Funny that this thread comes up now as I was kind of thinking about this recently and the past fan discussions around this. As far as whether "It's All Been Said Before" would have been a hit over "He's My Man?" Personally, I've never been convinced. I think it's mostly wishful thinking among fans more than anything else [[nothing wrong with that either!
). That being said, I do think it's a good song and I can see why it would have been a contender. I recall it standing out for me when I first heard it on one of the
Diana Ross & The Supremes Anthology collections [[which didn't include HMM) from the 80s. But by the time I got the album, "He's My Man" is the one that really burst through the grooves for me. It's contemporary for the time, it's got a disco edge that places The Supremes exactly at the crossroads of where they needed to be at that time, IMO.
Interesting that it was Suzanne dePasse who was angling for "It's All Been Said.." as a single. My question has long been: did Motown in 1975 have the resources to get behind a pop single like this and take it all the way to the top? A pop single which didn't crossover from R&B or increasingly at the time, Disco first? Because personally, I have my doubts. To me "It's All Been Said Before," while a nice song on it's own, doesn't really have a great deal of R&B or Disco appeal. So if it died on the pop charts, then there would be nowhere else to go with it. "He's My Man" at least seemed to have more across-the-board appeal with Disco and R&B audiences. I can see how perhaps the argument would have been that there was more room to manoeuvre with it, at least potentially.
Not sure if Mary would have had veto power per se, but I'm sure her opinions would have been considered. She had talked about how she "
lost the battle with Motown" over things like the cover and title of
New Ways but Love Stays, for example. So, it seems to me that even if she didn't have the final say, she certainly would have had her opinions taken into consideration, or at least made sure that they were! In this case, it's likely that there would have been others at the corporate level who shared her opinion over Suzanne's.
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