"Love Machine" is a 1976 number-one single recorded by Motown group The Miracles, taken from their album City of Angels. This single was one of two Billboard Hot 100 Top 40 hits recorded by The Miracles with Billy Griffin as lead vocalist; the other is 1973's "Do It Baby". Griffin had replaced Miracles founder Smokey Robinson as lead singer in 1972. The song features a growling vocal by Miracle Bobby Rogers.
Engineered and mixed by Kevin Beamish, "Love Machine" was produced by Freddie Perren, a former member of The Corporation brain trust in charge of the early Jackson 5 hits. It was written by Billy Griffin and his Miracles group-mate Pete Moore, with whom he wrote the rest of the City of Angels tracks as well. The song's lyrics, delivered over a disco beat, compare a lover to an electronic device such as a computer or a robot. The seven-minute song was split into two parts for its release as a single, with "Part 1" receiving most notoriety.
"Love Machine" was a multi-million selling Platinum single, and a number-one smash hit on the U.S. Billboard Hot 100, and, with 4.5 million copies sold, was the best-selling single of The Miracles' career. The single went to #5 on the Hot Soul Singles chart, and went to #20 on Record World's National Disco file Top 20 chart. It was also a Top 10 hit in England, peaking at number three on the UK Singles Chart.
By 1979, the song saw its first cover version, performed by Thelma Houston. Houston's version became a popular song with club DJs at the time in the United States, although it did not chart. In Asia, and especially in Japan, "Love Machine" became Houston's most successful single, topping the Japanese charts. The success prompted her album Ride to the Rainbow to be reissued as Love Machine for the Japanese release.
Wham! performed a cover version of "Love Machine" on their 1983 album, Fantastic.
The first 30-seconds of the song was featured in a couple of Denny's restaurant television commercials in the 80's, depicting a mother hen and her chicks dancing to this tune for their Grand Slam Breakfasts.
Also heard in the 1995 Disney film Heavyweights and the 1997 crime film Donnie Brasco, also it was featured in the 2002 film The New Guy.
"Love Machine," to which Griffin and co-writer Miracle Pete Moore were smart enough to retain publishing rights,through their own publishing company, Grimora Music, is the most-used song in Motown history and has generated more than $15 million in revenues.
Famous quotes containing the words love, machine and/or miracles:
“And this disease that was Swann’s love had so multiplied, it was so intimately tied to all of Swann’s habits, to all his acts, to his thoughts, to his health, to his sleep, to his life, even to what he desired for his afterlife, his love was so much a part of him that it could not be extracted from him without destroying him entirely: as is said in surgery, his love was inoperable.”
—Marcel Proust (1871–1922)
“A multitude of little superfluous precautions engender here a population of deputies and sub-officials, each of whom acquits himself with an air of importance and a rigorous precision, which seemed to say, though everything is done with much silence, “Make way, I am one of the members of the grand machine of state.””
—Marquis De Custine (1790–1857)
“What is it men love in Genius, but its infinite hope, which degrades all it has done? Genius counts all its miracles poor and short. Its own idea it never executed.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)