‘I’ll Be Around’: the “classic” that gave The Spinners life after Motown
Plenty of talented groups have been dropped by their record labels after failing to capitalise on a promising start. If you were a member of the Motown roster in the 1960s, though, there were fates more insulting than getting handed your walking papers.
For The Spinners, a run of failed singles in the mid-1960s led to a “reassignment” of their responsibilities for the label, as singers Bobbie Smith, Pervis Jackson, Henry Fambrough, and Billy Henderson routinely had to put in hours as shipping department clerks and chauffeurs for more successful artists in the Motown stable. By showing their loyalty, the group were still able to make a living and keep alive the potential for new recordings of their own, but it certainly wasn’t the lifestyle they’d signed up for.
“I remember when we didn’t make enough to file income tax returns,” Jackson later recalled. “I don’t feel that we got the proper attention at Motown,” Bobbie Smith added in a 1999 interview with the Arizona Republic. “I’m not bitter. It’s the business. Motown had too many groups of about the same calibre. We always got lost in the shuffle.”
The Spinners, also sometimes known as the Detroit Spinners by fans in the UK, did eventually turn around their fortunes, of course, but it didn’t happen under the Motown tent. With a nudge from Aretha Franklin, the group jumped ship to Atlantic Records in the early 1970s, and their subsequent relationship with hit-making producer Thom Bell and new co-lead vocalist Philippé Wynne turned them from a second-tier R&B outfit into one of the most consistent chart-topping groups of the ‘70s.
Even a storybook turnaround can sometimes print a few pages out of order, however, and in the case of the Spinner’s breakout 1972 single ‘I’ll Be Around’, Atlantic nearly made a catastrophic misjudgment, putting the track as the B-side to the decidedly less memorable ‘How Could I Let You Get Away?’ Fortunately, though, radio DJs who were curious enough to flip the record quickly discovered solid gold on the backend, and ‘I’ll Be Around’ soared up the charts, reaching number 3 on the Billboard Hot 100 and starting a run of hits that would also include ‘Then Came You’ (with Dionne Warwick), ‘Games People Play’, and ‘The Rubberband Man’.
Aside from its anthemic catchiness, ‘I’ll Be Around’ was also a heartstring-tugger, with lead singer Bobbie Smith expressing his desperation after a break-up, and his willingness to rekindle things whenever the girl in question had a mind to try it: “You made your choice / Now it’s up to me / To bow out gracefully / Though you hold the key / But baby / Whenever you call me, I’ll be there.”
The lyrics were primarily written by hired-gun songsmith Phil Hurtt, who put words to a melody crafted by Thom Bell. “Back in the day, you had to tell a story in three-and-a-half minutes,” Hurtt told Songfacts in 2013. “You didn’t have five or six minutes to tell the story. So it had to be like a soap opera. It had to be a beginning, a middle, and an end.”
“I’m just so proud and happy and blessed that that song has crossed over into that company of being referred to as ‘classic’,” Hurtt added. “You hear a great melody and a great idea for a song, and then all you’ve got to do is write the story. I mean, wow, what an opportunity.”
Hurtt hadn’t realised it back in ’72, but he was also helping to write a fairytale story for The Spinners, a group that finally got their due after nearly 20 years together.
