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Marilyn McCoo and Billy Davis, Jr.

Not So Silly Love Songs – Taking ‘Blackbird’ to New Heights

By Mark Mussari

Fifty years ago, Marilyn McCoo and Billy Davis, Jr. did something they’d never done before.

As the de facto lead singers of the legendary 5th Dimension, the couple covered Paul McCartney’s “Every Night” on the group’s Love’s Line, Angles and Rhymes album – and sang the lead as a duet. That proved auspicious, as the by-then married singers would eventually leave the 5th and strike out as a successful, Grammy-winning duo.

Now, half a century later, the duo has released an entire album of songs by the Beatles: Blackbird: Lennon-McCartney Icons. McCoo is 77 and Davis is 82 – but the two singers seem to be gifted with bionic voices that belie their ages.

“We’ve been blessed to be able to hold onto our voices this long,” says Davis.

The singers chalk that up to a decision early in their career to take care of their instruments. “When we came together – when the group first formed – and we started talking about our passions for our lives,” muses McCoo, “we started realizing if this is really what you want to do, you’ve got to take care of it.”

During their time with the group, McCoo and Davis recorded an R&B cover of the Beatles’ “Ticket to Ride” for the Magic Garden album, and they used to sing “All You Need Is Love” as part of a warm-up medley. They resurrect “Ticket to Ride” in a bluesy new arrangement on Blackbird.

“We were still doing Beatles songs in our live show,” explains Davis, “and people were really loving it.” A discussion of McCartney’s “Blackbird” with their producer Nic Mendoza led to the decision to record an entire album of Beatles’ songs (including “And I Love Her,” “Yesterday,” and “The Long and Winding Road”).

“Blackbird” reaches new heights in McCoo’s soaring reading, with a gospel arrangement by Darrell Alston and Jason Fabus. Hearing her vocal is a reminder that the singer has a three-octave range. “I was thrilled and blown away by what we came up with,” admits McCoo.

McCartney had written the song as a tribute to those struggling with the civil rights movement in the US. “In many ways it was a civil rights anthem,” adds McCoo. “It speaks the problem.”

McCoo’s plaintive vocal, infused with yearning, and the anthemic arrangement return the song to McCartney’s original intent. The album’s cover – featuring the names of victims of racial brutality – provides its own plea for societal change.

“With everything that’s been going on in the past few years, ‘Blackbird’ just seemed to lend itself to the vision that’s trying to happen in our society,” comments Davis, alluding to the Black Lives Matter movement. He observes that they chose the song “to make a statement. Those things happened to us too when we were younger.”

Ironically, as members of the 5th Dimension, the couple were contemporaries of the Beatles, both groups climbing up the charts in the late 1960s. That carried into the 1970s, when McCartney and Wings’ “Silly Love Songs” actually replaced McCoo and Davis’s “You Don’t Have to Be a Star” at the top of the charts in 1976.

In their cover of “Silly Love Songs,” which Davis takes lead on, the rhythm is brought forward as Davis offers up a muscular cover of McCartney’s defensive response to those critics – including former bandmate John Lennon – who felt he was writing light, inconsequential love songs. “Paul knew that they were needed,” says Davis. “For Marilyn and me, most of the songs we sing are love songs.”

Despite the 5th Dimension’s image as clean-cut, “mod” singers with enlightened pop sensibilities, McCoo and Davis have faced their own share of racism and unrest.

“People think that when you’re famous, you are removed from those situations,” notes McCoo. “Unfortunately, it is not so. We all have our stories to tell.”

While singing in Chicago during the tumultuous Democratic National Convention of 1968, the group had to leave the auditorium where they were performing because of a stink bomb. “We had been invited to perform, and it was a wonderful honor,” says McCoo.

“When we went outside,” adds Davis, “all hell had broken loose. There was a riot going on. People were being beaten with clubs. We wanted to get out of there fast, because we didn’t know what else could happen.”

“Here we are all these years later,” laments McCoo, “and these things are still happening.”

Even at their own homes, the duo encountered some of the ugliest forms of racism. At their house in Encino, someone burned a cross on their lawn. Later one evening, returning to a different home in Beverly Hills, the couple were carrying some belongings into the house when the police showed up.

“They actually pulled a gun on us,” Davis recalls. “They thought we were robbing the place.”

“People don’t want to believe that these things still happen in our country,” says McCoo. “They want to think better of people – but in thinking better of people in one respect, then you have to be thinking lesser of people in another.”

