“What more do you need”: the Motown band Johnny Marr said was was as important as Led Zeppelin
Not every rock and roll artist is mandated to like the same bands. Although there are acts like The Beatles and Led Zeppelin that have become omnipresent in people’s lives, there’s a good chance that someone could make it to the top of the charts without having to learn a single Jimmy Page lick in their lives. And while Johnny Marr knew enough to put respect on one of the biggest names in hard rock, he knew that the sounds of soul could go toe-to-toe with Zeppelin any day of the week.
But Zeppelin were never far away from soul music, either. Sure, they were more inclined to go into a bluesy direction based on their musical style, but given the way that Robert Plant sang most of his tunes, he had the same kind of chops to be a soul belter if he wanted to. Even John Bonham claimed to be a fan, eventually singling out records by Hall and Oates amongst his favourites and incorporating influences like Bernard Purdie into his sound.
In the case of Marr, though, some aspects of soul music are a lot more evident in the way he plays guitar. Many people can see the influence of bands like The Byrds in his sound, given his reliance on his trusty Rickenbacker guitar, but there’s a lot more going on aside from the jangly side of things. He wanted to create hooks in the same way that he heard on old Motown records, and it’s not like Hitsville didn’t know how to crank them out either.
After all, the major pentatonic scale is one of the first things that anyone ever learns when picking up lead guitar for the first time, but it takes a true craftsman to turn that into the main guitar motif in ‘My Girl’ by The Temptations. Many people were soon-to-be legends like Smokey Robinson and Stevie Wonder working for the label at the time, but anyone interested in pure singing was going to have to take a knee in respect to what The Four Tops were doing.
“Not only were the songs powerful, but the arrangements and instrumentation and the performances meant that, as far as I am concerned, Four Tops rock like Led Zeppelin.”
Johnny Marr
Any vocal group coming out of Detroit needed to come correct if they were working on the same label as people like David Ruffin, but the minute that everyone heard Levi Stubbs sing, it felt like the Earth could stop on its axis. It may not have had the guitar licks that some traditional rock fans were looking for, but Marr knew he was getting the right education going back to those tracks.
When talking about his all-time favourite records, Marr was willing to put the band’s greatest hits on the same level as any of Zeppelin’s albums, saying, “Not only were the songs powerful, but the arrangements and instrumentation and the performances meant that, as far as I am concerned, Four Tops rock like Led Zeppelin. What more do you need? It is a collection of incredible tunes. I bought this record when it came out and all my mates thought I was either really, really old-fashioned or a freak.”
Even if it was a little more retro than most people were accustomed to, it’s easy to see what appealed to Marr. Outside of having a few decent guitar hooks going on in the background, this is a perfect test for how a pop arrangement should sound, each of them having their hooks set up at the exact right time every time the chorus comes around.
And while Marr’s music doesn’t sound anything remotely like The Four Tops, that shouldn’t really matter. Neither he nor Morrissey could possibly hope to match what they did, but they could at least set up the same kind of foundation that they had when making their own musical melodrama.
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