You’ve Really Got A Hold On Me was originally the B-side of a largely-forgotten record, the upbeat Happy Landing. Both songs were taken from the forthcoming Miracles LP The Fabulous Miracles, and despite one being an uptempo rocker and the other a ballad deep enough to drown an elephant, the two share plenty of similarities. They were both recorded on the same day, during the same session. They were both heavily inspired by Sam Cooke records: the A-side by Having A Party, and this B-side by Bring It On Home To Me. They’re both based around the same musical gimmick, Marv Tarplin providing two unforgettable, but almost interchangeable, twangy guitar riffs.
Of course, it’s now known that Motown had backed the wrong horse. Upon release, Happy Landing went nowhere, but once DJs started flipping the record over, You’ve Really Got A Hold On Me pushed this single to rack up sales of more than a million copies and sailed effortlessly to the top of the R&B charts, the Miracles’ second such R&B #1 hit. So it goes in the music business; you never can tell.
Well, alright, sometimes you can, obviously. But despite this song’s subsequent success, it’s still easy to understand why Happy Landing, a fine uptempo rocker of a record, was the more promising of the two sides, and thus a wholly understandable choice of single. Many accounts written after the fact make it out to be almost unfathomable that You’ve Really Got A Hold On Me wasn’t originally thought of that way, but it makes sense enough without the benefit of hindsight.
You’ve Really Got A Hold On Me – “You’ve” is correct, incidentally, rather than “You”; it seems to have been the Beatles who retitled the song after the line Smokey actually sings on the record – was famously written by a bored and frustrated Smokey Robinson in his hotel room while on a business trip to New York in his capacity as Motown vice-president, and seems to have started out as little more than a freely-admitted attempt to write a ballad in the style of the aforementioned Sam Cooke record. In interviews, it almost comes across as though this were an experiment, a diverting little project that wasn’t meant to come to anything. Instead, it’s become a monument, one of Smokey’s most famous songs. From: https://motownjunkies.co.uk/2010/10/14/242/