Another recent project has brought the duo back into the spotlight. The world is familiar with the Summer of Love in 1967 and the Woodstock festival in 1969 – but it’s about to discover the Summer of Soul (held three months before Woodstock in 1969).

The Summer of Soul was a multi-act concert, spread across several weekends, and held in Harlem. The 5th Dimension performed, along with such heavyweights as Sly and the Family Stone, Stevie Wonder, Gladys Knight and the Pips, Nina Simone, and the Staples Singers.

Musician and director Questlove (Ahmir Kahlib Thompson) unearthed concert footage of the event, hidden in the can for five decades, and created an award-winning documentary: Summer of Soul (Or When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised). It captured both the US Documentary’s Competition Grand Prize and the Audience Award at the 2021 Sundance Film Festival.

“We remember that concert so well,” says McCoo. “We were excited about finally getting a chance to do some of our music for an audience that we knew didn’t often get a chance to see what we did – because a lot of people couldn’t afford the tickets. We were going to perform for a predominantly African-American audience, which we didn’t often didn’t do. The audiences were enthralled.”

The duo was shocked to see the huge number of people who showed up. “Thousands and thousands of people came out,” remembers Davis. In fact, some 300,000 people attended the concerts.

“We were thrilled to see Questlove had collected those incredible performance moments of so many major stars. And we were so honored when he asked to interview us,” explains McCoo. “It was an exciting time for us, and we were getting a chance to perform in Harlem.”

Today, despite the unrest that has gripped the nation, the two singers maintain some semblance of hope. “We would really love to see us, as a country, getting along and coming together and wanting to work together,” says McCoo. “Here we are fifty-three years later—we have to get it together. As the Bible says, ‘A house divided against itself cannot stand.’”

“You can’t stop what’s going on,” Davis contends. “I still believe the best is yet to come, because we’ve got so much to learn from one another.”

Blackbird: Lennon-McCartney Icons drops April 30 of this year. Both “Silly Love Songs” and “Blackbird” are available now for download.

Mark Mussari is a freelance writer and translator living in Tucson, Arizona.

#Marilyn McCoo and Billy Davis Jr #2021 #Music Interviews #Blackbird #Mark Mussari

Marilyn McCoo and Billy Davis, Jr.

The 5th Dimension Belong in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame

By Mark Mussari

One day in the middle of Woodstock – the three-day musical extravaganza that defined a generation in the summer of 1969 – the massive crowd broke spontaneously into a rousing rendition of “Aquarius,” the seminal number from the rock musical Hair.

Except the version the crowd sang wasn’t exactly the one from the groundbreaking musical. Instead, it was the mashup of “Aquarius” and the chorus of “Let the Sunshine In” made famous by the 5th Dimension that same year.

That number one record – featuring the group’s soaring vocals, Billy Davis Jr’s gospel-powered ad-libs, and the Wrecking Crew’s driving rhythm section – became the anthem for the Pepsi generation and served, in many ways, as a coda on the turbulent 1960s.

“Aquarius/Let the Sunshine In” won two Grammy Awards (including Record of the Year) and spent six weeks at number one on the Billboard Hot 100 chart in 1969. It was the ninth of 30 charting records by the 5th Dimension and the first of two number ones in a career spanning almost a decade. The Wrecking Crew served as the backing band for the group on all their recordings well into the 1970s.

The original quintet – with Davis, Marilyn McCoo, Florence LaRue, Ron Townson and LaMonte McLemore – were together from 1965 to 1975. McCoo and Davis left the group to perform as a duo that year, and LaRue has gone on with various members ever since.

The original 5th Dimension received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1991 and were inducted into the Vocal Group Hall of Fame in 2002. Yet, the group has never been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, despite their overwhelming success and influence.

Why have they never been inducted?

“That’s a question that’s hard to answer,” says Billy Davis, Jr.

“We think about those groups who were similar to us – and they’re in there and we aren’t,” adds Marilyn McCoo. “We’ve decided that there’s no way to ever explain it or understand it.”

The group’s singular sound, a blending of five wildly diverse voices, baffled critics early on. Their first major release was a cover of John Phillips’s “Go Where You Wanna Go.” The 5th’s take on the Mamas and Papas’ folk-based song was a departure from the standard “soul” or “r & b” group of the mid-60s – and it bore no resemblance to the Motown sound emanating from Detroit.

“They had problems categorizing us,” observes Davis. “They didn’t know what to do with us. Here’s this black group singing these pop songs. The black radio stations had problems playing our music because it was too ‘white’ for them, and the pop stations had problems because we were black and they thought we should have been singing r & b.”

