MaMotown Records famously churned out songs like an assembly line, and the songwriting team Holland, Dozier, Holland (HDH) (brothers Eddie and Brian Holland and the late Lamont Dozier) forged some of the company’s most illustrious and feel-good models, penning such mega-hits as Martha Reeves and the Vandellas’ “Heat Wave,” The Four Tops’ “Reach Out I’ll Be There” and 10 of The Supremes’ 12 No. 1s in the US charts. Yet while HDH’s tenure at Motown has been rightly celebrated, their later work has been largely ignored in comparison, despite its thrilling soulfulness, stylistic diversity and sharp political content (included in the new vinyl box set).
HDH’s time at Motown ended in disaster. Around 1967, they tried to renegotiate their years-old contract on fairer terms, but were repeatedly rebuffed by Motown elder Berry Gordy. Dozier wrote in his autobiography that HDH then “effectively went on strike” and “stopped turning in songs” in protest.
I asked Eddie Holland, now 84, fresh from a holiday in Turkey, if this was true. “Absolutely not,” he said, explaining that the hiatus for HDH was to allow for a stronger record. He blamed Motown’s lawyers for stoking tensions between Gordy and HDH: “I could have explained it to Berry, but I didn’t want to. I said, Enough already.” Things got worse: Motown sued HDH, the three countersued, and it took until 1972 for a settlement. “It cost us all, I don’t know, hundreds of thousands of dollars, but the only people who won financially were the lawyers,” Gordy later wrote.
After his relationship with Motown fell apart, Eddie founded two new record labels, Hot Wax and Invictus, with several former Motown staffers, including producer and A&R man Ronald Dunbar. Though Eddie was free to sign and produce new talent, HDH’s contract with Motown forbade him from writing for other companies, so songs often bore the credits of Dunbar and a fictional character named after Eddie’s then-girlfriend, Edith Wayne. “We just had to put somebody’s name on it!” Dozier told The Guardian in 2015. “Everybody knew it was Holland Dozier Holland.” (Eddie wouldn’t say much more, but in his memoirs, co-written with Brian, he says Dunbar contributed songs, but “not as many as he gets credited for.”)
The first song on the R. Dunbar, E. Wayne list was Honey Cone’s “While You’re Out Looking for Sugar.” Eddie was hungry for a girl group to emulate HDH’s success with the Supremes, and after seeing Edna Wright, Carolyn Willis and Shelley Clark singing backup for Andy Williams, he approached them. Clark, who had also sung with Ike Turner, wasn’t so sure: “I had heard from some of the artists that they weren’t happy. [at Motown] “They were out of control,” she told me, and she began avoiding Eddie’s calls, “but the guilt just grew.” With Clark’s reluctant approval, Honey Cone was formed and reached the top of the US Hot 100 chart in June 1971 with the catchy “Want Ads.”
If Honey Cone was the Supremes on Hot Wax, The Chairman’s of Board was the Four Tops on Invictus. Eddie engineered the group so that all members could share lead vocals, but General Norman Johnson emerged as the frontman. Founding member Harrison Kennedy spoke fondly of the band members: “Eddie [Custis] I could make birds sing from the trees. Danny [Woods] “He could knock a bird out of a tree, and General Johnson could make a tree grow!” Johnson’s choppy, staccato voice powers their song “Give Me Just a Little More Time,” a hit in both the US and the UK.
Meanwhile, Invictus’ leading female solo artist is Frida Payne. After struggling to find mainstream success as a jazz vocalist, Payne looked to artists like Diana Ross and Dionne Warwick for inspiration. Today, she reflects on her thought process: “They were singing pop and R&B… maybe this is what I should be doing,” and officially signed to Invictus.
Payne’s single “Band of Gold,” named by The Guardian as one of the UK’s greatest number one hits, is surely the most enduring song from HDH’s post-Motown records. The song is about a marriage that is mysteriously unconsummated. Payne recalls his confusion when he first read the lyrics: “‘But we stayed in different rooms that night on our honeymoon.’ What on earth? The bride is getting married. We know it’s the honeymoon, we’re going to be intimate, right?” Dozier explained in his autobiography, “This guy couldn’t make love to his new wife because he was gay.” This subtext sparked speculation in the press at the time of its release, but Payne claims that the song’s female narrator was “insensitive” and that Eddie was simply singing about a man who “couldn’t get it on.” Whatever the interpretation, the song was a huge hit.
In fact, despite lacking the promotional tools of Motown, Hot Wax/Invictus had churned out some hits by 1971. The album is full of HDH’s melodic genius, but has a rougher texture than his Motown-era work, and the new songwriters offer more range.[The sound] “It was a lot freer than Motown,” agrees McKinley Jackson, the in-house arranger for The Politicians, a band that played throughout the catalogue. “It was less formatted, less structured,” he continues, pointing to country-flavored songs like “Gut Bucket Blues” from Chairman of the Board’s self-titled track and Clarence Carter’s “Patches,” a Top Five hit in the U.S. and the U.K. “We weren’t trying to sound like Motown,” Eddie says. “We just thought the hits were hits.”
