Interview with Lamont Dozier
TAXI's Living Legend
Award Honoree

You are an unbelievably humble guy. I knew that about you last time you were here. I felt it the other night at dinner. Your humility bowls me over. You've been known to say, "I'm only human," that "...these songs are just the makings of God and [you] are nothing more than the antenna." So, after you've been blessed with this God-given talent. Does it take more? Were you touched on the head and imbued with this wonderful ability? Did you have to work at the craft over the years? Did it take persistence?
Yes. All of that. You have to love music first. If you're in it just to make money... Songwriters are a special breed. I like to think of them as God's angels on earth, going around spreading their little fairy dust, you know what I mean? And that's what a lot of us think we are, little angels spreading the word of fellowship and all of that. But it's a good thing, and I think we are. Those of us who want to change the world with our music for the better, meaning giving of ourselves, not for personal gain, but to do things that music has always been, I think, the forerunner to getting people together.

Lamont Dozier sharing one of his secrets to hit songwriting at the TAXI Road Rally.

When I joined Motown what I wanted to get across with the people at Motown was to create music for everybody, because before then it was all what they called "race music," or R&B music specifically for the black community. I came up there and I talked to a couple of guys in the A&R department, and they said, "One thing you've got to get straight, man. This is a black company and we do that." And I said, "Why?" Then somebody goes, "What do you mean, why?" And I said, "Because music is for everybody. Everybody's got a soul, everybody's got a spirit. What are you doin'? What are you talkin' about?"

With that thought in mind, and what I added to the equation becoming one of the architects of the Motown sound, we became the sound of young America. We became the sound of the world, of mankind. And that was my goal-to make people come together through the music, and they have through our participation in the music field. I mean, I've had people come up to me in some of the rural areas, areas of country music. Guys will come up to me when I go to Nashville and say, "Welcome home, baby," because they feel that I'm one of them, because they are songwriters, and the Country community, they write from the heart. And anybody that writes from the heart-whether it's Country, Jazz, or whatever-they are trying to touch mankind and trying to tell people, "Hey, c'mon, get on board. We're gonna all do this together." It's everybody being there together to make something beautiful happen.

Isn't it funny how radio has changed so much? I was born in 1954 and grew up with the music of the '60s.
Oh, you're just a year older than me. That's cool [laughs].

So, I grew up hearing your music on the same station that you could hear Led Zeppelin on. There were no color lines, there were no formats. I often wonder why the music industry hasn't gone back to that, because it worked so much better.
That's the way it was in England. We moved to England for a couple years. They only had one chart. Basically, the stations would jump from Country to R&B to Jazz, all on one station.

Your song titles alone tell the story. You excel so well in taking base emotions that we all feel and crafting them into these memorable moments and phrases that we can't forget—"Give me just a little more time," "Where did our love go?" "Reach out and I'll be there," "My world is empty without you." How can the people in this room as songwriters learn how to tap so directly into common emotions and craft them so eloquently into five, six, seven words that become a hook?

You were telling a great story at dinner the other night about sweeping the floors at the beauty salon. That's where a lot of your ideas for writing your songs came from. Could you tell these guys that story? I loved it.
My grandmother had a home beauty shop. I guess I was around 11 or 12, and I used to sweep up for my candy money, or whatever. And these women would be in there talking to my grandmother about their heartaches and what they'd been going through with their husbands, cryin' the blues. I'm sweeping, and when they get to certain matters of sex, then, "Lamont, you get out of here. Go in there."

	"First of all, if you're really serious about being a songwriter/composer, you just have to be serious about it, apply yourself, and be relentless in your pursuit. That's the only way you're going to win. You can't be thin-skinned and expect to achieve big things in this business. Think big, you get big. Think small, you get nothing. Always keep reaching. Keep reaching, because that will make you have the success that you want to have." — Lamont Dozier

But I would go out and I would sit on the steps right outside the door and I would listen to all of them talkin'. They were just talking about... [he imitates the women] "He takes advantage of me. I'm givin' my love. He just doesn't appreciate me." I'm listening to this stuff, and all this stuff was seeping into my subconscious. And then while that was goin' on inside the beauty shop, my grandfather was out there keeping the flowers where people walked in so it would look nice. He would see the women as they came in and he'd say, "How ya doin', sugar pie? How ya doin', honey bunch?" He was flirting with them, but under the auspices of just welcoming them. He was doin' his little thing-sugar pie and honey bunch, stuff like that. And I was just sitting there, and, I don't know why, but I was just taking it all in.

