Entertainment For Lively Minds
Motown - recent Podcast
Posted by Fitter Stoke on 21 May 2009 - 12:48pm.
So .... the essential ingredient in Motown was...
the tambourine??
At the risk of descending into cliche, any fule no that it was Jamerson's bass. I mean, come on....
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You clearly didn't watch this documentary
Against expectation or intuition, the tambourine was indeed the Motown sound. Recently on TV. Jack Ashford is the man.
http://www.standingintheshadowsofmotown.com
Without having listened
yet to the podcast in question, I'd say this: anyone old enough to remember the 60s will know that the bass response of transistor radios then was minimal.
Jamerson could barely be heard, whereas the tambourine cut through.
(NB I vaguely remember hearing somewhere that Motown routinely checked mixes on car radios, to ensure songs worked well where they'd often first be heard.)
Cone size
I'll let the ageist comment pass, but surely bass response depends on speaker cone size - I'm sure the bass response from big old walnut and valve jobs was more than adequate...
Indeed.
I'm talking the portables, the under-the-bedcoverables, the drive-around-listening-to-the-Sound-of-Young-America dashboard consolables (?).
Ageist? Pulling rank, maybe :-).
I *am* old enough to remember listening to Motown on a tranny, as we called them in our innocence, and it wasn't until years later that I discovered the subtleties of those basslines I've grown to love.
Also
Jamerson didn't play on everything, while the tambourine was virtually omnipresent.
More Cowbell!
I'll get me coat...
Cowbells and handclaps
Discos in the ’70s and ’80s had these sound-to-light systems whereby the sound and beat of the record would drive the lights. Cowbells, along with handclaps, would make the lights go nuts (and thus heighten the impact of the record). Pete Waterman noticed this and so shoved a load of cowbells on when he produced Dead Or Alive’s “You Spin Me Round”. In discos up and down the land it would tear the place apart and before long it was Number One. Canny bugger, Waterman.
Oh, the shame...
...my bass player instincts got the better of me - however, when I'm told, I stay told.