Switched on Pop - The Resistance is Dancing in the Streets

Episode Date: July 12, 2018

Our Switched on Summer Throwback Series continues with "Dancing in the Street," the 1964 Motown hit by Martha and the Vandellas that was co-written by none other than Marvin Gaye. Over 50 years and countless covers later, we explore how this song still manages to get people off their feet and onto the streets—not just to dance, but also to raise their voices in joy, catharsis, and protest. Also, start making your own summer hits with our Switched On Summer repack on Splice at www.splice.com/onpop-pack and use promo code ONPOP for a 1 month free trial. Featuring:Martha and the Vandellas - Dancing in the StreetMarvin Gaye - Stubborn Kind of FellowThe Mamas and the Papas - Dancing in the StreetThe Grateful Dead - Dancing in the StreetVan Halen - Dancing in the StreetMick Jagger and David Bowie - Dancing in the StreetKendrick Lamar - AlrightPharrell Williams - Happy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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It's free for iOS users. Welcome to Switched on Pop. I'm musicologist Nate Sloan. And I'm songwriter Charlie Harding. And Charlie, it is throwback summer. And today we are throwing back to 1964. Way back. Way back.

To listen to a track from the Motown group, Martha and the Vandela. it's dancing in the street. Sunglasses on, t-shirts on, flip-flops on, top down. Oh my gosh. I have so much that just popped up about this. Wow. All in due time, Charles. We are reaching back to this 60s Motown classic in order to unlock how this song, as you say,

just like lights you up as you listen to it. Yeah. But also to explore the surprising history, the surprising afterlife of this song. So in the first half, we're going to break down the genesis and the magic behind dancing in the street. And the second half, we'll see what it became. Ooh, cool. Okay. I'm so excited because I honestly have not listened so closely to this track.

It's almost always kind of in the background on the radio or something. I didn't grow up with it, obviously. And upon just one listen, I was like, oh my gosh, I just heard so much musical history. I'm so excited to break this down. So where do you want to take us? Good. Let's go right to the very start to a staff songwriter at Motown, which was very much modeled in the assembly plant fashion.

You know, very gaudy consciously was invoking Henry Ford at the Motown Studios. Pump them out. So we have the staff songwriter, Ivory Joe Hunter, brings this tune in to a session that's kind of the bones of what we just heard dancing in the street. Yeah. But it's different. It's melancholy. It's kind of a blues, kind of a down tempo thing. Two other Motown stalwarts, Mickey Stevenson and Marvin Gay.

No. Yeah. Workshop the song. Huh. And turn it into dancing in the street. Let's listen one more time. So once the team had this song in place, they needed a singer. And the singer was Martha Reeves and her backup singers,

Net Beard and Roslyn Ashford. Oh, they're good. They had cut a few hits for Motown like Heat Wave, but Martha actually started as a secretary in the Motown offices. What? Yeah, as she was working towards her big, break. Wow. Yeah. The Vandellas took their name from a street in Detroit called Van Dyke Street and the singer Delores, Van Dyke Della Vandela. That's how their name came together. So a very

local phenomenon. Yet becomes a national summer hit. Yeah, exactly. I want to see how this happens. I mean, you get the sense that Motown was a family. I mean, in a way, Marvin Gay in making the song, was repaying them a favor because Martha and the Van Della's sang backup vocals on one of his first big hits, stubborn kind of fellow. When you're getting that kind of vocal support, you got to pay it forward. Absolutely.

You need a lead. Yeah. Yeah. And Gay even went so far as to play drums and percussion on dancing in the street. No way. Wow. Yeah, so this was a real family affair.

Huh. Now, you're thinking of this song, and I think as soon as it starts, you're starting to groove. Absolutely. Yeah, the first thing that I noticed is that underlying it is this sort of just core bass vamp that just keeps running throughout.

Yes. I almost was like, whoa, this could be like sampled into a breakbeat and played in like modern hip hop almost. I kind of had assumed that like a lot of Motown tracks, especially of this era were more harmonically, like a lot more harmonic movement, a lot of choral changes.

