Lamont Dozier Quotations

Thank God for both our grandmothers, the Hollands' grandmother was very seminal, and mine was the head of the choir at my church, ... I had to be at church on Thursday, Saturday and Sundays rehearsing. I couldn't do anything else until I got that business taken care of.

She pulled it off, ... It was her voice and that take-no-prisoners attitude when she's onstage, she was just out there, hungry to be the star.

She put it up on the school bulletin board, and that gave me such a jump-start toward writing more things,

All three of us just had our eye on what was happening around us, we were very observant to what people were doing in love situations, and what was happening in the world,

You can't write all those little nuances, inflections that they'd do, ... James and Benny, playing off each other, they'd come up with something ten times better than what you thought you had.

Diana had a high thin voice that used to annoy me. Eddie too, ... We'd say, 'Why don't we let Mary (Wilson) sing the song?' But Brian was adamant, it's got to be Diana. Two against one, but we finally let her sing. We brought the keys down for Diana, to give her a fuller sound.

We wanted to guide the musicians, so we could create our own sound. We would never let the band just go in and play the chord sheets. We were very focused on what we had in mind for these productions.

We pushed back a lot of the old things, trying to get rid of the negative stuff and look at this as a new day, a refreshing, reinventing type of thing, ... Doing a musical is something that's been in my heart for years. We finally decided to do it together.

He was fussy and very childlike. He'd be a handful, ... He'd have you so angry, but then he'd come up and hug you. He was just aggravated and somewhat fearful about the key. But we knew if we made him stretch, he'd have to invent something for the performance, slide off into a little falsetto, and it just worked.

Billy Paul's song is hard to beat. I made it my own with a couple of little things, but I wasn't really going to fool with his thing. I ain't crazy.