Motown.. the move from Detroit to LA.

[robb_k]

Jimmy McFarland singing "Lonely Lover" was just a case of a local L.A. producer wanting his artist to sing a Motown song he liked, that, just by coincidence, was never issued on vinyl by Motown, until the 1980s.That song was written by Holland-Dozier-Holland, who produced the Marvin Gaye cuts on it.

So, the McFarland record had NOTHING to do with an L.A. Jobete/Motown Office producer releasing his version on a small L.A. label. The RPR producer and record company owner just decided to use that Motown song because Motown clearly had no intentions of using it [[3 years after it was written), AND he thought McFarland could do a good job singing it, and he would make up the loss of not owning the publishing rights by having a LOT more sales revenue from selling a LOT more records using a great HDH song, than they would using a run-of-the-mill RPR-published song. Getting a % royalty for every later use of a song that sells so little that no one ever hears it to want to pay the fees to use it, is worthless.

One might ask the question: "How did RPR's A & R man , McFarland's producer, or McFarland, himself, find out about that unused Motown song? I would bet that some Soul producers, who didn't have great in-house songwriters for their own publishing, regularly scanned the BMI publishing lists for songs written by prolific, hit-making songwriters, who had songs they seem to have forgotten, not having their artists release a version. Then, they'd have their arrangers look at the sheet music. If it looked good to them, they'd have them buy the sheet music, and record their artist on that song.

In this case, they saw a nice HDH song that hadn't been used by Motown for 3 years after its publication [[so, no competition from Motown), and an average HDH
song would be 10-20 times better than anything their [[RPR's) stable of writers, or McFarland, could come up with. So they gave it a try.

A similar situation existed with a Stevie Wonder song from 1964, written by Stevie, Clarence Paul and Luvel Broadnax [["I Prayed For a Girl/Boy Like You". In 1967, Ted Cooper at Clumbia Records chose it for his Epic Records artist, Patty Michaels, thinking that his artist could get more sales than by using a song by someone else [[there was no Columbia/Okeh/Epic writing staff [[once Carl Davis left. So, they wouldn't get publishing royalties in any case. There were almost no sales, anyway. So, in the end it didn't matter. But one can't blame them for trying.