Mojo - The Music Magazine

For Pt. 1, click here…

So you’ve signed to Motown and then your first two singles fail to chart. You must have been fairly worried...

Well, we were, but we were just happy to have a record out because we had a little fan base in Detroit and the records did pretty good around Detroit. They weren’t nationally distributed. It was just Detroit, Ohio and Chicago.

From there came the recording of Do You Love Me in 1962. The story is that Berry had originally written that song for The Temptations.

That’s not true. That’s not true. Let me back up for a second. The original Contours line-up was Billy Gordon, Billy Hoggs, Leroy Fair and Hubert Johnson. We’re the ones that went down, signed the contract with Motown, and we’re the ones who had the first two records out on Motown. We were the original Contours.

So we arrive at the point where you started recording Do You Love Me…

We had just left the record hop and we turned at the studio. Back in those days, the doors were always wide open; you could come in any time of day or night to rehearse and do whatever you wanted to do.

Berry was down there in the same studio working at the piano. We spoke but we were upstairs, foolin’ around and singing. After about an hour we came down and were fixing to leave when he said, Hey, come in here guys. I want you guys to try this song I’m writing. That was Do You Love Me. He was on the piano, playing the song. He said, This is your part, Billy Gordon, you’re leading. He wrote the words down, he told us how he wanted the backgrounds to go and we sang it.

Then he said: Try it again, I didn’t quite like it. You’re not reading it right. You’re putting your own words in there. I’ve given you the words. So we tried it again and after about the third time he said, That’s not right. It’s OK, I’ll give it to The Temptations. We said: Nah man, don’t get The Temptations. Let’s try it again. We’ll get it right. So we did it again and he said, That it’s – that’s the sound I’m looking for. That’s exactly how I want it. Come in tomorrow morning, we’re going to record it. We said, Great! Great!

We came in the next day, all the musicians were there and we recorded the song. I didn’t like the song. I didn’t mind recording it but it reminded me of Twist And Shout. Y’know, “Shake it up, baby!” I said: This song ain’t gonna do nothin’, man. That same week it was released and the following week it made the charts. I turned around and said: I love that song! [laughs]

So you changed your opinion overnight…

Of course! Why not? Right quick, it became a hit record. It was the biggest we ever had.

It’s hard to imagine how The Temptations could have done that song.

Nope. I’m quite sure you’re familiar with the voice of Eddie Kendricks and David Ruffin – they could not have done that song the way we did. We would always say to Berry: We know you didn’t write that song for The Temptations and he would always smile. Then he would say: Who got the song? And we would tell him we did and he’d smile. We knew he used that as a ploy to get us to sing it the way he wanted and, like I say, I’m glad he did.

There’s a very distinctive introduction to the song. Do you know what was it that inspired that intro?

Well, I can say, with all due respect to Smokey Robinson, who is one of the greatest songwriters there’s ever been, Berry Gordy is the greatest songwriter that Motown ever had. It was his idea. It was about this girl who broke his heart because he couldn’t dance. She didn’t even want him around. So he went and learned how to dance and he said, Now I’m back to let you know I can really shake it down. And he ended up getting the girl. But all that was Berry’s idea. He was an outstanding songwriter. Our second hit, entitled Shake Sherry, was also written by Berry Gordy. It was a song that was basically copied from The Four Seasons’ Sherry Baby.

Do You Love Me was a huge hit. How did that change things for you?

It changed for the best. Getting back to the song, where it dives down and comes back up? That was not Berry Gordy’s idea. That was one of the engineer’s idea. His name was Samuel Mack. That was the key signature to that song, really.

When you listen to that song now, how does it make you feel and what does it make you think of?

It makes me think of when we first recorded the song. I have flashbacks of how we done the song. I think of all the good moments and the memories we had from that song. I think if it wasn’t for that song, I wouldn’t have had those good memories. Like I said before, I always liked that song! [laughs] It changed my lifestyle; it made me lots of money. It made my family happy, it made me happy. It gave me a better outlook on life and prepared me for travel.

It really catapulted you to pop stardom, didn’t it?

Right. Even guys from your country did it!

