Surely this was going to be a long, difficult summer.
Suddenly it seemed white people who had more or less ignored black people wanted to know everything about who the Negroes were and what they wanted. Books explaining Negroes were in demand, and studies were regularly commissioned. On June 7, 1964, The New York Times Sunday Magazine published an article by a black novelist, John Oliver Killens, titled “Explanation of the ‘Black Psyche,’” which made the supposedly startling revelation that “the Negro is different, and his aim in America is not to be like the white man, but to be himself, to make his own contribution, in a free and equal society.”
Two University of Chicago sociologists got some press attention for a study of 721 black families and 839 white families in which they found that “contrary to what may be the popular stereotype, almost no Negro respondents reported that they would encourage their child to marry a white person.” This integration idea was turning out more complicated than most whites expected.
Meanwhile, the front pages of newspapers were filled with news on the United States spending ever more money and sending ever more military “advisers” to bolster a corrupt and repressive South Vietnam against a Communist North Vietnam.
The year 1964 was supposed to be one of civil rights, but even as the public increasingly focused on the “Negro problem” it became apparent from Lyndon Johnson’s own taped conversations, released after his death in 1973 at only age sixty-four, that he was agonizing increasingly about Vietnam. Only weeks before Kennedy’s death, a coup in Vietnam had taken the life of the first South Vietnamese president, Ngo Dinh Diem, installing a regime possibly more brutal, corrupt, and incompetent than the one he replaced. Kennedy had resolved to disengage from Vietnam after he was reelected. Like Johnson, he saw a tough anti-Communist stance in Vietnam as vital for the election.
Johnson saw the situation as a disaster in waiting and recognized that sending troops meant huge numbers of casualties and no way out and an unwinnable war that would be politically unpopular. In early March, a State Department report reiterated what French president Charles de Gaulle had been privately telling the United States, that a bombing campaign would be ineffective, neither weakening the resolve of the north nor boosting morale in the south. With no good alternatives, Johnson was obsessed with what had become known as “the domino theory,” by then a ten-year-old idea from the Eisenhower administration, that once Vietnam fell to the Communists, the rest of Southeast Asia and maybe even more of Asia would fall one by one to the Communists. The Communist doctrine claimed that their ideology was the future, and eventually the rest of the world would follow. Nowhere was this idea taken more seriously than in Washington. In March Johnson asked his defense secretary, Robert McNamara, about the world’s view of Vietnam. “Why aren’t the Russians as interested in this as we are? Why aren’t the French and the English? Why do they want the Commies to take over all of Southeast Asia?”
In his private conversations, Johnson asked friends and advisers for help with what he saw as a “mess.” But he couldn’t let all of Asia fall. In June 1964, the CIA produced a study authored by Sherman Kent, an intelligence analyst, that stated that the domino theory was a myth and if Vietnam were to fall to the Communists, no one other than possibly Cambodia would follow. In Johnson’s inner circle it was known as the “death of the domino theory memo.” Unfortunately Johnson ignored it. History disproved the domino theory. In the end, and millions of lives later, South Vietnam would fall and Asia would not follow.
• • •
The future was not looking bright for Detroit or for most other urban areas. Money was leaving the cities, and this had grave implications for the overwhelming majority of Detroit’s blacks. White people were leaving for the suburbs, a 1960s growing phenomenon in northern cities known as “white flight.” At the same time black immigration to Detroit had dropped off because of a lack of jobs caused by factories moving away as well. As a long-term consequence of this trend, in 1990 Detroit had half as many jobs as it had in 1960. Detroit began losing population. The 1960 census showed a 9 percent decline in total Detroit population. Charles Roemer, a member of the city planning commission, shrugged off this news, saying, “The gloss of the suburbs will wear off.” In Detroit, subsequent years would prove him wrong, as white flight increased. In the 2000 census, whites were only 12.3 percent of Detroit’s population.
