Holland/Dozier/Holland
Architects Of Motown
Nearly anywhere in the world, no matter what day or time it is, someone is likely enjoying the musical legacy of Holland Dozier Holland and the legendary Motown Records label. The list of songs the three soft-spoken men have written is staggering: “Heatwave,” “Where Did Our Love Go?,” “Baby Love,” “I Can’t Help Myself,” “Stop! In The Name Of Love,” “Nowhere To Run,” “Can I Get A Witness?,” “You Keep Me Hangin’ On,” “Baby Don’t You Do It,” “Standing In The Shadows of Love,” “Reach Out (I’ll Be There),” and on and on and on.
Unquestionably the American counterparts to Lennon and McCartney, Brian Holland, Lamont Dozier, and Edward Holland, Jr. were not only the greatest modern pop-songwriting team to emerge from this country, they were also among the most successful record producers of all time, a fact few realize. The list of artists they wrote for and produced is also monumental, and includes The Supremes, Martha & The Vandellas, Smokey Robinson & The Miracles, The Four Tops, Mary Wells, Marvin Gaye, The Isley Brothers, Jackson 5, Michael Jackson, Eddie Kendricks, Freda Payne, Chairman Of The Board, and many, many others.
And like Lennon and McCartney, nearly all of the creative output of HDH as a team was done in a matter of 10 years, from 1962 through 1972.
“You hear these Holland Dozier Holland songs on the radio and on TV and everywhere, all the time,” says Brian Holland, now retired and living in the Southwest. “I, too, hear them all the time. I live in [Las] Vegas and I go into the town and there are people playing them all the time. I love it. It’s great.”
Holland, his younger brother, and Dozier have not actively worked on a project as a team in nearly 20 years (even after the HDH company was dissolved in 1972, the three continued to work together, occasionally through the late 1980s), still they have assembled a number of times in the last five years to receive awards and accolades including the BMI Icon Award, The R&B Foundation Pioneers Award, and a Lifetime Achievement Grammy.
Recently, Universal Music Enterprises, the division of Universal that now controls the Motown recorded masters, has celebrated the artistry of HDH with Heaven Must Of Sent You: The Holland/Dozier/Holland Story, a three-CD box set that showcases a small, but historic portion of their immense musical output.
Another three-CD box set, The Motown Story, was also issued in conjunction with a PBS fund drive TV special, and that collection also contains several HDH classics.
“We started writing together [in 1962],” says Dozier, who still writes, produces, and records out of Los Angeles. “If one of us had an idea that we had previously we would all get together and try and work it out. That is how that happened. On some of the earlier songs, like ‘Come And Get These Memories,’ I had about 80 percent of the song already written when I played it for them. It was something that I had previously. There were songs like ‘Heatwave’ that I previously had some ideas on; there were things that I had the bass line for, like ‘Where Did Our Love Go?,’ and ‘I Can’t Help Myself.’ There were other songs that I had a bassline on the piano and had never done anything with. Stuff like the riff on ‘I Can’t Help Myself.’ Once we had the hit with ‘Where Did Our Love Go?’ with The Supremes, all of that stuff really started to blossom.”
Trying to explain the working process behind the popular tunesmiths, he adds, “Many times one would finish what the other two did. Eddie would usually finish off what we had come up when he did the lyrics. I always wrote with lyrics and melodies for the hooks and to get a particular idea up and working. Then Eddie would take over. We were trying to accumulate a lot of songs. If I had an idea like ‘Sugar pie, honey bunch — you know that I love you — I can’t help myself,’ we would give him the rough track and Eddie would finish it off when he wrote the remaining lyrics. Then, he would teach it to whoever the artist was that would record it.”
Adds Eddie Holland, “My job was usually to write the majority of the lyrics and then I would listen to the melody and make sure it had the right movement. I would make sure it had the right amount of bars. Sometimes, the other guys would want to make it short and exciting and give it only four bars; but I might have heard six bars in my head. But essentially, my job was to write the lyrics and teach the song to the artist and then take them into the studio to record it.”
In addition to their roles as songwriters and producers, Eddie was Motown’s director of A&R, Brian was its chief engineer and director of quality control, and Dozier worked as a staff arranger. Dozier was also known as the team’s idea man, who usually started the initial creative process on most of their songs . . .
– Bruce Pilato
To find out the rest of the legend and a track-by-track breakdown of H-D-H’s greatest hits, pick up the November copy of Illinois Entertainer.
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