It seems strange, given what later could plainly be seen as a commercial bent in the Gordys going back to Pops and the teachings of Booker T. Washington, that he would stake his business on something as noncommercial as jazz. But it had once been commercial, and Gordy had failed to recognize the large shift to R&B and rock ’n’ roll that had occurred while he was in the Army.
Detroit was a jazz town, and Gordy spent his evenings in clubs such as the Minor Key, Baker’s Keyboard Lounge, the West Inn, and especially Club Twenty-one. In these clubs he would hear such greats as Elvin Jones, Charlie Parker, and John Coltrane.
But at his store, these records were not selling. In his autobiography, Gordy recalled, “People started coming in and asking for things like Fats Domino. Pretty soon I was asking, ‘Who is this Fats Domino? What is this rhythm-and-blues stuff?’ I listened and ordered a few records by these people and sold them.”
But he didn’t sell enough of them, because his capital was invested in jazz records that he couldn’t sell, and soon the store was bankrupt. Gordy, his wings burned, resorted to what was always available in Detroit at the time. He worked on an assembly line at the Ford Motor Company’s Wayne Assembly Plant, earning $86.40 a week as an upholstery trimmer on Lincoln-Mercury sedans. This was exactly what Gordy did not want to do with his life, but from his tedious work he picked up valuable ideas.
What is most telling about Gordy from his 1994 autobiography, To Be Loved, aside from the way he doesn’t acknowledge a ghost writer, though he begins by confessing that he had never written a book before and hasn’t even read that many, is the way every success and every failure along the way were seen as lessons from which something valuable could be derived for the future. “A smart man profits from his mistakes,” his father had always told him.
Gordy was on the assembly line in 1955, and the cars that were made in Detroit in those years were admired around the world and are still remembered as a high point in the auto industry. Their engineering and bold panache made them products that gave worldwide prestige to the town called Motor City. Evidence of the central role of Detroit cars in American culture from the mid-1950s to the early 1960s is the fact that in 1963 Alfred P. Sloan Jr.’s account of running General Motors, My Years with General Motors, was a major New York Times best seller. The jacket refers to General Motors as “the largest industrial complex in the world.” General Motor’s innovation was to offer a variety of cars in different prices. They started in 1908 with Buick and Olds, and then brought in Oakland and Cadillac, named after the Frenchman who in 1701 built a fort that was the beginning of Detroit. They started manufacturing their own car parts and components—an idea that led to the upholstery section of an assembly line where Gordy worked. In 1916 they acquired the low-end Chevrolet, which was designed to compete with Ford.
In the 1930s GM embraced the idea of changing every car every year, a policy that other car companies adopted, so that, by the 1950s there was great excitement every year to see what the new cars would be like. New models took two years to develop, so the car companies were always working on the future. By 1955 the car industry was offering 272 models a year. Automatic transmissions, which made it easy for anyone to learn to drive, became standard equipment by the 1950s. The cars were ever larger, with little competition from small foreign models built for fuel efficiency. Detroit’s cars were huge and imposing, with fins and other design flairs suggestive of space travel, with tremendously powerful engines that were capable of greater speeds than the still undeveloped highway system allowed. In 1955, the year Gordy worked on a different assembly line, Chevrolet produced the Bel Air, with a “small,” newly designed eight-cylinder engine, the V8, a gas-slurper that produced 162 horsepower. But for an additional $59, a modified version was available with a bigger carburetor and a different manifold, an air cleaner, duo-exhausts, and a 180-horsepower engine. It has become one of the most collectible vintage cars.
In the 1920s the DuPont laboratories had discovered a chemical reaction that led to nitrocellulose lacquer. This led to a lacquer-based paint that held more pigment in suspension, which resulted in brighter colors, and to an extremely durable and bright paint called Duco. By the 1950s, all of the defects of Duco, such as poor adhesion to metal and slow application, had been worked out, and the painting was just another swift process on the assembly line. Throughout the 1950s GM worked with resin manufacturers, and in 1958 came out with an acrylic resin that allowed even bolder colors. The powerful, big-finned machines were turquoise and pink and sky blue and red and emerald green—often two colors, all accented with slashes of sparkling chrome. They were beautiful, and the durability of both the cars and the paint has been proven in Havana, Cuba. The Cuban moneyed class imported these cars, and after the Revolution the new government saw that they didn’t leave with their owners. Even with replacement parts embargoed they have kept them running and beautiful for more than half a century.
