Once in a Great City

by David Maraniss

  Gordy set up the Rayber Corporation to handle the Graystone and installed his big sister, Esther Edwards, as the treasurer, and her husband to help handle the books and ticket sales. Then he started planning events for his artists, friendly battle-of-the-bands competitions along the lines of the boxing matches he was involved in as a young man. He knew he had more than enough high-caliber Motown talent to put up on the Graystone stage. The breakthroughs had begun in the three previous years, but the second half of 1963 brought Motown its brightest glow, corresponding with the resurgence in the automobile industry. Ten Motown singles rose into Billboard’s Top 10 that year, and eight more into the Top 20. The boom was led by Gordy’s unusual live recording of his twelve-year-old phenom, Little Stevie Wonder, whose “Fingertips (Part 2)” was rocketing up the charts and before the summer was out would reach No. 1.

  The wonder of this record began with its conflicting origin stories. There is no doubt that “Fingertips (Part 2)” was recorded during a Motown show at the Regal Theater at 47th and South Parkway in Chicago, but music experts differ on when, citing two Motown shows there nine months apart. Some say the performance was in mid-June 1962 during a preview trip months before the first Motortown Revue. Others say it was “probably” recorded during another Motown show at the Regal on March 10, 1963. In either case, the rest of the story is equally unusual, although Little Stevie’s behavior was rambunctiously predictable. Ever since Gordy signed the talented Wonder, Motown had been trying with little success to get him a hit. Concluding that there was an electricity to his live performances that for various reasons was not duplicated in the studio, Gordy scavenged through his box of tapes searching for something from Wonder that captured his magic and settled on the Regal version of “Fingertips,” a song whose studio version had attracted little notice on Wonder’s previous album.

  The band that day at the Regal was conducted by Clarence Paul, who escorted Little Stevie onto the Regal stage with his bongos and harmonica. Comedian Bill Murry, who had accompanied the Motown troop on its first Motortown Revue, was also the emcee at this performance and introduced the young genius, who in his infectious high voice said, “Yeah, yeah. . . . A song from my album, The Jazz Soul of Little Stevie. The name of the song is called, uh, ‘Fingertips.’ I want you to clap your hands. Come on, yeah! Stomp your feet, jump up and down. Do anything you wanna do!” And with that he and the band were off on their wild, contagious ride. It is hard to say that “Fingertips” is a song so much as a feeling. There is no story to tell, no poetic lyrics, no memorable melody, just a jumping, joyous, musical jaunt, with Little Stevie starting on his bongos, horns soon firing behind him, then sliding into harmonica riffs. (Gordy’s strongest first impression of Stevland Morris was of his unique talent on the harmonica: “I didn’t even like his singing, but I loved his harmonica.”) When the audience was up and dancing and with him all the way, he started playing with them in a church-style call-and-response with his urging “Everybody say yeah.” Parts of it were clearly orchestrated, parts improvised. At one soft interlude Wonder threw in the first lines of “Mary Had a Little Lamb”—wittingly or not, a nod to where it all began, back to the Lincoln-Mercury assembly line where Gordy had used the simple notations of that nursery song as he composed the first pop tunes in his head.

  The climax came soon, or was supposed to, with Murry shouting, “How about it! Let’s hear it for him, Little Stevie Wonder! Take a bow, Stevie.” Wonder already had a reputation for hogging the stage, upsetting the acts that were to follow. It became part of the routine for Clarence Paul to grab the kid’s elbow and escort him off, not unlike a principal strong-arming a recalcitrant student into his office. But this time Little Stevie wiggled free and began honking back into “Fingertips” with his harmonica. What followed, as music writer Mark Ribowsky so aptly put it, were “a few confusing seconds—and music history bliss.” Wonder’s band members had put down their instruments and were clearing the stage for the musicians who would accompany the next act. Ribowsky said that was Mary Wells. The liner notes for The Complete Motown Singles, Volume 3, say it was the Marvelettes. In either case, the confusion was recorded as Little Stevie kept going and the musicians scrambled to get back into the groove, with Joe Swift, a bass player, heard shouting, “What key? What key?” And off it all went again, pushing the eight-minute mark when Murry was sent out to sign off again, and Paul walked over again to lead Wonder out, this time for good.