“We think that problem persists even today, fifty years later,” continues McCoo. “Nobody’s ever been able to pigeonhole us. Yet we’ve had hit pop songs, hit r & b songs, and the 5th Dimension always had jazz songs on our albums.”

The eclectic nature of the group’s repertoire was apparent to anyone listening to their music, especially their albums, which culled from a diverse group of writers. Their range was immense – along the way they covered songs by Cream, Burt Bacharach, Ashford & Simpson, Dave Mason, Willie Hutch, Elton John, and the Rolling Stones.

The group’s name is also indelibly connected to two of the rock era’s finest composers: Jimmy Webb and Laura Nyro. Both songwriters employed elements of pop, rock, soul, gospel, cabaret – and even vaudeville – in their sound.

“We loved singing that variety of music,” explains McCoo. “There were so many wonderful harmonic opportunities – different sounds we could create. That’s what turned us on.”

Webb gave the group their first big hit and Grammy winner, “Up, Up and Away,” along with one of rock’s first concept albums, The Magic Garden (1968). Nyro provided a string of hits, including “Stoned Soul Picnic,” “Sweet Blindness,” “Blowing Away” and “Wedding Bell Blues.”

“I loved our version of Laura’s ‘Black Patch,’” says McCoo of the multi-layered, imagist cut from Individually & Collectively (1971). “Laura ended up in the Hall of Fame – and rightfully so.”

The view of the group as MOR (the pejorative acronym for “Middle of the Road”) doesn’t hold water when one considers their accomplishments. The band became political more than once in their career. In 1970, with the Vietnam War still raging in Southeast Asia, the 5th released a muscular cover of Nyro’s antiwar anthem “Save the Country.”

In 1971, their arranger Bones Howe put together three seemingly diverse tunes into a ten-minute medley serving up a musical plea for racial equality: a musical reading of the Declaration of Independence, Sam Cooke’s plaintive “A Change Is Gonna Come,” and the Rascal’s “People Got to Be Free.”

“We knew it was political,” asserts McCoo, “but we felt like the time was right. Things were happening in music with different artists making political statements. We felt really good about it because people always thought of us as only making happy music. This was an opportunity for us to make a statement about how we felt about what was going on in our country at that time. We were all of one accord with that project.”

“We wanted to make a stand, also,” adds Davis. “We wanted people to know who we were. We weren’t just some group singing happy songs. We were also people – and we had opinions about what was happening.”

“Over the years we’ve met a lot of guys who were in Vietnam,” says McCoo, “and they say how much that recording meant to them when it came out. And we’ve heard from a lot of teachers and how they used our version to teach the Declaration to their students.”

Another person took notice when the group sang the Declaration medley for, of all people, Richard Nixon at the White House in 1970. At first the performance was met with silence – with everyone wondering if they had offended the president – until Nixon stood up and applauded.

McCoo and Davis’s final album with the group, Earthbound in 1975, was – like The Magic Garden in 1968 – produced, arranged, and mostly written by Webb. “That album is full of harmonics,” comments Davis. “When we finally reached back and listened to it, it blew our minds.”

Earthbound wasn’t released on CD until 2014 – almost forty years after its initial release on vinyl. The 5th hit a vocal peak in their take on the Rolling Stone’s “Moonlight Mile,” which Webb arranged with dreamy sitars, a languid arrangement, and the group’s almost ethereal polyphonics. “’Moonlight Mile’ is just one of our best,” notes McCoo.

Other highlights on the album include Davis’s gospel-driven reading of Webb’s “Lean on Me Always” and McCoo’s haunting ballad “When Did I Lose Your Love,” featuring intricate guitar work by Larry Coryell.

“I love that song,” admits McCoo. “There was a quality I wanted to achieve. I always felt as if I really ‘got’ that wistful, lost feeling.”

Yet the writing was on the wall for the group. “There were emotional problems that happened during the time we were recording Earthbound,” McCoo explains. “That led to the decision by Billy and me to strike out on our own. We hadn’t listened to it in a number of years, and the first time we sat down and listened to it, we were in tears.”

McCoo waxes philosophic about why the group has never been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

“After a while you make your peace with that,” she muses. “We think of the wonderful fans that we’ve had throughout the years who have hung in there with us. We think about the beautiful music that we’ve been blessed to be able to make and the songwriters whose music we’ve performed. About Bones Howe producing us and Bob Alcivar writing those wonderful charts. We feel so blessed to have had the career that we’ve enjoyed.”

