KCRW’s acclaimed music documentary podcast, Lost Notes, returns for its fourth season. Co-hosts Novena Carmel (KCRW) and Michael Barnes (KCRW / KPFK / Artform Radio) guide you through eight wildly different and deeply human stories, each set against the kaleidoscopic backdrop of LA’s soul and R&B scene of the 1950s-1970s. Support KCRW’s original programming like Lost Notes by donating or becoming a member.
Long before “Tainted Love” was an ‘80s anthem by Soft Cell, it was a 1965 B-side by LA’s Gloria Jones. We trace the song’s journey from a warehouse floor to the annals of pop history.
Novena Carmel
In 1960, a teenager named Andrae Crouch puts together a group of kids to perform in his dad’s church in Pacoima, California. And they call themselves the COGIC Singers, which is after the Church of God in Christ. And after a few years, they record one of Andrae’s originals called “It Will Never Lose Its Power.” And the
featured singer on that single is Gloria Jones.
Michael Barnes
Even as teenagers, the COGICs were a powerhouse. The organ player is Billy Preston, who by then had already played with Mahalia Jackson, Little Richard, and Sam Cooke. But this is Gloria’s first time on record. And you can hear the arrival of a major talent.
Novena Carmel
Since Gloria came up in the church, you know Gloria was trained to have a distinctive voice, and to harmonize with other powerful singers who had their own distinctive voices. And even at age sixteen or seventeen, she has that going on. So it’s not too surprising that she gets a call from Motown.
Michael Barnes
Indeed. The COGIC Singers end up on the radar of Hal Davis, who at that time was a talent scout for Motown. He wanted to sign the young women from the COGICs and make them into a girl group. But this is a time when Motown already have the Supremes; they already have Martha Reeves and the Vandellas … they have a lot of girl groups. So he doesn’t get much traction. But Hal Davis does introduce Gloria to a songwriter named Ed Cobb – who came from the pop scene, but recently had a run of hits on the R&B charts.
Novena Carmel
So Gloria and Ed get together. But it’s funny, because he’s already been working with Gloria’s old bandmate, Billy Preston. So, Billy and Ed have an instrumental number called “Heartbeat” that feels like it’s just missing something. And that something turns out to be Gloria Jones.
Michael Barnes
Thanks to “Heartbeat,” she has this little moment at the beginning of her career. The song hits the charts in October of 1965. And at that time, you have all these shows modeled on American Bandstand, especially here in the Los Angeles area. And she’s featured on all of them: Shindig, Shivaree, Where the Action Is, Hollywood-a-Go-Go…
Novena Carmel
She's on Shindig twice. They have her perform “Heartbeat” by herself. And then she comes back two weeks later with Billy Preston on organ, and Darlene Love and the Blossoms doing backing vocals. So there’s this moment where it seems like she could really break out.
Michael Barnes
Back then, you had this weird situation where artists would record other people's songs instantaneously, even if they were still brand-new.
So Dusty Springfield does a version of "Heartbeat" a few months after Gloria’s is released. And it starts to chart -- something that, now, would just be unconscionable.
Novena Carmel
Right, that’s like if Cleo Sol, for example, came out with a song, and then Taylor Swift was like, "Oh, that's good. Let me record her song and release it two weeks later." It just doesn’t quite go down like that in the present day. But that’s part of the landscape of how music was made in the '60s. And quite often, you’d have a Black artist recording the original version, and then a white artist coming along with a cover that became more popular.
Michael Barnes
But hold on: Gloria Jones released two singles in 1965.
“Heartbeat” comes out in September. But only a few months before, from the same recording session, she put out her first single: a song called “My Bad Boy’s Comin’ Home,” on Ed Cobb’s vanity record label, Champion. And the B-side of that single … the B-side! … is “Tainted Love.”
Novena Carmel
Oh, not the B-side!
