Mary Wells
| Track | Single |
|---|---|
| Bye Bye Baby | Motown M 1003 |
| I Don't Want To Take A Chance | Motown M 1011 |
| Strange Love | Motown M 1016 |
| The One Who Really Loves You | Motown M 1024 |
| You Beat Me To The Punch | Motown M 1032 |
| Two Wrongs Don't Make A Right | Motown M 1039 |
| What Love Has Joined Together | Motown M 1042 |
| My Guy | Motown M 1056 |
| Oh Little Boy (What Did You Do To Me) | Motown M 1056 |
| When I’m Gone | Motown M 1061 (unreleased) |
Mary Wells playlist
Contributor: Steve Devereux
Motown’s first solo superstar, Mary Wells shone brighter than any other Motown artist in the early Sixties, only to walk out on the company at the height of her success, never to rescale those same peaks.
Arriving at Motown as a budding songwriter in 1960, Mary quickly transitioned to a role as a vocalist, in which she excelled; partnered with star writer-producer Smokey Robinson, she was Smokey’s first great female muse, bringing out some of Robinson’s best early work. She topped the R&B charts on several occasions and struck up a productive duet partnership with Marvin Gaye before finally breaking through to national star name status with 1964’s My Guy, one of the biggest-selling singles in the Motown catalogue, the witty and beautiful Mary finding herself beloved around the world; the Beatles named Wells as their favourite artist and invited her to tour with them.
There was to be no follow-up; allegedly goaded on by one-time husband and fellow Motown artist Herman Griffin, Mary walked out on Motown in a contractual dispute shortly thereafter. She signed to 20th Century Fox in a big-money deal, but her career tailed off remarkably quickly, henceforth acting as a cautionary tale for all those other Motown artists unhappy with their lot and tempted to chance their arm crossing Berry Gordy. She never scored another Top Ten hit again.
Mary Wells died in 1992 following a battle with throat cancer, but her place in Motown history is assured forever.
On to the records …
Mable John had become Motown’s first female solo artist a few weeks earlier with the engaging Who Wouldn’t Love A Man Like That, but Mary Wells – Motown’s second female solo artist – was on a whole different level. Like so many of her early Motown contemporaries, Wells was only a teenager – just seventeen when Bye Bye Baby was released in September 1960 – but her exceptionally powerful voice was mature far beyond her years, and with her good looks and dramatic blonde hairdo, she was the first solo star in the Motown family.
More impressively, she was also able to provide her own material; she initially approached label head honcho Berry Gordy with Bye Bye Baby in the hope he might show it to Jackie Wilson. Gordy, impressed, decided young Mary’s future was in the spotlight rather than behind the scenes; to this end, he brought her in to record it herself. Taking note of Wells’ sultry, powerful, older-sounding voice, Gordy had her record the song over and over again, running through take after take after take until she literally sang herself hoarse – at which point the winning take was captured.
The song itself, a distant but definite cousin of the Isley Brothers’ Shout! (complete with soundalike intro) tackled at three quarter speed, is hardly a masterpiece, but Wells’ extraordinary full-throated vocal takes it up a notch.
Motown hadn’t had a star before, of any gender. Marv Johnson had been poached away by United Artists almost before the new Tamla label had had a chance to draw breath; Smokey Robinson was still searching for a first hit; Eddie Holland had had teen idol credentials, but suffered from a lack of sales and hobbling stage fright; Barrett Strong was a retiring, perfectionist songwriter with no ambitions of stardom who had just happened to luck into a big hit record.
But Mary Wells was different. The first Motown act whose records would sell because her name was on them, rather than her having to make her name through having a hit, she became unstoppable, a genuine sold-out headline act, consistent Top Ten recording artist and the company’s golden egg in its financially-unpredictable early years.
Mary wouldn’t write any more singles for Motown, for herself or anyone else, after this début effort; Wells’ compositions occasionally featured on her LPs for the label, but otherwise this was it for her as a Motown songwriter. As a performer, though, she was (literally) just getting warmed up. Bye Bye Baby was a Top Ten R&B hit, as well as cracking the pop Top 50. A very welcome surprise, and Motown’s first self-contained hit record.
