Calling themselves the Funk Brothers, they seemed to love playing together. At night, if the session was over, they would go to the Chit Chat Lounge, a small club on Twelfth Street, a rapidly deteriorating black neighborhood. There, in the heart of the ghetto, they would improvise jazz, jamming with Smokey Robinson or whoever was free, playing extraordinary music for anyone willing to go to Twelfth Street in the middle of the night. According to Jack Ashford, whose tambourine smashes may be heard throughout the “Dancing in the Street” track, many improvised ideas in the Motown sessions were never written but came from the session the night before at the Chit Chat Lounge. Ashford said that they would be handed music for a session and start playing and someone would recall something he had done the night before at the Chit Chat and, as Ashford put it, “Bam!! It would fit like a glove and sound like the parts were written out on the charts.”
Six months after settling into the new Tamla studio, Gordy concluded that they needed a better space, and his new wife, Raynoma, found another house at 2648 West Grand Boulevard. This house also was far from an ideal studio. Joe Messina remembered originally recording in the garage, “with a dirt floor and old carpeting on the walls.” In his autobiography Gordy recalled the two-story house as “always under construction.”
One of the first improvements was “studio A,” a small room with a wooden floor where hit after hit was recorded. Today the floor in the control room still bears the splintered hole worn through by foot tapping. They cut a hole in the wall of a bathroom to use as an echo chamber. “Don’t flush while they’re recording,” Martha Reeves recalled was a constant reminder. Four microphones hung from the ceiling. They had only four tracks, which meant limited mixing possibilities and a great deal of overdubbing from separate recording sessions. The sound was constantly being improvised. Although Ivy Jo Hunter refutes the often-repeated legend that he beat a crowbar in “Dancing in the Street,” they did do things like that. Holland, Dozier, and Holland in particular invented percussion. They placed two-by-fours in studio A and covered them with plywood, and would recruit the first four people they found with leather-sole shoes—they did not want rubber soles—to stomp rhythmically during a recording session. Reeves remembers that during the track session for her hit “Nowhere to Run,” a Holland-Dozier-Holland song, one of the Holland brothers beat a chain with a hammer, and by the end of the session his hand was bleeding.
Gordy placed a hand-painted sign, blue on white, that read “Hitsville U.S.A.” on the front of the building. “There was no way our purpose was vague,” Gordy said. He always maintained that confidence was a key to success, which interestingly was what General Motors’ Alfred Sloan always said as well. Gordy made it clear that he expected hits. He encouraged competition. The studio also had a family atmosphere; it was a place where people met and talked, like in the Gordy family’s grocery store. But there were also intense expectations.
• • •
Gordy and his lieutenants would go to amateur nights in local clubs and find talent to bring to Hitsville. Amateur night at the Warfield Theater on Saturdays was one of their scouting grounds. The Warfield, only about a dozen blocks from Hitsville, was a small 1914 theater later redone with a flashy Art Deco façade, seating fewer than four hundred people. Later torn down to build I-94, it was never one of Detroit’s premier halls or clubs, but Gordy found undiscovered talent there. Ivy Jo Hunter said, “That was the genius of Berry Gordy. He invested in raw talent. It was the only place you could learn as you earned from your craft.”
The studio was always open. Martha Reeves recalled, “We worked without a time clock. The studio was open twenty-four hours. You could schedule a two a.m. session.”
Hunter added that the two a.m. sessions were “when you got the big drinkers.” But Reeves reminded him that they drank outside in their cars because Gordy did not allow drinking in the studio. A few musicians, chiefly Jamerson and drummer Bennie Benjamin, had serious alcohol problems. But a two a.m. session was also a way of getting string players from the Detroit Symphony, who were recorded in a small trapezoidal room.
Gordy would grab talent anywhere in his city that he could find it. Unlike today, it was rare in those days for classical musicians to play on popular recordings. They grudgingly wore “I Like Ludwig” buttons. But Gordy wanted their abilities, even though the communication was often a struggle. The classical musicians would tell Gordy that what he wanted could not be done because it was against the fundamental rules of music. Gordy would tell them, “I don’t care about the rules because I don’t know what they are.”
