A look at Berry Gordy, the man who created legends like Smokey Robinson, Stevie Wonder, Marvin Gaye and Diana Ross
A look at Berry Gordy, the man who created legends like Smokey Robinson, Stevie Wonder, Marvin Gaye and Diana Ross By Geoff Brown
Before Motown, there was never a label like it. And there has never been one like it since.
An accident, but only in the sense that its foundation 50 years ago would coincide with a time of boundless American optimism, opportunity, pride and ambition. In the 1960s, Motown was a manifestation of all those qualities plus the very singular drive of one not very tall but impossibly energetic and enthusiastic African-American songwriter and entrepreneur, Berry Gordy Jr. His vision engineered Motown's solid local foundation, its rapid and inexorable national growth and thereafter the massive global expansion of what would become the best known black-owned corporation ever.
Among the children and young adults of Detroit, Gordy would unearth and extraordinary pool of talent. Let us pause for a headcount: Stevie Wonder, Marvin Gaye, The Miracles starring Smokey Robinson, The Supremes featuring Diana Ross, The Temptations, housing perfectly contrasting leads David Ruffin and Eddie Kendricks, Four Tops with Levi Stubbs' imperishable baritone, Martha And The Vandellas, The Jackson 5, The Commodores, Jr Walker and The All Stars, Mary Wells, The Marveletttes, The Contours, The Velvelettes, Kim Weston, Brenda Holloway, Edwin Starr, Jimmy Ruffin, The Detroit Spinners and Tammi Terrell...
Some like Gladys Knight and The Pips and The Isley Brothers, had been successful before they joined the label and continued to be so (rather more lucratively, in fact) after they left it, but the music they made in their Motown years is still indelibly a part of the label's and their, greatness. Add to this a cavalcade of songwriter/producers starting with Brian and Eddie Holland and Lamont Dozier. Stir in the legendary Funk Brothers house band, grounded by two of the most influential session players ever drummer Benny Benjamin and bassist James Jamerson, and you have an awe-inspiring roster of talent.
Berry Gordy saw the potential, harnessed the talent, and had the vision to insist his stars learned their trade as entertainers with mentors such as Maurice King, who taught them the rudiments of music theory, Cholly Atkins (choreographing) and Maxine Powell (deportment), all of which may have sounded cheesy to the white rock establishment but sure as hell meant his acts did not have to spend the rest of their lives on the ill-paid chitlin circuit and could infiltrate, not to say desegregate, the best paid venues of what was, at the end of the '50s, still a deeply racist society. And Gordy also instigated a weekly Quality Control meeting at which staff (singers, producers, writer, sales executives) critiqued that week's crop of finished singles and voted on them to ensure that only the cream were released.
In November 2009, Gordy will be 80. He doesn't sound it. An ebullient, peppy conversationalist, he keeps returning to his deep gratitude to UK Motown fans. "It was in England that (The Supremes) Baby Love first topped the charts and Motown went international!" And he reveals that he's still at work. "I write 'cos I'm a writer. I came out of retirement because I met the most phenomenal singer in the world that I'm gonna work with." His PA promptly interrupts to prevent further revelations about the young lady.
Famously, Gordy had tried a fair number of jobs before he established a foothold in the record business as a songwriter. Each experience selling a black newspaper in a prosperous white neighborhood, labouring as a plasterer/builder with his father's firm, fighting as a boxer, running a record store, working on the Lincoln Mercury automobile production line, selling cooking utensils door-to-door taught him something new.
His jazz store failed because first, he had a partner, and second, they were selling jazz while ignoring what he considered the "simpler" blues records. Lessons: no partners, keep the music simple. But the Gordys clearly had a business gene, a willingness to work hard, keep busy, keep pushing. His father, Pops, born and raised in the South, sold a sizable amount of timber for $2,600 and took the money north to Detroit when he thought, not without foundation, that whites were coming for the cash.