But this is like almost like, Proto James Brown bass fans. Yeah, no, this is powerful stuff. I mean, we have such a heavy backbeat. Let's just listen again and just focus in on that powerful, like, tambourine and snare sound we hear on every two and four. It's like the tambourine is the solo instrument. Yeah, exactly. Instead of more cowboys, more tambourine.

they got this sound that it's so intense and driving. They got this by recording the tambourine part in what they called the Motown Echo Chamber, which was actually a hole in the bathroom. Wait, okay, quick story. I definitely once got to go into Westlake Music Studios where Michael Jackson recorded a bunch of his albums and literally like the core thumb snaps

that he uses on his tracks with Quincy Jones We're done in a bathroom, and I definitely went in that bathroom and snapped my fingers and got a recording on my phone, and I will definitely play it for you. That's great. Okay, so part of a long lineage of bathroom recording studios here. Yes, yes. Great reverb. But that's how they got that effect that sounds almost like this thunderous backbeat kind of powering you through the song. So we've got this, like, driving rhythm underneath.

And then on top, we have Martha Reeves' vocal. This was the second take of the song. The first take, she nailed it, apparently, but they hadn't pressed record. So the second take, she was a little peeved, and I think you can hear that in her vocals. At certain points in the song, she puts a little anger into it

that really drives it home. That is fierce. Yeah, just leaving it all on the floor. I gotta ask you, though, talking about leaving it all on the floor, at this point in recording technology, are the entire band, performing at the same time with the vocalist?

Like, is this a live take? Yeah, this is all happening live. Oh, wow. There might be a few overdubs, like the tambourine, for instance. Right. But, yeah, the band is mostly all playing live. And so a lot of that big room sound we're getting, which was really popular in that era,

and obviously sort of known as the wall of sound, was that intentional, or is that happening just because that's what it takes to record that many people and that much sound and that big of a room, so you get that in the background? I guess that's kind of, a chicken or egg question. Motown was definitely channeling the

wall of sound production technique where you just have this sort of dense, unending texture of all these different orchestral instruments playing at once. You can hear that on tracks like the crystals da du run run.

It almost feels like it has this like jazz big band feel, right? Because it's just so many instruments filling a giant room with only probably a handful of mics capturing all the sound. So you're getting all that room noise and reverberation. I really particularly see it in my mind. I don't know if you saw the Beach Boys biopic Love and Mercy, but there were some really wonderful scenes of the recording of pet sounds, which uses a lot of that same sort of technique. And they're just in this big room, but everybody's just stuffed together around a few mics. Great reference and awesome movie to see.

Totally. You get the feeling of the excitement and the energy of the performance coming through your speakers 50 years later. But we've already dove into the musical aspect of what makes this song so effective. Let's kind of rewind and think about what this song is actually saying. In some ways, it's a very simple message. It's a summertime party anthem, boys and girls get out and dance in the street. but there's also some very specific references going on like at points in the song they call out different cities across the country Chicago, New Orleans, New York City, Baltimore

Such a classic way, it's a little bit of pandering calling out every single city but it works Yes, yes and it's a technique I wonder if they're not borrowing from a song that had come out a few years earlier Night Train by James Brown, which similarly kind of goes through a musical Atlas of the United States. So I was totally wrong. I had called out sort of a proto James Brown reference, but this is the era of James Brown

and they're definitely comping from it. It's great. Yeah. And it's worth noting the cities they're naming here, Chicago, New Orleans, New York, Baltimore. It's not, say, Salt Lake City or Portland, Maine. they are consciously broadcasting to African American cities across the country, trying to connect with both their musical and frankly, their economic audience. These are the same cities that the Motown Stars would go on tour.

So they're trying to build that connection with their fans and their audience. So it's a wonderful, you know, musical choice to have these cities that you can picture as you're listening. but it's also a very calculated measure at the same time. That this is a summer jam and that it's referencing all of these cities, encouraging people to go dance in the street. It definitely further reinforces this idea that I'm hearing, this vamping and these beats that could be sampled and later used in the world of hip-hop,

which started out in street parties in the summer. Yeah. Okay, so you're talking about like the continuum of urban summer music history, I guess. Yeah. So we first, we had the. bathroom recording studio continuum and now we have the summer dance party continuum cool yes yes many continuums yeah and i love that image because the last thing i want to dig into here is the way this song gives you such a feeling of release that just makes you want to dance that makes you want

a party and i think this is a very clever thing because it's all about the sense of stasis and then release uh okay great and that is all It's all happening harmonically, Charles. It's all happening in the chord. So in order to hear it, we have to go back to the very beginning. Yeah. And we have to pay attention to where the harmony changes, the point where the underlying chords change from one to another.