One of the primary talent hunters was William “Mickey” Stevenson, a handsome man with magnetic charm and a wide range of talents who joined the Motown organization in 1960 as the A&R director. This was an industry term standing for “Artists and Repertory”—the person responsible for acquiring both songs and singers and deciding which songs were for which artists.
There was a barbershop on Twelfth Street called Rene Mullins House of Style. Stevenson used to get his hair cut there, and so did Gordy. Mullins packed in more customers than he could cut. So he introduced them to one another and kept them busy socializing until he could get to them. One day Stevenson started talking about how much he liked Jackie Wilson’s songs. Mickey admired the singer’s ability to reach white audiences. Mullins said that he should meet the man who wrote his songs, and thrilled Mickey by taking him to a man waiting in a corner—Berry Gordy Jr.
The two men got along well and Gordy said he was starting a new company, and so Mickey went to Hitsville U.S.A. for an audition. Gordy listened to him sing his original songs and told him that he liked the songs. Mickey thought he was about to get an offer when Gordy added, “Your voice is shit.”
At the time Hitsville U.S.A. was not the great Motown but a start-up studio that might or might not succeed. Mickey was not about to be insulted, and started to leave. “I was getting out of here. I don’t need this,” Mickey remembered, when Gordy then told him that he was impressed by how much Mickey knew and offered him the A&R job. Mickey’s response as he remembered it was “A&R? What the fuck is that?”
This was another thing they had in common. In Gordy’s autobiography, he confessed that he wasn’t sure what the title meant either. But he knew that he was supposed to have one, and he was certain that this was the person he wanted to comb the Detroit streets and bring him talent. He liked the flashy way Mickey dressed and the hip way that he talked. “Mickey was street,” Gordy later said. “Much more street than I was. I could see he was definitely an Eastside graduate, while I was still sort of that Westside boy at heart.” There was that critical divide in black Detroit between the homey Westside and the faster, more hip Eastside. Somewhere around Woodward Avenue, the easy rural southern ways seemed to be traded for those of the harder, faster northern city. This, Gordy thought, was the man to work Detroit and find its raw talent.
Actually Stevenson grew up on the Westside, two blocks from the Eastside, where I-75 now is, in a neighborhood some fifteen blocks away from Hitsville U.S.A. He was born in the South, and his family had migrated from Alabama to Detroit by way of Chicago. His father was a tap dancer and his mother a singer named Kitty Brown Gale Stevenson. Kitty also wrote songs. She thought of herself as a blues singer but sang with a sixteen-piece orchestra, Todd Rise and His Orchestra. They played at the Detroit clubs with headliners such as Dinah Washington.
Like many other Detroit teenagers, Mickey sang in a high school group, a quartet called the Meadowlarks, who sang songs by the Ravens. It was fashionable at the time to name groups after birds because birds like to sing. He went on tour with the great vibe player Lionel Hampton and suddenly, instead of singing on Detroit streets, he was in a top professional group. “I saw great artists and great shows, great theatrical shows. Great lighting . . . I saw things that coming from Detroit and the Warfield Theater there was no comparison,” Mickey recalled while munching on ribs at his R&
B and soul food club in Los Angeles, where “Dancing in the Street” chimed out as his cell phone’s ringtone.
On tour with Hampton, Mickey was making money, but he sent most of it home because he could get more. “We thought the tour was going to go on forever,” he said. Then the tour ended and he went home with no money. Mickey called this “one of the basic lessons of life: the tour does not go on forever.” It was a lesson that most of the artists he recruited at Motown would have to learn for themselves.
