by Berry Gordy
Then somebody shouted out, “Marvin, you should be shame o’ yourself takin’ advantage of a little blind kid!” A few others agreed.
Marvin continued on with even more gusto, determined to bring the audience back on his side. He finished that number with a smattering of applause and more boos. There was some hissing as well. He looked out at me as if to say “What do I do?” He was so embarrassed, but told the band to start his next number, “Pride And Joy.” The smile on his face couldn’t hide his pain.
I jumped on the stage, politely taking the mike from Marvin. “Thank you very much. The show’s over,” I said as I motioned to somebody to start playing records.
Marvin left the stage. I hurried after him and found him sitting backstage by himself with his head in his hands. I sat down next to him.
Putting my hand on his shoulder I said nothing. He said nothing. There was nothing to say.
Though I still felt competition bred champions, I could see that it also had a downside. And in this particular case of putting a grown man against a little blind boy I had blundered badly. That was the last Battle of the Stars at the Graystone.
Having long since outgrown the main Hitsville house on West Grand, we had purchased some of the other houses close by—making our working home a true neighborhood. Barney Ales joked that Hitsville was “the only high-rise that went sideways.” My assembly-line dream was becoming a reality.
Not much could thrill me more than walking through the hallways of the various buildings and stopping in on the different creative stations. On a typical day I’d go from one end of the spectrum to the other—songwriting to corporate finance—problem-solving, encouraging, motivating, teaching, challenging, complaining. It might be giving the guys in the control room tips on balancing; or just being a fresh ear for someone who had sat too long at the mixing board. At whatever stage of the production I was jumping in on, I was in songwriter’s heaven going from room to room telling those creative people—writers, producers, artists—how I thought they could make something better. In one little room there was Brian Holland banging out chord patterns on the piano, humming and singing a new song idea; in another, Robert Bateman singing melodies and matching chords to them on a piano. In a third room Smokey might be rehearsing with the Temptations or working with Mary Wells. And around the clock Mickey kept the studio in use, either cutting sessions himself or parceling time out to other producers.
Another busy spot was in the building across the street. Gwen and Anna had never stopped pushing for an Artist Development Department and when they had finally gotten me to say okay, they wasted no time in getting it started. They brought Harvey Fuqua over from Promotion to head the department. Drawing from his experiences at Chess Records and with his own group, Harvey and the Moonglows, he assembled a great team.
Gwen, a former model at Maxine Powell’s Finishing School, and Anna, still the fashion plate of the family, helped select costumes for the artists while Maxine Powell herself came over to work with the female artists on everything. She taught them basic table manners, how to apply makeup, how to sit, and generally how to carry themselves—in public and at home.
“When you walk I want heads up, chest out, small ladylike steps,” I heard her say many times. Smoking or drinking in public? “Ladies just don’t do that sort of thing.” She demanded respect—and got it.
To handle choreography, Harvey brought in Cholly Atkins, one half of the well-known dance team, Coles and Atkins. While Cholly worked with the artists individually or in classes, showing them everything from special dance steps to just basic exits and entrances, musical conductor and director Maurice King would be going over the on-stage productions, including band arrangements and teaching the artists harmonies.
Each department had its own weekly meetings. On Tuesdays it was Esther’s ITMI meetings. In addition to protecting their money, working with booking agents and all the other things ITMI was established to do, they helped plan an artist’s career. My cousin, Evelyn Turk-Johnson, joined Esther and her chief of staff and artist manager, Taylor Cox, in ITMI administration. Also important to the work at ITMI were Esther’s son, Robert Bullock, and her assistant, Emily Dunn. My sister Loucye not only continued to handle manufacturing, but since Ray had left for New York, she had taken over the publishing activities of Jobete.
On Thursdays, Barney Ales had his marketing meetings, where he, his top salesmen—Phil Jones, Al Klein, Irv Biegel and Mel Da Kroob and later Tom Noonan—and the rest of the growing sales staff would map out strategies for upcoming records and pinpoint areas of sales activity or recent releases.