  When Gordy months later pulled the tape out of oblivion and turned it into a single, he broke the eight minutes into two sides. What was intended to be the B side began with “Mary Had a Little Lamb” and went through the confusion and the shouting and on from there. But disc jockeys and listeners loved the ad hoc vibrancy of that flip side so much that Gordy rereleased the single a few weeks later with that as the feature. Little Stevie finally had his breakthrough hit, with the obstreperous “Fingertips (Part 2)” rising and on its way to the top.

  Wonder’s first big hit was conceived in Chicago and created in Detroit, but the seven-inch 45 rpm record itself, like many other Motown vinyls, was pressed not in the Motor City but 533 miles away in another music city, Nashville. Here was another small but noteworthy way that rock and roll and rhythm and blues cut across the racial currents of America in the sixties. Nashville, home to the Grand Ole Opry, a cultural icon of the old South, was also a seminal outpost in the civil rights movement of that era, training ground for activists and embarkation point for freedom rides deeper into the Jim Crow states of the former Confederacy. As in Memphis, its Tennessee neighbor to the west, though to a lesser degree, Nashville’s recording scene could be more progressive than the society surrounding it. A prime example was Southern Plastics and its industrial plant on Chestnut Street that was busily stamping out Motown records along with country and rock and even the earliest Beatles records distributed in the United States.

  The impulse was business, not politics, but nonetheless Southern Plastics and its white owners—John Dunn, Joe Talbot, and Ozell Simpkins—went well beyond the impersonal transaction of turning analog tapes into vinyl records in their dealings with Motown. On the second floor—above the steam boilers and lathes and lacquers and resin and metal disks and stampers of the recordmaking trade—was a set of rooms that came to be known after the fact as the Motown Suite. Two single beds, bathroom, pine paneling in living room/kitchen with Formica table and black-and-white television. Hotels in Nashville were segregated, and there were no public accommodations downtown for Motown’s black executives, including at times Gordy and Smokey Robinson (nor for the rhythm and blues operators of Vee-Jay records in the Chicago area), so during visits to Nashville to check on production and distribution, and occasionally even for release parties held at the factory, they would spend a night or two in that second-floor suite.

  To borrow a phrase from Vince Lombardi, the football coach who had been assembling a powerhouse football team up in Green Bay during that same period, Gordy was developing a system at Motown in 1963 that nurtured freedom through discipline. His musical assembly line operated on a routine. Everything was framed by a structure devised by Gordy and his influential sisters, but within that structure lay a sense of creativity and possibility, just as there was a surprising amount of freedom within Lombardi’s disciplined playbook. The parallel goes one step farther. The Packer athletes were an eclectic bunch of roustabouts, playboys, cutups, and straight arrows, and so too were Motown’s artists, but Lombardi and Gordy both knew how to get the best out of all of them and keep them going in the same direction, at least for a time. Eventually success would become an addiction for the leaders, some of the athletes and artists would yearn to bust free of the structure, and issues of control and money and self-expression would complicate matters, but not yet.

  The structure of activities on West Grand Boulevard followed a weekly pattern. On Tuesdays, Esther Edwards led a meeting of the management department, known as ITMI (International Talent Management Inc.), at which
she and her team went over touring schedules and publicity appearances, trying to match those with the career needs of the artists. On Thursdays, members of the publicity and marketing departments gathered to talk about what they could do with deejays, radio spots, and print and radio advertisements to push records then hitting the stores. And on Fridays, at precisely nine in the morning, Gordy assembled his product evaluation committee to listen to demo records and vote on whether they should be released. He even had his own version of what in Green Bay was known as “Lombardi time.” If you arrived at a Packer meeting on time, you were ten minutes late and subjected to a fine. At Motown, if you arrived at the product evaluation committee meeting five minutes late, you were locked out, no excuses. There was always a tension in the room between ambition and objectivity. Gordy wanted it to be like quality control on an assembly line. He wanted to rid the room of jealousy and reprisal: “No lobbying and no holds barred. If you voted against me, it didn’t matter. The best record wins. No egos or politics involved. I was frantic about that.” But of course these were human beings, not automobiles, and jealousy and elbowing unavoidably were part of the scene. Gordy himself would carry little grudges for decades against his own sisters, who frequently voted against him, especially Esther, who, whenever there was a choice between a record Smokey Robinson had written or produced and one that her brother had written or produced, seemed always to vote for Smokey.