Michael Barnes
I know! You know, it’s possible R&B stations never even got the single, since the A-side was meant for the pop charts. But also, Ed Cobb didn’t even like the song that much. He thought the beat was too strong. And Gloria, as a teenager who was just singing for church folk, she thinks the lyrics were unbecoming. She doesn’t know what a tainted love was, and doesn’t want to know. So, as the song says … “Tainted Love” seems to go nowhere.
Novena Carmel
But she does follow it up with “Heartbeat,” which at least makes the charts.
So she must have had a little bit of cred, right?
Michael Barnes
I suppose so. She records a full-length album in 1966 called Come Go With Me. And it includes “Heartbeat,” but not “Tainted Love.” Which, again … missed opportunity. And that album doesn’t really do anything either.
Novena Carmel
Oof.
Michael Barnes
So, in the late 1960s, she decides to regroup. She starts doing theatre work in L.A. She was in the cast for "Catch My Soul," which was like a 1960s version of "Othello." She's also in the LA production of "Hair," which probably raises her visibility to a number of rock groups. And she starts doing backup singing for people like Harpers Bizarre and Ry Cooder, and also this early solo track by Neil Young.
Novena Carmel
And, around this time, she also meets Pam Sawyer, who was a staff writer for Motown. Pam had co-written “Love Child” and another song called “I’m Livin’ in Shame” for the Supremes. And instead of Gloria becoming a recording artist for Motown, she becomes a writer under the name
LaVerne Ware. A totally different name!
Michael Barnes
And at Motown, Pam and Gloria write songs for virtually everybody: The Jackson Five, Eddie Kendricks, Marvin Gaye and Diana Ross, The Four Tops, Martha Reeves and the Vandellas … a lot of songs for a lot of people. And for Gladys Knight and the Pips, they co-write "If I Were Your Woman," which becomes the biggest hit they’re associated with, and a song that was nominated for a Grammy as well. And it's just a classic of this period of Motown, and of soul music generally.
Novena Carmel
It’s interesting to me that Gloria was recording her own music during this period, but also writing for all these other people under a different name, so she has this double identity thing going on. And I wonder how that took away from propelling her into success, having to be more than one person. Like, if she had been recognized as the singer of this song, but also the writer of all these other songs under the same name, would that have put more steam into what she was doing as an artist altogether?
Michael Barnes
You think about these different situations that we bring up around, "Why didn't this become a bigger hit?" And a lot of it connects to that period of time. You don't really get the idolization of the singer-songwriter until the late 1960s, and even then, it’s primarily in rock music. And with those rock and pop hits of the period, usually you had someone writing the song, and somebody else performing it. So Carole King would write tons of songs for the Monkees, but the Monkees would actually be in the studio. The songwriters knew their job was to keep pumping out songs. Performers, though, didn’t write any of them.
Novena Carmel
So maybe if Gloria had come up a little bit later, the singer-songwriter thing could have been a part of what she was up to. But the fact that she didn't make it as a performing artist is maybe what kinda pushes her to become a backup singer, a songwriter for others, and eventually a producer.
Michael Barnes
I think that’s all part of it. But the funny thing is, in 1973, she ends up releasing a solo album on Motown. And it feels like another big chance for her to shine as an artist in her own right. But then, once again, something else comes along…
Michael Barnes
Gloria meets Marc Bolan from T. Rex in 1969, after one of her performances in “Hair.” But they didn’t really connect again until the summer of 1972. By then, she was working as a backing vocalist for Joe Cocker. And Marc was getting more interested in adding soulful elements into his own music. So he steals Gloria away from Joe’s and takes her along for his upcoming tour. And she becomes a really integral part of T. Rex, between her singing and her instrumental contributions on piano and Clavinet. And things really start to blossom between them.
Novena Carmel
And this is right about when she’s gonna launch her album with Motown.
Michael Barnes
Right as she’s about to launch this album for Motown. So literally as they’re releasing the first single, she tells them that she’s taking off for the UK, and isn’t going to stick around to promote it. So of course Motown is like, “Why should we even bother?”