The popular appeal, the variety of products, the rapid output of quality cars, the constant planning and adjustments for changing trends and popular taste, the efficiency of assembly lines, and the benefit of a quality-control board were all valuable lessons to Gordy.
• • •
How does an assembly-line worker keep his mind occupied while confronted with the tedium of a highly repetitious task? In the case of Berry Gordy, he made up songs—to the point where he decided that what he really wanted to do was be a songwriter. The idea had always been there. As a teenager he had won honorable mention in a talent show for his song “Berry’s Boogie.” His sisters Anna and Gwen were also interested in the music business, and once they decided to help their brother, they were an irresistible force. Attractive and savvy, they had many contacts in the music world through their cigarette and photography business at the Flame Show Bar.
The Flame was opened in 1950 by Morris Wasserman, an experienced Detroit club owner, a block east of Woodward Avenue on John R Street, known for its black clubs. Wasserman brought in Maurice King, a big band veteran, who played alto sax and wrote, arranged, and led. King, another immigrant from the Deep South, the Mississippi Delta, had spent most of the 1940s as music director of a national touring all-girl band, the International Sweethearts of Rhythm. It was the first girl band in which musicians were picked for their musicianship, not their looks or race. At a time when there were no mixed-race bands, except Benny Goodman’s, King’s Sweethearts were black, white, and Asian. Always a courtly gentleman, King never got romantically involved with his musicians.
Wasserman wanted to bring in national musicians, and commissioned King to build a big band to play with them. King’s band made the Flame the premier club in Detroit for black musicians. Among the young talent he brought to his band was baritone sax player Thomas “Bean” Bowles, and trumpeter Johnny Trudell, both of whom, along with King himself, Gordy would one day hire for Motown.
The Flame had a stage built into the bar. Detroit local Della Reese performed there, and years later said that the Flame Show Bar “was named correctly because it was hot.” So did Dinah Washington. Gordy recalled in his autobiography, “She’d walk the bar, shakin’ her behind, working it from end to end (both the bar and her behind).” He also saw Sarah Vaughan and Billie Holiday, about whom he wrote, “My fascination with her was total.” At the Flame, Gordy learned great respect for female vocalists, something he would have in common with King.
Gordy’s sisters were beautiful and glamorous. The Flame was usually packed with record producers, singers, all kinds of people from the music industry, and the men among them all wanted to chat with the Gordy sisters, who made their way through the club selling cigarettes and taking photographs, which were developed in a back room by two of their brothers. And they talked about their brother the songwriter.
They connected Berry with Jackie Wilson’s handlers. Jackie Wilson, according to Gordy, was “Mr. Excitement.” Wearing heavy makeup onstage and off, unbuttoned shimmerin
g shirts, diamond rings, and gold chains, Wilson dazzled. Gordy said with a sigh, “If only I could be Jackie, just for a night.”
Gordy began writing songs for Wilson. His first hit for Wilson was “Reet Petite.” It is surprising that Berry Gordy, who would become deeply connected to crossover commercialism, got his first hit from a song in “bop talk.” Bop talk was a coded language of jazz musicians in the 1940s that used rhyming phrases and sometimes African expressions. A “hip cat” comes from Wolof, the language of Senegal, in which a hepicat is someone whose eyes are open. Lionel Hampton’s “Hey! Ba-Ba-Re-Bop,” an R&B hit in 1946, was a huge influence on Jerry Lee Lewis in the 1950s. Bop talk had gone from 1940s black jazz into 1950s rock ’n’ roll, especially with Elvis Presley. Little Richard’s 1956 hit “Tutti Frutti,” containing such lines as
Tutti frutti, oh Rudy
A whop bop-a-lu a whop bam boo
Or Clyde McPhatter and the Drifters’ 1953 hit “Money Honey” and Larry Williams’s 1957 “Bony Moronie,” later more famously covered by John Lennon, are all examples of bop talk.
