Ready For a Brand New Beat

by Mark Kurlansky

  In 1969, songwriter Al Cleveland, who had some standing in Motown since writing Smokey Robinson and the Miracles’ 1967 hit “I Second That Emotion,” had a conversation with Obie Benson, the bass singer in the Four Tops who had been deeply upset by seeing police clubbing antiwar demonstrators in Berkeley’s People’s Park. “I saw this and started wondering, ‘What the fuck was going on, what is happening here?’” he later said. Cleveland wrote a song about it that Benson took to his group, but they did not want to sing it. They were still too much in the Motown bubble to see the potential of such a song. But Gaye, after talking with his brother, could see it. He asked if he could rework the song. His contribution seems to have been similar to his work on “Dancing in the Street.” He tweaked some lines and gave it a title, “What’s Going On.”

  The song began:

  Brother, brother, brother

  There’s far too many of you dying

  He recorded it in June 1970 and finally showed it to Berry Gordy in September. Gordy called it “the worst thing I ever heard in my life” and refused to release it. The Motown quality control department agreed. Gordy thought taking on these issues was a mistake. “Stick to what you do,” Gordy told Gaye. “Stick to what works.”

  When Gaye pointed out that Gordy’s whole career had been about trying something different, Gordy’s reply could have been a slogan for the company. He said, “If you’re gonna do something different, at least make it commercial.”

  The record was released in 1971. There is a Motown legend that Gaye got the first 100,000 records out without Gordy knowing, but Gordy refutes this. Gordy saw little hope for the record but claimed he told Gaye, “Marvin, we learn from everything. That’s what life’s about. I don’t think you’re right, but if you really want to do it, do it. And if it doesn’t work, you’ll learn something; and if it does, I’ll learn something.”

  Gordy always clung to his father’s lesson about learning from mistakes. After the song was released he added, “I learned something.”

  It climbed the charts rapidly to number 1 on the R&B chart and number 2 on the pop chart.

  • • •

  The sudden disappearance of cover recordings of “Dancing in the Street” after 1966 may have been connected with a reluctance of artists to be associated with rioting, although the revolutionary mantle was never placed on any but the original Motown recording. There was the occasional television appearance, such as the Carpenters’ 1968 television debut on Your All-American College Show. Eighteen-year-old drummer Karen Carpenter was the star of the trio, with great drum bridges, and they won a prize, handed to them by the aging Hungarian bombshell Zsa Zsa Gabor, who was a star at the time, though no one could remember exactly why. John Wayne saw the show and said of the young drummer, that’s who I want to costar in True Grit, but the film ended up going with Kim Darby, already a seasoned actress at twenty-two.

  The one notable “Dancing” cover of this period was by Ramsey Lewis in 1967. With his newly rebuilt trio, with Cleveland Eaton on the upright bass and Maurice White drumming to Lewis’s light-fingered piano, they brilliantly deconstructed Stevenson, Gaye, and Hunter into jazz riffs and variations. This was their first recording together, and it was pure modern jazz, the song probably unrecognizable to the average Martha and the Vandellas fan. Lewis tried to rebuild the bridge between pop and jazz not by altering his style but by choosing popular songs with which to work. “Dancing in the Street” was picked simply because it was a hit. According to bass player Cleveland Eaton, they would arrange the popular song for trio and then improvise. “We never just jammed,” he said. “But every night we did it different for ten years. That’s why I stayed with it so long. Every night it was a fresh tune.” The single reached number 84 on the pop chart, a considerable achievement for a modern jazz trio. The album, also called Dancing in the Street, included other pop tunes and reached number 59 on the pop albums chart.

  There was yet another phenomenon occurring as “Dancing in the Street” found its way into the pantheon of great popular music. Not only was it covered but it was imitated, and not only the music but the words. That bridge, the rhythm section, all that was special about the sound track was admired and imitated by other musicians.

