Ray: It has allways intrigued me that the lyrics to the bands songs were never printed on any of your Motown albums. As we all know In the 70's it was very common for bands to have inner sleeves etc with full lyrics to the tracks, but this never happened with Rare Earth, was there any particular reason for this?
In the 60s Motown was so focussed on the singles market that LPs just tended to be two single "A" sides, coupled with their respective "B" sides and then filled out with a collection of average songs which were no doubt songs written by staff writers considered not strong enough for release on 7". That's how I saw it anyway.
The fact that everyone has different tastes is probably why those early Motown albums contain some hidden gems. Motown had such a depth of quality writers and musicians, many overshadowed by H-D-H, Whitfield and Smokey Robinson etc.
Again, I felt Stevie Wonder changed things when he came of age and took more control of his musical direction, embarking on those wonderful five albums. That's when Motown started to understand the role of albums a bit more and introduced gatefold sleeves and lyrics.....I think.
I would imagine that Rare Earth (the band) worked in reverse to the usual Motown methods. Rather than the hit singles leading to an album, the album would be written and recorded as a piece of work from which singles would then be chosen as appropriate. I'm not sure whether this approach applied to all other acts on Rare Earth (the label).