Mickey went on to sing with groups in New York and Los Angeles. All the while he was writing songs, so that by the time he went to Berry Gordy he was calling himself a singer-songwriter. He had many ideas similar to those of Gordy. He had a preference for jazz musicians over blues because he thought that these were the people who really understood music. He also thought that, given what was going on in politics, society, and music, the time was right for a strong black-owned studio that produced black music aimed at white audiences. But he failed to get the financial backing for such a company. He had established himself in Detroit living over Denny’s Show Bar in the downtown club area. He liked living over a club:
I could bang on my piano and no one could bother me cause they got a band downstairs. You know to a normal person you’d go insane. But for me it was great. I could hear the bands downstairs and I could play as loud as I wanted to upstairs. So the musicians—I knew quite a few of them and they would say to me, “I want to borrow some money,” and I’d say, “I just saw you work on the weekend and you’re broke. You got a problem.”
“No, man, I didn’t get paid. . . .”
“I’ll go get your money for you. You give me 15 percent.” . . . I’d go to the club owner and say, “Pay the guy. . . . I’ll see to it that they are there on time. They play, you give me 15 percent.” So I made a deal on both ends, so now different musicians come to me. I end up working with the best in the city. These were guys who could really play. But they weren’t readers, but they were playing R&B and rock ’n’ roll.
Gordy was right. Mickey was streetwise and he knew the music world. He also knew how to find talent. He explained that he was always looking for what he called “the gift. The ability to sing or write, whatever it was, and if it was a one-time thing, could they repeat it. Give you something else. You strike me as a talented writer and I hear your song, I’d say, ‘Okay, do something else.’”
• • •
Another key element to the building of both Motown and “Dancing in the Street” was a smooth-voiced young man from Washington, DC, who looked sculpted as a black Adonis, named Marvin Gaye. The original name was Gay, but Marvin added an e, partly from a fear of being thought homosexual and partly to distance himself from a volatile relationship with his preacher father named Gay, a violent and sexually ambiguous man who secretly dressed in women’s clothes.
Marvin grew up in segregated Washington, DC, a fact of life that filled him with anger from an early age. This was the city in which the great contralto Marian Anderson, a child prodigy who came out of the black Baptist church, was refused a concert booking at the most prominent concert hall, Constitution Hall, because the theater, owned by the Daughters of the American Revolution, not only had segregated seating but would not allow a black artist to appear.
First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt resigned from the DAR in protest, and the NAACP pressured Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes to arrange an open-air concert for Anderson on Easter Sunday 1939 on the steps in front of the Lincoln Memorial. The concert, which drew seventy-five thousand people and was listened to on the radio by millions, established those marble steps as a venue of black protest. The concert took place a week after Marvin Gaye was born, and he grew up hearing the story repeatedly from his father.
As a child Marvin felt a connection to Marian Anderson. He believed that he was “destined to be a singer,” a conviction that he always claimed had come to him through dreams. He had other idols such as gospel star Mahalia Jackson. But as he grew to adolescence, he developed a different idol. Years later he told his friend and later biographer David Ritz:
My dream was to become Frank Sinatra, I loved his phrasing, especially when he was very young and pure. He grew up into a fabulous jazz singer and I used to fantasize about having a lifestyle like his—carrying on in Hollywood and becoming a movie star. Every woman in America wanted to go to bed with Frank Sinatra. He was the king I longed to be. My greatest dream was satisfying as many women as Sinatra. He was the heavyweight champ, the absolute.
In 1959 at the age of nineteen, Marvin went to Chicago to become the newest member of a group called Harvey and the Moonglows. Harvey was Harvey Fuqua, a savvy musician, eleven years older than Marvin, who had sung backup for Bo Diddley and had coauthored a successful song, “Sincerely,” with Alan Freed. Fuqua became Marvin’s mentor.
The Moonglows recorded only a few songs with Marvin, including singing backup for Chuck Berry. Only once did Marvin sing a lead, on “Mama Loochie,” which was written by Gaye and Fuqua.
The Moonglows were a victim of that decline of R&B and rock ’n’ roll in 1959 and 1960, when America seemed to be waiting for the new sound. The group disintegrated and Gaye and Fuqua drifted from Chicago to Detroit, looking for a future. Gaye was still hoping Fuqua could lead him on a path to black Sinatradom.