"Every lesson I learned, I used it. When I saw the cars coming off the assembly line in Ford Motor Company, I saw those cars started out as the bare metal frame and I saw them come off the other end as a spanking brand new car. So I got an idea, why don't I have a record company that has an assembly line where they come in off the street, an unknown person, come in one door an unknown and go out another door a star!
"We had people teach them how to walk, talk, speak, eat, dance, do a lot of things in this assembly line so that when they went through it and came out the other end they were hopefully a star. And that was the premise. It didn't always happen, but it happened many, many times."
Of course, none of this would have worked, or mattered, if the music the basic frame on the assembly line had not been so absolutely sound. Gordy had served as profoundly thorough an apprenticeship in music as he had in business. In the early '50s he hung out at Detroit's Flame Bar, where his sister Gwen worked, met Billie Holiday and befriended and began writing songs with Billy Roquel Davis. They also met the club's owner, Al Green. After writing for LaVern Baker, whom Green managed, and Etta James in the late '50s, Davis and Gordy approached a singer (Jackie Wilson) also managed by Green with some songs including one titled Reet Petite.
"I was just meeting Jackie Wilson and I never considered that such a good song.
Roquel Davis actually had the idea of the title, and we worked around it and I wrote some lyrics to it. I was amazed at what Jackie Wilson did to it. I realized then that he was probably one of the greatest singers in the world, because he took what I considered just a normal song, Reet Petite, and made it into a classic, the way he sung it, and that was just my greatest joy. When I heard that on the air, my head had swelled up like it was gonna burst I was so excited! So that was the beginning of all of this stuff."
In 1957, it was Reet Petite that gave Wilson, and Gordy, a first UK Top 10 hit, and Gordy would emphasise the importance of this phase of his life by titling his 1994 autobiography not after a Motown song but after one he wrote for Wilson, To Be Loved.
Confident after writing hits for Wilson, Gordy learned other business lessons fast. When publishers wouldn't pay due royalties, he set up his own publishing company, and when an early single, The Miracles' Got A Job, earned him a first producer's royalty of under $4 he set about establishing a label, in 1959, assisted by an $800 loan from the Gordy family fund. Had his nights at the Flame Bar, Twenty Grand nightclub and Graystone Ballroom alerted him to a deep untapped well of singers and musicians in Detroit?
"Less than one per cent of the people in the world ever reach their full potential, which meant that I had 99 per cent of the people in the world that I could work with. I think success and failure come from inside the person, not so much from outside. My thing was to teach people to always be themselves, so one person would not sound like another person. Diana (Ross) would not sound like Marvin Gaye, Marvin Gaye would not sound like Stevie (Wonder), he would not sound like Diana. It was about being yourself and what you feel. And so that was brought out in their song. So that was kind of what made the Motown Sound unique, it was what they felt."
As word of a black-owned and largely black-run recording corporation making an ever-increasing string of hits spread, artists and songwriters seemed to form a queue around the block at the Motown headquarters Gordy had brought as 2648 West Grand Boulevard and dubbed Hitsville USA. Take the case of Martha Reeves. One evening, after hearing her sing as Martha LaVelle during happy hour at the Twenty Grand, Mickey Stevenson, installed by Gordy as A&R director, gave Reeves his card and asked her along for an audition. "I went there the next day," Martha remembers. "Mickey asked what I was doing there.
I said, do you remember giving me that card last night? He said, 'Yeah, but you should have called first. We have auditions every third Thursday.' The phone was ringing at that time and he was heading off for another part of the company, another part, I should say, of the house (laughs) 'cos Motown was a house converted into a recording studio and Berry lived upstairs in one of the apartments. (Stevenson) was off to prepare for a session for this drummer named Marvin Gaye, so when he asked if I'd answer that phone I did. He was gone for three hours."