But you know how kids are, always wanting to stay up to hear grown-ups talk. So, I'm just takin' this all in, and, sure enough, when I started writing poems and songs, those things started creeping back in as though I had been sittin' there listening for ideas.

You have to listen. You have to get out there in life. The reason why the songs are so poignant or people identify with them is because they're a slice of life. We're talkin' about life, everything that happens in those songs. It's plain simple language, you know, not Shakespeare. I ain't writing Shakespeare.

You have to get out there and watch and listen to people. I'll be sitting at McDonald's or something, and somebody behind me is saying, "But why do we have to break up? I thought you got rid of her." And I'm sittin' there just writin' stuff down. That's how you grab ideas; they don't just fall out of the sky. You have to go lookin' for them; you have to put forth some effort. Watch those soap operas. Listen and be aware.

In school, when I got to junior high, they called me the Candy Man because I used to sell love letters. A guy would say, "I broke up with this girl; now write me a love letter." I'd say, "Put the money on the table, tell me what the girl's name is and I'll give you something." See, when I wrote those letters—and I didn't tell them my secret—I had at least five, six maybe more ways... If she answered this one, and it didn't come out right, then there were only three or four ways she could come back. If I say this, she's either gonna say #1, #2, or #3. So, I might get caught in a lie, you know. So I had to nail it all down, and that's how I would decipher everything. So the love letters were full-proof, and the guys would come back. I had customers comin' back. You know, "Candy, Candy Man, you gotta help me. I need a letter, man. Or better yet, why don't you talk to her." See, a telephone call was a dollar; 50 cents was the letter. I'd disguise my voice, "Hey baby, I got a little cold. I was cryin' all night from missin' you, and I got this cold now." She'd say, "Oh, you finally called. I wanted to say I'm sorry about..." "Me too, baby. It wasn't supposed to be like that." Blah-blah-blah.

There's a song title, "It Wasn't Supposed to Be Like That."
That's how I used to fine-tune my skills, you might say, by saying to myself, "If I say this, what would her reply be?" It's either A, B, or C. And once you start thinkin' like that, it'll work every time...or just about every time.

I'm thinkin' there might be a book deal in there. How many of you guys would need a copy of that book?
Well, I'm workin' on that book. It's called The Lamont Dozier School of Music.

How do you stay fresh and current and not get stuck doing the same old thing over and over. Do you listen to radio? Is it all coming out of "All My Children"?
No. You know, life changes. Everything changes from day to day. Like, when I go to a different city or a different town or a different country, there's always a different feeling. It's a different feeling that I get in New York than L.A. or Chicago or Atlanta or Nashville. You know what I mean? If you listen. One thing I found that I do now—I didn't want to tell you all this and give away theses priceless ideas—but I wake up in the morning and I open up the windows, and, you know what I started doing? Listening to the birds. And, you know what I started hearing? All kinds of melodies. Now when I wake up, I stick the tape recorder out the window. So many ideas. [he whistles] You'd be surprised at the melodies the birds will give you if you are really in tune with what they're doing, and I got a tune about a year or so ago to what they were whistling. Great melodies. I use them as a starter, and then you play with them. You can use what you can.

The point is, you have to look for music. Music is all around us, and you change with the times. Right now we have tough times in the music business, but, you know what that is? Opportunity knockin'. You have to realize that instead of being all depressed and, "Oh, man, nobody wants to hear my stuff." You better start thinking about how to get your stuff out another way. This is an opportunity, I'm tellin' ya. Opportunity's knockin', and you can't get discouraged. You gotta be positive about it. "I'm gonna get this stuff out, and I'm gonna make people like it one way or another. And I'm gonna find a way of doing it." That's how music changes.

When Motown came on the scene—probably very few of you in the audience were around then—in the '60s, it was a bad time for music. Rock 'n' roll was in the toilet; Elvis went into the Army. Everyone was saying it was a bad time, and that's when this little black company-with Barry Gordy-started. From that little place, it got people interested. The next thing you know comes the Beatles from Europe, and it came back. What they found, what we all found, and Barry Gordy found, and the Beatles found when they were putting these companies together, were opportunities. Opportunity was knocking. It wasn't the end of anything, it was the beginning of a whole new thing. That's what's happening now, it's the beginning of a new thing. If you want to apply yourself and be in it, you better join the crowd and start tap dancing, you know what I mean? Because the music is out there calling you.

