Lamont Dozier, Motown songwriter-producer, dead at 81

NEW YORK — Lamont Dozier, the center identify of the celebrated Holland-Dozier-Holland group that wrote and produced “You Can’t Hurry Love,” “Heat Wave” and dozens of different hits and helped make Motown a necessary report firm of the Nineteen Sixties and past, has died at age 81.

Dozier’s demise was confirmed Tuesday by Paul Lambert, who helped produce the stage musical “The First Wives Club” that Holland-Dozier-Holland wrote for.

In Motown’s historic, self-defined rise to the “Sound of Young America,” Holland-Dozier-Holland stood out even in comparison with such gifted friends as Smokey Robinson, Stevie Wonder and Barrett Strong. Over a four-year interval, 1963-67, Dozier and brothers Brian and Eddie Holland crafted greater than 25 high 10 songs and mastered the mix of pop and rhythm and blues that allowed the Detroit label, and founder Berry Gordy, to defy boundaries between Black and white music and rival the Beatles on the airwaves.

For the Four Tops, they wrote “Baby I Need Your Loving” and “Reach Out (I’ll Be There),” for Martha and the Vandellas they wrote “Heat Wave” and “Jimmy Mack,” for Marvin Gaye “Baby Don’t You Do It” and “How Sweet It Is (To Be Loved by You).” The music lived on via numerous soundtracks, samplings and radio airings, in cowl variations by the (*81*) Stones, Linda Ronstadt, James Taylor and lots of others and in generations of songwriters and musicians influenced by the Motown sound.

“Their structures were simple and direct,” Gerri Hirshey wrote within the Motown historical past “Nowhere to Run: The Story of Soul Music,” printed in 1984. “Sometimes a song barreled to number one on the sheer voice of repetitive hooks, like a fast-food jungle that lurks, subliminally, until it connects with real hunger.”

Brian Wilson, Ron Wood and Mick Hucknall had been among the many many musicians providing tributes Tuesday. Carole King, who with then-husband Gerry Goffin was one other main hitmaker of the ’60s, tweeted that that “striving to keep up with them made us better songwriters.”

The polish of H-D-H was ideally suited to Motown’s signature act, Diana Ross and the Supremes, for whom they wrote 10 No. 1 songs, amongst them “Where Did Our Love Go,” “Stop! In the Name of Love” and “You Can’t Hurry Love.” Expectations had been so excessive that when “Nothing But Heartaches” didn’t make the highest 10 in 1965, Gordy despatched an organization memo demanding that Motown solely launch chart toppers for the Supremes, an order H-D-H obeyed with “I Hear a Symphony” and a number of other extra information.

Holland-Dozier-Holland weren’t above formulation or carefully repeating a earlier hit, however they labored in varied moods and kinds: the informal pleasure of “How Sweet It Is (To Be Loved by You),” the escalating want of “Heat Wave,” the urgency of “Reach Out (I’ll Be There).” Dozier’s focus was on melody and preparations, whether or not the haunting echoes of the Vandellas’ backing vocals on “Nowhere To Run,” flashing lights of guitar that drive the Supremes’ “You Keep Me Hanging On,” or the hypnotic gospel piano on Gaye’s “Can I Get a Witness.”

“All the songs started out as slow ballads, but when we were in the studio we’d pick up the tempo,” Dozier instructed the Guardian in 2001. “The songs had to be fast because they were for teenagers – otherwise it would have been more like something for your parents. The emotion was still there, it was just under cover of the optimism that you got from the up-tempo beat.”

The prime of H-D-H, and of Motown, led to 1968 amid questions and authorized disputes over royalties and different points. H-D-H left the label, and neither aspect would get better. The Four Tops and the Supremes had been among the many acts who suffered from now not having their most reliable writers. Meanwhile, H-D-H’s efforts to start out their very own enterprise fell far wanting Motown. The labels Invictus and Hot Wax each light inside just a few years, and Dozier would recall with disbelief the Hollands’ turning down such future superstars as Al Green and George Clinton. H-D-H did launch a number of hits, together with Freda Payne’s “Band of Gold” and Honey Cone’s “Want Ads.”

Holland-Dozier-Holland had been inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1988 and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame two years later. On his personal, Dozier had a high 20 hit with “Trying to Hold on to My Woman,” helped produce Aretha Franklin’s “Sweet Passion” album and collaborated with Eric Clapton and Hucknall amongst others. His greatest success was co-writing Phil Collins’ chart-topping “Two Hearts,” from the 1988 film “Buster,” a mid-tempo, Motown-style ballad that received a Grammy and Golden Globe and obtained an Oscar nomination.

H-D-H reunited for a stage manufacturing of “The First Wives Club,” which premiered in 2009, however their time again collectively was temporary and sad. Dozier and the Hollands clashed usually and Dozier dropped out earlier than the present launched. “I can’t see us ever working with Lamont again,” Eddie Holland wrote in “Come and Get These Memories,” a memoir by the Hollands that got here out in 2019, the identical yr Dozier printed the memoir “How Sweet It Is.”

Dozier acknowledged that his early success conflicted together with his household life, however he ultimately settled down with Barbara Ullman, who died in 2021 after greater than 40 years of marriage. His kids included the songwriter-record producer Beau Dozier and composer Paris Ray Dozier.

Like so many Motown artists, Dozier was born in Detroit and raised in a household of singers and musicians. He sang within the choir of his Baptist church and his love for phrases was affirmed by a grade faculty instructor who, he recalled, appreciated certainly one of his poems a lot she saved it on the blackboard for a month. By the late Fifties, he was an expert singer and ultimately signed with Motown, the place he first labored with Brian Holland, after which Eddie Holland, who wrote a lot of the lyrics.

Some of Motown’s greatest hits and catchiest phrases originated from Dozier’s home life. He remembered his grandfather’s addressing girls as “Sugar pie, honey bunch,” the opening phrases and ongoing chorus of the Four Tops’ “I Can’t Help Myself (Sugar Pie, Honey Bunch).” The Four Tops hit “Bernadette” was impressed by all three songwriters having troubles with girls named Bernadette, whereas an argument with one other Dozier girlfriend helped encourage a Supremes favourite.

“She was pretty heated up because I was quite the ladies’ man at that time and I’d been cheating on her,” Dozier instructed the Guardian. “So she started telling me off and swinging at me until I said, ‘Stop! In the name of love!’ And as soon as I’d said it I heard a cash register in my head and laughed. My girlfriend didn’t think it was very amusing: we broke up. The only ones who were happy about it were the Supremes.”