Gladys Knight: Nitty Gritty : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

Every Motown group must have at least one super-stone masterpiece, a production so powerful it moves you far past the boundaries that keep you from bestowing the obsessions on most soul music that you get almost daily in hard rock. Martha and the Vandellas capsulized the summer of '64 in one smoky vision in "Dancin' in the Streets," and I still get chills every time I hear Stevie Wonder's "I Was Made to Love Her." When I first heard Gladys Knight and the Pips' "I Heard It Through the Grapevine" on the radio, I stopped stockstill and just listened, openmouthed, to the most searing single I'd heard in months. Gladys and the Pips don't occupy the top stratum of the Motown pantheon, but they have sustained themselves beautifully while continuing to release some of the most powerful soul blasts around: last year's "The End of Our Road" was a searing rage-filled exorcism in the great "Grapevine" tradition. After listening to their last three LP's, their strategy becomes obvious: divide the material about equally between violent outer-edge wailers, standardized Motown soul grooves that sometimes harken far back as the Fifties, and the tamest, lushest of "sweet-soul" stylings.

At first you feel the urge to skip the lush ballads and make a beeline for the grinding bedrock. When I first got these albums, I played Feelin' Bluesy constantly, dipped into Nitty Gritty on occasion, and filed Silk 'n' Soul impatiently away after one half-completed playing. After a while, though, I found myself beginning to dig their soft sides almost as much as the churning blues, and before I knew it I was playing Silk 'n' Soul repeatedly and listening to it in amazement at the sincere bluesy melancholy Gladys imparted to such slices of pure schmaltz as "Theme From Valley of the Dolls" and "The Look of Love." Maybe it's true when they say that a true artist can make any kind of shit, no matter how intractable, into something beautiful. The reason it's so convincing here is that the treatment Gladys gives those lame Broadway/Hollywood shots seems like a radically toned-down expression of that same fierce urgency with which she ignites songs like "Grapevine." The tenderness so often has just the tangy edge of ever-so-subtle bitterness, with none of the oozing, gushing histrionics all those white chicks give these songs on the Merv Griffin Show.

Nitty Gritty is a beautifully balanced album, with a refreshing variety to the songs and arrangements. Aside from a "Cloud Nine" almost identical to the Tempts' version, there's not a dull or banal moment on the album, and one song, "The Stranger," is extraordinarily good, with an unusual melody and arrangement as haunting as some of Martha and the Vandellas' old masterpieces like "Dancin' in the Streets," impressing its subtle twists of tone and feeling in your consciousness until it's the first thing you play on getting home from a day of it running mesmeric circles in your head. Shirley Ellis' old "Nitty Gritty" also gets a gutty, propulsive workout.

But Feelin' Bluesy has still gotta be my favorite, because this is where Gladys and the Pips excel: on the one hand, throat-wrenchingly soulful ballads that pass the usual Motown pyrotechnics to touch the heart; on the other, showcase pieces like "The End of Our Road"—burning, incredibly intense blues shouts slashing through charging, grinding rhythms as razor-edged chorus exclamations explode from the Pips with sizzling ferocity.

Many more albums like these, and Motown just might reclaim its lost throne as supreme force in the soul music industry. In any case, the rewards for our ears are all right here, right now.