The 1960 census showed that the city was 28.9 percent black, almost double the black percentage in the 1950 census. In 1960, more than 35 percent of the workforce was black, but only 3.3 percent of the police force. In 1961, Mayor Louis Miriani ordered a crackdown on crime, which resulted in a widespread harassment of blacks by the white police force. In the mayoral election blacks organized behind a thirty-three-year-old unknown white lawyer, Jerome P. Cavanagh, the son of a Ford worker, and the sizable black vote elected him, marking the beginning of black electoral power in Detroit.
Even though Detroit car sales were up, there were largely unheeded warning signs. Smaller foreign cars had made the first sign of inroads in the market, gaining 10 percent of car sales by the early 1960s. In June 1964, the Connecticut State Police released a report that the new, smaller cars were not as safe as the Detroit giants. Studying 1,300 accidents, they concluded that the smaller car crumpled every time it hit a big one. According to the director of the project, A. J. White, when a big and small car collide, “it’s like a sledgehammer hitting a tack.” This was good news for Detroit automakers, who liked to make them large and were starting to worry about smaller imports. And it was good news for Motown, since every new star purchased a safe sledgehammer in the form of a very long and befinned Cadillac. They lined West Grand Boulevard near the studio day and night. In 2012 Martha Reeves still had one.
But bad news for Motown came from the Public Health Service in Washington. The “baby boom” was over. In March there were fewer babies born than in any March since 1955, and the total from March 1963 to March 1964 was significantly less than that of the year before. The Public Health Service could not explain why this was happening, but for the music industry in time this might mean fewer teenagers buying their records.
Trouble was brewing and there was a fear in many sectors for many reasons that the good times wouldn’t last. Perhaps the general mood of the country was expressed by Grayson Kirk, the president of Columbia University, who told the graduating class: “Our country has rounded a corner in its history; the road, which led to that corner, no longer beckons us ahead with the same legible signposts that guided our fathers. In one sense the American dream is over.”
• • •
Nineteen sixty-four was a presidential election year, and the first declared candidate was trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie, who announced his candidacy at the time of the 1963 march. He said that if elected, he would rename the White House “the Blues House.” For his cabinet he promised to appoint Duke Ellington as secretary of state, drummer Max Roach as secretary of defense, Charlie Mingus as “minister of peace,” Peggy Lee as secretary of labor, and Miles Davis as director of the CIA. He promised to appoint Mississippi governor Ross Barnett to direct the U.S. Information Service. Malcolm X was to be attorney general and Alabama governor George Wallace was to be deported to Vietnam. Among his campaign promises were free health care and education. Lest anybody thought he was joking about all of this, he sold Dizzy for President buttons and sent the profits to James Farmer’s CORE and Martin Luther King’s SCLC.
In hindsight few presidential elections have had a greater impact on the future of U.S. politics than the 1964 presidential election. Lyndon Johnson, who had been an incumbent for only months, was the uncontested Democratic nominee—at least once it was clear that Robert Kennedy would not run—a fill-in for the murdered president. In fact, it was one of the least planned presidential campaigns of modern history. President Kennedy had conducted only one meeting about the 1964 campaign, and Johnson had not been present. Log
ically, given the depth of the emotional wound from the killing, the Republicans should have put forward one of their prominent liberals and argued that he could better carry the Kennedy mantle. But Republican voters were rejecting the leading liberal, New York governor Nelson Rockefeller, in the face of issues of war and peace and civil rights, because he had divorced. Others, such as Pennsylvania’s William Scranton and Michigan’s George Romney, never caught on enough in the face of an insurgent right-wing movement that coalesced around Arizona senator Barry Goldwater.
The Republicans had never had a candidate like Goldwater before. Traditionally, the central argument between Republicans and Democrats had been government involvement. Democrats wanted government programs and Republicans didn’t, though they initiated them anyway. It was a relatively small difference.
