Motown songwriter, Toronto’s R. Dean Taylor dies at age 82

Label founder and owner Berry Gordy Jr. called in a new set of writers to continue the momentum and Canada’s R. Dean Taylor, was one of the recruits.

“Panic set in and Berry said, ‘we’re gonna prove that Motown are not Holland/Dozier/Holland,’” Taylor recalled in a 1982 interview with Doug Thompson, writer, producer and director for the Canadian radio documentary series “The Producers.”

“He (Berry Gordy) rented a suite of rooms at a big hotel in Detroit and had pianos moved in. This was on a Thursday or Friday and Berry told us they were going to record The Supremes on Monday and we’d better come up with a song. He called us ‘The Clan’ — which was Paul Riser, Hank Cosby, Frank Wilson, Pam Sawyer, myself and God knows who else — and we were all sitting in the room trying to come up with something.’”

The something they came up with, mainly due to the writing and production efforts of Taylor and Sawyer, was “Love Child,” a song about the anguish of an impoverished, child born out of wedlock — and the Supremes’ first chart-topper that was minus the Holland-Dozier-Holland magic.

Hitting No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 for two weeks and eventually selling two million copies, “Love Child” underscored Taylor’s importance to the label, even though there was immediate controversy.

“The deal was that we would split the writer’s royalties, but Pam and I really wrote the song,” Taylor told Thompson. “She called me later and she was crying and I said ‘what’s wrong?’ She said, ‘I got a copy of the record and there’s four names on it!’

“So, I got all hot and barged in to see the Motown lawyer and he got Berry on the phone who lit into me calling me ‘an ingrate.’

“I didn’t care. ‘Love Child’ was a very important song for me.”

Frank Davies, who helped induct the song into the Canadian Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2008, said “Love Child” was even more significant in terms of Motown’s future direction.

“It was a big one because of its social commentary as well as its pop success,” said Davies.

And it wasn’t Taylor’s last: with “The Clan” again — which also included Deke Richards — he struck Supremes songwriting gold again in 1968 with the Top 10 “I’m Livin’ In Shame.”

While those were some of his most visible contributions to the Motown canon — along with his own chart-topping smash, 1970s “Indiana Wants Me,” — Taylor, largely remained a behind-the-scenes figure at the label that, along with Memphis-based Stax, was responsible for bringing soul and R&B music to mainstream audiences.

Taylor died Jan. 7 at his Los Angeles home at age 82, more than a year after he contracted COVID-19 and was placed in hospice care.

Prior to signing with Motown in 1963, Richard Dean Taylor, born in Toronto on May 11, 1939, grew up in the city and set his sights early as a performer, appearing at open-air country music competitions and playing piano with numerous bands. Even though his father got him a non-creative job at Toronto advertising agency Vickers and Benson, Taylor’s heart was in making records.

Releasing several singles in the years before Canadian radio stations were mandated by the CRTC to play a minimum of 30 per cent Canadian content, Taylor enjoyed some success with the CHUM turntable hit “At The High School Dance,” which he recorded in New York in 1962 for the Bell Records’ subsidiary Amy-Mala. It would ultimately lead him to Motown.

“My option came up and they were deciding whether or not to re-sign me,” Taylor told Doug Thompson. “In the meantime, I was working at the advertising agency Vickers and Benson in Toronto, although I spent most of my time in my car trying to hear the record. A friend of mine who had been at the agency had moved to Detroit, we were really tight, and he called me and said, ‘there’s this company I’m reading about here called Mo-something. On your way down to New York to talk about your contract, why don’t you stop by, I’d love to see you and we’ll try and get you an audition.’

“So, I did. My audition was with Brian Holland and Lamond Dozier and I played them my ‘ratty’ tunes. For some reason, Brian just took to me and he brought me upstairs to the legal department and they signed me as a writer.”

Adam White, co-author of “Motown: The Sound of Young America,” said Taylor must have shown plenty of potential in order for Brian Holland to sign him both as a writer and a producer.

“Brian Holland really saw him as a bit of protégé,” noted White. “He must have felt that Taylor genuinely had talent or he wouldn’t have wasted his time if he didn’t.”

