i actually would not mind if Geroge and Andy did an RCA lost and found and had some of these RCA tracks remixed by Kevin Reeves
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i actually would not mind if Geroge and Andy did an RCA lost and found and had some of these RCA tracks remixed by Kevin Reeves
"Eaten Alive" should have been a duet with Diana Ross and Michael Jackson. The video would have been phenomenal! I like this song. On the dance floor this song rocks! There are remixed versions of this song to prove my point.
yeah i think that would have really helped it. diana had had some decent hits off of Swept Away but let's face it, none were MEGA hits. something like Mountain, Upside Down, Love Hangover. something that totally took the pop music world by storm and became a sensation. given her age, her declining sales and popularity, i think something mega was needed.
Without Gordy, she was and is a shadow of her once awesome self.
You can have the finest cut of steak, but if you don’t have the best chef, it tastes like hamburger.
I always gave the supremes success to HDH, with some guidance from BG.
But I also think he was losing his touch ...
i think how BG didnt like Love child Originally, then he wrote No Matter What Sign.flop.
then he didnt like Stoned Love or Aint no Mountain but, both became million sellers, then he wanted Dooobe Doo be Doo or whatever released and thought it would be huge,it wasnt.
dont get me started on Last Time I Saw Him album or why Blue was shelved
Y'all crack me up. Y'all know I love the EA album.
On the subject of Tina Turner, Typical Male is one of my favorite songs of hers! Need to get that Foreign Affair 4-disc that was re-released last year
I am surprised to see Tina's post-"Private Dancer" recordings discussed alongside Ross' RCA years. I think "Break Every Rule" and "Foreign Affair" are excellent albums. Good songs and great production. The same is not true of Ross at RCA, which we have dissected at DRATS ad nauseam. In fact, there is no other artist of Ross' commercial stature -- that I can think of -- who experienced such a precipitous decline in artistic quality for SUCCESSIVE albums. All down to the dangerous degree of artistic freedom she apparently enjoyed during the 1980s.
The Eaten Alive album is one of my top 5 albums of Diana Ross. I actually love this album.
it’s classic Diana Ross. IMO.
I agree Guy. The decline in artistic quality was not only alarming, but changed the way her music was perceived. It was was no longer being taken seriously by the music media at large and often held up an object of ridicule.
By the time she got her act together America was bored, and sin of sins she was no longer young.
You may be viewing Diana’s tenure at Motown through rose tinted glasses. The Wiz was a dreadful movie and a flop of epic proportions. “Ross 78” a shoddy collection of odds and ends not worthy of an artist of Diana’s stature. Diana herself was the force behind the hugely popular “The Boss” And “diana” albums, not Gordy.
The 90’s proved a return to form with decent albums and a run of hit singles throughout Europe at least. There was also her mega successful concerts with the two tenors.
I agree in that her solo live shows desperately needed a revamp, and became oh so predictable and rather stale. “I will, you will, we will” lol.
i don't know that i totally agree with this assessment either. and that's have the fun lol. her career is SO long and so many points of interest to dissect
it was not Diana that arranged the pairing with A&S [[either at the beginning of her career or with The Boss) nor did she arrange the work with Niles and Rodgers. motown handled the selection of the producers. What she did do was partner with Valerie and Nick on the content for The Boss in terms of discussing her feelings, ideas, wants, etc. It is also possible they reviewed a handful of songs - talking about the sound and tone, possible lyrics and content. it was probably pretty well know that the album would have 8 songs on it. that was pretty standard by 79. so that probably eliminated a lot of the "bonus tracks" we would have today. And A&S could have adjusted lyrics or material to better fit their discussions with her too.
And then sort of similar with the Chic team although my guess is that she had a little less involvement. sure they discussed things - like her wanting a simpler song her little girls could sing along with.
But in both cases, these were still the overall product of excellent production teams and in the label helping arrange these partnerships
at RCA, there were times she partnered with great producers - Perry on All of You [[and he at least helped clean up some of the mess of So Close for the single version), Ritchie, jackson, daryl hall. If she had turned over production control more often to others instead of doing it herself, the RCA would have at least resulted in better quality material, if not better sales and charts
I thought the story went that Diana had taken her children to see Chic in concert. Being impressed with their sound, she had later approached Nile and Bernard with regards to writing and producing her next album.
