Gladys Knight & the Pips and the guys were like my own children!" The group was a touring standout during this period with Knight's contralto lead vocals and the Pips' impeccable choreography and characteristic background vocals becoming highlights. By the end of 1965, Berry Gordy was scouting to get the group signed to his fabled Motown Records label. Though the three Pips wanted to sign with the label, Gladys Knight initially refused, due to her fears that the label would overlook them over the more popular artists on his roster. They would sign with Motown in 1966, being assigned to Motown's Soul Records label, a
Battle of the Pips no hits. Radar was still a new and unreliable technology at that time, and weather conditions around the Aleutians were characteristically bad, with the very poor visibility normal for the area. No Japanese warships were actually within . Author Brian Garfield surmises, based on analysis by modern Aleutian fishing-boat captains, that the pips were rafts of sooty or short-tailed shearwaters, species of migratory petrel that pass through the Aleutians in July every year. Battle of the Pips The Battle of the Pips is the name given to an incident on 27 July 1943, part of the Aleutian campaign of World