Read Online The Lost Supreme: The Life of Dreamgirl Florence Ballard by Peter Benjaminson - Free Book Online

for her new venture, former Marvelette Katherine Anderson Schaffner said. “She had the voice we needed.” She pointed out, however, that unlike the Primettes or the Supremes, “The Marvelettes liked to 33
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    dance on stage. We did our own routines.” This was hard on Flo: “We laughed because she had a hard time doing the steps. They were foreign to her,” Anderson said, “but we told her it was OK. After a while, she did the steps her own way, and we lightened up the steps” to allow Flo to do them more easily.
    When Flo finally returned to the Supremes in May 1962, the group went back to performing all around Detroit and also touring sporadically outside the Motor City.
    Meanwhile, Hitsville was living up to the hopes Gordy had so fervently invested in it. The big beat in most Motown hits was one reason. Even if Gordy hadn’t been intent on producing a big sound, he might have found the development hard to avoid. Motown’s first recording studio, a converted room in one of the West Grand Boulevard houses, gave any instrument played in it a big, booming sound. For a while, Gordy thought that this “boom-boom” sound would actually prevent Motown from making good records. But it did just the opposite, appealing to listeners and making Motown’s records hard to copy.
    While the Supremes couldn’t get a hit, they showed spunk by harassing Motown’s producers incessantly. “We were still sitting there fussing at the producers,” Flo said. “‘We were the first group here! And we haven’t got a hit record yet!’ We wanted a hit so bad we didn’t know what to do.”
    Four other sides written for the group in 1962 and 1963 by Robinson, with Diane as lead, failed to bust the group out of the no-hit ghetto in which they found themselves. The dreamy “Your Heart Belongs to Me” barely pushed its way into the Top 100, and “Let Me Go the Right Way” couldn’t move past #90. “My Heart Can’t Take It No More” didn’t do any better. The wistful “A Breathtaking Guy,” originally titled “A Breathtaking, First Sight Soul Shaking, One Night Love Making, Next Day Heartbreaking Guy,” made #75, but numbers that low were not going to jumpstart the Supremes’ career. They and others noted, however, that their numbers were improving.
    During this same period, Motown was producing hits like “Stubborn Kind of Fellow” by Marvin Gaye and “Playboy” by the Marvelettes. In 1962
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    it produced “Beechwood 4-5789” by the Marvelettes; “The One Who Really Loves You,” “You Beat Me to the Punch,” and “Two Lovers” by Mary Wells; and “Do You Love Me?” by the Contours. In 1963 it released “You’ve Really Got a Hold on Me” and “Mickey’s Monkey” by the Miracles; “Laughing Boy”
    by Mary Wells; “Pride and Joy” by Marvin Gaye; “Fingertips—Part 2” by Little Stevie Wonder; and “(Love is Like a) Heat Wave” and “Quicksand” by Martha and the Vandellas. (“Heat Wave” and “Quicksand” are excellent examples of Motown’s often successful attempts to produce two songs, and twice the profit, from one. Except for some of the words, the songs were almost identical.)
    Flo, Diane, and Mary, on the other hand, were being mocked as the “No-Hit Supremes” by the crueler spirits among their colleagues. Even when they were able to arrange for relatively high-level gigs in Detroit, the freshness of their youth, which many found appealing, hurt them on at least one occasion. A Temptations-Supremes show at Detroit’s Twenty Grand Nightclub, a show that Flo called “hot” and “fantastic,” lasted for only one week in February 1965 because, while Flo was nearing twenty-two, Diane and Mary were each a month short of twenty-one, the age required for performing in a club with a liquor license.
    “The Temptations were dressed in white suits, and we were dressed in white gowns, and at the end of the show we’d do a song together,”