The Supremes – Where Did Our Love Go

The song that made the Supremes the biggest group in America was one another Motown act had already thrown back as too childish to record.

Lamont Dozier wrote the backing track with the Marvelettes in mind, cut it low in Gladys Horton’s key, and carried the chorus into the Motown office fully expecting a yes. Horton’s answer, as he told it, was blunt: they didn’t do songs like that, and it was about the worst thing she’d ever heard. Under Motown’s rules a songwriter paid for tracks nobody recorded, so Dozier went down the artist roster to the bottom, to the group the hallways called the “No-Hit Supremes,” and handed them a song their labelmates had already rejected. They didn’t want it either.

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The song was “Where Did Our Love Go,” written by the team of Brian Holland, Lamont Dozier, and Eddie Holland, and it arrived at a low point. The Supremes had released eight singles without a real hit, and this ninth felt to them like more of the same — simple, repetitive, beneath what they wanted to be. Because Dozier had built the track for Horton’s lower range, Diana Ross had to sing it well below her natural register, in a breathy, almost bored murmur she disliked at the time. That reluctant, half-whispered tone turned out to be the whole trick. It made the record sound intimate and cool where a belted vocal would have sounded ordinary.

They recorded it at Hitsville U.S.A. in Detroit in the spring of 1964, Ross’s lead riding over Mary Wilson and Florence Ballard’s steady backing and that hand-clap pulse that never lets up across the two-and-a-half-minute runtime. Whatever the group thought of it in the studio, Ross heard something in the playback and ran to fetch Berry Gordy. He listened to the end, nodded, and told them it had the makings of a top-ten hit.

From the bottom of the bill to the top

Released as a single on June 17, 1964, it entered the Billboard Hot 100 at number 77. The Supremes were out on Dick Clark’s Caravan of Stars that summer, opening near the bottom of a bill stacked with bigger names, playing to crowds who hadn’t come for them. Week by week the record climbed. On August 22, 1964, it reached number one and held there for two weeks, knocking Dean Martin’s “Everybody Loves Somebody” off the top before the Animals’ “House of the Rising Sun” took its place. By the time the tour wound down, the group that had started near the bottom of the bill was closing the show. It was the first of five straight number ones — the Supremes became the first American group ever to manage that — and the beginning of one of the most dominant runs in pop history.

Caught on film at the Santa Monica Civic

The performance on this page comes from one of the most important concert films ever shot. On October 28 and 29, 1964, with the single freshly a number one, the Supremes took the stage at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium for the T.A.M.I. Show, the first major rock concert captured for theatrical release. Directed by Steve Binder, the film put them on one bill with the Rolling Stones, James Brown, Marvin Gaye, Chuck Berry, and the Beach Boys, and among the go-go dancers moving behind the acts were a young Teri Garr and Toni Basil. The Supremes sang “Baby Love” and “Where Did Our Love Go,” poised and unhurried, already carrying themselves like the stars they’d just become. In 2006 the Library of Congress added the T.A.M.I. Show to the National Film Registry as a culturally significant work — which means the footage of three young women from Detroit performing the song nobody had wanted is now preserved by the United States government. Not bad for a bit of rejected album filler.