Someday We’ll Be Together

Bruce Springsteen’s cover of Someday We’ll Be Together sent me back to Diana Ross & the Supremes’ original, a song that I misread when it came on the radio at the tail end of 1969.

Up to that point, it was difficult to think of the Supremes as “soulful.” Their records were hooky little sugar cookies, but Ross’ vocals often seemed a little too cool, emotionally detached. What grabbed me about Someday We’ll Be Together was that male voice in the background, distant enough that he sounds like he’s standing in a hallway outside the studio, and like something out of a black church sermon with his echoing “say it” and “sing it.”

My misconception was that I always thought it was one of the Temptations; after all, hadn’t the two groups cut an album together with the unwieldy title, Diana Ross & the Supremes Join the Temptations?

Turns out the “preacher” is Johnny Bristol, one of the song’s three co-authors. His idea was to sing with Ross to push her a bit and get her into the right mood. When an engineer accidentally recorded Bristol’s words of encouragement, the Motown brass thought it added something and kept it in. Bristol’s coaching seems to have worked as Ross' vocals gets a little more heated as the song goes on.

The record was originally intended to be her first solo single, so neither Mary Wilson or Cindy Birdsong are on it (which might also help account for the song's different feel from what they’d recorded before). One of the background singers is Merry Clayton, a first-call singer when white rockers were looking for a little touch of gospel (see Neil Young’s The Old Laughing Lady, Lynyrd Skynyrd’s Sweet Home Alabama and especially the Stones’ Gimme Shelter). And just to stretch these connections even further, Clayton was married to jazz saxophonist Curtis Amy, who played the smoking solo on the fadeout of the Door’s Touch Me.

Ross’ first solo single instead, released in early 1970, was Reach Out and Touch (Somebody's Hand), a song choice more in line with the Las Vegas/Copacabana aspirations Berry Gordy had for her.

Someday We’ll Be Together remains one of the songs from the time period that wasn’t specifically about Vietnam, but could certainly be interpreted that way, along with I Say A Little Prayer, Last Train to Clarksville and Leaving On A Jet Plane. It was also the last number one hit of the 1960s, hitting the top spot on the Billboard chart dated December 27, 1969. For those keeping score, the first #1 single of the decade was Marty Robbins’ El Paso.

 

Favorite TV Show Episode Blogathon: 

I Spy: Home to Judgement 

The Story 

Government agents Kelly Robinson and Alexander Scott are on the run. They’ve botched an assignment, been captured – likely tortured – and escaped. Now they scramble through cornfields and countryside as silent, faceless enemy agents track them. Kelly wears a shackle around one ankle. He’s wounded and feverish. 

They stumble across a farmhouse that Kelly realizes belongs to his Uncle Harry (Will Geer) and Aunt Alta (Una Merkel), whom he hasn’t seen for 27 years. He and Scott hide out in a hayloft. 

Kelly is in bad shape, and as he recites the names of the comic strips he read during his teenage summers on the farm, Scott comes out of hiding and offers to help Uncle Harry with his chores in return for food, which he sneaks back to Kelly. Their trackers, meantime, are closing in. 

Will Geer and Robert Culp

Uncle Harry and Aunt Alta realize something is amiss and Kelly is discovered. Uncle Harry, suspicious of these two strangers, tries calling the sheriff, but the telephone is dead. He asks his wife to bring the car around; he’ll drive them to the sheriff himself. Kelly stops his aunt, and a search confirms that the stalkers have wired dynamite to the car’s starter. 

AUNT ALTA: Who are you? What’s your name? 

KELLY: It doesn’t matter. You couldn’t possibly know me. If you remember me at all it would be as a child – who doesn’t exist anymore. (Holding up the dynamite sticks). This is what I am now. And this is what I brought you. 

With the farmhouse now completely cut off, the truth is that the enemies coming after Kelly and Scott will wait until dark, then storm the house and kill everyone. 

Taking inventory of his uncle’s firearms, Kelly asks about a .22 that once belonged to him, and in doing so, reveals himself. 