I Don’t Want To Take A Chance, the second single by Mary Wells – already a star in the making – couldn’t have come at a better time for Motown. The company had had no hits at all in four months, since the Miracles’ forgettable Ain’t It Baby had scraped the pop Top 50; Barrett Strong, once a bankable performer, had missed the charts entirely with his last few releases, the Miracles had struggled to follow up their national smash Shop Around, and none of the new artists the company had invested in had made much of a splash.
But although Motown seemed to be treading water, Berry Gordy wasn’t about to repeat past mistakes. Despite knowing he had something special on his hands with Mary Wells, he refused to rush-release her second single, conscious that he risked ruining the momentum that was starting to build around his young starlet by putting out a sub-par sophomore release. Instead, he took his time, writing and working out arrangements, allowing Mary to continue to build her excellent reputation on the live circuit and grow her ever-increasing fanbase while he crafted a surefire hit single for her. In this task, Gordy was aided by the newest member of his growing songwriting and production corps, William Stevenson, universally known as “Mickey”, soon to become the head of A&R during Motown’s early/mid-Sixties golden age.
Perhaps Stevenson’s arrival was just what Gordy needed to help mix his stale palette; this engaging, danceable R&B pop number sounds fresher and more vibrant than any song Gordy had had a hand in writing since the Miracles’ Shop Around, and marks an important step in the development of Motown from Berry Gordy’s personal project into a magnet for songwriting and performing talent from all over America: a genuine artistic force.
Sassy, charismatic, beautiful, and a superb singer, Wells is electric here, her smoky, mature voice sounding much older than her actual age of 18. It’s a song about guardedness and nervousness, not wanting to lay your heart on the line for fear it’ll be stepped on, as Mary exhorts her boy to put up or shut up; she won’t give him her love only to find herself dumped two weeks down the line. It’s a great performance and a definite step towards the Motown Sound.
Wrapped up in one of the best Motown backing tracks to date – absolutely no expense had been spared in making sure this sounded good, perhaps to the disadvantage of the groups and artists who’d had records released in the past few months – it’s an excellent song. Fast-paced, enjoyable, featuring a great, memorable chorus, it was a deserved and long-awaited hit, again going Top 10 R&B, Top 40 pop and cementing Wells’ reputation as an emerging star in a way neither Barrett Strong nor the Miracles had managed on the back of their own big hits.
With her début album already in the can awaiting its November 1961 release, Berry Gordy greenlit Mary’s most expensive recording yet.
Mickey Stevenson had done a fine job co-writing I Don’t Want To Take A Chance, and Wells was now turned over to his control, with Stevenson both writing and producing this third single, Strange Love. He took a leaf from Smokey Robinson’s book and hired an outside arranger, Sammy Lowe, to drench proceedings in layers of lush strings. Finally, Stevenson wrote Mary a staggeringly-orchestrated, full-on emotional big ballad in the Etta James mould which called on her to give the best performance of her young career. She duly obliged, and the rest of the performers raised their games to match her; lead vocals, backing vocals, band, drums, strings, production, it’s all here and it’s all just about as close to bloody perfect as any Motown record had come in these first three years.
Galling, then, that this should turn out to be a resounding commercial flop. Far from scoring her another R&B Top Ten hit, Strange Love failed to make an appearance on any chart and sold so disastrously few copies that Mickey Stevenson was promptly removed from the Mary Wells project, a promising partnership cut short before it had a chance to get started. Mary would henceforth be transferred to the care of Smokey Robinson, who was keen to up his workload as a writer/producer outside the Miracles; the rest, as they say, is history, and the listening public in Sixties America quickly forgot this record ever existed at all.
But the listening public in Sixties America, it transpires, could be cloth-eared morons of the first stripe. This is a brilliant record, played with passion by the band – who know just how good a job they’re doing, their confidence beaming through the speakers – and sung quite superbly by Mary.
