REAL GONE
The Meaning Of Soul
Motown luminary Barrett Strong left us on January 29.
Where it’s at: the hits just kept on coming from Barrett Strong.
“I DIDN’TLIKE singing,” Barrett Strong told MOJO in 1999. “I preferred playing the piano and writing.” Yet the co-author of such classics as The Temptations’ Cloud Nine and Edwin Starr’s War voiced Motown’s first chart hit, his throaty, confident vocal driving 1960’s brazen Money (That’s What I Want). Beyond the rival claims of Berry Gordy and Strong to have co-written the US R&B Number 2/Billboard Number 23 hit, the song put Motown on the map and was covered by both The Beatles and the Stones.
Born in West Point, Mississippi on February 5, 1941 and raised in Detroit, Strong played piano and sang with his elder sisters in gospel group the Strong Singers. Inspired by Ray Charles, he wrote his first songs at 14. He came to Gordy’s attention through his sisters’ friend Jackie Wilson: Money was one of six singles he recorded for Gordy between 1959 and ’61, when he moved to Chicago and co-wrote Stay In My Corner, an R&B Number 1 for The Dells in 1965.
By that time Strong had returned to Detroit, and taken an incomplete song to Norman Whitfield at Motown. Their subsequent collaboration would become I Heard It Through The Grapevine, a hit first for Gladys Knight in ’67 and given its platonic form by Marvin Gaye in ’68. Between 1967 and 1972, Strong and Whitfield primarily worked with The Temptations, revolutionising Motown with the socially aware psych-soul of songs including Run Away Child, Running Wild, Ball Of Confusion (That’s What The World Is Today) and Papa Was A Rollin’ Stone, the latter winning the Grammy for best R&B song of 1973.
He left Motown that year and recorded for Epic and Capitol before setting up Grapevine Studios in Southfield, Michigan. In 1998 he launched his own Blarritt records, and in 2001 released his last album, Stronghold 2. Writing in tribute, original Temptation Otis Williams called him, “a beloved brother and extraordinary songwriter… his distinguished legacy of chart hits epitomises the golden age of Motown.”
Lois Wilson
Yukihiro Takahashi
Japanese electronic music pioneer BORN 1952
INSPIRED BY The Ventures’ percussionist Mel Taylor, Tokyoborn drummer Yukihiro Takahashi dropped out of a design degree at Musashino Art University to play in college bands and on TV commercials. He replaced Hiro Tsunoda in Osaka’s Sadistic Mika Band in 1972, the glam-rockers enjoying some success abroad, including a support slot on Roxy Music’s Siren Tour. Takahashi starred in spin-off outfit Sadistics before showing his solo hand with 1978’s Saravah!, drawing much of its inspiration from French pop.