What sound is closer to a coffin lid being slammed shut for all eternity—the endless sepulchral chord that ends “A Day in the Life” (and Sgt. Pepper, fifteen weeks at #1 starting in June 1967), or Diana Ross singing, “And there ain’t nothin’ I can do about it” on “You Keep Me Hangin’ On”? (#1 for two weeks in November 1966).
For my money, it’s the Supremes singing the kind of pop song that, in all its ambition and vanity, Sgt. Pepper meant to leave in the dust. “A Day in the Life” remains unsettling—it is still, with the possible exception of David Bowie’s “Five Years,” the closest thing pop music has given us to a theme for the end of world. John Lennon’s faraway vocal relating one atrocity after another in a voice that barely registers them emotionally, is, as with everything else on that album, very conscious of the desired effect while trying not to cop to the affect. Like the album it closes, it’s as good as a fundamentally pretentious piece of art can be.
“You Keep Me Hangin’ On” was, on the other hand, the product of a factory, one of the expert tunes written for the Supremes by the team of Lamont Dozier and the brothers Brian and Eddie Holland, who were also responsible for the song’s heartstopping production. (The song was the first single off the LP The Supremes Sing Holland-Dozier-Holland.) Like everything from Motown in those days, it was slick, calculated, and came at you with the confidence of a song that knows it’s a hit before anyone even knows its name. The sheen and engineering behind it were what would very shortly be looked down on as rock ‘n’ roll ceded to rock (or “rawk!”) and people came to accept the idiocy that the authentic artists were the ones who wrote their own material (tell it to Maria Callas). You can hear that dumbness in full flower on the appalling seven-and-a-half minute cover version the horror that was Vanilla Fudge rode to #6 (cut down to three minutes) the following year. (This was the version on which Rod Stewart, backed by Fudge drummer Carmine Appice, based his 1977 cover.) The only honesty in this lummox of a version, in which any trace of real musical or vocal emotion is replaced by bombast, comes in the first word of the band’s name: only white people could groove to this. (The best cover is Kim Wilde’s, #1 twenty years after the original in 1986.)
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