Okay, cool. Okay, so let's dim the music a little bit. And you and I can just keep talking, Charles. Sounds good. Because for as long as we're continuing to converse, we are listening to the same harmonic chord. Right. We're listening to the same bass tonic note.

It's just damping over and over, the same thing. Yeah, we're not going anywhere. We could just go on about any old subject in the world. You know, like, I could ask you about your health. But then... Ah, okay, that was the moment. Now, all of a sudden, I'm not interested in whatever you had to say because we just exploded into a new harmony.

Let's press pause. So what they're doing in dancing in the street is they're kind of lulling you into this single harmonic stasis point. And then they're waiting almost 40 seconds and eternity in pop music time. I mean, glaciers are moving across the continent. The tectonic plates are breaking apart. I mean, eons is passing before we get a harmonic change. It's so unusual and it's so effective. Yes.

Because every time you do get that move from the tonic to the subdominant. Yeah, every time they do that, she says there'll be sweet music. Sweet music everywhere. Exactly. So music is the release. Music gives you that sense of ascension and transcendence. Again, there's something like proto-dance music quality here where in modern electronic music, oftentimes the sort of verse material will be.

fairly repetitive. So everyone's kind of doing the same dance move and like, all right, getting kind of bored and then just at the right moment, it releases into a drop and you have a whole new movement of energy. Everybody dances, takes on a new pose.

And I feel like this is doing the exact same thing, but in a very different era of music. Charlie, I love it. You are all about the diacronic perspective here. I love it. I didn't know that I was diachronic, but thank you. Continuums past is present, future is then, now is everywhere.

I love it. And you will be pleased because after a short break, we are going to take this song into the future and see what became of it since its 1964 release. Cool. Take me there. Maria, you have a podcast now and you need to start acting like it. What's the first step as a podcaster? Well, you have to ask lots of questions. I'm Maria Sharpova. And I'm hosting a new podcast called Pretty Tough.

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That's this week on America Actually. Every Saturday in your audio and video feeds. When Dancing in the Street was released in 1964, it was an immediate hit. Of course it was. Look at the name. It's his own apotheosis. And one of the great signs of sort of the lasting effect of this song is how often it's been covered.

Yeah. One of the first was from an unlikely source, the Mamas and the Pappas. Let's just take a quick listen to their version of Dancing in the Street. I don't know. Very different approach, right? Very kind of sparse. Oh. But really great payoff when they go into the music moment.

Yes. Oh. Okay. So I think that the bass vampire is really strange. They've altered it in a way which has like a... twanginess to it, but there's some really great payoff with that awesome drum fill that leads into the chorus, that heightened moment. So it's even more reductive in the beginning and then pays off more in the end, certain degree. Yes, so this is a radical reinterpretation of the song.

And this song just has even more in store for it, because if we fast forward to the ensuing decade, the 70s, we're going to find the Grateful Dead incorporating this into their epic, free jam jazz exploration sets. Well, this is totally appropriate, considering everybody and following the Dead is tailgating in the parking lots of stadiums, so they're all dancing in the street. Yes, and beyond fitting, the aesthetic of The Dead, this song actually helped open the whole musical approach of the band up to more free-form improvisation. It's the same thing we analyzed in the first half of the episode, I think, this sense of

of having this harmonic stasis for so long at the beginning of the song. That laid a groundwork for the band to improvise extended phrases and play off each other without having to worry about getting harmonically dissonant because there was just this underlying single harmonic structure. But that when it explodes up into the other chord change, then it has a real great payoff in an awesome guitar solo,

I imagine. Yes, exactly. So there's those improvisatory peaks and then you can sort of explode together back into the structure of the song. Yeah. So it's very flexible in that way. So it's interesting.

I think dancing in the streets played a not insignificant part in the Grateful Dead's evolution. Interesting. We zoom forward another decade and we find perhaps a pair of surprising covers of this song, one by the band Van Halen.

Somehow managing to identify a hard rock. hair metal aesthetic within the song. Wow, that is frenetic. I know. It makes me realize that every single time someone says that you're coming out dancing to a brand new beat, the song is inviting reinterpretation because they can't play it the exact same way or else they're not meeting the promise of their cover. Yes, I totally agree.

But I think it's worth noting too that it's like this song somehow has a flexibility to be stretched into all these kind of different styles and still be effective. Yeah. There's something unique to its skeleton that somehow allows all these different interpretations to work, including one also from the 80s. That was a huge hit by Mick Jagger and David Bowie. This was recorded for live aides, so they substituted cities around the world. This is a global dancing in the streets.