“That will always be our legacy,” concludes Davis.

Indeed. But the 5th Dimension belongs in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

It’s time.

Mark Mussari is a freelance writer, translator, and scholar living in Tucson, Arizona.

#Marilyn McCoo and Billy Davis Jr.#2020 #Music Interviews #The 5th Dimension #Mark Mussari #Rock and Roll Hall of Fame

The country singer tells Mark Mussari of PopEntertainment.com about looking back at her roots with 'sleepless nights.'

Posted: November 7, 2008.

When Patty Loveless was a little girl, she had an ongoing argument with her father. Each week the two would settle into their living room in Pikeville, Kentucky to watch television. Her father, a coal miner and country music fan, wanted to watch the Earl Scruggs and Lester Flatt Review, but his daughter preferred The Flintstones. “Of course Daddy would always win out,” she admits, “and I’m so glad he did. It taught me a lot.”

And we’re so glad he did. Loveless, who possesses a plaintive, aching voice with the elastic sensibility of a steel-guitar, is one of the last genuine country singers in a genre gone far too pop. One of the most expressive voices in any genre of music, her yearning alto resides somewhere at the intersection of Twang & Soul. She is the torchbearer for the brutally honest approach that defined the careers of Patsy Cline and Loretta Lynn (who is Loveless’ distant cousin).

Anyone who wants to know what country music is really about — the heartache, the despair, even the drinking — need look no further than Loveless’ latest CD: Sleepless Nights: The Traditional Country Soul of Patty Loveless (Saguaro Road Records). Gathering songs for the project, she and her husband, producer and musician Emory Gordy, Jr., listened to hundreds of classic country songs before settling on the fourteen standards that grace the CD, lauded by critics as a true return to form.

“We’d just sit there and listen to George Jones and then Jack Green or Webb Pierce,” explains Loveless, “and a smile would come across Emory’s face or mine.” She describes the country classics, stalwarts like “The Pain of Loving You,” “There Stands the Glass” and “Please Help Me, I’m Falling,” as music that “just pulls at your heart, old friends that you revisit again.” To create the CD’s rare blend of retro tunes with fresh arrangement, Loveless and Gordy amassed musicians from “old school” Nashville — players like Harold Bradley, “Pig” Robbins and Billy Lenneman — with contemporary pros like Steve Gibson and Al Perkins. And then they threw in background singers like the inimitable Vince Gill, who blends seamlessly with Loveless on the title track, to sweeten the pot.

Not surprisingly, the George Jones songs take Patty to another level, further solidifying her reputation for authenticity. “I’ve been listening to him probably since I was a baby,” she says. “When I was in my mother’s womb, my family was playing those records around the house.” Apparently, the prenatal osmosis worked. On “He Thinks I Still Care” or “The Color of the Blues,” Loveless takes Jones’ signature melisma, his inventive flirting with notes, and kicks it up a notch with her own signature power. “It’s just that I studied George so much that those songs were easier for me,” she comments.

In fact, Loveless’ first top-ten hit was a cover of a Jones tune, “If My Heart Had Windows” in 1988. She also won a Grammy nomination in 1997 for her collaboration with Jones on “You Don’t Seem to Miss Me.”

Loveless has studied at the altar of many of country music’s greatest performers. She grew up in a house filled with not only country and mountain music, but also early rock and roll. “I even had one brother — my oldest brother — who enjoyed Otis Redding and Percy Sledge,” notes Loveless, “and in that neck of the woods, you didn’t hear that much of that music.” And the music spawned home-grown talent: her older siblings Roger and Dottie formed a singing duo and moved to Louisville to pursue a career.

After Loveless replaced Dottie, who retired to marry, she and Roger were invited by the revered country duo of the Wilburn Brothers to visit them at the Grand Ole Opry. By the age of fourteen, she was watching Dolly Parton and Porter Wagoner on the stage of the Opry. When Wagoner heard Loveless sing, he immediately took her and Roger under his tutelage.

“We would sit around with Porter at his boathouse — we would just go out there and hang,” says Loveless. Her current cover of the Wagoner classic “The Pain of Loving You” actually grew out of that experience. “We used to sing that song together,” she recalls. “And Dolly and I would sing one of her songs, ‘My Blue Tears.’ She would sing harmony and I would sing lead.” When Wagoner made his final appearance at the Opry, shortly before his death in 2007, both Loveless and Parton performed for him.

