We had echoes and stuff, but there weren’t synthesisers then, so we made our own sounds. We brought in snow chains from tyres to make beats. We’d bang on the piano or underneath it with a hammer, anything. No one could work out what we were doing. Everyone thought the sound on Where Did Our Love Go was handclaps. It was actually a guy called Michael Valvano, stomping on some plywood. He became our resident stomper. Music is found in the strangest places.

Do you see much of Berry now?
I was at his house recently. His secretary Edna passed. Smokey and Otis Williams [of the Temptations] and Duke Fakir [Four Tops] were there. When we do get together, it’s usually a wake or a funeral, unfortunately.

What are you, Brian and Eddie doing these days?
They’re doing things in the business world, but we did a play together in Chicago (3). I’m in the musical theatre business, working on three or four plays, and people want to hear about Motown. I don’t listen to the records that much, but now I’m not so close, it blows me away how good they sound today.

Did you have many that were never finished or released?
God, we had a lot of stuff in the can when we left (4). Some songs came out later on and became big hits. Others never surfaced, and the people that own Motown’s library have them. There’s probably some hits in there.