The Dave Clarke Five covered it, obviously, and then Brian Poole & The Tremeloes, then in the States, The Sonics and Paul Revere & the Raiders. You must have felt validated when people started covering the track?

The first time I ever heard it another group do it was The Dave Clarke Five from England and I thought, Wow! They do a nice song! I didn’t mind it a bit because to me it meant that someone else liked that song so much that they recorded the song. It let me know that they liked what we did. So we were pretty happy. and it kept the song out there. But the way that Berry wrote it, you couldn’t change that song much. There’s a certain way it has to go. I don’t care what they did with the lyrics, because you know The Dave Clarke Five changed it to ‘Why do you love me’. No matter what words they put in there, the framework of the song remained the same.

In the wake of that song, things changed within the group. Ultimately, it led to you guys leaving Motown in 1964 and parting ways. What happened exactly?

Well, you have different aspects of what you want to do and the company wants you to remain this way. We basically wanted to force Motown into going the way that we wanted to go. So we had a meeting with Berry and told him that we weren’t satisfied and that we were planning on quitting at the end of the year. He asked each individual what they wanted to do and three of us said that we wanted to quit. Billy Gordon and Hubert Johnson said they wanted to stay and Berry agreed to release the other three because he still had the lead singer and the bass singer. About a week later Hubert Johnson decided he wanted to quit and that ended up leaving Billy Gordon all by himself. He had to find other guys.

What made you decide that you wanted to leave? It seemed like it was going in the right direction.

It was going in the right direction but, like I said, when you’re an artist you want to change things. You want to have some input in your career. We had some input but not that much.

We were out on the road and we did a show; the promoter wanted to take us to Miami, Florida to do another show. I called the company and they said that there was no booking for another week and a half so we could go with the promoter and do the show. So we were in the swimming pool the next day and the guy from the hotel came out and said I had a phone call from Detroit. It was the studio and they said we couldn’t go, that we had to put a record out. The record that had been out had only been out three months! But, of course, we had to come home. On the way home all five of us decided that we were going to go in there and give Berry a piece of our mind and tell him that he had to do what we wanted to do. But one of the guys in the group had snuck down and told Berry what we were planning on doing, so Berry called a meeting right away. So he had the upper hand.

When we quit three or four weeks later, we spoke to Berry’s bodyguard John Oden. He used to be road manager for The Supremes. He told us that we had Berry [where we wanted him], that we could have called our own shots. He said: But when he divided you, he was able to control you guys. Had we stuck together, it would have been OK. But we didn’t stick together.

Despite what happened with the split, there must have been such excitement at Motown…

It was exciting. We were The Contours. We were from Motown. To be from Motown back in the ’60s was a heck of a thing. We had a code at Motown: you never embarrassed yourself in public, you never embarrassed yourself on the road, and you never embarrassed the company in public or on the road.

And did you stay true to that?

All Motown artists stayed true to that. They stayed true to that statement. You never embarrassed the company. And it was good. All the other artists out on the road looked up to Motown artists. We were groomed at all times. If you were a male you had to show courtesy, you had to be polite to the females. You had to be polite to everyone, actually.

Looking back ,it’s quite unbelievable – such a concentration of talent in one place.

Let me give you another little titbit… After 1987, when the movie Dirty Dancing came out, we got a call that they were putting out a Dirty Dancing concert tour. Our record Do You Love Me was the second biggest record out of that movie. And when they released the soundtrack, Do You Love Me was not in the soundtrack. So quite a few kids went to their local DJs and radio stations and so forth, requesting the Dirty Dancing song. And people would ask: What’s the Dirty Dancing song? And they say, The one from the barn scene. So right away the company, United Artists, released a second album entitled More Dirty Dancing featuring Do You Love Me. Do You Love Me was the first record from Motown that, 25 years later, charted again. And that’s a milestone for The Contours and for that song. 25 years later! On its own.

It’s corny to say it, but it will live forever...

I think it will. I really think it will. We didn’t get as big as The Temptations or have as many hits as The Supremes but we got one of the greatest songs to ever come out of Motown and we’re proud of that. That was our legacy. It is a song that will live forever.

Interview by: Phil Alexander