In the summer of 1981, the slowest record on American radio was also one of the biggest. Slow Hand did not rush anywhere — that was rather the point of it — yet it climbed to number two on the Billboard Hot 100 and stayed there for three weeks, held off the summit only by Endless Love, the Diana Ross and Lionel Richie duet that nothing on earth could have displaced that August. Underneath Anita Pointer’s unhurried lead vocal, the song made a request that pop singles rarely made so plainly, and almost never in a woman’s voice: slow down.
The strangest thing about Slow Hand is who it was not written for. The song arrived from two professional songwriters, Michael Clark and John Bettis, and Bettis cheerfully admitted in Billboard that summer that “the Pointer Sisters were the furthest act from our minds.” The smoldering signature ballad of the trio’s middle career was, in its writers’ imagination, meant for somebody else entirely.
The Lyricist Behind the Carpenters
John Bettis was one of the most valuable pens in American pop. As Richard Carpenter’s writing partner he had supplied the words to Top of the World, Yesterday Once More and Goodbye to Love, songs built on understatement — lyrics that left space for a singer’s phrasing to do the emotional work. He would later write the words to Michael Jackson’s Human Nature and Madonna’s Crazy for You. With Michael Clark, a Nashville-based collaborator, he wrote Slow Hand: a plea for a lover who would “spend some time, not come and go in a heated rush.”
It was a lyric written by two men, and its candor about female desire was unusual for mainstream pop in 1981. Nothing in it is explicit, but nothing is coy either; the narrator knows exactly what she wants and says so. The question was who could sing it without making it sound either vulgar or timid — and by the writers’ own account, the Oakland sisters were not the act they pictured.
The Producer Who Knew
Richard Perry pictured them immediately. Perry, who had run the Pointer Sisters’ career since signing them to his Planet Records label in 1978 and rebuilding them as a sleek pop trio after Bonnie Pointer’s departure, said he knew Slow Hand would be “an instant smash” — one that would “recapitulate and expand on the intimacy” of Fire, the Springsteen song he had taken to number two with the group in 1978. Fire had been a slow burn disguised as a rocker. Slow Hand would be a slow burn with the disguise removed.
The reinvention Perry had engineered was by then well advanced. The early Pointer Sisters had been a bebop-and-vintage act, four sisters in 1940s dresses harmonizing like the Andrews Sisters; the Perry-era trio was contemporary, sleek and unabashedly sensual, and Black & White was their fourth album together. What Slow Hand offered that the earlier Perry records had not was stillness — a ballad that trusted a groove, a voice and a single frank request to hold a listener for four minutes.
Perry built the record accordingly at Studio 55 in Los Angeles. The musicians were first-call Los Angeles session royalty: John Robinson on drums, Nathan Watts on bass, Paul Jackson Jr. and Tim May on guitars, John Barnes on electric piano, William “Smitty” Smith on organ and Paulinho da Costa on percussion. Everything moves at a deliberate, swaying pace, with countrified guitar figures gliding over a soul rhythm section — countrypolitan polish welded to R&B muscle. And at the center, as on Fire, Perry placed Anita Pointer, the group’s songwriter and its most intimate lead voice, with June and Ruth wrapped around her in close harmony.
The country flavor was no costume. The Pointer sisters had grown up in Arkansas and Oakland hearing country radio in their parents’ house, and they had already proven their fluency in the genre in the most public way possible: their own Fairytale had won a Grammy for country performance in 1975 and taken them to the Grand Ole Opry stage. Slow Hand simply let that country blood show through a soul arrangement.
Three Weeks Behind Endless Love
Slow Hand was released in May 1981 as the lead single from the trio’s eighth studio album, Black & White, which followed in June. The single climbed through the summer and settled at number two on the Hot 100 in August, where it remained for three weeks — every one of them behind Endless Love, then in the middle of its nine-week reign. It was, remarkably, a repeat of the group’s history: Fire, too, had stalled at number two. The Pointer Sisters were becoming the great runners-up of American pop, and making it look like a triumph.
Everywhere else, the record simply won. It reached number two in Canada and Ireland, number five in Australia, number six in New Zealand, and number ten in Britain — the group’s first appearance in the UK top ten. At home it crossed every chart that mattered: number seven on the R&B chart, number six on adult contemporary, number two on the Cash Box Top 100. It spent twenty-four weeks on the Hot 100, finished 1981 as the year’s number nineteen single on Billboard‘s year-end chart and number five on Cash Box‘s, and was certified gold by the RIAA in September 1981. The parent album peaked at number thirteen on the Billboard 200, went gold the same month, and became the first Pointer Sisters album to produce two top twenty singles when Should I Do It reached number thirteen the following spring.
The Country King Takes It Home
The surest sign of what Clark and Bettis had written came from Nashville. Within months of the Pointer Sisters’ hit, country singer Del Reeves covered Slow Hand, taking it to number fifty-three on the country chart in 1981. Then, on April 24, 1982, Conway Twitty — one of the most successful country singers of all time — released his own version on Elektra Records, from his album Southern Comfort, with a few lines adjusted so a man could sing them.
Twitty’s Slow Hand topped the Billboard Hot Country Singles chart for two weeks in June 1982. It was his last multi-week number one, and his last gold record: the final coronation of a two-decade chart career, delivered by a song that had begun life as an R&B ballad its writers never imagined the Pointer Sisters singing. There was a pleasing symmetry in the choice of interpreter, too. Twitty had begun his own career as a rock-and-roll singer, topping the pop chart in 1958 with It’s Only Make Believe before remaking himself as a country star in the mid-1960s — another artist, like the sisters themselves, who treated genre borders as suggestions. The journey was complete — a lyric by the Carpenters’ wordsmith, carried first by three Black sisters from Oakland, and crowned at last in the genre where its writers’ instincts had probably pointed all along.
A Hand That Never Hurried
Slow Hand endures as the bridge in the Pointer Sisters’ story: the record that connects the sultry trio of Fire to the hit machine that would detonate with Break Out two years later, and proof that the group’s genre-hopping was not a gimmick but a birthright. It has outlived its chart run in soundtrack placements, oldies rotation and a New Zealand platinum certification earned decades on.
But its quietest achievement may be the simplest. In an era when female desire on pop radio was usually something to be hinted at or apologized for, three sisters sang, slowly and without flinching, about exactly what they wanted — and America kept the record at number two for three weeks, singing along. The song’s writers never pictured them doing it. Nobody else, in the end, could have.
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