It was a huge blow for Berry Gordy, who had always assumed that once anyone was within the nurturing embrace of the Motown family, no contract issue would make them want to leave. He started rewriting Motown contracts to avoid any other escapes. It was a tremendous upheaval to lose their biggest female star, the key player in developing the “Motown sound.” It was also a huge blow for Smokey Robinson, who now had to compete with other songwriters and producers for emerging female stars.
Part of Gordy’s formula for success was constant competition within the family. Artists competed with one another to get songs. On the road, the bigger the hit, the later in the act an artist appeared on the bill. But positions could be changed by the size of applause, which was carefully calibrated every night. Producers were hooked up to artists based on the proven chemistry of the match. Chemistry meant having a hit. As soon as a record was produced that was not a hit, the artist got a new producer. Even Berry Gordy and Mickey Stevenson produced under these rules. Nothing short of a hit was acceptable at Motown. The same applied to songwriters. If an artist had a hit, the writer of that song had an option on the artist’s next recording, and other writers would have to prove that they had something better. There was even competition for studio space. Mickey Stevenson recalled:
We worked at home, Hitsville, where we all felt at home. We had the kitchen working—chili cooking. You could go back and get a cup of chili so you didn’t have to run home. Don’t lose your spot. You lose your spot, they look for you, you’re not there, you lose your spot. We were going round the clock. Instead of going home, you be in the kitchen with the chili.
Now even beyond the usual competition was the competition for which producer with which song was going to make which female singer the next Mary Wells. Mickey Stevenson’s idea for the Mary Wells replacement was his wife, Kim Weston, but she did not do well with the Smokey Robinson song she was given, “Looking for the Right Guy.” Later in the year Mickey did produce a number of hits with the help of Holland-Dozier-Holland, with Kim replacing Wells on Marvin Gaye duets.
Martha Reeves was also in contention, but Gordy had another idea. The Supremes’ last song had been their first hit in eight recordings, and on the road their amateurism next to the Vandellas was obvious. Yet they were the group Gordy focused on. Gordy’s idea was that rather than having the strongest voice, Flo Ballard, as the lead he would bring up the skinny, big-eyed girl with the soft voice who mugged and hammed her way through the songs. Diana Ross would carry the group with charisma. Lamont Dozier, who often supervised the backup, started moving the microphone farther away from Ballard, lest even in backup she overpower Ross. Gordy became fixated on developing Ross to the point that the other female singers, including Kim Weston and Martha Reeves, were growing resentful. Ivy Jo Hunter recalled once suggesting to Gordy that someone else could sing a song better than Diana, “and Berry turned a different shade of dark” and asked if he meant the phrasing. Ivy said, “No, she just has a better voice.” And Berry was silent.
There were unconfirmed rumors of a sexual romance between the two. At least it was unconfirmed until 1994, when Gordy detailed their lovemaking in his autobiography—apparently he was unsuccessful on their first night—and Ross gave the book possibly the weirdest blurb ever to appear on the back of a book: “I also wish he had told me he loved me, as he says in the book. Maybe things would have been different—and maybe not.”
Gordy was famous for his several marriages and various affairs. His brother-in-law Marvin Gaye called him “the horniest man in Detroit.”
But there was not a great deal of complaining because at Motown, even more than most places, there was no arguing with success. In the spring of 1964 the Supremes released “Where Did Our Love Go,” which reached number 1 on the Billboard chart. Their next four songs all hit number 1: “Baby Love,” “Come See About Me,” “Stop! In the Name of Love,” and “Back in My Arms Again.”
Like “Where Did Our Love Go,” all of them were Holland-Dozier-Holland songs. They were all songs about love, with tremendous crossover appeal and no real edge in those edgy times. They were an escape with a hard beat and a soft melody well suited for what had become the soft sound of the group. And there was an additional key to their success. Gordy and his company pushed their records harder than any other Motown recordings.