In that time Martha diligently answered the phones, took messages. "When he came back I had literally taken over the studio. I was asked to come back the next day, and the next day, and finally I got a salary u2013 I was good typist and my shorthand was OK u2013 and finally I got to go in the studio and make a demonstration record. So my recording contract had to be earned (laughs). So I was just a performer who could be used in other areas until I got a hit record."
So when Berry met Smokey Robinson was he certain he'd be a success?
"No. I was never sure. It would depend on him, as I told him. Smokey, who turned out to be just one of the most incredible poets and great writers of all time, did not know a lot about structure and stuff like that, and about some of the philosophies (of song-writing), because I was like a common-sense philosopher. You know, two-and-two was always four, it always had to make sense to me, and Smokey's songs did not always make sense. They were great poetry, but they never made a lot of sense in terms of structure. And once I taught him that he then boomed out of here, he was likeu2026 it really depressed me.
I thought I was a great songwriter, then Smokey came along and started really writing, I fell down lower. Then when Marvin came and started writing I fell even lower! And then when Stevie came I just sank to the bottom, I was in free fall!"
But of course, many of Motown's first important hits were Gordy co-writes. "Well, (Barrett Strong's) Money was a personal song, (The Contour's) Do You Love Me was a personal song. Those are songs I wrote because I was having trouble, one, with girls, so I wrote Do You Love Me because I couldn't get them to dance with me. Money I wrote because I was broke. I had gotten the love, but (also) a bill! So I decided to write about it.
"So I realized that just writing personal stories that were comical or whatever would be great. And so I encouraged the artists to do the same thing and the writers to write simple things that they felt, because if they can express feelings to people that people couldn't express for themselves, I'm appealing to what everybody feels."
A rapidly expanding Motown roster in the early 1960s brought a steady increase in record sales in the USA with major hits for The Miracles, The Marvelettes and Mary Wells. In 1963 Martha And The Vandellas, Marvin Gaye and Little Stevie Wonder all broke into the US Top 30 and then, as if without warning to all but the most diligent pop-soul and R&B watchers, in 1964 the graph suddenly shot off the top of the page with even bigger breakthroughs for The Temptations, Four Tops and The Supremes, among others. In the space of five years and apparently out of nowhere, the label, still housed in, well, a house, had at least nine acts all capable of hitting Number 1. Their singles were virtually the only American records to offer serious and sustained competition to the co-called British Invasion, and indeed led a counter expeditionary force to the Old World.
"We were thrilled that The Beatles did, on their second album, three of our songs (the Fabs covered The Marvelettes' Please Mr Postman, The Miracles' You've Really Got A Hold On Me, Barrett Strong's Money (That's What I Want) on 1963's With The Beatles) and that was just a joy and a privilege for us because we never expected what happened."
The sheer volume of hits gives the Impression that Motown in the '60s was a procession of unremitting success. But that wasn't the case. Alongside basic labels Motown and Tamla, Gordy launched numerous other imprints as he tried to break into pop and easy listening (Miracle, Mel-O-Dy), Gospel (divinity), jazz (workshop), spoken word (Black Forum) and rock (Rare Earth). Almost none of this worked, and all were quietly discontinued, mostly in the '60s. Nor had Motown's Atlantic crossing been plain sailing. In the first five years, releases in the UK came via short-term distribution deals on London (1959-61), Fontana ('61-2), Oriole ('62-3) and Stateside ('64-5) until in 1965 the UK hybrid Tamla-Motown was established.
There were sounder reasons for the launch of Gordy, Soul and V.I.P. in addition to Motown and Tamla. "The reason we had so many labels was because I couldn't get more than one record, or two, on a label played on the radio. When the disc jockeys said, 'How many records do you want played?' I would say, They're all hits! They would say, 'No, no, we are playing one from Columbia, one from RCA, two from this one and that one and I can't play your records.' In those days pop stations didn't play black records anyway that much, unless it was Nat King Cole or Ella Fitzgerald. I realized they wouldn't play but one record from a label so I started five labels and put a record on each one and then I could put a record out on each label and they wouldn't realise that it was the same company.
