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Re:Masters: The Motown Legacy
'The Sound of Young America' celebrates a half century of
musical landmarks
By Alan Light
Special to MSN Music
Posted Jan. 27, 2009
Fifty years ago this month in Detroit, a 29-year-old African-American
songwriter named Berry Gordy Jr. -- a former boxer, autoworker, and Army veteran
-- borrowed $800 from his family. That's not usually an auspicious start to a
story. But with that money, Gordy founded a company called Tamla Records, which
soon transformed into Motown Records, one of the best-known and best-loved
record labels of all time.
After securing the loan, Gordy got into the game in a matter of days --
Tamla's first single, Marv Johnson's "Come to Me," was released Jan. 21, 1959.
The label's first major hit came the following year with Barrett Strong's "Money
(That's What I Want)," a song co-written by Gordy himself (and now most familiar
from covers ranging from the Beatles' blazing rendition to the Flying Lizards
icy-cool new wave take). In 1961, the Miracles, featuring Smokey Robinson,
scored Motown's first million seller with "Shop Around," followed quickly by the
company's first pop No. 1 hit, "Please Mr. Postman," by teen girl group the
Marvelettes.
View photos of original Motown
artists
After that, as they say, came the deluge. The Supremes, the Temptations, the
Four Tops, Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder, the Jackson 5, Martha & the Vandellas
-- a staggering roster of superstars would pass through the doors of "Hitsville
U.S.A.," located at 2648 West Grand Boulevard in Detroit (now the home of the
Motown Historical Museum). Guided by immortal writers and producers such as
Norman Whitfield, Nick Ashford and Valerie Simpson, and the
Holland-Dozier-Holland team, and supported by brilliant instrumentalists
including drummer Benny Benjamin and incomparable bass player James Jamerson,
Motown would dominate American R&B and pop in the 1960s with a sound steeped
in gospel and blues but stuffed to the brim with endlessly inventive pop hooks.
Expanding beyond Detroit, the label would later reel in powerhouses such as the
Commodores, Rick James, Boyz II Men and Erykah Badu.
Motown has released more than 180 No. 1 hits worldwide, now gathered into the
10-CD box set "Motown: The Complete No. 1s." In 1968, the company had five
records in the pop Top 10; it also held the top three spots for an unprecedented
full month. And through soundtracks, radio, samples, commercials and covers,
Motown's songs remain almost as ubiquitous today as they were in the label's
peak years.
How is it possible that such a wealth of talent came of age at the same time
in a single, industrial Midwestern city? Motown artists from those glory days
offer a few tangible explanations: Mary Wilson of the Supremes credits the
Detroit school system, especially the music programs, whereas Duke Fakir of the
Four Tops posits that it has to do with the city's large number of churches. But
Otis Williams, the only surviving member of the original Temptations, puts it
most succinctly: "It was God's infinite wisdom to bring along this unique
company at that exact time," he says.
Of course, as amazing as the tens of millions of records that Motown sold was
who they sold them to -- which is to say, everyone, of all races, around the
world, at a time when pop music was still largely a segregated marketplace. From
the beginning, Gordy's vision for his company (which he nicknamed,
significantly, "The Sound of Young America") involved a belief in the ability of
black American music to reach beyond its existing boundaries.
"Berry wanted to make music for everyone," says Fakir, the only original Four
Top left after the death last year of the group's lead singer, the magnificent
Levi Stubbs. "He talked constantly to the writers about that -- the idea that we
were not just playing to one market." Motown artists were the first
African-American guests on television shows such as "American Bandstand" and
"The Ed Sullivan Show," and the Supremes were the first R&B act to play the
country's most prestigious nightclub, New York's Copacabana.
Motown's success became inextricably linked to the rising tide of the civil
rights movement. "We represented a social environment that was changing," says
Wilson. "The experience we had known being black was not being bona fide
citizens, not being able to drink out of the same water fountains, playing to
segregated audiences. When that started to fall away, and you saw that music was
one of the components that was helping it fall away, that's when it really felt
like we were doing something significant. "
"We looked at Martin Luther King and we thought, he's doing the same thing on
foot that we're doing on the radio," says Fakir. "I like to think that we were
softening the blow for him a little bit."
Fulfilling such immense ambitions was obviously an enormous challenge, which
Gordy countered through an elaborate system of artist development. He modeled
his thinking on the piece-by-piece construction he saw on the Ford assembly line
and required that Motown artists receive tutoring on their dress, speech,
manners, and stage show. "Berry wasn't only selling records, but training people
to become stars," says Fakir. "He wanted the image to fit the music, and it
really made people look at us in a different light."
Wilson stresses, though, that sometimes too much is made of this instruction
period. "Some people think that we were being made, like puppets, by Motown,"
she says. "But all the artists really brought in their own talent, and then
everyone contributed their expertise so you could get better. It wasn't just
rolling out like an assembly line -- the artists were like diamonds in the
rough, and they were all there to help polish us up."
Everyone, however, acknowledges the value of Motown's famous, highly
competitive quality control system, in which all new recordings were played to
an assembly of the writers and producers, and the singles were selected by a
combination of consensus and Gordy's final decree. "They would spend eight hours
a day discussing those choices, and they were always pretty much on it," says
Fakir. "And I know, because I didn't much like 'Reach Out (I'll Be There)' when
we first cut it! They said, 'Don't worry about it. You just sing, and let us
sort it out.'"
Williams says the process encouraged both "consistency and diversity -- there
was an insistence on quality, but they were also very adventuresome." He offers
as evidence the Temptations' own journey from the sweetness of "My Girl" to the
wailing psychedelia of "Ball of Confusion" in just a few years. (Story Continues On Next Page...) |
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