Bop talk was already an old-fashioned thing by the time of “Reet Petite” in 1957, and in fact the phrase was borrowed from Louis Jordan’s 1947 “Reet Petite and Gone.” Gordy’s “Reet Petite” was coauthored by his sister Gwen and her boyfriend Billy Davis, who later did numerous hits for the Chess label. Wilson had recently left the Dominoes, and “Reet Petite” was his first hit as a solo performer. It made it to number 62 on the Billboard 100 chart. It even made it to number 6 on the UK singles chart.
Berry Gordy was now a hit songwriter for the biggest black entertainer in Detroit. He continued to write songs with Gwen and Davis, and they produced several other hits for Jackie Wilson, including “To Be Loved” and “Lonely Teardrops.” But royalties were not huge and he found himself in a similar position to the one he had been in as a boxer, winning fights but getting neither rich nor famous.
In 1957 an act called the Matadors was auditioning for Jackie Wilson’s managers, who were not impressed. But when the young singing group was sent away, Gordy followed them outside. He liked the fact that they did original material, most of it written by their lead singer, William “Smokey” Robinson. He offered to manage them, renamed them the Miracles, and worked on Robinson’s songwriting. Gordy impressed on him that “the hook,” the phrase by which people would remember the song, must never be buried. It must be repeated over and over, what Frank Sinatra had called “imbecilic reiteration.” It became a credo of Motown. Recently Mickey Stevenson, one of the key creative figures of Motown and a coauthor of “Dancing in the Street,” was asked in an interview in Los Angeles, where he now lives, what the key was to a good song. Without hesitation he replied, “A good hook—the part that grabs you.”
Together Gordy and Smokey Robinson sold several successful songs, for which Gordy earned about three dollars. It was increasingly clear to him that he had to produce his own records.
In the spring of 1958, a singer named Raynoma Mayberry Liles won a talent show at the 20 Grand, one of the premier clubs of downtown Detroit. It had a bowling alley, a separate jazz club, and a number of lounges, of which the most famous was the Driftwood Lounge, which got top acts from around the country. There was also an amateur night and a large dance floor. There was even a 20 Grand Motel next door under different ownership where out-of-town artists could stay.
Raynoma was advised to see Gordy, who was earning a reputation for developing young talent. Gordy was more impressed with her songwriting than her singing; the two formed a company. Soon Gordy divorced his first wife, Thelma Coleman, who had also advanced his career and with whom he had three children, and married Raynoma, the second of the numerous marriages and liaisons with which he would produce eight children.
The Rayber Music Company, the name coming from Raynoma and Berry, was established with an $800 loan from the Gordy family to produce their first record. The money came from a fund to which each family member contributed two dollars every week. The primary purpose was to buy real estate. Raynoma ended up in charge of a publishing division that he called “Jobete” from the names of his first three children: Hazel Joy, Berry IV, and Terry James. Gordy always loved to make up acronymic names.
Rayber produced “Come to Me,” which Gordy cowrote with the performer Marv Johnson, a local Detroit kid who had cut two records without great success. But Gordy, who always had a remarkable eye for raw talent, saw a future for this singer. Even though they did not have funding for distribution and sold it to United Artists for $3,000, this was really the first Motown record. It reached number 30 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart.
Tellingly, Gordy named his first label Tamla. His intentions were clear. Though he was recording black R&B music from Detroit street talent, he named his label after “Tammy,” a 1957 saccharine hit ballad by Debbie Reynolds. That was about as white as music gets. He wanted to call the label “Tammy” to cash in on the popularity of the Reynolds recording, but that name had already been registered.
The home of the Tamla label was a typical Detroit building—a two-family house on Gladstone Street on the Westside. A closet was converted into a sound booth, and the bathroom made an effective echo chamber.
This first recording already had some of the fundamentals of what would become “the Motown sound.” To begin with, he used Thomas “Bean” Bowles for the session and would continue using him. One of the backup singers, Brian Holland, would later join his brother Eddie and Lamont Dozier to make one of the most important songwriting teams of the 1960s, penning hit after hit for Martha and the Vandellas and for the Supremes.