But Barry Goldwater, out to steal the South from the Democrats, opposed the Civil Rights Act. While Robert Kennedy in his commencement speech at Marquette University was praising the “genuine and intense concern with social justice” of the college generation, Goldwater at Pennsylvania Military College claimed that he was the “voice of reason” against “impatient spirits who . . . make social changes an end in itself.” He appeared to be calling for an end to civil rights and an end to the kind of social programs that had kept Democrats in power in every election since 1932, with the exception of the eight years of Eisenhower the war hero. Goldwater also wanted to end efforts to live peacefully with Communist nations. He denounced “the illusion of coexistence and peaceful accommodations.” Between the United States and the Soviet Union, a relationship called the Cold War, which had been a nuclear-armed stare-down for the past two decades, Goldwater was speaking at a particularly sensitive moment because the reform-minded Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev, had been trying to ease relations with the United States.
Goldwater said that NATO commanders in Europe should be given the authority to use nuclear weapons on their own initiative. Goldwater even urged the use of “low-yield” nuclear weapons to defoliate South Vietnamese forests.
Usually American presidential races are decided more on differences in personality than on differences on issues. That was certainly true in the previous election between Kennedy and Richard Nixon. But this election was to be about huge differences on the main issues.
• • •
In 1964, even if the birthrate was slacking off, seventeen-year-olds became the largest age group in the United States, a group deemed too young to vote for another four years but eligible to be shipped to war in only one year, and a group who felt the one voice that could express what they thought and felt was music. The race was on to sell them records.
By 1964 Hitsville U.S.A. had become the hit factory that Gordy had planned. His assembly line found talented youngsters—to use a favorite Ed Sullivan word—kids fresh out of high school, or in a few cases even younger.
Gordy now had a staff in place hired, with specific skills for the assembly line that would turn gifted street singers into polished nightclub performers. Motown artists wore glittery tuxedos and dreamy pastel gowns of chiffon and sparkles and satin with gold lamé. They sometimes brought in designers such as Helen Duncan, who designed satin pantsuits for the Vandellas, and they had a hairstylist named Betty Bullock. If the hair couldn’t obtain the look the designers wanted, there were styled wigs. The fashionable Gordy sisters played a key role in designing what were known at Motown as “the uniforms,” especially Gwen, who ran a department called Special Projects.
Cholly Atkins was a nightclub singer in the 1930s. He became famous appearing with the great tap dancer Charles “Honi” Coles in an act billed as Coles and Atkins. When rock ’n’ roll started to dominate in the 1950s, it seemed that his era of elegant, formally dressed club performers was over. In fact it was, but Berry Gordy gave it a brief respite in the first half of the 1960s. When Gordy was starting Hitsville U.S.A., Cholly Atkins was working at Harlem’s Apollo Theater. It was that lull after rock ’n’ roll when everyone was trying to find the next new thing. Atkins started helping young acts that he liked at the Apollo. Soon he had his own studio in the building where The Ed Sullivan Show was shot, and acts went to him to pick up a few steps. Starting at the very beginning, in 1959, especially at the urging of Harvey Fuqua, whose Moonglows had learned steps from Atkins, Motown would periodically work with Atkins until they hired him full time to choreograph all of the Motown acts.
Early Motown acts were occasionally awkward. Martha Reeves struggled with her microphone cable. But by 1964 smooth-moving acts were a Motown characteristic. Much of the look of the Supremes, perhaps Motown’s smoothest act, was the result of the hand gestures and over-the-shoulder poses devised by Cholly Atkins. Atkins told music writer Nelson George that he took R&B acts “and prepared them for that transition from chitlin circuit to Las Vegas.”
That transition was what Motown was all about, taking black talent and making it something that was still black but with universal appeal, an act that played the Apollo but, as integration slowly took hold, could also play Las Vegas. Atkins worked for Motown in a department called Artist Development. Among the other key figures in this department was Maurice King, whom Berry Gordy had lured from the Flame. King was eighteen years Gordy’s senior and he always insisted that the young artists call him “Mr. King.” He not only taught them music theory but prepared them for club performances with such details as the patter between sets.