• • •
By 1964 Motown and American R&B was confronted with a sudden and powerful new challenge. In the top 100 songs of 1963 in which Martha and the Vandellas had three hits and the Supremes one, the new British group, the Beatles, had seven hit records, and in the month of February 1964, when they visited the United States, 60 percent of records sold were by the Beatles. Another British group, Gerry and the Pacemakers, also had a hit, as did the British group Freddie and the Dreamers, with “I’m Telling You Now.” Also at number 39 was Dusty Springfield with “I Only Want to Be with You.” Springfield was one of a number of white British singers who took up American R&B in that period when it appeared to be fading in the United States. Springfield, who became a great champion of Martha and the Vandellas in Britain and a close friend of Martha Reeves, intuitively understood R&B and this was evident in her evening gown costuming, her singing, the hard-driving beat, the backup singers, and the sound track with brass and strings. She would have easily fit in at Motown despite her peroxide blond hairdos.
Though the Beatles named themselves after a white American group, Buddy Holly and the Crickets, they too were clearly influenced by black music, especially in their early songs. Most notable was their use of slides into falsetto, as in “I Want to Hold Your Hand.” There were also the Chuck Berry guitar riffs. Almost all the new British music had these old African American devices.
In 1964, that year of Motown and the Beatles, Little Richard wanted to revive his career and found that he had been forgotten in the United States. He went to England and toured with the Beatles. To the English he was still a star.
On the Beatles’ first American tour, eight days in February, they were known to young fans but not widely known in America. They wanted to pose with the then–heavyweight champion Sonny Liston, but he grumbled that he did not want to be seen with those “sissies.” So they tried for the contender, the long shot still known as Cassius Clay, even though he would probably be beaten and forgotten. It was prefight and good publicity. Clay was working out at the Fifth Street Gym on Miami Beach. He stayed in the black section of downtown Miami and ran the few miles to the gym as part of his workout, hoping the police didn’t stop him running along the causeway. A black man running was considered cause for suspicion.
The Beatles, too, were on Miami Beach at the last stop of their tour at the Deauville Hotel. Clay, always appreciative of comic moments, agreed to pose with them. They climbed on each other to try to be as big as him. In one shot he jolts all four of them lined up with one punch. It was silly and good publicity and everyone was happy, but when the four left, Clay walked over to Robert Lipsyte, a cub reporter for the New York Times sports page, whose lack of seniority drew him the coverage of the unlikely contender. Clay leaned down and asked Lipsyte, “Who were those sissies?”
A lot of people did know who they were. The four played to 3,500 at the Deauville, almost 3,000 at New York’s Carnegie Hall, and 8,000 at Washington’s Coliseum, and their appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show became one of his most famous broadcasts. They were all premier venues, but when they returned in the summer they would need bigger spaces, giant stadiums.
More British invasions were planned. While the Beatles were poor kids from Liverpool, the core of the group to be known as the Rolling Stones were two very middle-class kids named Mick Jagger and Keith Richards. Jagger’s father was a gym teacher who expressed disappointment that Mick never realized his potential as a cricketer. “He could have been a great athlete,” the older Jagger once said. The two grew up together in Dartford, Kent, in southeastern England. Nevertheless, they were greatly i
nfluenced by Chuck Berry and Little Richard—whomever they could hear from those few movies that made it over, because the BBC kept them off the radio.
And then, just when they started getting the music at the end of the 1950s, the music seemed to stop. Keith Richards said in a 1972 interview with David Dalton of Rolling Stone magazine about the end of the 1950s, when they were starting: “By that time, the initial wham had gone out of rock ’n’ roll. . . . They’d run out of songs in a way, it seemed like.” The Rolling Stones decided to take up where America had left off. Not only were they to make music in the R&B and rock ’n’ roll traditions, but—unlike the Beatles—in the style of Chuck Berry, Jerry Lee Lewis, and later James Brown, they moved onstage and made themselves a visual spectacle. Jagger, as it turned out, was an athlete after all.
They were one of the first white groups to sing with blacks, doing an opening act for the Ronettes on their 1964 English tour. Although the Ronettes, two sisters and a cousin, had mixed parentage and were light skinned, they were considered black.