Gaye and Gordy met at a Hitsville Christmas party in December 1960. Gordy, laughing in the sound booth with Mickey Stevenson and Smokey Robinson, just wanted to continue with his Christmas party, which was going on throughout the little Hitsville house, when his sister Gwen started to drag him away to hear this new talent that he just had to hear. “My sisters were always promoting somebody,” Gordy recalled. Gwen was as always very insistent. She took him looking for her latest find, Marvin Gaye, a thin and handsome young man who they found slouched on a piano bench playing a jazzy tune.
“Berry Gordy, how you doin’, man?” said Gaye, without looking up from the keyboard.
Gordy’s first impression? “He was cool. Real cool.” Which is funny, because Gaye’s first impression of Gordy was “the coolest dude I’d ever met.” They instantly liked each other. Gordy asked Gaye to sing, and he loved what he heard, later describing his voice as “pure, mellow, soulful, and honest.”
Gaye thought the ex-fighter had “a short man’s complex,” and recognized his tough and competitive nature, and even as he moved to the Motown inner circle, he predicted that they were “destined to clash.” But he saw Gordy as a man who knew how to seduce “beautiful world-class women” and how to make world-class money, which were two of Gaye’s central interests.
Motown from the outset was a Gordy family business, just like the grocery store, the plastering company, and the printing business. The four Gordy sisters, Esther, the oldest and most accomplished, Loucye, who died in 1965, and Gwen and Anna, the intriguing women who moved through Detroit like stars, were all strong players in the new company. Esther, the vice president in charge of management, was the second most powerful figure in the company. By 1966, according to a New York Times Sunday Magazine article, ten members of the Gordy family were on the Motown staff.
Fuqua, who had guided the shy and impressionable Gaye, had a plan. Gwen, who had dragged Berry to meet Marvin, was to be his wife. She had recently broken off with Billy Davis. At the same time, Harvey would marry Anna. Such things rarely go according to plan, but incredibly the plan still more or less worked. Anna, thirty-seven, seemed enthralled by the twenty-year-old Marvin Gaye. They had their wedding reception at the 20 Grand. Fuqua adjusted and married Gwen instead.
Was this a cynical career move by young Gaye? He told David Ritz, “From a professional point of view, I have to say—and I hope this doesn’t sound too cold—that I knew just what I was doing. Marrying a queen might not make me a king, but at least I’d have a shot at being a prince.”
Anna saw her young husband as a tremendous talent and worked hard on developi
ng him. She was his mentor, teacher, and guide. It was not surprising that Gaye would have such a marriage, coming from an abusive and violent father but a mother to whom he was devoted. As a child he used to have a fantasy about robbing banks so that he could support his mother. He did have a lifelong relationship, often violent, with prostitutes, and it is not known if that continued during his marriage. But as Marvin became the kind of crooning sex symbol he dreamed of being, he shunned the young women who chased him and was devoted to his wife, who in turn, was devoted to him. His marriage, his tie to the Gordy family, and to the broader Motown family, probably provided the warmest, most secure nest he ever knew.
Meanwhile, Harvey Fuqua, married to Gwen, who was herself always promoting someone or pushing some group, became head of promotion for Motown. It was all in keeping with the way the Gordys ran Motown, an incestuous little company built on marriages, romances, and affairs. Gordy was always marrying or having affairs with the talent. His sister Loucye married the saxophone player Ron Wakefield. Their oldest brother Fuller’s daughter Iris married producer and songwriter Johnny Bristol. Mary Wells, while still a teenager, married another teenager, singer Herman Griffin. Mickey Stevenson married Kim Weston. Smokey Robinson married Claudette Rogers, the lone female singer in his group, the Miracles. Her cousin Bobby Rogers, who also sang with the Miracles, married Wanda Young of the Marvelettes. Georgeanna Tillman of the Marvelettes married Billy Gordon of the Contours. Berry Gordy would even chastise his young artists for dating outside of the company, telling them that there were many good choices within the company and no need to look outside.
Ready For a Brand New Beat Page 9