Covered: Brian Holland, Lamont Dozier & Eddie Holland, Volume 5: 1967

The Motown magic continues with another volume of the Brian Holland, Lamont Dozier, and Eddie Holland songwriting team, better known as Holland-Dozier-Holland. Once again, they came up so many excellent songs that this volume in the Covered series only deals with a single year, 1967.

1967 was a year of great change in rock music, with psychedelia being all the range, and songs getting more sophisticated and diverse. But Holland-Dozier-Holland had a wildly successful formula, and they didn't change it much at all. Their thing was a poppy version of soul music, and I read an interview with them in which they said they didn't have much interest in rock music. But despite all the changing musical trends, the hits kept on coming.

Again, I managed to order the songs by the dates of the singles releases, more or less. I had to guesstimate with some songs that were only album tracks, or weren't Motown releases.

Speaking on Motown, as expected, the vast majority of songs here were put out on the Motown label. But there are a couple of exceptions. "Too Many Fish in the Sea" was a hit for the Marvelettes in 1964. It was a rare case in which the song was written by Norman Whitfield and Eddie Holland. I already have the Marvelettes version in my Covered series for Whitfield. So instead I used a version here by Mitch Ryder & the Detroit Wheels, a non-Motown band. I also decided to include "Your Keep Me Hangin' On" by Vanilla Fudge, even though I included the original hit version by the Supremes in the previous volume in this series. That's because both versions were massive hits, and yet are drastically different from each other. I like both versions quite a lot, as they bring out different aspects of the song.

This volume, unfortunately, is basically the end of Holland-Dozier-Holland at Motown Records. But it was far from the end for them, as they set up their own record companies and kept coming up with hit after hit. All that shall be explained in the next volume in this series.

This album is 54 minutes long.

01 Love Is Here and Now You're Gone (Supremes)
02 Jimmy Mack (Martha & the Vandellas)
03 Bernadette (Four Tops)
04 The Happening (Supremes)
05 There's a Ghost in My House (R. Dean Taylor)
06 All I Need (Temptations)
07 Too Many Fish in the Sea - Three Little Fishes (Mitch Ryder & the Detroit Wheels)
08 7 Rooms of Gloom (Four Tops)
09 Everybody Needs Love (Gladys Knight & the Pips)
10 Your Keep Me Hangin' On (Vanilla Fudge)
11 I'll Turn to Stone (Four Tops)
12 Reflections (Supremes)
13 Going Down for the Third Time (Supremes)
14 [Loneliness Made Me Realize] It's You that I Need (Temptations)
15 In and Out of Love (Supremes)
16 You Keep Running Away (Four Tops)
17 I Got a Feeling (Barbara Randolph)
18 Whisper You Love Me Boy (Chris Clark)

https://www.upload.ee/files/17410466/COVRDHOLLNDDZRHLLND1967Vlum5_atse.zip.html

alternate:

https://pixeldrain.com/u/bQ5c9wd5

The cover image is one where I had to create something out of very little. I was lacking having enough photos of Holland-Dozier-Holland together, so in this case I had to make one. I found three photos of them individually, probably all from the early 1970s. That's not too close to 1967, I know, but it was the best I could do. Then I colorized them using the Palette program, since all three were in black and white. Then I put them all together in Photoshop. Finally, I ran the merged image through Krea AI, which helped give more of a consistent look to the whole thing. It's still not ideal, but at least it's something.