A key component of the Artist Development department was Maxine Powell, who knew the Gordys from their print shop and was lured away from her finishing school to Motown. She told the artists that they were being trained to perform in Buckingham Palace and the White House. Over time a few of them have appeared at those venues. She taught them social graces and manners and that what she called “body communication” was “an art.” She also taught them how to give interviews without ever saying anything with the slightest negative suggestion about Motown. Even today, former Motown artists, full of complaints about their treatment, many of them having even taken Gordy to court, are careful to consistently praise Motown and Berry Gordy.
Powell was also a bargain hunter, scouring the sales racks for bargain dresses, often in wrong sizes, which she would then tailor to the singers. She worked especially with Motown’s women, such as Kim Weston, Martha Reeves, and the Supremes. Looking at recordings of the Supremes’ successive appearances on The Ed Sullivan Show over the years, one can see Powell’s work on Diana Ross. At first she was an uncontrollable ham, mugging outrageously to the camera, but Powell gradually smoothed these impulses into a more subtle performance. Diana Ross called Maxine Powell “the woman who taught me everything I know.”
Powell also worked with the men. She tried to keep the Temptations from sweating too much. Marvin Gaye, wandering Hitsville in hats and shades and pipes, insisted that he was already too cool to need Miss Powell. She did think he was better than most, more polished and well mannered, but pointed out that he had bad posture and sang with his eyes closed, and she worked with him on that.
“I am here to help you skip to the bank,” she would tell them.
According to Powell, when she met Martha Reeves she was “like the rest of them, crude and rude and speaking street language.” But she said that Martha became “a great lady.” She and Martha Reeves remained lifelong friends in Detroit, even though Reeves still called her “Miss Powell.” Even decades after Motown, in her nineties, Powell remained a serious bargain hunter, terrorizing the local Walgreens with her weekly newspaper coupons, ordering around the staff, demanding to know where the listed items were, and insisting on the advertised sale prices. Then she would give a sweet smile. She mobilized the entire sales staff in her search for discounts. No one argues with a tiny nonagenarian in a large hat with a sense of mission.
When Miss Powell was interviewed for this book, Martha said she was over ninety-five, but Powell would not give her age. “If I told my age, p
eople would start asking if I have arthritis or something. I don’t have nothing, I’m not on any medicine,” she explained. She was a tiny woman not much more than four feet tall but a powerhouse in her way. She poked with a jabbing left to make a particularly urgent point. She still picked up some work when people came to talk to her about Motown. She would give them some pointers and they would end up hiring her.
Ivy Jo Hunter said of Maxine Powell, “She made show business look like show business.” In a 1970 article in the London Sunday Times, Philip Norman wrote, “Songs like Marvin Gaye’s ‘Through the Grapevine’ or Martha and the Vandellas’ ‘Dancing in the Street’ have all the sharp style of the urban Negro at his best.” That was the goal.
But it took time to arrive at just the right style and the right sound. Jon Landau, in his 1967 Crawdaddy article, pointed out that the Motown of 1963–64 was far more musically sophisticated than the earlier recordings. They developed an extremely strong percussion beat and an extremely simple and clear melody line. Back when Martha and the Vandellas were backing up Marvin Gaye, they established a pattern of the backup coming in high-pitched at the beginning of every sentence, usually with “oohs.” This, too, became a trademark of Motown songs.
By the summer of 1964 they were there. A key turn in this route was the upheaval caused by Mary Wells. In April 1964, Mary Wells’s “My Guy” rose to number 1 on the Billboard chart, a fact that seemed to confirm the magazine’s decision to have a combined black and white singles chart. The song had been written and produced by Smokey Robinson, who was unofficially in charge of Mary Wells. But shortly after this, she demanded a new contract with a better share of royalties. She used the loophole that she had signed her previous contract at age seventeen, and now that she was no longer a minor because she had just turned twenty-one, the old contract was no longer valid. She could not get the terms she wanted and left Motown, signing a far more lucrative deal with 20th Century Fox Records.
Ready For a Brand New Beat Page 13