First of all, if you're really serious about being a songwriter/composer, you just have to be serious about it, apply yourself, and be relentless in your pursuit. That's the only way you're going to win. You can't be thin-skinned and expect to achieve big things in this business. Think big, you get big. Think small, you get nothing. Always keep reaching. Keep reaching, because that will make you have the success that you want to have.

One of the things that I preach to our members all the time is how important song form is. So many people feel like the muse dropped this song into me, I'm just going to write what I feel and the public has got to love it. I'm a big fan of song form; it goes back hundreds of years. People like song form because it's what we've grown used to. We feel when the chorus is coming; we feel when the bridge is coming. Do you write your songs in form, and do you recommend that they should be?
I know we are supposedly writing the songs, but—I hate to say this—songs actually will tell you how they want to be written, through emotion. If you are sitting there playing [he sings], "Sugar pie, honey bunch...," and you put in the wrong bridge or the wrong turnaround, you're going to break the flow.

...and all of a sudden you're starting to feel like, "What happened to the pocket?" The song didn't want you to go that way. You should have stayed where you were and just added some more melody around the base of the music.

Mega-hit songwriter, Lamont Dozier taking time to sign an autograph for TAXI member Tracey Marino, a successful songwriter in her own right.

So do you write and re-write to keep refining your songs?
Yeah. Sometimes you can over-write or over-produce. Sometimes simplicity is the answer. You get a theme, and you don't have to vary from that theme. Then sometimes the song calls for more sophistication, where you have to have a bridge and a pre-chorus and different things like that. It all depends on the song and if it will hold up. Sometimes, like I say, if you listen to a lot of that early Motown stuff, it was very simple, very child-like in a way, but it was done in such a way that everybody could identify with it without it being over somebody's head. And when I did try to show off how good I was as a songwriter, the song was not as good, it was not a big seller, like a great sounding record "Forever Came Today" by the Supremes, which was one of the last songs the Holland brothers and I wrote together before we left. It was a big orchestrated, over-the-top piece—not that it was a bad song—but it was not the right time for it. Psychedelic music was coming in. So we said, "Oh, we missed on that one." So, just before we left we had to gang up with the time, we had to jump on the time, so to speak. They wanted [he sings] "Reflections of...," electronic sounds. "Reflections" was our answer to electronic music, and it went to #1. There it is.

You have to be very aware and sensitive to what you're doing, because if you don't feel it and like it, nobody else is gonna like it, let me tell you. You have to put in the time to examine the song and give it the proper care and time it needs to develop that is so important. And that means trying all types of forms to get this song, this title. You may have a title and it cries out to want to have a theme or words that compliment the melody. The melody and the lyric and title of the song should all be a marriage, you know what I mean? You have to be aware of that, and you have to really take the time to pinpoint all those areas that sell a song. You get my drift I think.

I totally get it. You are very quiet about this stuff, but you do a lot of giving back. You've been on the board of NARAS, you're a trustee at NARAS, you go to Washington, D.C. lobbying for songwriters' rights. You are everything everybody should aspire to be, and congratulations for that. You're not a take-the-money-and-run kind of guy. You deserve a lot of credit for being so generous and being so humble. And, before I forget, I want the audience to know Lamont has donated his sizeable honorarium to be here today to St. Jude Children's Hospital. So I'd like to present you with this check. [much applause]

I've had the pleasure of becoming friends with your son Beau over the last two or three years. He's a very talented songwriter and producer in his own right. One night he and I were in a car together and I said to him, "Dude, your dad's Lamont Dozier. Isn't it hard to follow in his shoes?"

He said, "My dad has always encouraged me to fill my own shoes. But tell you what, I sure am glad I've got his genes." He finished by saying, "He's a pretty awesome guy." And you are an awesome guy, Lamont! It's been great having you here today. Congratulations on having an amazing career and giving so much back and remaining humble throughout. You are truly a Living Legend. Ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Lamont Dozier! [Applause and standing ovation]
Thank you everybody. God bless you. God bless each and every one of you!

The audience was glued to Lamont Dozier’s every word during the interview at TAXI’s annual convention.