When the Sales Department saw a record begin to take off, whether through sales orders or DJ and radio reports, they’d alert me. Switching hats from whatever else I was doing, I would call ITMI to get the artist into that area for a promotion if they weren’t well known and a paid date if they were. We’d move our forces into that area promoting, advertising, passing the buzz from DJs to distributors to record stores, doing whatever we had to do to spread the record out from that area to the next, the next, and the next.
By the middle of ’63 the Friday morning product evaluation meetings were much more intense. Whether people got to my office early to claim their favorite seats or dashed in just before the doors were locked at exactly five minutes after nine, there seemed to be a sense in the air, felt by everyone: “This day could change my life.”
I remember one Friday morning. Mickey, Billie Jean and Smokey were early, as usual. Legal administrator Ralph Seltzer and his assistant, Bette Ocha, and Esther came in right afterward, followed by writers and producers Harvey Fuqua, Clarence Paul, Hank Cosby, Ivy Joe Hunter, Freddie Gorman, Norman Whitfield, Brian and Eddie Holland and Lamont Dozier. Around 9:04 and a half there was gridlock in the doorway as Barney, Phil Jones from Sales and Loucye and Fay Hale from Manufacturing were literally stuck there for a moment, trying to get in before the deadline.
Brian and Eddie Holland and Lamont Dozier were now the writing and producing team of Holland-Dozier-Holland. Shortly after teaming up in March of ’63, HDH had their first hit—Martha and the Vandellas’ “Come And Get These Memories,” which gave Martha her first hit, too. That morning they looked especially confident and cocky.
Ralph Seltzer found a seat next to Mickey Stevenson, who wasn’t too thrilled because he was one of the creative people who didn’t like Ralph and Bette sitting in judgment of his product. Ralph, who had a legal background, was now in charge of okaying all creative budgets. I liked his honesty and directness. He had begun with the company as coordinator of our out-of-town offices, keeping track of operations in New York and our newest outpost in Los Angeles.
Norman Whitfield, one of the new producers, was tall and broad-shouldered with a thick head of hair. He was quiet and shy—not someone you’d think would turn into the boldly innovative producer he later became. He had started at Hitsville like many others, doing everything: assisting Mickey in A&R, scheduling sessions, handling auditions on Saturdays, cleaning the studio, whatever.
His first collaboration of note was Marvin’s “Pride And Joy”—along with Mickey and Marvin—but it would be a couple more years before I recognized what a talent he was.
Looking at the long list of productions we’d be hearing, I made my first announcement: “We have a lot of songs to get through today so any garbage will be eliminated quickly. Anyone submitting garbage try not to get upset.” Amused, they started looking around at each other, trying to guess who had garbage. They knew what “garbage” meant. Garbage did not mean necessarily the worst record in the world—garbage, to me, was anything that we didn’t think would reach the Top 40.
Billie Jean nudged me, pointing to the pile of acetates we had to listen to.
“Okay, let’s get started,” I said, turning to Smokey. “You got anything good on Mary Wells?”
“Good? Wait till you hear ‘My Guy,’ this new thing I’m writing. Number one—no question. I’ll bet on this one, and I ain�
�t even cut the track yet.”
“I’ll bet. I’ll bet,” five or six voices shouted. Mine was one of them. “Number one? How much?” I said.
“Well, I’m not gonna bet on number one, but I bet it’ll be Top Ten.”
“You said number one,” I reminded him.
“Yeah, I know what I said, but that would be a stupid bet.”
“Then you shouldn’t have said it,” I said. “But, okay, well let you off the hook this time, Smoke. ‘My Guy’ probably won’t even make the charts, that is, if it gets released.”
The first record we played that morning was on Marvin Gaye. A song called “Can I Get A Witness” written and produced by HDH, a record that got my attention right off with its Gospel uptempo feel and Marvin’s passionate pleading.
Giving away none of my own reactions to it, I began our normal voting procedure.
“How many think it’s not a hit?”
Four hands shot up.