The chorus only consists of the word ‘you’, stretched out melismatically over seven or eight syllables and sung at the very top of Mary’s register – but she deals with it in her stride and hits it perfectly every time. Such ambition would have been unthinkable for a Motown session even a year previously, but boundaries were being pushed all the time, and this record is rich evidence of just how far things had come. Mary’s vocals throughout the song are nothing short of fantastic.
At the start of 1962, paired for the first time with writer/producer Smokey Robinson, she turned in her best record so far. Not coincidentally, The One Who Really Loves You landed Mary her biggest hit to date.
Opening with a burst of three increasingly loud drumbeats – a kind of early fade-in, presaging the Supremes’ Come See About Me two and a half years later – and then picking up with a strange quasi-calypso tempo, a stop-time guitar/bass riff, bongos and drums in tandem, along with an understated, perfectly-timed crash of cymbals, the record grabs the attention straight from the off.
The song itself is one of Smokey’s best to date, pulling in everything he’d learned from a series of increasingly complicated and advanced Miracles numbers and putting it all to splendidly good use. Lyrically, too, it’s highly affecting … obviously coached by Smokey, Mary’s cadences are very similar to his even though their voices are nothing alike, and the effect is entrancing.
Mary has to take a lot of the credit for this record’s expansive, professional sound, as she excels herself here. She tones down the operatics in her voice and turns in a sassy, knowing performance, full of emotion and jazz-inflected character. She was still only eighteen, but she sounds both worldly and experienced. She’d remain in the care of Smokey Robinson for the rest of her remaining two and a half years with the company, racking up a series of classic singles – of which this should be counted one of the first.
Now nineteen years old and with her stock rising every day, Mary Wells finally punched through to the top spot, scoring her first R&B Number One with You Beat Me To The Punch, another great Smokey production. He spent much of 1962 working on a series of midtempo, calypso-influenced numbers, both for his own group the Miracles and for various other Motown acts, in the ongoing development of a coherent early ‘Motown Sound’. Here, it’s been refined, reworked and polished to a brilliant shine.
It’s the lyrics that are showcased here. This song is another step forward in Smokey’s lyrical development, both for its evocative, self-contained story, and its use of a relatively new idea in pop song storytelling: the ‘twist ending’. In the first two verses, Mary talks about getting her nerve up to speak to a boy – first to ask him for a dance, and then ask him out on another date – only for the boy to be a step ahead of her both times, and ask her first. As far as I can tell, nobody had written a song around this particular trope before, meaning there was a rich vein of fresh emotional impact for Smokey to tap into. Given free rein on how best to couch the story, the choice of boxing imagery for the central metaphor is inspired; the song’s surprise twist, in which Mary discovers the boy has been playing around behind her back, and gets a pre-emptive strike in by dumping his cheating ass before he can leave her, is pretty much a perfect fit.
Once again, Mary herself lifts things up a notch. Her delivery is enchanting, and she hits all the emotional marks in a difficult song, meaning she has to strike exactly the right character; coy and vulnerable (“much too shy”) at the start, but strong and independent enough to drop the boy once he starts playing away. It’s pitched somewhere between the sweet high school romance of traditional teen love songs and a more adult relationship drama, but it’s somewhere quite specific, so a wrong move would wreck the whole song – and Mary plays it to perfection. Her already amazing, throaty, bluesy voice is now enhanced with a new technique, a sexy, almost-spoken semi-whisper (as though she could barely open her lips to get the words out) which she’d later employ to devastating effect. Here, it’s used to pronounce the word ‘punch’ in the title, wedded to Smokey’s instrumental break to form that irresistible hook I mentioned earlier; it melts you.
Mary Wells scored her first number one record with this, her best single to date, the Motown quality threshold going up and up with each passing month; perfectly judged, enticing and mesmerising, this is one of the best records of 1962.
Originally issued as a B-side, Two Wrongs Don’t Make A Right, a cover of a 1961 Barrett Strong flipside, ended up cracking the charts in its own right (scraping in to the Hot 100 at … well, number 100, but it still counts, right?), becoming Mary Wells’ first double-sided hit in the process. Superior to both Strong’s original, and to her own A-side here, Laughing Boy, this really is excellent. Unlike the strange, beautiful but somehow ill-suited ethereal high notes of the A-side, here Mary is back in the blues groove she’d started out in; grittier, throatier and less polished than her recent pop chart outings. (I don’t know when this was actually recorded, so it could date from before she started to hit big with the likes of The One Who Really Loves You – it’s certainly more of a raw delivery than any of her previous Smokey-produced sides).