KELLY: It was mine. But I couldn’t take it back to the city with me and boarding school, so at the end of summer, I left it here, with you. 

UNCLE HARRY: Kelly? Why, it’s Kelly. 

KELLY: You put two nails on the wall in the kitchen. And your 30-30 (Winchester) was on it, for me to take down, when I was tall enough to reach it. The next summer. I would have made it too, because I was tall and skinny the next summer, but that winter my mom died. Next summer never came. And now I’ve come and wished I hadn’t. 

Aunt Alta tears up and Kelly chokes back a sob. His training won’t allow for emotional breakdowns, but what’s implied is that the price for “swingin’ on the Riviera one day,” as Johnny Rivers sang on Secret Agent Man, is emotionally immense. “We’re poison,” Kelly says. “Everything we touch gets contaminated.” 

But it’s getting dark, and this isn’t a time for self-reflection. Working with what’s on hand – two hunting rifles, some barbed wire, homemade explosives in plastic bags, hurricane lamps, fuses for blasting tree stumps and the dynamite sticks taken from the car, Kelly, Scott, Uncle Harry and Aunt Alta prepare to defend themselves. And wait. 

It’s night and the sound of the cicadas give way to footsteps on the roof and in the storm cellar. 

As the intruders try to break into the darkened house, the climax of Home to Judgement is a crescendo of violence and intensity – as much as the networks might allow back then. Electrified barb wire. Explosions. Gunshots. Lit by car headlights or flares. Even the family Dalmatian gets into the action going up against a snarling hound used to hunt down Kelly and Scott.  

Since this is network television, you can guess the outcome. In the final scene, Kelly and Scott walk back to the highway, Kelly holding the rifle his uncle promised him as a teen. He’s smiling for the first time. You can go home again. 

The Script

Robert Culp’s script for Home to Judgement was nominated for an Emmy for Outstanding Writing Achievement in a Drama.

Uncle Harry and Aunt Alta are based on Culp’s own grandparents, whose farm was in Idaho. “The story Kelly tells about the two rifles is true,” Culp said. “My children and grandchildren will always have this little magic carpet to take them back to a better time, the way I remember it.”

Synchronicity

Home to Judgement was broadcast as the networks’ fascination with secret agents was running on fumes. One week after it aired on Jan. 8, 1968, The Man from U.N.C.L.E. broadcast its final episode. I Spy survived until April 1968. 

One of the comic strips Kelly remembers in the hayloft is Terry and the Pirates. At the time of his death in 2010, Culp was working on a film adaptation of Terry and the Pirates that he was to direct. It was his favorite boyhood comic strip. 

Straw Dogs

Culp originally wanted Sam Peckinpah to direct Home to Judgement. They had a long relationship working on television projects together. 

One could guess that Peckinpah saw Home to Judgement and may have had it in the back of his mind when he directed Straw Dogs (1971). Both share a common reference point of a violent finale of homemade traps in a darkened house and a hero redeemed. 

You can also draw a straight line from Home to Judgement, through Straw Dogs, to Home Alone (1990). While they take different routes to get there, they share similar final acts, even if the violence in Home Alone is more along the lines of a living Warner Brothers cartoon. A crew member on Home Alone said, “I kept telling people we were doing a kids version of Straw Dogs.”

Only The Strong Survive

Albums of all cover versions can fall into a couple of different areas. Some are contractual obligations. An artist owes the record company an album and what’s easier than recording a bunch of songs you don’t have to labor over writing.

Sometimes they’re pay-it-back tributes to music that influenced an artist, like David Bowie’s Pin-Ups. Or indulgent crate-digging through an artist’s record collection (see Elvis Costello’s Kojak Variety).

Bruce Springsteen’s Only The Strong Survive falls into the former, a heartfelt revisiting of soul and R&B standards and half-remembered songs that once clipped the lower regions of the Top 40. It’s Springsteen’s passion and commitment – his strong and expressive voice – that puts this record over. That and the arrangements, all of which fall close to the originals and feature an army of backup singers, Motown strings, Stax horns.

