May 12, 1940: Norman Whitfield is born.
Norman Whitfield was an unlikely star. By his own account he got into music because he “saw Smokey Robinson driving in a Cadillac.” A Harlem native, he would not move to Detroit, Michigan, until he was nineteen, and it had been, fatefully, Detroit, only because“his father’s car broke down there” on the way back from his grandmother’s funeral. After landing almost accidentally in this birthplace of the still-embryonic company known then as Tamla, Whitfield pestered, and impressed, Tamla’s ambitious founder, Berry Gordy. He landed a job in the company’s quality control department and before long, he had worked his way into songwriting and production. By then, Tamla had become Motown.
Described as “arguably the first black/African-American producer auteur,” Whitfield would go on to mastermind, behind the scenes at Motown, some of the most popular songs to ever come out of Hitsville USA and some of the most beloved songs of the era, full-stop: “Cloud Nine,” “Ball of Confusion,” “Just My Imagination (Running Away with Me),” “I Heard It Through the Grapevine,” “Papa Was a Rolling Stone,” “War” (later, under his own label, for a different sound and time, he would write and produce Rose Royce’s classic “Car Wash.”)
After establishing his hitmaking credibility, Whitfield crafted his own corner within Berry Gordy’s Motown machine. At Motown, the bottom line was, generally, the bottom line, which did not always necessarily encourage eclecticism let alone experimentation. But in this space, Whitfield stitched into his work the storms, in culture and sound, of the times, and introduced a little modern grit into the polish of product. He worked most famously and fruitfully (though not always cordially) with the Temptations, whom he helped direct toward a sound sometimes referred to as ‘psychedelic soul.’ Whitfield had at first hand-waved the sounds of psychedelia as faddish, its gimmicks as purely gimmicky, but he would end up cementing and disseminating them outside of rock as much as anyone.
Eventually he delved so deeply that his experimentation necessitated an entirely separate outfit, which became the group the Undisputed Truth. Some of the Temptations had become disgruntled with Whitfield’s focus on production and his rich instrumentation, which meandered along its own sense and disregarded their vocals. They would hardly have agreed to become the vehicle for his productions, so there was much reason in this; for example, the Temptations’ version of “Ball of Confusion” ran a standard 4 minutes. The version that appeared on The Undisputed Truth (1971) allowed Whitfield the space of a trippy 10 minutes. Whitfield relished this experimental, indulgent work, but he also produced lean masterpieces, such as Marvin Gaye’s “I Heard It Through the Grapevine.”
In their earliest years, the Temptations were best known for sweet, smooth love songs like “My Girl,” working in the general spirit of the highly pop-conscious ‘Motown Sound.’ In 1968, Dennis Coffey, a Motown studio guitarist, recalled this exchange, which gave shape to the Temptations’ wonderfully skittering “Cloud Nine:” During a recording session, Coffey pulled out a wah-wah pedal. The now-iconic effect was still earning its associations with the hippie late 1960s, as “psychedelia’s non-psychotropic aid,” onstage at Woodstock and San Francisco, in the music of Jimi Hendrix, Cream, Sly and the Family Stone. Whitfield might have thought Sly Stone a fad, at first, but Coffey started playing, and Whitfield heard, and he knew: “That’s what I’m looking for!”
The wah-wah was only one signature, but it was a defining one. Several of Whitfield’s compositions would feature session guitarist Melvin Ragin (better known as “Wah Wah” Watson) and his “chugging, funky, wild wah-wah groove:” in, for example (and perhaps most famously and most gloriously), “Papa Was a Rolling Stone.”