By the time Loveless was fifteen, she began to travel and perform professionally with the Wilburns. “We were riding in the back of a Cadillac,” she remembers. “I would sleep on their shoulders — we didn’t have a tour bus.” Is it any wonder traditional country runs through her veins?

When Loveless turned sixteen, she received a surprise birthday present from Doyle Wilburn. “He gave me a demo session of seven songs as a birthday gift,” she remembers. Ironically, some of the very players who appeared on those demos — which Loveless still owns — are featured on Sleepless Nights: pianist “Pig” Robbins and bass-player Bill Lenneman. “We sit around and talk about the Wilburn Brothers days,” comments Loveless.

In 1985, Roger took a tape of his sister’s tunes to producers Tony Brown and Emory Gordy, Jr. After a number of hits, including the infectious “Timber, I’m Falling in Love” (1989) and “I’m That Kind of Girl” (1990), Loveless and Gordy were functioning as a unit, both professionally and personally. In 1989 Loveless won her first platinum record for the album Honky Tonk Angel.

In 1992, with her career burgeoning, Loveless faced one of her greatest challenges. “I was starting to have some throat problems out on the road,” she recalls. She was about to head out on a 30-day tour in the West when a visit to the doctor brought a stern warning: “He told me, “No, you can’t — if you do this, you’re going to blow your voice, and it’s going to be gone, and that’s it.” At first undaunted, Loveless went on to film appearances on the television special, The Women of Country, but a follow-up appointment brought her singing to a screeching halt. “He told me, ‘You just can’t do this,’” says Loveless.

Following surgery and during her recuperation, Loveless did a lot of praying and wondering about the eventual shape of her voice. “We went in on my birthday to cut ‘Blame It On Your Heart,’ and I just couldn’t believe it,” admits Loveless. “It blew me away.” Loveless received the best possible birthday present: thanks to the surgery, her voice had attained a richer timbre and a fuller sound. Her next recording Only What I Feel (1992) became her second platinum album and yielded not only the number one “Blame It on Your Heart,” but two of her signature songs: “How Can I Help You Say Good-Bye” and the riveting “Nothing But the Wheel,” one of the finest-written country songs from the past twenty years.

More number ones came with the playful “I Try to Think About Elvis” from When Fallen Angels Fly (another platinum record and the winner of the CMA Album of the Year in 1995). Both “You Can Feel Bad” and “Lonely Too Long” from The Trouble with the Truth”(platinum in 1996) also hit number one. The Trouble with the Truth also spawned one of Loveless’ favorites, “To Feel That Way At All,” a brilliant performance she tried but failed to get her then-record company to release as a single. “I kept telling them,” she now reveals, “that song is the one the fans want.”

In 2001, Loveless released what many have considered her masterpiece, Mountain Soul, an album of traditional bluegrass songs inspired by her family’s own coal-mining roots and the music that told their story and sustained them through hard times. Its centerpiece was “You’ll Never Leave Harlan Alive,” a Southern gothic mini-drama of thwarted opportunity and hopelessness delivered in a mountain cry. She dedicated the album to her parents (her father, John Ramey, eventually developed black lung disease, the bane of all coal miners).

Emotionally, Loveless is a fearless singer, particularly deft at choosing those kill-billy ballads that take listeners to the darker places. “It’s music for the soul,” she observes, although she admits that there are “very few” truly haunting songs still being written today. “There’s nothing wrong with songs that touch people in some way, even if you have to haunt them. I think in this day and time, and this economy we’re all facing and people facing hard times, you’re going to hear more of those types of songs. People need that — to cleanse their soul.”

When Loveless was only twelve years old, she learned to sing Linda Ronstadt’s pensive ballad, “Long, Long Time.” “I’d do it at some of the jamborees we used to play,” she says. Seeing Loveless sing a song like “Nothing But the Wheel,” you realize that she imbibed not only the genuine emotion that characterizes Ronstadt’s singing but also the capacity to meld with the song, to become one with it. “That’s what I’ve always tried to accomplish,” she explains. “For me, I’m not really acting the song — I’m living the song.”

Loveless took a three-year sabbatical before recording Sleepless Nights: she lost her mother, her mother-in-law and her friend and inspiration Porter Wagoner all in that period. “I had to go through a process of healing for a while,” she confirms, “but as I said, music is like a wonderful friend.” She hopes the songs on Sleepless Nights will reach a younger audience. “I hope the youth of tomorrow and the next generation will be influenced and maybe even inspired to write this way,” she comments. “This kind of music and these melodies — they’re classic.”