Novena Carmel
Well, that’s not a surprise. But what is surprising is that “Tainted Love” suddenly springs back to life, seemingly out of nowhere. It’s been almost a decade since that single was released. And now it’s found a whole new audience in England, where Gloria happens to be living. And this thing called Northern Soul is really blowing up.
Novena Carmel
I remember first hearing about the term Northern Soul, and I assumed it was related to where the music was made. Like, Southern soul was made in Memphis and Mussel Shoals. And my guess was Northern Soul referred to music made in places like Michigan, Detroit. But Black American music became Northern Soul because it was played by white DJs in northern England.
Michael Barnes
Yeah. Tough to predict something like Northern Soul. The north of England did not have a reputation for being the happening spot, or a place that people wanted to go. It was a pretty grim life for many of the working-class youth who, when the weekend came, they wanted to party literally all night and until the dawn. And these songs became their soundtrack. People would travel miles to go to a particular spot to hear particular DJs. And the more obscure the records, the greater the reputation.
Novena Carmel
So, a record like “Tainted Love,” a song that was completely obscure, performed by a singer nobody knew, from that classic mid-’60s period …
All the record had to do was show up.
Michael Barnes
Well, as the story goes, an English DJ named Richard Searling came over to the US on a record-hunting trip in 1973. He just finished combing over a warehouse of discarded and discontinued soul 45s. But as he was leaving, he found this one record on the floor of a freight elevator. No sleeve, just a beat-up old record all by itself. Tossed it onto the pile, and that record turned out to be “Tainted Love” … and the kids. Went. Nuts.
Novena Carmel
So what are we listening to now, Michael?
Michael Barnes
We’re listening to a tape someone made in the crowd at Wigan Casino in 1974. And that was one of the epicenters of Northern Soul. You hear immediately how much dancers love this song. Just all those claps! You know, in the Soft Cell version, I always thought that that was why people clap, because you can hear the claps at particular times. But In the original version, there's no clapping. So this is something that the dancers added out of the feeling that they got from the song.
Novena Carmel
So you have one experience of the original song feeding another, which then fed the next version … and it just keeps building from there.
Michael Barnes
Yeah. And, of course, the song’s revival immediately inspires other artists to cover it … none of them very successfully. But you can already hear those claps in this 1975 version by The Jezebelles.
Novena Carmel
So, Gloria Jones is in England. And her original recording of “Tainted Love” is blowing up in the same country she lives in. And now, of course, there are these inevitable cover versions. And I’m sure she was not making money on any of this, because she didn’t write it, and she wasn’t getting artist royalties either from an old 1965 record contract. So it stands to reason that she would re-record her own version of “Tainted Love.”
Michael Barnes
This is on her album “Vixen,” which was produced by Marc Bolan. But what’s strange is that she doesn’t release “Tainted Love” as a single. She releases four singles for “Vixen” in the U.K., including a version of T.Rex’s “Get It On.” But not “Tainted Love.”
Novena Carmel
You know what, Michael, I don’t think she needed to release it as a single. She already had a great original version of it, and I think this was just her opportunity to remind folks who sang the original, while also sharing some of the new stuff she was up to. But the question is, how did this new album of hers do in the public?
Michael Barnes
This album, and the music she was making with Marc Bolan in T. Rex at this time, were not their biggest sellers. Though it’s really clear that the two of them were really enjoying this musical partnership. You hear it in the music, you hear it in some demos that have been released, and of course, they also were enjoying raising their son, Rolan Bolan.
By the time 1977 rolls around, Marc Bolan has found a happy middle ground between these new styles and his old sound. He's being embraced a bit by punk rock, which is now a thing in the UK; The Damned are opening up for him, and he's doing shows. He seems very excited about how everything is going. But 1977 is also the year when tragedy strikes.
"The 6:00 News, this is Iain Ramage. We’ve just heard that controversial rock star Marc Bolan has been killed in a car crash. His Mini, being driven by girlfriend Gloria Jones, has careered off the road into a tree in South London. Gloria is detained in hospital with serious injuries."
