California flop article

Graeme Thomson guardian.co.uk, Thursday 30 June 2011 21.30 BST Article history
Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons hit 'an unexpected purple patch' on Mowest in the 1970s. Photograph: David Redfern/Redferns
If success was purely a question of aesthetics, then Mowest could have ruled the world. The label logo certainly deserved to be stuck to the centre of any number of hit records: a generous slice of bright blue Pacific framed by a golden sunset and the equally golden California sand, it promised fine times and good living. The reality of its brief tenure, however, proved less blissful.

The existence of Mowest, one of Motown's more obscure subsidiaries, is attributable to a very American impulse to head west and prospect for gold. By the early 70s, Motown supremo Berry Gordy was already inching his Hitsville operation from Detroit to California. Motown had run a Los Angeles office since 1963, while Gordy had been living in the city since the late 60s. Mowest, a wholly west coast enterprise with its base in LA on Sunset & Vine and a studio in Romaine Street, was formed in 1971 as an expendable advance party for the final phase of Motown's westward creep.

"For Gordy it was a transitional thing," says Don Peake, a member of the legendary Wrecking Crew group of LA session players. It's Peake's bass line you hear on the Jackson Five's I Want You Back and ABC, but you may be less familiar with his work in the multicultural seven-piece Odyssey, who released their only album on Mowest. "Mowest was their first arena to test the waters out there and foster talent in the area."

If Mowest's function was largely strategic, the release this summer of Our Lives Are Shaped By What We Love, the first compilation of the label's music, uncovers a rich musical legacy. While other Motown subsidiaries were genre-specific, Mowest was created with the intention of expanding the musical horizons of its parent company. This roaming brief allowed it to explore west coast rock, deep funk and lysergic symphonic soul, sometimes all at once, making Our Lives Are Shaped By What We Love a constant surprise. Three songs by a commercially faltering Frankie Valli & the Four Seasons constitute an unexpected purple patch, and the Sisters Love's deliriously funky cover of Curtis Mayfield's Give Me Your Love offers a shimmying premonition of Philly soul. The Commodores and Thelma Houston pass through, en route to greater things, while Syreeta, then married to Stevie Wonder, contributes the sublime I Love Every Little Thing About You.

Odyssey are emblematic of the entire enterprise. A not entirely organic alliance of LA sessioneers and west coast hippie-rock tyros – "We were invited to lunch, introduced to some nice people and told we were going to form a band," Peake says – their epic 1972 single provides Our Lives Are Shaped By What We Love with its title and its mandate. The funky underlay nods to a Motown provenance, but the architecture is spacey, post-acid rock. The ruthlessly disciplined create-make-sell ethos of the Detroit hit factory met the counter-culture, and everyone won. "We didn't think of it in those grand terms, we were just players in the trenches," says Peake. "But I'm sure someone else was thinking like that."

If the music is this good, why was Mowest such a commercial failure? It lasted barely long enough to leave a trace, releasing just 10 albums and 40 singles, many of which failed to make it beyond the promo stage. Its only hit was Tom Clay's terrible spoken-word rendition of What the World Needs Now, the portentous oration intercut with socially provocative media reports. It isn't included on the compilation.

Many of Mowest's troubles stemmed from a fraught relationship with its parent label. Dave Pell, a celebrated jazz saxophonist, producer, record executive and former president of the Grammys, was hired by Gordy to be "in charge of all Mowest's music, production and signings". At least that was the theory. In reality, "Berry was involved in everything," Pell says. "He was a strong record man and I really liked him, but I fought him every day. He hired me to change things, then stood in my way. It was like, 'What the hell did you hire me for?'"

There was, feels Pell, little impetus from above to make Mowest work. Motown's marketing men and pluggers were constantly preoccupied with Marvin Gaye, or Stevie Wonder, or extending the Jackson Five's run of hits. By comparison, Pell's ragged roster of obscurities, in-house writing talent, future stars and familiar names fallen on hard times seemed less than essential. On the rare occasions when an act did show a glimmer of commercial promise, they were swiftly spirited off to the mothership. The Commodores released their first two Motown-related singles on Mowest. When the second reached the nursery slopes of the R&B chart, Motown snapped them up for further development. "We were auditioning acts for Motown," says Pell. "Of course that was happening. 'It's too good for Mowest.' I heard that a couple of times. I felt we were secondary to Motown people, we weren't on the first team."