“How many think it is a hit?”
Seven hands were raised.
Starting with Billie Jean, who had voted for it, I asked for comments. They ranged from her “It’s different from other stuff out there,” to Mickey’s “The lyrics don’t make no sense.”
Many voting for it called it their favorite Marvin record, while Phil Jones piped up: “Number one all the way.”
“What makes you think so?” I asked.
“I took it home last night and my kids could dance to it. White kids.”
Ivy Joe Hunter said he knew it was a hit just because “it is.”
I asked how they thought the record compared to Peter, Paul and Mary’s “Blowin’ In The Wind,” which was high on the Pop charts.
“It’s apples and oranges,” they said. “How can you compare a folk song to a dance tune?”
“If you only had one dollar and could only buy one record,” I said, “‘Blowin’ In The Wind’ or ‘Can I Get A Witness’—which one would it be?”
They thought for a moment, then most picked Marvin’s record.
“Now,” I said, “if you were hungry and had only one dollar would you buy this record or a hot dog?”
Whenever I asked this, invariably they would pick the hot dog. But what I was looking for was how long it took them to make up their minds.
Here it took long enough to let me know that this record had solid support—including mine.
From the minute we heard the opening of the next HDH acetate—guitars leading the pace for the rhythm section—everybody’s eyes lit up. As soon as Martha Reeves’s voice let loose with “Whenever I’m with him, somethin’ inside starts to burnin’…” I showed no expression but my toes were jumping.
When it was over, I asked in a flat tone, “How many think it’s not a hit?” No hands. “How many think it is a hit?” Everyone’s hands came up. There was nothing more to say about “(Love Is Like A) Heat Wave”—except “I love it” and “This has to go out as soon as possible. Next record?”
That night as I was leaving the studio on my way to the Graystone Ballroom I grabbed the “Heat Wave” acetate. I knew we had something and couldn’t wait to see how the kids reacted to it at our weekly record hop. Whenever we put on a record that no one had ever heard before it would usually take them time to get used to it. I had prepared to play this one about four times. But the minute the needle touched down on the first few bars, the wood on the dance floor was nowhere to be found.
HDH didn’t stop there. That same summer they hit again with “Mickey’s Monkey,” recorded on the Miracles. And in the fall, they achieved what had seemed impossible—a hit on the girls who had long been called the “no-hit” Supremes, breaking them into the Top 30 with “When The Lovelight Starts Shining Through His Eyes.”
Just as Smokey had a lock on Mary Wells, HDH was now in the best position to do the same thing with the Supremes. Whoever got a hit on an artist automatically got the follow-up record. Unless, of course, someone else had produced a much better one on that same artist. It couldn’t be a little better, it had to be a lot better.
By the fall of 1963 we had increased our visibility in Europe with the signing of an international foreign distribution deal with EMI. Because the Tamla label was already so popular in Europe, when we introduced the Motown label, we used Tamla-Motown as our international label name. Also through George Schiffer, my copyright attorney and international adviser, we set up our own publishing operation throughout Europe.
Our international success proved to me once again that my theories were right—all people have so much in common. Our music conveyed basic feelings, cutting through cultural and language barriers. It’s just a matter of communication. Communication breeds understanding and understanding breeds everything else. Words, our primary form of communication, often mean different things to different people. That’s why I’ve always been more concerned about what people mean rather than what they say. Sometimes the most innocent words can lead to big trouble.
I made the horrible mistake one day of calling Marvin Gaye “boy.” I’ll never forget that day because it was the same day President Kennedy was killed.
Friday, November 22, 1963.
Not long after the last of the stragglers had left the Friday morning meeting Barney called.
“Berry, we got a little problem. Marvin just left here screaming about his record not being pushed. And you know we work our asses off promoting the hell out of his stuff.”
“They’re fucking with me, BG,” I heard as I turned my chair around to see Marvin standing in front of my desk.
“He’s here,” I told Barney. “I gotta go.” I looked up. “What do you mean?”
