The Unhooked Generation: Holland-Dozier-Holland After Motown – Part 6
The team of Brian Holland, Lamont Dozier, and Eddie Holland – known collectively as Holland-Dozier-Holland, or HDH for short – wrote and produced some of Motown’s most beloved classics, including hits for the Supremes, the Four Tops, and Martha Reeves & the Vandellas. The trio left Motown due to disputes over contracts and royalties, forming their own pair of labels, Invictus and Hot Wax, in 1969. (A third, the short-lived Music Merchant, followed in 1972).
The seven-part series The Unhooked Generation: Holland-Dozier-Holland After Motown examines every single released on that trio of labels. The series follows the format of the 14-disc box set Holland-Dozier-Holland: The Complete 45s Collection, released this year by Harmless Records to coincide with the 45th anniversary of the formation of Invictus and Hot Wax.
Hot Wax was always considered secondary to Holland-Dozier-Holland’s other label, Invictus Records, despite the fact that it a greater percentage of its releases became hits. But by virtue of being the smaller label, Hot Wax’s decline would be swifter and more sudden than that of its sister label. At the end of 1971, with the departure of soul-rockers Flaming Ember, Hot Wax’s roster was down to just three active recording artists. Honey Cone, 100 Proof (Aged in Soul), and Laura Lee had all scored Top 40 pop hits, and all but Lee had earned Gold records for the label. Just a little more than a year later, however, only one of those artists would be left standing, and Hot Wax itself would be taken off life support.
First, however, star act Honey Cone followed their back-to-back smashes “Want Ads” and “Stick Up” with a single that built on their established formula. “One Monkey Don’t Stop No Show” features a memorable title (borrowed from the ‘50s hit by Big Maybelle) and catchphrase-like interjections of “arriba!” and “the show must go on.” Yet its looser feel and more traditional song structure set “One Monkey” apart from the hook-a-second pacing of their previous hits, while its doo-wop and Latin flourishes give it a sophisticated sheen and keep it from sounding like a retread.
“One Monkey” earned the group a Top 15 pop hit and Top 5 R&B. Follow-up “The Day I Found Myself,” an optimistic spin on a much-needed breakup, did nearly as well, despite abandoning the “Want Ads” recipe entirely.
Meanwhile, Laura Lee followed up her biggest hit yet, “Women’s Love Rights,” with another look into the politics of relationships. Like Lee’s previous single, “Love and Liberty” opens with a dedication (“the Liberty Bell rings for all the women / this day, I decree: FREEDOOOOOM!”), but never quite lives up to it, lacking the hooks that made “Women’s Love Rights” so memorable.
Strangely, its B-side, the very B-side-ish “I Don’t Want Nothing Old (But Money),” was released as her next single. It flopped, but its own flipside, a version of the jazz standard “Since I Fell for You,” made a decent showing on both the pop and R&B charts. Her melodramatic spin on the song, incorporating a two-minute spoken word intro and shifting tempos, has since become one of her best-remembered releases on Hot Wax.
But not her best – that would be the follow-up, the fiery “Rip Off,” in which Lee gets revenge on her cheating man by clearing everything out of his house while he’s away. It has all the elements that had become Lee trademarks – the wornout vocals of someone used to making her voice heard; her straight-talking, no BS attitude; her penchant for tearing down no-good men – and rolls them into a catchy record with a sly sense of humor. “Rip Off” was only a minor success on the pop charts, but it outdid even “Women’s Love Rights” to become her biggest R&B hit, climbing all the way to #3.
While Honey Cone and Laura Lee may have relied on prior hits for inspiration, 100 Proof (Aged in Soul)’s series of gimmicky attempts to recapture the success of “Somebody’s Been Sleeping” had yet to pay off. So for their first single of 1972, the group went in a very different direction. “Everything Good is Bad” trades innuendo for anguish, as the narrator tries to fight his temptation to cheat on his wife with another married woman. Unlike “Rip Off” (or 100 Proof’s own “Somebody’s Been Sleeping”), “Everything Good is Bad” takes a nuanced, conflicted view on infidelity – although that’s probably easier to do when writing from the POV of the one considering cheating, rather than the one being cheated on.
100 Proof were rewarded for this departure with their second-biggest hit ever, climbing to #15 on the R&B charts and just missing the pop Top 40. As big a change as the lyrical content was, the near-skeletal, slow-burning groove, with a vaguely sinister, wordless vocal riff, was an even more astonishing change for the group. 100 Proof’s next single, “Don’t Scratch Where It Don’t Itch,” aims for a similarly murky sound, but breaks the dark spell by piling on horns and harmonica. Even if it’s not as singular as “Everything Good is Bad,” though, it’s far more interesting than the group’s old shtick. Nevertheless, neither “Don’t Scratch” nor its follow-up, the straightforward soul ballad “Since You Been Gone,” managed to chart at all.