  LeRoi Jones, before he changed his name to Amiri Baraka, said, “Actually the more intelligent the white, the more the realization he has to steal from niggers.” He was talking about music, and in music this seems true.

  Touring in 1964, the Rolling Stones, especially Mick Jagger, had been deeply influenced by the black music in the United States. Apparently that strange, scrawny Jagger bird that started hopping and flapping its wings onstage was an interpretation of the broad muscular moves of James Brown. In 1965 Jagger and Keith Richards wrote “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” a phrase that they took from a Chuck Berry song. Both the phrase and the accompanying guitar riff supposedly came to Richards one night as he was falling asleep. The next day he not only did not like the phrase but also realized that the guitar riff sounded very much like something from the track of “Dancing in the Street.” The rest of the band talked him into going ahead with the song, one of the biggest hits the Rolling Stones ever recorded.

  In March 1968, about twenty-five thousand anti–Vietnam War protesters, including Mick Jagger, gathered in London’s Trafalgar Square and marched toward the U.S. embassy in Grosvenor Square, calling for the victory of the North Vietnamese. The visiting German demonstrators seemed best prepared, since they were wearing helmets. At Grosvenor Square the demonstrators charged the embassy and were met by mounted police with clubs. A battle ensued. Demonstrators were clubbed to the ground and dragged away by their hair. After two hours of fighting, the demonstrators retreated. Eighty-six people were injured.

  The incident, which Jagger witnessed, seemed to have been the inspiration for a song he and Richards wrote, “Street Fighting Man.” Whether the song was for or against street fighting, their point of reference is America’s famous “riot song,” “Dancing in the Street.” It wasn’t Motown. There were no electric guitars, but just acoustic instruments amplified so that they sounded like a screech—actually sounded a bit like Mick Jagger’s voice—and the words, for those who could make them out to the singsong tune with a hard-hit third beat, were “Summer’s here, and the time is right, for fighting in the street.”

  The first inspiration may have been the Grosvenor Square incident—some, but not Jagger, suggested that one of the demonstration organizers, Tariq Ali, was the street fighting man—but as they were working on it, students shut down the government in France. So many bigger things were happening in the world that instead of the song being about the incident in London, it ended up being about the lack of one. In subsequent interviews, Jagger said that it was not about street fighting but the lack of it. In 1968 he told the German magazine Der Spiegel that he did not intend it to be about street fighting. “In America the rock ’n’ roll bands have gotten very political . . . but when I come home to England, everything is completely different, so quiet and peaceful. If one lives in such an atmosphere, one has a great detachment from politics and writes completely different about them.”

  There was always something about Mick Jagger and the Rolling Stones that left you wondering if they were putting you on. They were always a little too earnest, a little too down and dirty. Is it counterculture or is it a spoof on counterculture? “Street Fighting Man,” in which they mimic the lyrics of “Dancing in the Street,” if you follow Jagger’s interviews over the years, was either (a) a call for revolution, or (b) a laugh at people calling for revolution, or (c) both. It may be the reverse of “Dancing in the Street” because it came out in 1968, when everything had fiery meanings and this seemed to as well, but some thought this masked an inner complacence. In a more recent interview with a London magazine, Student, Jagger was asked if he was interested in politics and he said no because “I thought about that for a long time and decided I
haven’t got time to do that and understand other things. I mean, if you get really involved in politics, you get fucked up.”

  Still, British radio and record distributors did not want to handle the song. In Chicago, where that summer the Democratic Convention had turned into a police riot, Mayor Richard Daley ordered radio stations to ban the song, which greatly increased its popularity in Chicago and around America. Jagger’s reaction was, “It’s stupid to think that you can start a revolution with a record. I wish you could.”

  It was also banned in the UK. All that meant was that the BBC, which controlled the airwaves, banned it. Jagger sent the song to Tariq Ali, and asked him to publish it, which he did in his Black Dwarf with the headline “Fred Engels and Mick Jagger on Street Fighting.”

