A Cellarful of Motown
Motown actively discouraged stylistic variety–it was official company policy to follow up a hit with as close an imitation as possible, and only a few successful hit makers like Marvin Gaye and Stevie Wonder ever gained creative control. Cellarful offers not just another look at Holloway’s career, but a new lens through which to view Motown’s familiar history, defining the label by what it did not release as much as what it did. And Holloway’s story illustrates the sad, obvious point that an artist and her label don’t always share the same goals. Motown’s obsessive quality control made no space for artists whose personas deviated from the label’s strict expectations. Maybe Brenda Holloway was right. Maybe she should have been a star.
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Several of the unreleased tracks on Cellarful showcase Holloway’s best-acted role: the woman struggling (and generally succeeding) to remain graceful as her heart breaks. Holloway merely maintains her composure on “My World is Crumbling,” but on the apologetic “How Can I” she rises above her pain entirely. After her backup singers deliver a staccato “How can I,” Holloway stretches “goooo onnn” so proudly it’s easy to forget the desperation written into the lyric.
The stringent practices of Motown’s quality control team, which held weekly sessions to decide which recordings would be released, clearly affected Holloway. By 1968 she had released only one album. She had had enough. She wrote Gordy a letter claiming that the company discriminated against her. “During my four and one-half years as an artist with Motown, there have been four other artists who affiliated with Motown less than two years, who have had several hits and also one to two album releases,” she wrote. She also complained that, unlike other artists, she was responsible for her own choreography and “personal grooming,” and that she was not receiving film work or being scheduled to perform in Las Vegas. Gordy never officially responded to these charges, and let her contract lapse.