Taylor began working on Holland-Dozier-Holland sessions almost immediately as a ghostwriter, playing tambourine on sessions with the label’s Funk Brothers rhythm section and contributing to some hits where he received no credit, like The Four Tops’ “Standing In The Shadows Of Love” and “7 Rooms of Gloom.”

“He was paid in cash for some of the ghostwriting he did and that was clearly good income for him,” says White. “As Holland-Dozier-Holland became more successful, it seemed only fair that he got some credit, too … So the best trio songs with his name on them were “I’ll Turn To Stone” and “I’m In A Different World,” and then, of course, his success with The Clan.”

In a 1972 interview with Hit Parader Magazine, Taylor told journalist Larry LeBlanc that Holland taught him the ropes.

“When I joined Motown I had to learn to write. I could always write songs but I always couldn’t write good songs. The difference between a hit and a good song can be a very slight thing. It could be the way the thing is put together. It could be the structure. I didn’t know this. I learned from Brian. I learned from the best.”

Motown tried to develop Taylor as an artist, but a few singles failed to gain much traction. In 1968, he did score a UK hit with the self-written and self-produced “Gotta See Jane” before striking international gold with the pop classic “Indiana Wants Me,” a tale about a fugitive running from the long arm of the law, a song inspired by the films “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” and “Bonnie and Clyde.”

The song hit No. 1 on the Cashbox charts in the U.S. and peaked at No. 5 on Billboard.

“It opened up a lot of doors for Motown,” Taylor told LeBlanc.

The song also confirmed characteristics that would inhabit Taylor’s best storytelling originals: a sense of danger, drama, and tension, as evident in such Canadian hits as “Taos, New Mexico,” with its main character rotting in a jail while his prospective girlfriend decides to move on, and “Ain’t It A Sad Thing,” a song mourning the tragic damage to the environment being caused by businesses. Aside from Canada and his one-hit U.S. stature, Taylor also made an impact in the U.K.’s northern soul movement with “There’s A Ghost In My House.”

“He wrote dark songs,” Janee Taylor, his wife of 52 years, told the Star. “He wrote a song called ‘Candy Apple Red’ about committing suicide. He wrote about things that were troubling people in life.”

Taylor himself told LeBlanc that he wrote “about real-life things — things with shock value … things that people just don’t write about, things we all think about, that are around us. I’ve always written those kind of songs. Songs of the Shakespearean thing and the anti-hero, the hopelessness of life.”

When Motown relocated to Los Angeles in the early ‘70s to be closer to Berry Gordy’s Hollywood aspirations, the Taylors moved with him. Despite numerous efforts, however, Taylor never had another U.S. or international success, despite signing many acts to his own indie labels and publishing deals,

“In hindsight, it was probably not the best move,” says Janee Taylor. “Dean had all these different labels, a production company, and all these artists he signed and produced records … That was time-consuming and he spent his own money on it. But there wasn’t anybody of any notoriety that came out of it.”

In 1983, Taylor also made a foray in country music, but again, to no avail.

“I think he was disappointed,” said Janee Taylor of her animal-loving vegan husband, one who was private but enjoyed collecting Western cowboy memorabilia and cartoon character watches.

“He got discouraged after a while. He was almost becoming an executive but as far as his own writing, I think that got lost. Maybe if one of his groups had had a big hit, he might have felt different.”

Within the past two years, Janee Taylor said her husband caught COVID-19 and “never fully recovered,” spending the last year of his life at home with hospice treatment. She said he died in her arms at 7:30 a.m. on Jan. 7, and her lack of social media skills delayed the official announcement of his passing for a few days.

Although underappreciated by Motown standards, Taylor left a rich legacy of compositions that were covered by everyone from Janet Jackson and The Fall to Gladys Knight & The Pips and the Mynah Birds, the temporary group formed by Rick James and Neil Young in the mid-’60s.

“He broke barriers,” said Frank Davies. “When you think about a white kid from Toronto working in an all-Black music company and how Lamont Dozier and the Hollands embraced and mentored him, it just demonstrated his talent and the fact that music knows no borders.

“He’s also produced a body of work that has been embraced by so many artists and he’s had a successful artist career. It’s a rarity.”