  The Motown team was never more talented than that summer. Earl Van Dyke had joined the house band, the Funk Brothers, providing leadership and virtuoso keyboard to a boisterous group that included Benny Benjamin and Pistol Allen on drums, James Jamerson on bass, Mike Terry on saxophone, Jack Ashford on vibes, Patrick Lanier and Paul Riser, still a teenager out of Cass Tech, on trombone, Marcus Belgrave and Russell Conway on trumpet, and guitarists Robert White, Joe Messina, and Eddie Willis. The Four Tops were signing up with their soulful four-part harmony and pulsating lead singing from Levi Stubbs. The Temptations and Supremes were about to come into their own; the always underrated Velvelettes, a five-girl group with a velvety sound that came to Motown via Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo, were getting regional play for “There He Goes”; Little Stevie (he would drop the diminutive the following year) was fingertipping to the top; Smokey and his Miracles had another hit with a show-closing dance number called “Mickey’s Monkey”; Mary Wells was still on the rhythm and blues charts with “Your Old Standby,” as usual a song Smokey wrote for her; Marvin Gaye was in the studio recording “Can I Get a Witness,” with the Supremes singing backup. (The Rolling Stones would soon appropriate the song for their first album, part of a trend of popular British rock groups consistently endorsing and covering songs from Motown and other black American artists.) And Martha and the Vandellas were emerging from the West Grand studio with Holland-Dozier-Holland’s “Heat Wave.”

  If “Come and Get These Memories” established the quintessential Motown sound, “Heat Wave,” with its irrepressibly joyous momentum, did something more important for Martha Reeves, Rosalind Ashford, and Annette Beard. It propelled Martha and the Vandellas toward stardom. “Marvin, Smokey, Mary Wells, my pal Little Stevie Wonder—they were all hot, and finally so were we,” Reeves noted later. Rock critic Dave Marsh, who was born in Detroit and grew up with Motown, later worked a writing riff of praise off “Heat Wave’s” most buoyant stanza—“has high blood pressure got a hold on me, or is this the way love’s supposed to be?”—by confessing, “Personally, I’d be willing to endure hospitalization for a few weeks just to feel the way [Mike Terry’s] baritone sax sounds.” “Heat Wave” was released just as a true heat wave roasted Southern California, prompting L.A. weathermen to use it as background music for their nightly reports, boosting its popularity. In Detroit there was another heat wave of a more troubling kind.

  • • •

  Anyone familiar with the late-night street life on John R knew Cynthia Scott—all the pimps and johns and cops. She was a singularly imposing prostitute, standing over six feet without heels, and weighing nearly two hundred pounds. At three on the morning of July 5, two young patrolmen in the First District, Ted Spicher and Bob Marshall, arrived at the corner of John R and Edmond in what was officially called a disorderly persons car. The cops called it a whore car. Their job was to clear out and, if the opportunity arose, arrest the passel of prostitutes who walked John R from Edmond to Brush until dawn soliciting johns, mostly white and mostly from the suburbs, including regulars on their way to or from the Fisher Body plant. They operated in an underworld of nicknames. One pimp went by Black Diamond, another by Big Tiny Little. One of the prostitutes, who also doubled as an informant for the cops, was called the First Lady. And Cynthia Scott was known as St. Cynthia. Her sainthood included seven arrests for prostitution and one for destruction of property when she obliterated everything in her path during a drunken rage in a bar.

  Scott was with a john when patrolmen Spicher and Marshall spotted her in the early morning darkness on John R. She seemed to be hugging the man with one arm while holding a wad of bills in her other hand. Was she robbing him? They approached and attempted to escort her to the whore car. She resisted—and ended up dead, shot by Spicher. The official report went like this: Scott pulled a knife on the officers as they tried to get her into the car, sliced a gash in Spicher’s hand, and started to run away. Both patrolmen chased after her and ordered her to stop. Scott flashed the knife again, lunged at Spicher, and as she turned to flee across the street, Spicher shot her. She was walking, not running, when the bullet entered her back and pierced her heart.