  Ali thought the song was “probably a conjunction of May ’68 in France and our inability to create a similar situation in Britain.” But Ali, who remembered “Dancing in the Street” from parties in his student days at Oxford, said that he “certainly didn’t think of it as political in any way.” Yet thirty years later, when he wrote a book about the events of 1968, he titled it Marching in the Streets.

  • • •

  Times were changing music, and it was hard to know what to do. In 1969 the Rolling Stones toured the United States again and found the country changed from how it had been in 1964. At concerts Jagger would sometimes give the peace salute and sometimes the black power fist. At a concert in Berkeley he tried giving both, and the crowd booed. Keith Richards said, “Before, America was a real fantasy land. It was still Walt Disney and hamburger dates, and when you came back in 1969 it wasn’t anymore. Kids were really into what was going on in their country.”

  In October 1968 a group of advertising agencies and large entertainment companies offered a conference called “Selling of American Youth Market,” at which for a $300 admission fee one could learn how to sell your product to young people with the use of words such as revolution. The age of masking was over, and so was the revolution.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  IT DOESN’T MATTER WHAT YOU WEAR

  If the summer urban disturbances were not chance riots but motivated insurrections, they were not without results. They focused attention on the conditions in ghettos of American cities. Once the Promised Land, these neighborhoods were now the symbol of the mistreatment of African Americans in American society. In a July 1967 speech, after Detroit and Newark had exploded, President Johnson said, “The only long-range solution for what has happened lies in attack—mounted at every level—upon the conditions that breed despair and violence. . . . Not because we are frightened by conflict, but because we are fired by conscience.”

  The Kerner Commission, which comprised Republicans and Democrats, conservatives and liberals, blacks and whites, recommended “experimental programs” to ameliorate conditions and break a cycle of “failure and frustration” in inner-city ghettos and called for “unprecedented levels of funding and performance.”

  The report stated, “Segregation and poverty have created in the racial ghetto a destructive environment totally unknown to most white Americans.” At the height of the Vietnam War, poll findings were showing more public concern about race relations than the war. Many were feeling a sense of responsibility that the commission had clearly laid at their feet, declaring, “What white Americans have never fully understood—but what the Negro can never forget—is that white society is deeply implicated in the ghetto. White institutions created it, white institutions maintain it, and white society condones it.”

  Unfortunately, at the time the U.S. government was giving unprecedented funding, billions of dollars, to killing people in a small, impoverished Southeast Asian country and little was left for Johnson’s “Great Society.” But programs were launched to address grievances, provide opportunities, and try to end the sense of hopelessness in urban ghettos. Police departments integrated and changed both tactics and attitudes. Racism was not eliminated from the police but it at least lost its respectability and automatic acceptance within the departments.

  The initial reports of the value of damaged property in Detroit, about $500 million, turned out to be an exaggeration, and the real figure was closer to $45 million. It is difficult to affix value to ghetto property, but what is clear is that the trends that accelerated following the 1967 disturbances have continued to increase into the twenty-first century. Detroit has been losing about a quarter of its population every decade. Not only have white people left—by 2010 the population was only 10.6 percent white, whereas in 1967 whites were 60 percent of the population—but companies have folded or moved. A third of Detroit’s population is below the poverty level, and the average household income in this city that once had the highest-paid labor force in America is only slightly more than half of that of the rest of Michigan. To travel from Martha Reeves’s family home on the Eastside to the old Hitsville studio on the Westside is to pass rows of abandoned factories that look as though they had been bombed and boarded-up houses. Families that leave Detroit often have no buyer for their property, so it is just left behind. It is a city of plywood, broken windows, and decaying walls. Detroit looks like the site of a natural disaster but there has only been an economic one.

  No wonder Martha Reeves, who loved her city, hated the fact that the beginnings of its destruction in 1967 had taken place while people sang her song. Yet the downtown has sparkling high-rises, one of which Reeves lives in, and the suburbs have mansions on leafy boulevards.