The band are excellent, as they had been on Strong’s rendition. Their performance here moves away a little from the slow, smoky blues jam of the original, and towards more of a jazz-pop feel (check out the great horn flourishes) – but it’s a great decision, as Mary takes the song as though it was written especially for her. Barrett Strong had drained the lyrics of much of their punch, but Mary brings them out splendidly; the narrator, mired in an especially unhealthy relationship, having been caught cheating on her partner, now urges him not to compound her mistake by breaking up with her (or cheating on her in retaliation). She sells it wholly convincingly, a timely reminder of her skill in bringing ‘story’ songs to life; regardless of when it was recorded, coming as it does on the heels of a pair of rather insincere-sounding Wells performances (Two Lovers, Operator), it packs a surprising emotional punch.
If this was hardly an avenue that Mary Wells’ future career could follow, it’s still a very fine record, and well deserving of its (very brief) time in the chart sun.
As with so many of Smokey’s songs, What Love Has Joined Together (the B-side of Your Old Stand By) is a refinement of a concept he’d explored in an earlier song; in this instance, lyrically, it’s the Miracles’ beautiful I’ll Try Something New; Smokey’s madly-in-love narrator offering to do a series of impossible things replaced by Mary’s madly-in-love narrator promising that a series of impossible things would be easier than splitting her from her love, thereby pledging her heart until the end of time.
Another of Smokey’s usual tricks was to provide a neat twist on a familiar aphorism, in this case, a tweak of a Biblical quotation well-known to listeners from its use in wedding ceremonies – but what a tweak, what love has joined … substituted for what God has joined, and the original let nobody … (an instruction) replaced intentionally with can’t nobody (an affirmation) – and build a song around that conceit. Sometimes it worked, and sometimes it didn’t; here it definitely does. It’s never made clear whether Mary and her lover are actually supposed to be married (Mary was, in real life), but the devotion is there in the text (It would be easier to take the wet from water / Or the dry from sand / Than for anyone to try to separate us) and the acting required to sell this properly is top-notch.
Musically, it’s equal parts half-pace rewrite of Two Lovers, and slow-as-molasses dress rehearsal for the Supremes’ A Breath Taking Guy a couple of months later, but tailored specifically to the rhythms and cadences of Mary Wells’ singing – tailored, in fact, as well as anything Robinson ever wrote for her. I love Mary’s voice on this so much, it’s almost perfect; breathy, sultry, calm, wonderful. Smokey knew what he was doing.
The mix is just beguiling. Mary acts her way through the song as well as she’d done on any of her records to date, showing the believable, down-to-earth qualities she’d displayed on the A-side and which would shortly shoot her to superstardom (that is, a level beyond the mere stardom she currently enjoyed). Too slow to be a single, this is still one of the best records of Mary Wells’ all-too-brief tenure with Motown, and it gets better each time you listen to it.
Unbelievably, this was Mary Wells’ first single in seven months, a strange circumstance for Motown’s first bona fide star. Famously, and even more unbelievably – though of course nobody knew it at the time – this was also to be Mary’s last Motown seven-inch as a solo artist.
In between, My Guy became Motown’s biggest-selling single to date, the label’s third Number One pop hit (and Mary’s first), embarking on a lengthy spell on the charts in 1964 as spring became summer, seeping through to the popular consciousness to such an extent that even now, fifty years later, it’s hard to find anyone who doesn’t know how this goes (even if they haven’t necessarily ever actually heard it).
This is just a wonderful record, on so very many levels. A pop jewel, a confection, a piece of beautiful, intricate ironwork decorated with sugar frosting, all warmed up like a delicious little pastry. Smokey and Mary had had their ups and downs, each counting on the other’s strengths at various points to ride through any momentary weaknesses, but this time they both nail it, and the effect is so astonishing that the record still works, even after all these years and all these listens.