In addition to releasing records by Hot Wax’s core trio, the label also put out two singles in this era by tangential artists. Philly outfit Silent Majority had never quite caught on at HDH headquarters, perhaps because they wrote their own material and weren’t from Detroit. “Something New About You” is probably a leftover from the same sessions that produced their previous single, “Frightened Girl,” and while pleasant, doesn’t really argue for Silent Majority as a major lost opportunity for the label.
Meanwhile, Invictus/Hot Wax in-house band The Politicians followed up “Love Machine” with a chugging, fuzz-heavy instrumental, “Free Your Mind.” A slightly different version of the track had already appeared as the flipside to The 8th Day’s “You’ve Got to Crawl (Before You Walk),” under the title “It’s Instrumental to Be Free.” “Free Your Mind” managed to best “Love Machine” by climbing up to #33 on the R&B charts; Silent Majority never charted at all.
They weren’t the only ones having problems with the charts. After a run of four Top 40 singles, including a #1 hit and two million-selling records, Honey Cone’s “Sittin’ on a Time Bomb (Waitin’ for the Hurt to Come)” just barely scraped into the pop charts at #96. Whatever reasons may have been behind Honey Cone’s sudden nosedive in sales, the quality of their material was not to blame. “Sittin’ on a Time Bomb” is perhaps the group’s most fully realized single, combining the strong songcraft of their early, HDH-penned material with the tight conceptual framework of their biggest hits – in this case, the conceit of the time bomb extends from the lyrics (“I get a feeling that the fuse is getting shorter”) to the ticking noise that draws the song to an uneasy close.
The group’s most ambitious release, “Innocent ‘til Proven Guilty,” is structured almost more like a suite than a traditional pop song, while the meaning of the chorus shifts between its first and final repetitions. In contrast, “Ace in the Hole” is a laidback record that lets their harmonies and sassy personality shine through. However, the group’s final single, “If I Can’t Fly,” shows some signs of wear – it’s simply good, not great, and the four-on-the-floor beat and disco strings give it a more generic sound than Honey Cone’s previous releases.
After the success of “Rip Off,” Laura Lee’s singles mostly settled in the mid-range of the R&B charts. She didn’t really have any more hit singles while on Hot Wax, but she at least maintained a consistent presence. “If You Can Beat Me Rockin’ (You Can Have My Chair),” an upbeat, wah-wah-drenched challenge to any woman who might come after her man, even managed to outdo “Rip Off” on the pop charts by a couple of spots.
Lee followed “If You Can Beat Me Rockin’” with a cover of The Glass House’s “Crumbs Off the Table,” the first single ever released on Invictus Records in 1969. While Scherrie Payne’s vocals on the original version were that of a young woman who doesn’t get why she’s being overlooked, Lee’s age and gritty voice presents evoke a woman who understands far too well why she’s being taken for granted. Tearjerking ballad “I’ll Catch You When You Fall” returns Lee to her familiar milieu as the victim of cheating. Rather than feeling indignant and plotting vengeance, however, she vows to stand by her man once the woman he’s seeing forsakes him.
“I’ll Catch You When You Fall” marked the final release on Hot Wax before the label closed up shop in 1973. By that point, both Honey Cone and 100 Proof (Aged in Soul) had broken up, leaving Laura Lee as the only classic Hot Wax artist to make the transition to the consolidated Invictus Records that year. Joining her was a Chicago-based singer named Lee Charles, whose “Somebody’s Gonna Hurt You, Like You Hurt Me” wasn’t recorded for Hot Wax, but was licensed by the label, presumably so it’d have something besides Laura Lee’s records to release. As with Silent Majority, it’s a decidedly minor record that obviously has its roots outside the HDH complex, but its catchy melody and lightweight bounce make for a pleasant listen.
Brian and Eddie Holland briefly attempted to revive both Invictus and Hot Wax in late 1976, after the latter label had lay dormant for three and a half years. The new Hot Wax only released three singles before folding again in 1977. Despite the familiar names attached to these records – two credited to 100 Proof (Aged in Soul), one to “Honey Cone featuring Sharon Cash” – no original group members appeared on these releases. None are lost classics, though neo-Honey Cone’s “Somebody is Always Messing Up a Good Thing” is a solid disco dancer, and 100 Proof’s “I’m Mad as Hell (Ain’t Gonna Take No More),” a collaboration with Invictus Records’ New York Port Authority, is at least notable for demonstrating how deeply the Network catchphrase pervaded the late ‘70s pop culture lexicon.
None of the singles on the rebooted Hot Wax made much of an impact on the charts, and the revivals of both it and Invictus ended just as soon as they had begun. While Hot Wax’s run was brief – only about three and a half years total, across both iterations – it managed to produce an impressive number of hits and shoulda-been classics for an independent operation. Another branch of the Holland-Dozier-Holland empire, however, was not so lucky. Next week, the final installment of this series will explore HDH’s “lost” label, in The Unhooked Generation, Part 7: Music Merchant.