The ethos of Gordy's self-contained operation also meant it never saw itself as being in competition with the Beatles and other British Invasion warriors or soul-slanted labels like Atlantic and Stax. "No, I never felt in competition so much with the Beatles or any of the international people, because I was inspired by them and their music and I knew that they were influenced by Motown. So far as I was concerned it was not competition. Music is about joining, I loved their music because I appreciated it. As far as the other labels, I was never in competition with any of the black labels as much as I was in competition with me, with us, we were in competition with each other to get the records out and so we didn't deal in politics or any of that kind of stuff. Whatever the best record was, we wanted to come out with it.
And the best record was usually the one that was the best record 'cos we voted on them. But there was not a sense of competition other than with inside (the label) for having the best record." In the same time frame that Motown was established, many independent labels failed not entirely for musical reasons but because of mismanagement. Similarly, no independent record company at that time found itself free of innuendo but, Gordy has said, he was interrogated by the FBI and Motown was declared free of rumoured mafia infiltration.
An unspoken codicil to this is that some people find it hard to believe a black man has such drive and business acumen. Does it come from family, or just him? "It came from the family, my father, his business ethics. He just felt that everybody had to win. He taught me that it should always be a win-win situation. If you win and somebody else loses, that's not good. Or if they win and you lose, that's not good. So he taught me (to aim for) a win-win situation, so I wanted everybody to win whenever I made a deal. And that was the principle that I lived on and it always worked."
As his business grew, Gordy had less and less involvement as a writer and as a producer with the musicians in the Snakepit, as the basement studio at 2648 West Grand Boulevard was 'affectionately' known by the band. "I hated the business side. When I started out I was doing 90 per cent creative and 10 per cent business. And then, within 10 years, I was doing 98 per cent business and two per cent creative. I did not like it. I was still a happy person because everybody else was doing it well and the company was moving. But personally I did not get the joy that I got (before)."
Others, too, in the late '60s were feeling dissatisfied and left such as their first bonafide woman star, Mary Wells and there would be continued wrangling over conflicts of interest, until Gordy ceased managing and promoting dates for his artists as well as recording them. Another thorn was perceived favouritism in terms of song material and promotional investment shown towards some artists, most famously The Supremes lead singer Diana Ross with whom Gordy had an affair and a daughter, Rhonda.
The most catastrophic '60s departure was that of writer-producers Holland-Dozier-Holland. "The people that came up during that time, the Motown period, cannot not love each other. Though we've had family arguments, I mean, Holland-Dazier-Holland and I, we had a lawsuit on and off for over three years. But we are now the best friends and Motown is for ever and that's why this anniversary is so important to all of us, because we have a chance for the world to really understand what it was from the people who did it, made it."
This is true. As well as the continuing presence on the label of Stevie Wonder, 46 years after his first Tamla hit, and 50-year veteran Smokey Robinson, many, many former acts have long forgiven and forgotten the painful fissures. When I asked Martha Reeves about her leaving Motown she laughed: "Actually, Motown left me, we must get that straight! When Motown moved (to Los Angeles) I simply stayed." In fact, when Gordy relocated his company to LA at the end of the '60s in pursuit of expansion into the film industry, many musicians and singers were left in a similar bind and the music industry in the city never really recovered. But the indestructible music it created there has grown in stature, in its ability to evoke a time and place, and the profundity of its influence on current pop music.
So now, 50 years on, what is Motown's legacy? " I don't know for sure," Gordy laughs. "Love, and believing in yourself. With our company, I was in charge but I made logic the boss. There was no company politics or egos allowed when it came to record selection and that sort or thing and everybody knew it, everybody knew that logic was the boss. So I would think that honesty, love and competition were probably some of the major factors. But no politics, no egos allowed, it was the best records. It was all about the work. And anybody that does that will have successful endeavour."
-u00a0Courtesy Planet Syndication
