BY EDDIE STATS HOUGHTON
Leon Ware Rockin’ You Eternally (Elektra) 1981
meditation. It was a method that perfectly suited not only Marvin’s voice but also his persona, matching the questioning, soul-searching intensity he had cultivated since What’s Going On . Ware quickly followed this success with another solo LP. Musical Massage (1976) is a sort of deep-cut companion piece to I Want You , treasured by connoisseurs for its alternate renditions of some of that album’s source material. Its cult status also established the sort of liminal stardom that would define Ware’s career; celebrated but not a celebrity, his own spotlight always competing with the success of the material he crafted for artists with more established personas. This was a space he had occupied in L.A.’s studio world for some years already when he crossed paths with Marcos Valle. Like Ware, Valle was born into a perfect musical storm, but on the opposite end of the gulfstream, growing up across the street from bossa nova architect Antonio Carlos Jobim in Rio de Janeiro’s beachside Copacabana neighborhood.Trained in classical piano from age five and immersed in the mix of jazz and samba wafting out of the same Zona Sul cafés where Jobim composed “The Girl from Ipanema,” Valle wasted no time channeling his unique upbringing into great music, recording one of bossa nova’s most recognizable melodies (1964’s “Samba deVerão”) by the time he was in his early twenties. Young, talented, and famous, with beach-boy looks, Valle seemed to be living the most charmed of lives. But, by the early ’70s, he’d fled this South Atlantic paradise to escape Brazil’s military dictatorship. He landed in L.A., and, by decade’s end, had carved out a life as idyllic as self-imposed exile can be, motorbiking between sessions for Sarah Vaughan and tennis matches with fellow studio rats from bands like Toto and Chicago. It was Chicago’s Robert Lamm who recruited Valle to contribute words and melody to “Love Is a Simple Thing” from Leon Ware’s 1979 album Inside Is Love . The Carioca and the Detroiter clicked immediately— Valle’s ability to unpack complex musical structures around a polyrhythmic groove opening all sorts of unexpected side passages from Ware’s confessional way with a chord—and they began collaborating on work that would form the core of 1981’s Rockin’ You Eternally. A snapshot of L.A.’s soul at the dawn of the ‘80s, the album defied easy description in the moment but was the sort
Leon Ware is one of those names that can make you pick up a record out of the Soul, New Arrivals bin on the strength of a writing credit alone. Long before his exquisitely sensual compositions (Minnie Riperton’s “Inside My Love,” for example) were looped up into your favorite beats (A Tribe Called Quest’s “Lyrics To Go,” for example), “Written by L. Ware” already conveyed an aura of IYKYK cachet. Born a preacher’s kid in the perfect musical storm of post- war Detroit, young Leon sang in jazz bars with a teenage Yusef Lateef and started a doo-wop group with Lamont Dozier. Plugged into the Motown circuit from the early ‘60s, he wrote songs like “Got to Have You Back” for the Isley Brothers but made his artistic debut with a self-titled release for another label— United Artists—in 1972. Bluesy and vulnerable, driven by Ware’s fragile, gospel-tinged tenor, the album contained gems (“What’s Your World”) but didn’t generate a chart hit. Within a few years, however, his songwriting for Motown delivered a different sort of breakthrough when “I Wanna Be Where You Are”—co-written with Diana Ross’s little brother, Arthur “T-Boy” Ross—became one of Michael Jackson’s earliest solo hits. In demand as songwriters for the likes of Jackson, Riperton, and Quincy Jones (who recruited Ware to pen and sing the title track on 1974’s Body Heat , later interpolated on Mobb Deep’s “Temperature’s Rising”), Ware and T-Boy began work on songs intended for a Motown album from the younger Ross. But when Berry Gordy heard one of the tracks Ware had tossed off to round out their demo, he felt it was so right for Marvin Gaye that it might lure the reclusive singer back into the studio.That song was “I Want You,” and as Ware explained to Jason King in 2016, he soon found himself at Marvin’s home, running through his reel of unreleased material: “We listened to it three times. [Marvin] turned around, looked at me, and said,‘If you give me that album, I’ll do the whole thing.’” I Want You became not only one of Marvin Gaye’s most commercially successful releases but also one of the first albums Motown trusted to a single writer and producer. A far cry from the polished lyrics and catchy changes of the Motown formula, Ware’s approach was to find a bittersweet chord and then linger there, exploring the emotional (and erotic) possibilities within the subtlest variations of groove and texture, like a sort of tantric
8 WaxPoetics
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