  Not all of the flight of people and businesses from Detroit was white. Berry Gordy never looked at his city the same way again. The little house on West Grand Boulevard had long been too small, but he had expanded by buying the surrounding houses. But in 1968 he moved operations to a cold ten-story building on downtown Woodward Avenue. Gordy said that this was not as much a response to the riots as to the growing crime rate. But this was all part of the reality that the Detroit that he grew up in was vanishing. In 1964, the year of “Dancing in the Street,” Detroit had 125 homicides. In 1967, the year of the riot, the city had 281 homicides. The following year, when Motown moved, Detroit had 389 killings, more than three times the number in 1964, only four years earlier.

  A final blow was a telephone call threatening to burn Motown to the ground. The new building had excellent security, which meant it was no longer a place where artists felt comfortable drifting in or out at any hour. Motown lost its family feel. Now artists had to make an appointment to see Gordy, who was to be addressed “Mr. Gordy.” “Berry” or “Berry, baby” seemed to have already vanished. Once the artists were no longer part of a family, they started looking more closely at their contracts.

  By 1970 Motown was the largest black-owned company in America. Despite being the majority population, there were only a handful of wealthy black people in Detroit, and Gordy was one of the richest. He lived in a mansion in the wealthy Boston-Edison section of Detroit that had cost a million dollars to build early in the twentieth century. His company was privately owned, with thousands of shares, all owned by Gordy. According to The Story of Motown, a 1979 study by Peter Benjaminson, he paid himself a dividend of $3,100 a share, and in this way between 1967 and 1970 Gordy was able to secure for himself $5 million of the company’s money.

  Much of this money was spent in California, opening an office on Sunset Boulevard, working his way into Hollywood society, and buying a Beverly Hills home from television star Tommy Smothers, for whom the 1970s were looking bleak. His close friend Smokey Robinson pleaded with Gordy not to go to California and even sent him books about the San Andreas Fault.

  It was a gradual process, but by 1972 Motown was a Los Angeles company gone from the Motor City and leaving a lot of people who had thought they were stars—“divas”—behind. Mickey Stevenson was right—an important lesson in life is that “the tour does not go on forever.”

  The dream of black capitalism was a disappointing reality. It turned ou
t that black artists did not get treated any better by blacks. But it is also true that through Motown Berry Gordy enormously improved the standing of black artists. They became not just black stars, but stars.

  Marvin Gaye once said, “Berry thought like an oil man. Drill as many holes as you can and hope for at least one gusher. He wound up with a whole oil field.” A record company is generally considered successful if 10 percent of its records become hits. Between 1960 and 1970, 67 percent of the records released by Motown made the Top 100 charts. But this meant that these records earned a great deal of money and artists started wondering where all that money had gone. Backup musicians were not even given credit on record jackets until Marvin Gaye, who had often played drums with them, listed them on the album of What’s Going On. Percussionist Jack Ashford wrote in his autobiography, “As Motown came to dominate the pop charts and several of the acts became household names, the Funk Brothers, who pumped life into the songs, remained nameless and without recognition. We knew we were hot and we knew we were good. But the general consensus was that they would downplay our importance to avoid us from getting a representative to attempt to cut a recording deal for the Funks.”

  To support Ashford’s claim that the Funk Brothers “pumped life” into the recordings, it is only necessary to listen to the lifeless later recordings of Diana Ross without them.

  The musicians were not paid well, and many ended their lives in poverty. Eddie Willis, one of the last surviving Funk Brothers, lived in poverty in rural Mississippi. He did not seem a bitter man. He said, “Motown was the best time in my life.” But he also said, “You do all this big stuff and no one knows who you are. It’s ridiculous. No one knows who I am. I don’t have no money.” But he accepted the fact that he played under a contract that he had agreed to. “I’m not angry about the money. It just got to be bigger and bigger, and we agreed on a certain amount.”