“I was down in the Sales Department, BG, and they’re bullshittn’, man. They were supposed to get my record more airplay but all they’re pushing is Martha and the Vandellas’ ‘Quicksand’ and the Miracles’ ‘Mickey’s Monkey.’ ‘Can I Get A Witness’ is just barely breaking into the Top thirty and it’s been out over two months.”
“Marvin,” I said calmly, “I’ve told you, you can’t be running into the Sales Department screaming at those guys. It’s just not wise on your part. You’re the artist. I want them to like you—not hate you. I told you before, you got a problem, come to me.” I reminded him of everything that Sales was accomplishing for him—marketing his records and breaking him through to white audiences here and in the rest of the world.
Marvin didn’t care.
“I don’t like the way they talk to me,” he said. “They told me they didn’t have time. They fronted me off.”
I set up a meeting for later that day for the two of us and included Harvey Fuqua, Marvin’s close friend, and Phil Jones to represent the Sales Department.
Rebecca Nichols, my secretary, had brought in some correspondence for me to review and I had just started on it when somebody, I don’t remember who, ran in and said the President had been shot!
We scrambled to the radio and it sounded like it might have been just a wound of some kind. But shortly after, the news came back that he was dead.
Stunned, I decided for the next hour or so to sit in my office quietly. Calls came in from family and friends to find out if I knew. No one was able to say much. Marvin called to see if I still wanted to have the meeting. I told him yes.
The meeting got off on a sad note but soon grew into a heated argument between Marvin and Phil. Explaining his side, Phil brought in the radio sheets and store reports, showing the great amount of effort that had been put behind the record, along with saying what a fan he was of Marvin’s, and how much he liked him. But Phil added that the record just didn’t have the legs to go to #1 as he had expected. And the reason it had stayed on the charts as long as it had, he said, was because of Sales making sure the stations kept it on their play lists and pushing the distributors for reorders as hard as they could.
“Bullshit,” Marvin said, arguing a point we knew was a problem—the fact that black records weren’t always charted like white records. Even thoug
h many black artists sold more records in the black stores, the people who tracked sales for the different Pop charts would usually call the white stores more than they did the black stores. Not surprisingly “Can I Get A Witness” did better on the R&B charts—peaking at #15, while it went no further than #22 Pop.
Marvin was not wrong in calling this practice unfair—except that he was blaming our Sales Department for it, the very people, especially Barney and Phil, who were working so hard to change it, developing close contacts with the top people at all three of the main charts—Billboard, Cash Box and Record World. (Long sympathetic to our cause, George Albert, the owner of Cash Box, was helpful to Motown throughout the years, including making sure his people accurately charted our records.)
Harvey, who besides having been our first promotion man, knew a lot about different facets of the record business, joined with me in trying to convince Marvin we were all on his side. Stubborn though he was, Marvin began to understand.
As the meeting was nearing the end, with everybody in better spirits, I tied things up by saying, “So once again, Marvin, I’m asking you. Don’t run into the Sales Department cussing them out. Be a good boy, okay?”
“Boy!?” Marvin jumped to his feet, glaring at me from across my desk.
The mood of the meeting took a major turn.
“See! See, BG! That’s a whole bunch of bullshit. You think I’m a boy just like the white man.”
Silence. I stared at Marvin. He stared at me. I stood up. He stood up.
“‘Boy’ is not a bad word. My father calls me ‘boy.’ I call my sons ‘boy.’ It is not what a person says, it’s what they mean. If they mean something bad by it, then it’s bad. If they don’t, then it’s not.”
Marvin pounded my desk. “See, that’s how you do it. You con everybody, BG. Talking to you, man, you try to switch shit around and stuff.”
Before I even thought about it, I had backhanded the top of my desk, scattering everything in arm’s reach to the floor. “What the fuck are you talking about, man?” I said, stalking over to stand face-to-face with him. “Don’t you realize that the President was killed today? Don’t you understand that I stayed here just for a meeting with you to solve a problem because I care about how you feel? How about how I feel?”