Do we honestly know for sure who was responsible for pairing Diana with A&S again for “The Boss” set. It was certainly her first album where Gordy is not credited in anyway, so that probably discounts him.
Regarding RHR&B, it is at least well produced and marked a return to a more traditional Diana Ross sound.
isn't gordy still listed as Executive Producer for The Boss? clearly that was mostly just a title rather than actually partnering with the team on the content. and maybe that was the link for bringing them back into the motown studios. sort of like the Hollands with the Supremes.
diana was hot as hell with her 76 album and Hangover. the problem is motown bungled any solid follow up. One Love is probably the next best dance track on the album but it pales compared to LH.
then in 77 she went on and did BIM. this is a glorious album but out of place, timing-wise. it was released in fall of 77 just prior to Saturday Night Fever and the total explosion of DISCO across the US. the content on BIM is too pop and lightweight to compete with the heavy dance songs like Stayin Alive and the others. had it been a year earlier or a couple years later, i think it would have been huge.
and in 78 she did Ross with some disco tunes but none truly massive ones, along the lines of LH.
So by 79, she was no longer really hot in the discos. back to back lp disappointments plus the Wiz debacle. i could see people in the motown offices saying "WTF - we need a surefire hit on DR." Michael Masser was all about lush ballads so he wasn't the answer. so who else had had massive hits with DR? A&S. plus they'd had a lot of recent successes themselves.
As i posted, i’m almost certain it was Diana herself who approached Nile and Bernard to write and produce the “diana” album for her.
As regards ”The Boss”, i guess we can only speculate. One can imagine Diana’s anger that Motown would follow a flop film with a dud of an album. It’s more then possible that being friends with A&S it was she who suggested teaming up again. Who knows?.
I do find it hard to believe at that crucial point in her career, and after the disaster of “Ross” she would have left the decision making entirely to the company.
Ross moving to New York might also have been a reason to reach out to producers who were working in the same city. Both The Boss and diana fit the whole "I'm now an independent woman living in Manhattan" vibe that was surrounding Diana Ross at the time: https://people.com/archive/cover-sto...z-vol-11-no-2/
Berry had "Executive Producer" on all Diana albums from LADY SINGS THE BLUES through AN EVENING WITH DIANA ROSS. BABY IT'S ME carried no executive producer credit but a "Special Thanks" to Berry and Suzanne dePasse.
ROSS [1978] was Diana's last album to have an "Executive Producer" credit for Berry.
From what I recall reading in J. Randy's books, THE BOSS was the first album that Berry had little or nothing to do with. Randy also wrote that the promotion for THE BOSS might have been half-hearted as some of the Motown staff resented Diana's growing independence around this time, with her starting her own company and such.
Randy mentions that Motown would make efforts to promote “The Boss” when Diana was around but curtailed it’s efforts when she was absent, being probably on the road.
A controlling attitude that Diana certainly inherited from BG.
It would be intriguing to know just what his final offer was to keep her with the company regarding creative control as opposed to monetary.
I don’t believe everything in Randy’s books, as you know a lot of the crap that he made up in the first one got added it out of the second one when they were proven to be untrue. There’s nothing wrong with an artist wanting to have some control over their career, if the folks at Motown didn’t like that she was wise to leave. I don’t believe it though because for an album with one single that barely scraped it to the top 20, it sold extremely well. Motown issued promo 12 inch singles on no one gets the prize, it’s my house , and the boss. Motown had very little to do with the chic album in the car well it did. Makes for a good story perhaps but I don’t believe it, unless somebody who was there told the story. JRT is not exactly a slave to the truth … he wanted to sell books And when he saw all the nonsense that Mary was able to perpetuate into dollars, I think he decided to do the same thing. At least he admitted some of his information was incorrect when it was proven to be incorrect, Mary never addressed it.