Another musical mini-step toward integration took place at the hands of a British singer in 1964. Adam Faith, an Englishman with carefully combed straight blond hair, at first glance seemed whiter than Pat Boone. But he had adopted some of the vocal distortions of blues—or of Elvis Presley’s adaptation of blues—and moved to a hard beat. In 1964 he recorded “It’s Alright” with the backup sung by two black brothers, the Isley Brothers. Though only backup singers on this recording, they had some standing as black stars. They had previously had doo-wop hits and in 1966 would become Motown stars with the Holland-Dozier-Holland song “This Old Heart of Mine.” In fact, at the time of the recording the black backup singers had a bigger name in America than did the British lead singer. The Adam Faith song was only released in the United States, where with its simple lyrics screamed and shouted to a driving rhythm, it became a racially integrated Top 40 hit. Perhaps of more significance, the integrated aspect of this 1964 hit was rarely discussed.
• • •
The Rolling Stones came to the United States in June 1964 with a new R&B that was harder and edgier, and faced screaming teenagers on a three-week tour that was the beginning of a growing reputation in America.
There can be no doubt that Motown would have sold more records were it not for the British groups, especially the Beatles, but Motown did hold its own, and in 1964 the record industry was once again thriving, due largely to both Motown and the Beatles. It was the British that gave the popular music world a sense that something new was happening, the new music that deejays like Cousin Brucie were looking for, and that sense of excitement also helped Motown as they perfected their sound. Motown had cordial relations with their British rivals, though the Beatles’ management irritated Gordy by negotiating low prices for Motown song rights. Motown groups, including Martha and the Vandellas, toured the UK and got the same kind of screaming reception that the Beatles got in the United States. They were feeding off each other’s excitement and selling a lot of records. Martha Reeves said, “The Beatles came here and they did Ed Sullivan and they became big here, but there was always the idea of an exchange, so we went to England and we were big there. It was never a competition. We were complimentary and we sang each other’s songs. I sang ‘Eleanor Rigby.’”
• • •
By May the press was getting more interested in a few hundred young people who preferred freedom songs. In fact their struggle was becoming so famous that the music was bringing substantial record sales. It had always been part of Bob Dylan’s repertoire. The Kingston Trio, a San Francisco folk group, regularly had Top 40 hits and included in their pop folk albums occasional songs from the civil rights movement, such as Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind.” By 1964 so many other groups were doing freedom songs that the trio faded. The Freedom Singers themselves, the civil rights singing group, were selling records. Peter, Paul, and Mary, who also sang at civil rights events, recorded their first album, Peter, Paul and Mary, in 1962, and it was a number 1 hit for seven weeks. Pete Seeger, who had been blacklisted in the 1950s, reemerged as a civil rights singer in the 1960s, popularizing “We Shall Overcome,” while being directly involved with SNCC. He was also enormously popular by 1964, as was Joan Baez, who was equally famous for her recording of “We Shall Overcome.”
In June 1964, the Mississippi Freedom Summer began with great national interest. SNCC leader Bob Moses had been developing his ideas on a campaign to register black voters in Mississippi since 1960. SNCC was strongly divided on whether this was the most worthwhile effort, given the unlikelihood of success. The idea of bringing in hundreds of volunteers from the North, mostly white, was particularly controversial. At the heart of SNCC’s success was its ability to find and nurture local black leaders. There was a fear that the whites who would join would be well educated and would tend to take over the movement. But unidentified assailants regularly murdered local black activists in Mississippi, and these killings drew little attention. Attacks on white northerners would not go unnoticed, and these northerners would draw northern news media and then the federal government would have to start protecting civil rights workers.
As the volunteers were being trained in Ohio, Mississippi was preparing its violence. In February the Ku Klux Klan, a relic of the past, was resurrected in Mississippi. Before the volunteers even arrived, there was an increase in beatings and other violence directed at organizers in Mississippi. The state highway patrol was increased by two hundred men. The Mississippi legislature gave municipalities greater power to make arrests. The distribution of leaflets on economic boycotts was declared a felony. Local police increased personnel and acquired more firearms.
Meanwhile three hundred volunteers arrived at a well-greened campus in Oxford, Ohio. They were told to expect beatings, shootings, and arrest. For SNCC workers, that had become a way of life. Years later John Lewis estimated that he had been arrested forty times while campaigning for civil rights.