First and foremost, it’s just a lovely song. This is Smokey the lyricist at the top of his game, not only working out the phrasing of the words to precisely fit Mary’s diction (as was his particular speciality), but now making form reflect meaning, having Mary’s character use intentionally repetitive wording to reflect a lovestruck but clear-eyed sentiment. My Guy is Mary’s crowning achievement, the one record she’s forever to be remembered for. She’s magnificent here. Her voice has literally never sounded better; there’s a tangible sweetness of character, underpinned by a breathy, throaty hint of sexuality, culminating in the final, spoken, almost-whispered lines, There ain’t a man today / Who can keep me away from my guy, Mary smouldering so intensely she’s barely even breathing the words; the single greatest line delivery in the entire history of pop music.
Ultimately, the career of Mary Wells is best remembered by listening to My Guy. Play it loud, and remind yourself how incredible it all is, what a wonderful single. The band are brilliant, Mary is brilliant, and the exceedingly well-crafted lyrics mean that everyone’s efforts are in the service of a beautiful, wholly lovely pop record. And for that, not for historical significance or critical representation, it gets a ten from me, probably the easiest one I’ve ever had the pleasure to give out. Perfect.
If the A-side, the eternal My Guy, was Mary Wells’ crowning achievement, then this demented, wide-eyed, and utterly, utterly brilliant record – which turns out to be the unexpected equal of the big hit – is the lasting glory of the career of Andre Williams.
I almost don’t have the words to describe how great Oh Little Boy is, especially if you’ve not heard it before. This is the past and the future of all pop music, stirred in a great big pot by a certified loon, thrown at Mary Wells to interpret, and all in less than three minutes. The very first couple of seconds give the listener some kind of fair warning as to what’s about to happen: the Andantes, augmented on this occasion by Liz Lands, no less, strike up an offbeat, out-of-key chant of “Sh-bop sh-bop!”, a direct lift from the Flamingos’ equally otherworldly I Only Have Eyes For You (and just as out of place on this record as on that one), calling up a world now already disappearing: sock hops, soda fountains, class rings, the golden age of doo-wop. But where the Flamingos’ record uses the weirdness to create a surreal, dreamlike, floating atmosphere, here it’s just deliberately jarring, reflecting the fractured mental state of the narrator.
Oh, the narrator. Mary Wells, already one of the finest actresses in pop music, plays a woman who’s been unceremoniously dumped and is having trouble staying on the right side of crazy. (The aforementioned Andre Williams, who co-wrote and produced this, was and is proudly on the wrong side of crazy, making him an inspired choice to chair this one.) Williams coaxes a brilliant performance out of Mary, dramatically and vocally; her voice is just out of this world on this one, by turns throaty, menacing, off the beat, flat, semi-spoken, semi-spat, alternately self-reliant and helplessly pleading, playing off the backing vocals to invent her own vocal line that has nothing to do with the rest of the tune … it’s not only presaging stuff like Aretha’s Respect but also the likes of Kelis or even Missy Elliott:
A carton of cigarettes
And a tear every now and then
Gives me some relief …
It’s never less than totally captivating. Totally believable, too; Mary’s acting talent I’ve already referenced, but there’s also the music to consider, which completely reflects the subject matter in hand, always veering somewhere between defiant spite and complete mental collapse, Williams keeping the tone just right for whatever emotion the song happens to call for at that precise moment, in the most advanced and natural synthesis of form and function Motown had ever seen.
The chorus is just outstanding, Mary half a beat behind the operatically-enhanced Andantes, letting them carry the woozy, swooning tune while she just toasts over the top of it all, spitting out her words one syllable at a time in something almost approximating rap. You’re gonna want me back and it’s gonna be too late now here’s what I’m gonna tell you I’m gonna say no no no, she barks, as we sit and listen, mouths agape.
Most great pop hits would be satisfied there with a job well done, but not this one – so when we’ve already had that chorus twice, Williams and Wells have one more trick up their sleeve for us to really set the tone once and for all. The narrator’s finally lost the plot, the lead vocal disappears, the drums ramp up, mariachi horns kick in; now, for the last time, enter Liz Lands, battering high C for a full six seconds, her single greatest contribution to any Motown record, a miniature aria that sums up the narrator’s mental breakdown and, somehow, fits the song like a glove.
