New Valerie Simpson Interview
Valerie Simpson on life without Nick Ashford
Singer/songwriter deals with mortality after husband's death
Greg Kot/ Chicago Tribune
Valerie Simpson says she never really used to think much about posterity. After all, there was still so much work to be done with her musical partner and husband, Nick Ashford.
But then Ashford died last August at age 70 of complications from throat cancer, and Simpson, 65, came to grips with mortality, both personal and artistic.
"Nick's passing made me realize that one day we'll both be absent," she said in her first major interview since her longtime partner's death. "You see certain things that are happening now because of his passing, and I'm content to know that the music is everlasting."
Ashford and Simpson were triple-threat songwriters, producers and performers who had a hand in crafting dozens of hits that straddled the Motown, disco and MTV eras. They wrote signature tunes for Ray Charles [["Let's Go Get Stoned"), Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell [["You're All I Need to Get By"), Diana Ross [[her radical, Ashford-Simpson-produced remake of the Gaye-Terrell hit "Ain't No Mountain High Enough"), Chaka Khan [["I'm Every Woman"), among others.
From her office in New York this week, Simpson reflected on her life and what's ahead:
Q. How did you maintain both a marriage and a working relationship with your spouse?
A. We had the good fortune to be friends first, writing partners for eight years. He had other girlfriends and I had other guys in my life. I got to see how he really was, and vice versa. So when the romance came, we could skip over a whole lot of stuff [[laughs). At first, people would always wonder why we weren't a couple, and I'd say, "He's like a brother to me." Later on, he told me that really bugged him [[laughs).
Q. You met him when you were only 17 and playing gospel in a church choir in Harlem. What was Nick like?
A. When I met him, he had just come to New York [[from Michigan). We found out that he wrote gospel songs, and the gospel group we were part of needed new songs. He had a knack for lyrics. At the church, they had a piano and then there were rehearsal studios we could rent for $15, and we clicked. A person who came to our church and heard us sing gospel asked us if we could also write love songs, because he wanted to help us publish them. Pretty soon it was all about the area around 50th Street and Broadway, where publishers were looking for material.
Q. How did you come to work with Motown?
A. [[The legendary Motown songwriting and production team) Holland, Dozier, Holland came to New York scouting talent. We had pretty good demos, pretty developed. I'd play piano, and we'd put a little rhythm section on there because Scepter Records had given us a little space to do our songs. They were impressed with that, and the next thing I know we're going to Detroit, which is weird because that's where Nick had just come from. But I was ready to leave New York. Motown was the mecca. It was every writer's dream to work there.
Q. You ended up writing all the key hits for Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell. Did you request to work with them?
A. Harvey Fuqua and Johnny Bristol were producing Marvin and Tammi, and they asked us for material. We sent them 'Ain't No Mountain High Enough.' It's funny because Dusty Springfield had just come to town [[looking) for material. We played that song for her but wouldn't give it to her, because we felt like that could be our entree to Motown. Nick called it the "golden egg."
Q. You knew it was going to be a hit?
A. Oh, we knew that it was a hit. Sometimes you have real gut feeling about something. Then it becomes a question of what do you do with it, and who can carry it the furthest, and you start designing how you can get it to as many people as possible.
Q. Diana Ross has a reputation as a diva, difficult to work with. How was she working with you?
A. She came in prepared, she knew the songs, knew her lyrics. When you work with someone who knows what they want, even if she is a diva, we knew how to finesse it, how to stroke her. She also wanted hits, and she was very much about business.
Q. There are some Motown people who contend that near the end of Tammi Terrell's life [[she died in 1970 at age 24 of cancer), you had to step in and do some of her vocal parts on the albums with Marvin Gaye because she was too ill to perform. Is that true?
A. Tammi was very ill. We would have everything ready, the track and Marvin's vocal, and then I'd get her alone in the studio and we'd go line by line. There were a couple things that were tweaked, but not a lot. I couldn't just sing like Tammi. People give me the credit of thinking I could be Tammi Terrell, but it's just not true. We did some production edits to fix things, but that's about it.
Q. You transitioned from being behind the scenes in the '60s and early '70s as songwriters and producers to performing and recording as Ashford and Simpson in 1973. Was performing your own material always the goal?
A. No, the goal was to be songwriters first. We did a [[public-television) show called "Soul!" — the first time we had a TV appearance and got to sing and perform. They got so many letters, which clued us in that maybe we should try this. The timing was right. Our contracts at Motown, which were for seven years, were up around 1973. We asked them about being recording artists, and they were going to placate us, string us along, but they wanted us to remain a writing machine for the acts they had. They weren't taken with us as artists. I had done two solo albums for them, which they didn't do much to sell or promote. So the handwriting was on the wall to go somewhere else and do it. That's when we signed to Warner Bros. and started recording albums.
Q. Will you do any more recording?
A. I have to go one day at a time. I'm not used to him not being here yet. I'm open to music and hopefully his spirit will stay with me and give me a hint.
From The Detroit News: http://detnews.com/article/20111119/...#ixzz1eBwG0g6m