So once again, in the capable hands of Jagger and Bowie, this song comes to life. surprisingly resilient, but in looking at all these covers, we're just looking at one side of the story because dancing in the streets has another tale to tell as well. And that's as an unlikely protest anthem. Oh, I had no idea. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense getting out in the streets and raising your voice. Exactly. This song alighted from a party song when it was released in 1964 to over the course of the increasingly fraught politics of the 60s becoming this more almost militant anthem embraced by SNCC, the student nonviolent coordinating committee during the 1960s. It was played during riots and protests in major American cities during

1966 in 197. It was fully endorsed by these groups as an anthem. of resilience and consolidation of the larger struggle. Wow. So this song was not just a party song. It was a political song. I really love that this became a song of resilience at the same time because there is an incredibly joyful experience of people marching and fighting for their rights,

something which is, you know, fights for justice are overwhelmingly serious and important. And yet the experience of the community building that happens in those moments is also extremely special. and there is a celebratoryness in it. So I love that it contains both of those qualities. Yes, no, Charlie, I think you've struck something, too, that's an interesting reminder that music that accompanies protest

isn't always angry or demanding. It's often an expression of collective joy. Yeah. And this song is a perfect example of that. I mean, it corresponds. So now, to return to your obsession with the continuum of past and present, you know, if we fast, forward to some of the songs that have materialized as anthems for a current generation of civil

rights protesters of Black Lives Matters, demonstrators, we'd find songs like All Right by Kendrick Lamar. Right. Extremely upbeat song. I mean, very affirmational. But then if we widened our lens even further, we'd find other surprising songs. You can watch videos made in. war-torn regions like Yemen, shot by survivors, literally amidst the debris of fallen buildings.

And these videos, these compilations of people dancing are all set to one song. Get out of here. That's amazing. Yes. Happy is another one of these unlikely anthems that maybe started as, you know, just a song. just exploring the euphoria of momentary joy. And then somehow in these surprising situations became this anthemic glue to hold people together in times of crisis. So I think both these songs are reminders

of how the politics of protests and the politics of joy can also and often collide. In Happy, a lyric that could be read entirely differently, just like dancing in the streets could also be protested. in the streets. Here he says and happy, clap along if you feel like a room without a roof. And in

war-torn countries where literally people's homes are being taken away from them, it's I mean, just stunning to think that this can be read in another way, but sort of this celebratoriness of still overcoming the human condition even when you've lost your home. Right, right. That's not just

a metaphor anymore. No. Wow. Wow. So dancing in the street this celebratory summer jam from 1964 has radiated out into our culture and frankly around the world, I think, in all these surprising ways that no one could have imagined when they were putting it together in one of the Motown studios in 1963, Marvin Gay, Ivory Joe Hunter, Mickey Stevenson, Martha and the Vandela's. this track. It's stunning after, you know, hearing stories of playing the tambourine in the bathroom. What the destiny of this kind of humble summer splash slash commercial appeal to Motown fans has turned into. Wow. Well, I really love what you've done here as well because you've taken the idea of the song of summer, which, you know, kind of has this like really lighthearted sort of bubble gum quality.

Right. And yet expanded to show that the summertime is the time for communal gathering of all kinds, both of joy and struggle. And so that songs of summer might say something more than just let's have a party. I had never considered that before. And I really like that you've brought that here. Thanks, man. And, you know, it comes back to that harmonic shift, I think, because that sense of release,

that can... Stasis to relief. Yeah. I mean, that can take so many forms. Like you said, it could be like, where does the kind of... joy of a party and and the joy of a, I don't know, political party begin. Wow. Really cool.

Charlie, thanks so much for dipping back into the summer vault with me. We will be back in two weeks with another episode. Switched on Pop is produced by me, Nate Sloan. And me, Charlie Harding. This episode, as always, was edited and mixed by the brilliant Bill. Lance. Designed by Luke Harris. We are a proud member of the Panoply Network. You can find more of our shows on the Apple podcast app on Stitcher, Spotify, any podcast player you so desire. You can get in touch with us on Twitter at Switchdown Pop. We love getting recommendations and having conversations with you.

You can also email us at Contact at Switchdownpop.com. Again, we're going to continue some fun summer jams through the summer every two weeks. So we'll catch you then. Until them. Thanks for listening.