ARTIST: The Supremes
FORMAT: 7" 45 RPM
TITLE: "The Happening" & "All I Know About You"
YEAR: 1967
LABEL: Motown Records
50 years ago this month "The Happening" topped the Billboard singles charts. The film this song supported, also titled "The Happening," flopped and was widely panned. (Bosley Crowther's New York Times review ends viciously: "It isn't as long as 'Lawrence of Arabia,' and that's the only good thing to be said for it.").
Both the song and film were, in some way, inspired by artist Allan Kaprow's concept of a "happening": a somewhat spontaneous, somewhat planned art event, often involving the audience as participant rather than observer. Happenings aimed to inhabit and expand the shared space between art and life, blurring the boundaries like a pair of discarded glasses drawing crowds at a gallery. It was a movement contemporaneous with John Cage's conceptual performances and Fluxus' playful, avant-garde re-configuration of art practice.
It's hard to imagine the out-there work of Kaprow making its way into pop vernacular ("What's happening?") and spawning a hit song and wide-release film, but it did. In fact, it caught on so much that Kaprow promptly ditched the term, feeling that it had escaped him and been mis-appropriated. The Supremes' song, however, written by super team Holland-Dozier-Holland along with Frank De Vol (the film version's music director), has some striking lines that allude, quite faithfully, to Kaprow's work. They cleverly refract happenings through the perfunctory romantic context of a Supremes song:
Hey life, look at me
I can see the reality
'Cause when you shook me, took me, outta my world
I woke up
Suddenly I just woke up to the happening
Is it real?
Is it fake?
Is this game of life a mistake?
I like to believe that these references to seeing differently and acknowledging artifice are riffs on the meta-commentary that happenings offered the art world.
Beyond the surprising allusions in the lyrics, there's another power to this track and other Motown singles like it: they're just flat out louder. This is something I've noticed while digitally transferring Motown music alongside other labels. It seems the Motown formula was not just to be universally and irresistibly appealing, but to shock you to attention. In a way they had their own Spector-esque "wall of sound." Instead of deep, resonant reverb (although there is a bit of that) there's highly emotive performances, both vocally and instrumentally. "The Happening" could be a fairly low key R&B song, but it is instead a flood of noise jarred by some tempo changes. In some ways it mirrors Diana Ross's radiant performances, which crackled with personality in a way you didn't see very often in groups of the era. She was able to balance the Motown-mandated live-performance polish with a Diana-specific flourish of casual, personable gesture and delivery.
You can see this personality -- winks, nods, and bobs -- in The Supreme's performance of the song from The Ed Sullivan Show, a show The Supremes performed on many times, but this one was a bit more special. It just so happened that "The Happening" hit during the Montreal World's Fair -- branded Expo 67 -- and Ed Sullivan was broadcasting live from the event. The Supremes traveled to Montreal to perform live on the show on Sunday, May 7, 1967.
The Supremes at Expo 67 in Montreal
I bet my mom watched this live. The Supremes were ever-present when I was growing up with her in the suburbs of Detroit. My mom would listen exclusively to Oldies 104.3 (WOMC) during car rides and at home, and as a byproduct I know the lyrics to just about every major Motown single. "The Happening," however, is missing from my memory. The first time I heard this song wasn't a cigarette smoke-filled car ride to the local coney island, but when I started writing this post.
Since my mom died, I've been thinking a lot about these tiny unknowable details about her life, and all life, that disappear in death: every memory, decision, thought, conversation, experience, movement, sensation, emotion, creation, and on and on. So much of this is shed like skin throughout life, but, if my mom is anything like me, a lot is purposefully locked away. We accumulate a lot and share only a little in sanctioned bits of confession -- a spontaneous heart-to-heart, a drunken night, a post-breakup email, a funeral. Some are better at this than others, but I've always found it mentally and physically challenging to express myself. I think my mom did too. I mean let's be clear here: this blog scares the shit out of me. I worry it's bad, self-indulgent, pretentious. As I type I'm fighting the urge to delete it all and retreat.
I continue it would seem out of a sense of service to these unknowable aspects of my mom's former life. That is, after all, the pitch behind this project. But, if I'm being honest, it's a facade to protect the liminal, risky space my mom's death opened up here between what I've lived and performed, experienced and communicated. That is, I hope, something worth saying.