So Hot Wax/Invictus diversified their lineup beyond Motown archetypes, signing George Clinton’s psychedelic funk band, white rock bands like Parliament and Flaming Ember, and the British singer Ruth Copeland, whose recording The Medal is a heavy rock epic about a woman who accepts a medal on behalf of her husband who was killed in Vietnam. “It’s a small thing to get for your husband’s life in a stupid war,” she told me, in a powerful reference to President Richard Nixon. “I wanted to scream at him. [in the song],I did so.”
“The Medal” was one of several Hot Wax/Invictus songs to denounce the Vietnam War, along with Chairman of the Board’s ominous “Men Are Getting Scarce” and Payne’s anthem “Bring the Boys Home.” Though the latter was a minor hit, Eddie recalled that they “had a hard time promoting it,” and that radio stations received public complaints that the song was anti-government. The song was eventually banned on military networks in Southeast Asia.
Hot Wax/Invictus songs also connected with the women’s liberation movement, most inspiringly coming from the raspy-voiced Laura Lee. “Girls, when you cut the cake / Don’t make a big mistake,” she warns on Wedlock is a Padlock, and calls for liberation on Love and Liberty and Women’s Love Rights. “I’m not interested in women’s liberation,” Lee told Blues & Soul magazine in 1972. “I’m interested in women’s love!” Still, tracks like Glass House’s bluesy Crumbs Off the Table and Honey Cone’s Are You Man Enough, Are You Strong Enough? feature more outspoken female voices. “It was very empowering,” Honey Cone’s Clark says of the songs, crediting the young, mostly male writers, including Greg Perry, Angelo Bond, General Johnson and HDH themselves. “I think they jumped into the female body and said, ‘If I wanted to sing to a man, what would I say?’
Despite all this successful, socially conscious songwriting, most of the artists I spoke to shared their issues with not being paid enough. (After I put my allegations to Eddie, his representative said he had “no comment on the questions posed.”)
Freda Payne sued Invictus, writing in her memoir that she “received no financial compensation for my work.” The suit was settled out of court, Payne recorded one final album with Invictus, and her contract was bought out by a new label, ABC/Dunhill. She said that her dispute with Invictus was complicated by her romantic relationship with Eddie. “I thought I loved him, which only exacerbated the feelings of anger and disrespect,” she said, before clarifying, “We’re OK now, friends.”
Honeycorn also ultimately fizzled. “We were tired all the time,” says Clark, who feels her initial skepticism about forming the group was justified. “I wanted to say, [to my bandmates]”‘Hey, I told you bitches what this was going to be like before we started!'” she laughs.
Dozier’s enthusiasm for the project also waned, despite releasing his own material on Invictus: “When you’re working with your brother you always feel like an outsider,” he later wrote. Dozier signed with ABC/Dunhill in 1973 to pursue a solo recording career and quietly moved to Los Angeles, only to find further legal disputes erupting, this time between himself, ABC, and the Holland brothers.
“Lamont always wanted to be on his own for many years,” Eddie says, noting that Gordy had a special “respect” for Brian, whom Eddie calls a “real melody man.” Lamont didn’t like that one bit, noting that the subsequent feud between the Hollands and Dozier “took a toll on me emotionally.” [my lawyers] Lamont said: “Lamont was like a brother to us. … We’re not going to fight him. We’ll see what he wants and let it go.” Dozier wrote that he was eventually released from his Hot Wax/Invictus contract in exchange for giving up ownership of those companies, but the trio reunited to work with the Four Tops in the 1980s when the iconic group returned to Motown. Eddie remembers that Dozier had reached out about two years before his death, eager to reunite the HDH partnership. “If you want to do Holland-Dozier-Holland, I’d be happy to do it,” Eddie told Lamont. “But he just got sick.” Dozier passed away in August 2022.
After Dozier left in 1973, the hits for Hot Wax and Invictus dried up, and his new label, Music Merchant, was not a success: Eddie claims that Capitol did not understand black audiences at the time, and that he started his own division to sell Invictus records in black neighborhoods, “spending $250,000 out of our budget every year.”
Though short-lived, HDH’s post-Motown project left behind an impressive catalogue; this article cannot begin to cover the extensive lineup of artists, including The Barrino Brothers, Melvin Davis, Eloise Rose, Tyrone Edwards and 100 Proof (Aged in Soul). Eddie’s own favourite song remains “Give Me Just a Little More Time.” “I don’t like listening to most of the records I make,” he admits, “but I’ll turn the radio back on to hear this one!”
