One Hit No More, No. 6: The Contours, To Answer the Question, "Do You Love Me?" Not Enough.

You like "Whole Lotta Woman" best. I never realized.....

More than a little hyperactivity surrounds Detroit’s “other” Motown group, the Contours, and it goes beyond their live-wire stage shows. They changed personnel like most people change clothes - e.g., often and without much thought. One website I found organizes that detail in a way that draws the high-volume, “anyone can go” turnover in high relief, but nothing clarifies the mysterious mechanics quite like the lawsuit that wound up blessing the existence of two groups that toured at the same time - one as “The Contours with Joe Billingslea” the other as “The Contours featuring Sylvester Potts.”

To second guess that second lawsuit a little, Potts wasn’t even an original Contour.

Whatever the current line-up at the precise moment/location, The Contours chief claim to fame was 1962’s “Do You Love Me,” a song so nice, it made ‘em famous twice. The second time happened when that song showed up on the soundtrack for one of the 1980s most iconic movies, Dirty Dancing (not a fan; oh yeah, just put Baby in a corner). The soundtrack(s) for that song re-charted as high as No. 11 and kicked off a brand new, 10-month “Dirty Dancing Concert Tour,” and for a group that never really stopped touring (or rearranging the line-up).

To return to the stray reference above to the “other Motown group,” The Contours worked and lived in the shadow of the label’s bigger names - e.g., The Temptations, The Four Tops, and The Miracles. (If it makes The Contours feel better, I didn’t recognize The Miracles until I put “Smokey Robinson and the” in front of it.) Then again, The Contours owe a couple of their other hits (yes, they had them; more later) to Smokey Robinson, including “First I Look at the Purse” and, a personal favorite for the way it gives them something else to do, the ballad “That Day She Needed Me.”

Overall, the story of The Contours is a collection of near-misses – and those started at the beginning. They had to take two runs at Motown Records founder, Berry Gordy Jr., before he decided to sign them, and even that took the familial connection of a recently-acquired bass singer, Hubert Johnson. When they failed to impress Gordy face-to-face, his cousin, “R&B star and Gordy associate Jackie Wilson” prevailed on Gordy to give them another shot through a second audition – but as The Blenders. That they also came close to losing “Do You Love Me” says everything about how close The Contours came to missing their shot.

I’ve read conflicting things about “Do You Love Me.” In one telling, The Contours only got the song because people couldn’t find The Temptations on a particular afternoon; in another telling, things came together like so:

“…Billingslea stated to author Phil Alexander that the song's author, Motown founder Berry Gordy, offered the song to the Contours first, only intending to give The Temptations the song after he saw that the Contours were having trouble with it. However, after practicing the tune again, Gordy gave the nod—and the song—to the Contours.”

One can read that a couple ways - e.g., that could be Gordy deciding to give The Contours a real shot, or just him sharing the wealth - but I did find a source that held up the version about “lost Temptations.” Because counter-factuals don’t matter in the real world, the only thing that really matters is that The Contours got “the nod,” the Dirty Dancing revival happened, and these guys have rarely stopped touring since their biggest hit came out.

As with all these “one-hit wonders,” The Contours put out a lot more music - even songs that charted. I’ve already named two above - “That Day She Needed Me” and “First I Look at the Purse” (#37 on the R&B charts and #12 on R&B and #57 U.S., respectively) - but they went reasonably strong through the meat of the 1960s with songs like “Shake Sherrie” (#21 R&B, #43 U.S.), “Can You Do It” (#16 R&B, #41 U.S.), and “Can You Jerk Like Me” (#15 R&B, #47 U.S.). They had a couple more songs hit at the same level up to 1967, and that’s more or less when they switched from putting out new material to being a novelty act. Their contract with Motown expired around the same time (1967), and those two things feel connected.

For as long as they’ve been around, though, their live performances have been their calling card. Just about every site I found on The Contours mentioned something along the lines of:

“…their dancing style was over the top and it even included synchronized splits, flips and an occasional summersault. The result was a highly energized performance that thrilled audiences wherever they went.”

I never found video that shows any Contour pulling off a pants-ripping split, never mind 5-6 of them, but I did find one live performance from the 1990s, one that featured a new song, “Running in Circles.” If you take the passage of time into account and squint a little, you can see the outlines of what once was. Regardless, when you account for age, that’s pretty tight.

As these posts keep demonstrating, the whole “one-hit wonder” concept rarely survives contact with reality. More than anything else, it seems like having just one massive hit leaves the rest of any act’s/band’s career suffering by comparison. That doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with merit, at least in my mind - e.g., my favorite song by The Contours, at least that I’ve heard (and I’ve heard most by now) is “Whole Lotta Woman,” one of their first stabs at fame. While it still fits the Motown template, it listens rawer, and with a heavier rock influence than what Motown pop finally bled into.

That's it on The Contours, but there's one thing I should have mentioned earlier.  I can barely listen to Motown at this point. I got hold of The Big Chill soundtrack in high school and, being a high school kid, I played that thing to the point of aversion therapy - I’m talking Clockwork Orange levels. Given that, the only songs that I really enjoyed with The Contours are the songs that don’t sound like Motown. That said, so long as you like that sound, The Contours have a lot more in their tank besides “Do You Love Me,” so there’s no need to stop there.