The song titles give away the ground he’s covering here: When She Was My Girl (Four Tops), I Wish It Would Rain (Temptations), Don’t Play That Song (Aretha), Turn Back the Hands of Time (Tyrone Davis) – heartache and regret were no strangers to soul music. There’s an unexpected cover of the Commodore’s 1985 tribute to the recently departed Marvin Gaye and Jackie Wilson, Nightshift, a song that deals with another kind of loss and a subject that Springsteen seems preoccupied with lately.

Jerry Butler’s 1968 hit Hey Western Union Man is a reminder that once upon a time, songs that referenced telegrams and made use of that dot-dash cadence were big hits, like Western Union by the Five Americans.

Whether purposefully or not (and I tend to think that as with most Springsteen projects, a lot of thought went into the song selection), a few songs fit right into the artist’s persona. The Motown oldie from 1966, What Becomes of the Brokenhearted (Jimmy Ruffin), opens with a line that sure sounds like something Springsteen would have written on one of his better days: “As I walk this land of broken dreams/I have visions of many things/But happiness is just an illusion/Filled with sadness and confusion.”

Someday We’ll Be Together is not just a cover of the underrated Supremes hit from late 1969, but a title he used for a song intended for Darkness on the Edge of Town that didn’t make the final cut.

The Four Tops’ version of 7 Rooms of Gloom always felt chaotic and unpleasant. You can make out the lyrics in Springsteen’s version better and it takes on the life of the midnight ranting of a man whose wife has left him. He can’t sleep and as he roams his house in the dark, bumping into the furniture, it recalls Springsteen’s own line from Adam Raised A Cain about walking “these empty rooms looking for something to blame.”

If I have a single complaint, it’s the album cover. Hey Bruce, it’s okay to smile occasionally. And stop posing in front of cars. Brian Wilson hasn’t been photographed with a surfboard since the Kennedy administration.

Bruce has taken many paths over the course of his long career. Sometimes, there are detours that leave me cold, but this album is not one of them.

 

My All-Time Greatest Albums, part two

With the understanding that the music you love when you’re young always seems more exciting, more essential, I came up with a truly personal All-Time Greatest Albums list. 

In the days before albums became Artistic Statements, the Ventures were knocking out one record after another, all of which could be filed under the heading “teenage dance party music.” Between 1962 and 1967, they released 22 albums of instrumental rock, 13 of which reached the top 40. Their most successful single during this time, Walk Don’t Run ’64, went to #8. 

The kids in my neighborhood lined up to buy the latest Ventures’ release and for decades, thumbing through someone’s record collection or a box of albums in a garage sale or a flea market, you were always bound to come across, usually looking worse for the wear, at least one Ventures album. 

My initiation was Christmas 1965 when I found Ventures A Go-Go under the tree. Ventures’ albums were as predictable as mail delivery, and Ventures A Go-Go met the same criteria as all other Ventures albums. A quick listen? Both sides of the record, taken together, clocked in at under 30 minutes. Recent Top 40 covers? Satisfaction; Louie, Louie; The In Crowd; Wooly Bully; I Like It Like That. A bunch of original songs cooked up by the band in the studio, with interrelated titles? They’re listed right there on the back of the record: Go-Go Slow, A Go-Go Guitar, A Go-Go Dancer. Special guitar effects? Some fuzz tone here and there, certainly on Satisfaction. A pretty girl on the album cover? She’s in blurry motion, but it still counts. 

I was only ten-years old, but I figured I had the soundtrack for my first teenage dance party. All I needed was a few more years and have, like Sam Cooke sang in Having A Party, “Cokes are in the icebox/Popcorn's on the table.” Instead, my parents held what used to be referred to as an “open house” that New Year’s Day, with other couples and family. I played Ventures A Go-Go on their stereo as background party music. Nobody got up to dance. 

I really scratched my Ventures itch in the 80s and 90s, picking up a bunch of their records at several of the aforementioned flea markets. Their Christmas album, which came out two months after Ventures A Go-Go, still gets played every holiday season. The first one was still the best.