There’s so much to love here. The drums on the heavy beat as if the world’s about to end, the jangling, detuned guitars that sound as if there’s something broken somewhere in the mix, the blurry rhythm that feels somehow intoxicated, the two almost but not quite totally separate vocal lines dovetailing with almost surgical precision yet giving the chaotic impression of a jumbled, off-the-cuff screed of passion … this is a record you can listen to a hundred times and still get something new out of it on the 101st play.
Motown’s best ever B-side, and – even in light of the perfect pop precision of My Guy – quite possibly Mary Wells’ best ever record. A genuine masterpiece, and a fitting end to a bunch of brilliant careers.
According to the studio papers unearthed by the compilers of The Complete Motown Singles: Volume 4, When I’m Gone was the very last thing Mary Wells ever recorded at Motown. She served a writ on the company two days after cutting the record, already scheduled as her follow-up hit to My Guy and assigned both a catalogue number and a release date. To have his biggest star – and let’s not forget that’s exactly what Mary was once My Guy started to build towards a million copies – walk out on him wasn’t pleasant; he took the insult exactly as you’d expect.
When you listen to When I’m Gone you realise that there was just no way Motown could have released it when they were supposed to. What are you gonna do when I’m gone?, she asks in the song’s very first line – surely with provocative glee, given she must have known what she was about to do when she recorded it – and hence the reason Motown squashed the record.
We were happy in the public eye
They think you’re such a wonderful guy
But they don’t know how much you can lie …
People would have laughed, and not kindly. The kitchen towel that could remove that much egg from Berry Gordy’s face hadn’t yet been invented. All of which is a real pity, because this is another excellent record from Motown’s first great summer. The irony in the title aside – and even if Mary knew what was up her sleeve, there’s no way writer-producer Smokey Robinson (who again gives this his very best shot) could have foreseen the out-of-nowhere self-destruction that would render this unusable – this is a perfect follow-up to My Guy.
The tune isn’t as effortlessly perfect as the super-hit (how could it be?) but Mary is on splendid form as she tells her on-again, off-again boyfriend that she’s come to the end of her road. Smokey delivers one of his best lyrics to date, confrontational and wronged while still giving Mary enough material to work the vulnerable aspect of her acting repertoire by harking back to past memories – not just the bare facts, but the emotions Mary’s narrator was feeling at the time.
It’s another super vocal performance. The bright, twangy guitar, and the long, cooing organ and backing vocal passages that buffet Mary’s voice along throughout the song, are brand new, and quite magical to boot. This is a really good, sweet-sounding pop record, a matter-of-fact account of a small-scale breakup, an act of revenge without the vengeance set to a riveting, bouncy new tune. For want of a better word, it’s sophisticated, in pretty much every sense. Mary, having come of age, delivers the first great single of her new career as one of America’s top stars – and nobody got to hear it for two years.
Mary Wells Discography (Motown & post-Motown)
Mary Wells: The Tumultuous Life of Motown’s First Superstar
by Peter Benjaminson (Chicago Review Press, 2012)
Mary Wells biography (AllMusic)
Our contributor Steve Devereux is the founder of the Motown Junkies website, a track-by-track review of every US and UK Motown single, including all subsidiaries – a work-in-progress since 2009.
Editorial note: The above post is abridged from Steve’s writings on Mary Wells at his highly recommended website. For more detail on Mary’s departure from Motown and to read the full reviews of each of these 10 records visit the Motown Junkies site: Bye Bye Baby, I Don’t Want To Take A Chance, Strange Love, The One Who Really Loves You, You Beat Me To The Punch, Two Wrongs Don’t Make A Right, What Love Has Joined Together, My Guy, Oh Little Boy (What Did You Do To Me), When I’m Gone – and for Steve’s reviews of all Mary’s singles (A+B-sides) click here. His Toppermost on the Velvelettes is here.
TopperPost #1,133
Follow