Switched on Pop - The Resistance is Dancing in the Streets (ICYMI)

Episode Date: September 1, 2020

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. SPONSOR We use Reason Studios to make music on Switched On Pop. You can use Reason too free for 30 days: http://reasonstudios.com/onpop SONGS DISCUSSED Martha and the Vandellas – Dancing in the Street Marvin Gaye – Stubborn Kind of Fellow The Mamas and the Papas – Dancing in the Street The Grateful Dead – Dancing in the Street Van Halen – Dancing in the Street Mick Jagger and David Bowie – Dancing in the Street Kendrick Lamar – Alright Pharrell Williams – Happy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Charlie, I'd like you to finish this thought. Dun-da-da-da-da. Beautiful. Thank you. That's Beethoven's Fifth Symphony. And somehow, you know it as well as any hit song on the Hot 100. Yes, I do. This year is Beethoven's 250th birthday,

so there's no better time to figure out why we can't escape the symphony, a symbol of all that's good and bad in classical music as we know it. I'm musicologist Nate Sloan, and I'm songwriter Charlie Harding. And we're the hosts of Switched on Pop. In our four-movement miniseries, the fifth, we're going to explain why we still can't get the symphony out of our heads 200 years after its composition. We're going to hear how Beethoven created a piece that totally rewrote the rules of classical composition. It was a total rock star symphony, but also explain why it became is symbol of freedom for some

and exclusion for so many others. And we're going to do it with the help of an orchestra that's been performing Beethoven's 5th since 1842, the New York Philharmonic. Starting on September 8th, listen to the 5th on Switched-on-pop anywhere you get your podcasts. If you're tired of endless scrolling

to figure out where to eat, same. I'm Stephanie Wu, editor-in-chief of Eater. We've just launched the new-ish and way-better Eater app. has all the restaurants we love, gives you personalized picks wherever you are, and serves up smarter search results just for you. You can find my list of the best places for martinis and fries in New York City, and save your favorite spots, share lists, follow editors, and book right in the app. Download the eater app at eaterapp.com. It's free for iOS users. Welcome to Switch 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 Vandellas. 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 lights you up as you listen to it. But also to explore the surprising history, the surprising afterlife of this.

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. 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. And turn it into dancing in the streets. 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, Van Dyke. Della Vandella. 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 this song was repaying them a favor because Martha and the Vandela'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 for.

forward. Absolutely. You need to 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. 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 is 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 vamps. Yeah, no, this is powerful stuff. I mean, we have such a heavy backbeat. Let's just listen again. 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 were 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 a bathroom,

through recording studios here. Yes. Yeah. 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 peaved. 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 did kind of ask you, though,

like talking about leaving it all on the floor, at this point, 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. Yeah.

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, Dadu, Ron, Ron. It almost feels like it has this, like, jazz big band feel, right? Because there'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 really. 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 it 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. 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 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 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 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 to party. And I think this is a very clever thing because it's all about the sense of stasis and then release. Ah, okay, great.

And that is 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. 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 vamping over and over the same thing. 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, you know, 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, you know, releases. to 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, 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. records of

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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. 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 and 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. 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 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, like, getting harmonically dissonant because there was just this underlying single harmonic structure.

But 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 aid, 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. It's 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, it 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 and 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 Lamont, 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 it's 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 protesting in the streets. Here he says, Inhappy, 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. 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. 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 cutting this track. It's stunning after 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.

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 end 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. Nate Lide. We'll be back again next week on Tuesday with our mini-series,

the fifth, accompanied by the New York Phil Harmonic. This is one of the most important pieces of music of all time, and whether you love classical or hate it, you know this work. But what you might not know is how it has fundamentally changed the way that we all listen to music, the way that we experience it, and the way that we divide ourselves through music. So we'll be back next week with the beginning of our four-part mini-series. It's going to run four episodes over two weeks every Tuesday and Friday.

Check it out starting September 8th. This rerun episode, a Switched-on Pop, was produced by Nate Sloan and meet Charlie Harding, and it was edited by Bill Lance. Check us out on social media at Switchedon Pop on Twitter and Instagram. We'll see you next week with The Fifth.