The label's image was also problematic. Motown was changing, but it retained a powerful core identity, whereas one of the charms of Mowest's output was its lack of any unifying aesthetic. "It was eclectic, open format, multicultural, crossing all sorts of boundaries," says the Canadian DJ Kevin Howes, who compiled Our Lives Are Shaped By What We Love. "People want an identifiable style, and Mowest wasn't that bag, which may have been part of its downfall." Intrinsic to the aim of giving soul music a broader base was the idea of making the music a less overtly black proposition. This, too, alienated both audiences and artists. "Acts didn't really want to come with us because we didn't have the right image," says Pell. "And people weren't buying because they thought we'd made a vanilla Motown that didn't have the soul, the feeling, or anything else that was really Motown. Mowest didn't have an identity."

Perhaps that's why many musicians felt little personal investment in Mowest. Several were house songwriters and session players whose affiliations lay with Motown. Marilyn McLeod, who has written for Diana Ross, Marvin Gaye, the Four Tops and Anita Baker, released one Mowest single, A Heart Is a House, as part of the Nu Page. "I wasn't signed up as a Mowest artist," she says. "I was signed up to Motown as a songwriter." Peake agrees: "I was a staff musician for Motown and I never really felt much of a distinction. While I was in Odyssey I was still making records in California with the Supremes and the Temptations."

Hamstrung by internal power struggles, identity confusion and a commercial profile somewhere south of low, Mowest lasted less than two years. By the time it folded in 1973, Pell had already gone. "I got fired for a story I won't tell," he says. "Gordy brought me into a room with 20 of his people and said: 'Here's what we're going to do, what do you think?' and I said, 'This stinks, it's a shitty way of doing things.' And I was gone, out of my office in five minutes."

By then Mowest had fulfilled its primary function of preparing the ground for Motown to make its permanent base in Los Angeles, which it did in 1973. In the end, Pell believes: "Motown didn't fit out in California, I thought they were very uncomfortable." History largely backs him up, and yet had its adventurousness been enthusiastically harnessed and its output properly promoted, Mowest could well have mapped a viable route for Motown to follow. Several songs on Our Lives Are Shaped By What We Love predict the popular soul trends of the near future: the sleek, orchestrated shimmer of Philly, the polished sheen of disco. The new sounds, in fact, that by the mid-70s had made Motown seem increasingly irrelevant as it became over-reliant on a handful of waning big-hitters.

Instead, the memory of Mowest swiftly faded, although the occasional spark caught light. Frankie Valli's The Night, released on Mowest's British imprint in the mid-70s, has become a northern soul standard. Odyssey were briefly hip among Tokyo's elitist rare groove/free soul DJs in the 90s, while New York DJ Danny Krivit's eight-minute edit of the Sisters Love's Give Me Your Love was a huge US club hit in the early 80s. "I first heard it in 71 or 72," says Krivit. "Curtis Mayfield was everywhere, but this was the get-down version that really got people jumping. It was an independent, underground kind of thing, a hot cover version. I never saw it on Mowest because there were so few original copies, I got it on a bootleg 7in. It just stuck with me. I always thought it was too short, it had so much energy and I wanted to extend it in my edit. The breaks were just fierce."

Our Lives Are Shaped By What We Love should go some way to popularising Mowest's lost treasures, but it would be a distortion to judge the label entirely on the merits of its 16 songs. "There were a lot of duds on Mowest, real, real bad stuff," says Howes. "The hit-to-miss ratio was more misses than hits, but the hits were epic and soaring." Dave Pell is less inclined to swoon. Now 86, he received a copy of the compilation a few weeks ago, but won't be listening. Too many memories, too many regrets. "I haven't unpacked it," he says. "I don't give a shit." He sighs. "Every song goes with a story, every song reminds me of problem." Sun, sea and sand, it seems, will only take you so far.

• Our Lives Are Shaped By What We Love is out now on Light In Your Attic
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California flop article - Guardian