‘Baby Love’: the “perfect” Motown masterpiece that Berry Gordy rejected
That light, twinkly jingle instantly paired with Diana Ross’ irresistibly smooth vocal was perhaps the most indulgent factor in making The Supremes’ ‘Baby Love’ the absolute defining hit of Motown that it was.
While it wasn’t the song to catapult the group to stardom, it was definitively the track that cemented them there, making history with the trio as the first ever Motown group to secure a second number one single, they had achieved the first with ‘Where Did Our Love Go’, but this very nearly wasn’t the case.
Of course, everything at Motown came to life under the watchful eye of Berry Gordy, the undisputed mogul of the genre responsible for all the hitmakers we know today. In this sense, he was perhaps cast in quite a godly light, but in the case of ‘Baby Love’, his unscrupulous decisions turned a number of heads, as the song, under his instruction, transformed into something entirely different from its original blueprint.
The songwriting dynasty of Holland-Dozier-Holland didn’t often find themselves being undermined, but coming off the back of ‘Where Did Our Love Go’, they thought The Supremes would be better off banking on a completely different sound. After all, not long before this, they had been branded the ‘no-hit Supremes’, so it was understandable that they wouldn’t want the group to only reach the heights of a one-trick pony.
But as it turned out, this was exactly the direction that Gordy was looking for. His view for The Supremes was that hits weren’t made out of innovation or fresh ideas, but as many classic hallmarks as you could possibly cram into a two-and-a-half-minute song. As he recalled in his 1994 autobiography To Be Loved: “When H-D-H finished it the first time, I said, ‘It’s great, but it has no life, there’s no gimmick here’…of course they disagreed with me.”
Despite this, clearly whatever the boss said had to be done, as Gordy noted that despite the original song being created in August 1964, it didn’t hit the airwaves until a month later, as: “They went back into the studio and re-cut it. And at the beginning, they put in the little thing, ‘ooh-ooh-ooh’– that little bit. And I said, ‘That’s perfect!’” As such, Ross’s cooing vocals were the key to making a hit, and as much as the songwriters may have initially turned up their noses, it just proved that the top man was always right.
Transforming ‘Baby Love’ from a slow ballad into a charmingly bouncy pop hit, but as singer Mary Wilson put it herself in a subsequent interview with The Guardian: “The upbeat feeling of the music is counterbalanced by the lyrics: someone pleading with a lover not to leave them. It’s the Motown way: the music is beautiful, but the words are stories about life and hurt, which reflect the way life is. The combination of the two made the music last.”
Above all else, that marked the stroke of genius that Gordy lived out his career by. People wanted authenticity packaged into pop, almost as a way of pacifying life’s troubles and making it seem sweet. And sure, the bubblegum route for The Supremes may have been an unpopular choice, but upon the release of ‘Baby Love’ in September 1964, where it shot straight to the top of the charts, all his demands truly proved to have a point. Nobody makes a masterpiece by going out on a limb.