  At the time of the shooting, Police Commissioner Edwards was with his wife, Peg, far from Detroit, on an ocean liner making its way across the Atlantic. Their plan was to spend a month in Europe, starting with a judicial conference in London. Edwards had been Detroit’s top cop for eighteen months by then and left for the working vacation confident that he had made significant progress easing racial tensions between the police force and the city’s black citizens. That cause had been his obsession, the main reason he had heeded Mayor Cavanagh’s request and resigned from the Michigan Supreme Court to take the police job in the first place. He was still aboard ship when he received a situation report from back home, including word of the shooting. Everything was under control, he was told. The policeman acted appropriately, no reason for concern.

  Wishful thinking, or narrow thinking, or no thinking. The shooting of Cynthia Scott was not so easily dismissed, not with the long and difficult history involving Detroit cops and the black community. St. Cynthia quickly became a martyr, a victim of police brutality. Her funeral service on July 13 drew hundreds to St. John’s African Methodist Episcopal Church on Woodward, and an even larger throng gathered outside 1300 Beaubien that day to picket police headquarters, where the leader of Detroit’s Nation of Islam temple, Wilfred X, brother of Malcolm X, spoke to the angry crowd. The Michigan Chronicle ran front-page stories and editorials. Scott, the newspaper argued, “was not a felon but a known prostitute.” Spicher suffered no more than a finger cut. “The situation did not warrant extreme measures.” Letters and telegrams of protest flooded police headquarters and the mayor’s office. Congressman Diggs said the city had to take action “to prevent citizens from taking the law into their own hands against trigger-happy cops.” The Wayne County district attorney and the Michigan attorney general’s office both looked at the case and declined to take action against Spicher. And soon enough Edwards got an urgent call from an old labor friend saying that things were falling apart, no matter what his police aides told him, and that he had to cut short his European sojourn and return to Detroit.

  The situation was so dire by the time Edwards got home on July 28 that reporters met him at the airport gate with questions about the Scott case. “We want no reckless or wanton use of deadly weapons by anyone, least of all by police officers,” Edwards said. “But we have also assured our police officers that when they follow the police manual they are protec
ted by the law.” He spent the next week investigating the case himself, interviewing the cops and other witnesses and examining the county and state decisions not to prosecute. In the end, he reached the same conclusion they had: Spicher feared for his life when he fired at Scott, who had already assaulted him. His decision to shoot was regrettable and unwise, Edwards said, but by the standards of the law it was justified.

  The Nation of Islam and another group loosely affiliated with Reverend Cleage called for the commissioner’s resignation, but Edwards had built up enough goodwill in the black community that most key institutions, including the Chronicle, the Baptist Ministers Alliance, and various black business associations, supported him, even as they disagreed with his conclusions about the case. But there was something deeper that now haunted Edwards. He regretted that he had been out of town when the shooting happened, calling it “one of the worst mistakes of my life.” He wondered whether he could have somehow prevented it, or at least have stepped in immediately to ease the tension. Now it was too late, and everything that he had worked so hard to achieve seemed in jeopardy. The distrust was there again, and might deepen with every new confrontation or controversy. He and Mayor Cavanagh began with good intentions, but here was a reminder of how vulnerable their intentions were to the vagaries of daily life.

  With the ramifications of the Scott incident, Edwards was feeling squeezed from all sides. He ended up supporting his officers, but by that time his liberal attitudes and determined effort to rid the department of its old guard had caused morale problems with the rank and file and diminished his support in the high command. Earlier that year he had tried to foreclose resistance from the old guard by transferring its two lead actors, the Berg brothers, Louis and James, who had served in the number two and three positions, superintendent and deputy superintendent, to the Traffic Bureau, demotions that forced their resignations. But the sensibility of the Berg brothers, who had resisted all of Edwards’s efforts to improve the department’s reputation in the black community, ran deeply through the department. The cops on the street, several levels below the commissioner, believed that nobody who was not in their position, and certainly not Edwards, who had come out of the judiciary, could understand the pressures and strains of their assignment.