Michael Barnes
Gloria and Marc have this car accident less than a mile from their home. Bolan is killed instantly. Gloria is in the hospital with multiple injuries: a broken jaw, and her vocal cords are injured. And, although they'd been in this partnership for a few years -- I mean, their son is almost two years old at this point -- Marc is still married to somebody else. And so he dies and she inherits nothing, her son inherits nothing, and they're essentially destitute. So they have to go back to Los Angeles. And one of the things I've heard is that David Bowie, who was a major fan and friend of Marc’s, helped them out financially during this time. But it was still a horrific tragedy in so many ways.
Novena Carmel
But Gloria Jones is resilient, and she goes back to work behind the scenes.
A year later, she releases an album dedicated to Marc’s memory called “Windstorm.” And there are moments when she recalls the strength she was known for as a singer. But there are other times when you can really feel the tragedy of it all weighing on her.
Michael Barnes
When that album fails to chart, she goes behind the curtain again. In 1979, she writes a hit for the disco-funk band Gonzales, "Haven't Stopped Dancing Yet," which is a huge hit worldwide. That same year, she does some unreleased sessions for Dr. Buzzard’s Original Savannah Band, just before August Darnell became Kid Creole. And that brings us up to 1981, when Soft Cell covers "Tainted Love."
Novena Carmel
Gloria puts out one more album in 1982, just as Soft Cell is breaking records on the American charts. And this time, she returns to working with Ed Cobb, the songwriter who gave her “Tainted Love” in the first place. The album is called “Reunited,” and although most of it is new, they also include the original 1965 version of “Tainted Love” … just in case.
Michael Barnes
She also reunited in 1984 with the COGIC Singers and released a new album. And that’s pretty much where the new music ends. But since then, she and her son Rolan Bolan have opened up a school in Sierra Leone, Africa: the Marc Bolan School of Music and Film. In 2015, she also started her own reissue label, the Light of Love Wax Co., putting out a reissue of “Tainted Love” on 45, and also a track that was previously unreleased for years: “Gone With The Wind Is My Love.”
Michael Barnes
In some ways, there are similarities to the story of Betty Davis, who recorded this amazing music in the 1970s and had this connection to Miles Davis. And people who were “in the know” recognize the influence she had, as well as her own artistry. But it took twenty years for people to catch up and hear how amazing those Betty Davis records were.
Novena Carmel
There is some of that with Gloria Jones, where we only see in hindsight these moments where it could have gone this way or that way for her. But it’s also seeing the bigger picture for her: someone who it’s easy to classify as a one-hit wonder who never really even had the hit … but when you dig a little deeper, you see this career that she sustained over a long period of time. Even if she didn’t achieve the kind of success that we might think people are searching for.
Michael Barnes
Or maybe that even she was searching for. But it’s a career that has so many amazing moments.
Novena Carmel
It is. And there's multiple ways to look at it. You can look at it like, "Oh, it's a shame, people don't know who the original singer of ‘Tainted Love’ is.” But that doesn’t take away from her being a hugely important part of an epic song. And, at the end of the day, someone who had an incredible career.
Michael Barnes
Mm-hmm. And I tell you this: Wherever "Tainted Love" is played, whatever version it is, that thing slays dancefloors.
Novena Carmel
Slays, honey!
Michael Barnes
Just absolutely slays dancefloors.
Novena Carmel
And that's something to be proud of.
Michael Barnes
And so much of that is connected to the amazing artist that is Gloria Jones.
Novena Carmel
That sounds like success to me.
Lost Notes is a KCRW Original Production. It’s made by Michael Barnes, Ashlea Brown, Novena Carmel, and Myke Dodge Weiskopf. Special thanks to Gina Delvac, Jennifer Ferro, Ray Guarna, Nathalie Hill, Anne Litt, Phil Richards, Arnie Seipel, Desmond Taylor, and Anthony Valadez.
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Lost Notes: 1980 - Ep. 6: Minnie Riperton
Lost Notes: 1980 - Ep. 1: Stevie Wonder