When not singing freedom songs, the volunteers took self-defense workshops in which they were taught in the event of an attack how to curl up on the ground in a fetal position with knees tucked up as close to the head as possible. They also learned to lock arms and sway as they sang freedom songs. They were advised not to carry watches, pens, contact lenses, glasses, or more than ten dollars in cash. They were never to go out alone, especially at night. They were also schooled to avoid offending local customs by swearing, slights to religion, drunkenness, or women wearing pants. Though the volunteers were an interracial group, mixed dating was absolutely to be avoided.
Volunteers were screened for correct attitudes. They had to understand that they were to defer to local leadership. Glory seekers and those with what was called “a John Brown complex,” the desire to be a charismatic crusader, were to be avoided. In the end, seven hundred volunteers were sent south. While the average young American was listening to Motown and the Beatles, these seven hundred with their own songs were an elite. The average family income was 50 percent above the norm. Ninety percent of them were white, but that was also true of America as a whole. Almost half were from Ivy League or other elite colleges.
The world they went to could have been a planet away from the Motown bubble, where they were polishing etiquette, vying for studio space, and singing love songs aimed at appealing to an integrated market.
The hypothesis that the abuse of these all-American northerners would stir a huge response did not take long to confirm. On June 21, when the project was just getting started, a volunteer and two CORE organizers working with the Summer Project disappeared in the area of Philadelphia, Mississippi. Had it only been James Chaney, a local Mississippi black who had joined CORE the year before to work on voter registration, the rest of America would have taken no more notice than it had with the dozens of other blacks killed and missing. But with him were two white organizers, Michael Schwerner, an Ivy League–educated New Yorker with some experienc
e as a CORE organizer, and Andrew Goodman, also from New York, a volunteer with the Summer Project.
Goodman had arrived only the day before. The three were sent to investigate the burning of a church where Chaney and Schwerner had urged the black congregation to register a month earlier. It was one of twenty black churches that were fire-bombed in the summer of 1964. The three were arrested and released, and then they vanished.
President Johnson and Attorney General Robert Kennedy responded to a huge public outcry. The disappearance of the three had been a front-page story around the country. The FBI resisted involvement, but under enormous political pressure from the administration, they took on the case, setting up an FBI office in Philadelphia with one hundred and fifty FBI agents who questioned about a thousand people, half of whom were thought to be KKK members. Hundreds more, including Navy divers, were sent to search for the bodies. Divers found seven other bodies of local civil rights workers whose murders had drawn little attention, but no one could find the three for whom they were searching. Meanwhile, the drama made almost daily news throughout the country.
• • •
On July 16, in a world somewhat closer to Motown, an off-duty policeman became involved in a dispute between black summer school students and a white supervisor in Harlem. The officer shot and killed a fifteen-year-old boy who the officer said had attacked him with a knife. A crowd of young blacks began smashing store windows. This led to days of violent conflict in both Harlem and Bedford-Stuyvesant, the leading black neighborhoods of New York. The expected “riot” season had begun.
Life magazine reported, “The worst fears come true as New York’s Negro ghetto erupts.” The press struggled to understand the phenomenon, which they tended to see as Negroes run amok and police defending law and order or, as the Life headline put it, “A Rampage and the Bullets of the Law.” A photograph showing a bleeding black man with a clearly horizontal wound across his temple explained that he was grazed by “one of the hundreds of bullets fired into the air by police to disperse rioters.” Aside from the fact that such a horizontal wound could not have come from a bullet fired into the air unless the victim was an unlucky skydiver, the article doesn’t even question the use of bullets for riot control. But even this reporting suggests that there was something more profound going on. “What sets the New York riots apart from past racial upheavals,” the article stated, “. . . is rather the blind desperation of the rioters. They have gone—or, as they feel, been driven—beyond reason.” Even the magazine’s own photos of clubbing and shooting suggested that it was the police who had run amok. A week later, the National Guard was called in to control a black uprising in Rochester, New York. In August there were similar disturbances in New Jersey—in Paterson, Jersey City, and Elizabeth—and in Chicago and Jacksonville. It could spread anywhere that had a large black ghetto, and every city was braced for a summer explosion—Philadelphia, PA, Baltimore and DC, can’t forget the Motor City . . .
Ready For a Brand New Beat Page 14