But Gordy never lost his admiration of jazz, and scoured Detroit jazz clubs for musicians. One of his first acquisitions became central to that sound—James Jamerson, who was to become one of the most influential bass players in R&B history.
He was from Edisto Island, one of South Carolina’s Sea Islands famous for slave plantations that produced Sea Island cotton. The island was so isolated that the African American population there spoke their own African-English hybrid language, Gullah. When he was a teenager, his family moved to Detroit, and he learned to play bass at Northwestern High School, which, like most Detroit schools at the time, had a solid music program that produced many future musicians. They were competitive and spurred one another on. Some of Jamerson’s classmates also had successful careers, such as Richard “Popcorn” Wylie, who later wrote hit songs for the Platters, and Clifford Mack, a future drummer with Ramsey Lewis. Jamerson began performing in local jazz clubs while still in high school. Underaged, he had to get a special permit from the Detroit police to perform in clubs where alcohol was served. Even after he started playing for Gordy, he continued to play jazz in the clubs at night, as did most of Motown’s musicians.
Jamerson started at Tamla with the same German upright double bass he had played in high school. But around 1962 he switched to an electric bass—a 1962 Fender Precision. This instrument, first available in 1951, was part of the new electric sound of rock ’n’ roll. Partly because of Jamerson, it became the bass of R&B. Paul Riser, the arranger for “Dancing in the Street” and many other Motown hits, said, “Why would you use an upright bass on an R&B song? You couldn’t get the feel of it.”
Jamerson played upright on many of the early Motown hits, including those of Martha and the Vandellas, such as “Heat Wave.” Before Jamerson, there was not a great deal of invention to the bass line in R&B songs—a simple two-beat pattern. What made Jamerson unique and influential was the importance he gave the bass line. It was often so melodic that it seemed to be a secondary theme to the song. The jazz influence was unmistakable. He liked to swing eighth notes, shave a little off so that they seemed to hop into the quarter note next to them. He was very syncopated—that is, he shifted accents off of what would logically have been the strong notes—and his playing had an improvisational feel. Riser said, “Jamerson did mostly his own bass line.
I would have a lot of parts written out but the rhythm instruments were left to do things for themselves.” Jamerson said of himself and the rhythm section, “We didn’t need sheet music. We could feel the groove together.”
Other bass players often cite Jamerson as their primary influence, including Bernard Odum, who played for James Brown; the Band’s Rick Danko; Led Zeppelin’s John Paul Jones; and Paul McCartney. Stevie Wonder, blind from childhood, said, “Jamerson’s bass playing made a certain fabric of my life visual.” Marion Hayden, who plays upright bass in jazz clubs around Detroit today, said that in her classes, she teaches Jamerson. “Although I never heard him play and although I am a jazz player, I study his bass lines, even on a Fender.”
The original band also included baritone saxophonist Thomas Bowles, from King’s band at the Flame. Guitarists Eddie Willis and Joe Messina, who played on this first record, became mainstays of the Motown band for many years. Messina played a top backbeat and Willis a bottom. Later Robert White was added for the bottom, and Willis played a middle with soft riffs. Willis was born in Mississippi. He started out at age nine as a blues player. Later he got interested in rock ’n’ roll. Living back in Mississippi, he said in a recent interview, “Everything happened when I got to Detroit.”
The band labeled the guitar section the Oreo cookie, because Messina was the rare white player. He was from an Eastside Detroit Italian neighborhood. His father, who could not read music, played guitar at Italian weddings. Messina, born in 1928, and one of the older Motown artists, had played with the ABC studio band in the late 1950s with such notable jazz players as Charlie Parker and Stan Getz. He also played with Miles Davis. Gordy heard him in clubs in Detroit and hired him for his first recording. An inventive musician, Messina created his own modified Fender with six small bridges—an instrument later produced in Japan and sold as “the Messina Funk Machine.” Recalling his years at Motown from his suburban home north of Detroit, Messina said, “Sometimes a track could take nine hours to make. But on the way home I listened to jazz on the radio.”
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