Ready For a Brand New Beat

by Mark Kurlansky

  • • •

  Originally Anna and Gwen had their own label, “Anna.” Sometimes when the sisters tried to interest Berry in new talent he would say, as he did to Gwen at the Christmas party, when she dragged him to Marvin Gaye, “Why don’t you put him on your label?” But they kept pushing talent toward their brother, and eventually it was all the same company. Hitsville U.S.A.’s first breakthrough record was produced on the Anna label. The song “Money,” written by Berry Gordy, was a song about the obsession with money. Chroniclers of Motown have made much about how this early song was about money. It seemed to be a presentation of Gordy’s values. Gordy always denied this, saying the song was supposed to be funny.

  But Berry Gordy is not to be confused with Harold Battiste, starting up a black company to help black artists. Battiste, after all, went broke and Gordy was determined to become rich. One of the advantages of picking up raw talent was that you could sign them to any kind of contract you wanted and did not have to pay them well. They were to become famous and Gordy was to become rich.

  • • •

  Motown emerged at a time of transition in both music and the country. Fifties rock ’n’ roll had died, and it was an open question what was going to take its place. The goal of Motown was clear in the logo they printed on their record jackets: The Sound of Young America. It was no longer about black or white. The lucrative market was teenagers, and it was biracial. To Gordy crossover was something far more complicated than cleaning up black songs so that they would be acceptable to whites. He saw that if you made the right kind of black music and avoided the controversies of a controversial age, you could have all teenagers as your market, and this could be the most lucrative music market the world had ever seen.

  Bo Diddley once commented, “You cannot say what people are going to like or not going to like. You have to stick it out there and find out. If they taste it and they like the way it tastes, you can bet they’ll eat some of it.”

  Berry Gordy’s approach was exactly the opposite. He believed that he could identify the exact sound and theme that teenagers wanted. The trick was to invent a sound that seemed new. In an age of change, new is a key to success. Gordy was looking for the perfect crossover music that fused the musicality of jazz and the hard-beat blues of R&B, and bent it to the softness of white balladeers. Jon Landau, in his groundbreaking article on Motown in Crawdaddy magazine in 1967, called it “A Whiter Shade of Black,” which was both an apt description and a parody on the new, somewhat incomprehensible hit “A Whiter Shade of Pale” by a British band with an equally incomprehensible name, Procol Harum.

  Change was the big idea of the 1960s. The election of John Kennedy was change. As historian and confidant Theodore White wrote in 1964 about Kennedy when he first came to office, “His scholars could describe quite clearly what he instinctively sensed: that the pace of change in America was accelerating—industry changing, habits changing, technologies changing.” Even the Catholic Church recognized the yearning for change, and in 1964, that great season of change, ordered priests to turn around and face the worshippers instead of the altar and speak the old Latin Mass in English.

  Everyone had the feeling, expressed by Bob Dylan in his third album, released only months before “Dancing in the Street,” that “the times they are a-changin’.” But ironically Dylan’s song was written in a very old-fashioned folk ballad style. Berry Gordy understood that in this climate the music would have to change, too, and he would have to introduce “a brand new beat,” a new sound. He was in search of the Motown sound. And it had to be a sound that would work well on small transistor radios and car radios, their radios.

  He had learned a great deal from the car industry. He learned how to mass-produce, putting out new hit records every week from a pool of in-house talent:

  . . . my own dream for a hit factory was quickly taking form, a concept that had been shaped by principles I learned on the Lincoln-Mercury assembly line. At the plant, the cars started out as just a frame, pulled along on conveyor belts until off the line. I wanted the same concept for my company, only with artists and songs and records. I wanted a place where a kid off the street could walk in one door an unknown and come out another a recording artist—a star.

  Gordy even borrowed the phrase quality control from the car industry for a board that reviewed every recording to make sure that it was flawless—or flawlessly in line with Gordy’s ideas. Nothing was to be left to chance. Another idea from the car industry: You were not just offered a General Motors; you could choose between a Chevy, a Buick, or a Cadillac. Hitsville U.S.A. offered a variety of labels. The labels gave the illusion of choice, so that the public and the radio stations did not feel that they were getting all their music from one company—Tamla, Miracle, which became Mel-o-dy, VIP, Gordy, Motown, and several others. Detroit had long been called Motor City, but the phrase “Motown” was Gordy’s invention.

  Like the auto manufacturers that had their own companies to make ball bearings, axles, and paint, Gordy established a network of ancillary companies. The Motown Record Company produced records. Hitsville U.S.A. owned the studios. Jobete Music was the true cash cow, a publishing company that controlled rights to the songs. International Talent Management Inc. (ITMI), the in-house management company, supposedly represented the artists but actually signed them to contracts that kept them under the control of the larger company.

  Motown was built on training raw talent. A bare frame of a street singer could go through the Motown plant and come out a Cadillac of a performer. Young hopefuls knew the company could do this for them and that they probably could not do it without the company.

  The backbone of Detroit’s native music talent was the public school system. The black population of Detroit insisted on extensive music education in the schools so that any Detroit graduate with an interest in music graduated reading music and with a basic knowledge of music theory. Starting in the 1940s and even earlier, Detroit produced important musicians such as the Jones brothers—Thad, Elvin, and Hank—and Ron Carter and Tommy Flanagan in the jazz world. And as Gordy mentioned in his autobiography, kids in Detroit grew up with upright pianos in their homes. Martha and the Vandellas, the Supremes, and Wilson Pickett all got their starts harmonizing in the school yards, lots, and alleys of Detroit.

  The Reverend C. L. Franklin’s New Bethel Baptist Church was an important center for gospel, nurturing not only the reverend’s daughter Aretha but visiting stars such as Sam Cooke. Franklin also drew the Reverend James Cleveland as choir director. A great gospel performer in his own right, sometimes called “the King of Gospel,” Cleveland had a huge influence on Aretha Franklin and other locals. He was one of the innovators who had brought jazz and pop into gospel solos and choirs and turned church music into popular music.

  In 1960, in Detroit, there were no important record companies. Successful local artists such as Della Reese and Jackie Wilson went to other cities to cut records. But as Motown’s reputation grew, it became a magnet for Detroit’s black immigrants and their children.

  Success for a black company meant selling not just to the black 10 percent of the market but to the white 90 percent. By now, as Mickey Stevenson pointed out, the idea of crossover was not so much making songs that appealed to white people—they had already done that—but songs that appealed to white radio programs. Part of that was to create a groundswell among young people. Stevenson said:

  I’ve had people . . . say that when they were growing up and wanted to hear Motown music they were not allowed to hear it in their homes. But someone would tell them about it and at night they would pull the cover over their heads and listen to the Tempts or the Four Tops. . . . If something starts taking off underground, if it’s hot you can’t stop it.

  The white radio stations had to be courted carefully and a largely white promotion and sales force at Motown was masterful and without a whiff of payola at the height of the scandal. Cousin Brucie
said, “Gordy was a tremendous businessman, and he was surrounded by tremendous businessmen.”

  • • •

  Though Motown was having great successes with male groups, Gordy had a particular interest in recruiting young women, because he believed that this Motown sound, this ultimate crossover music, would be best with female voices. White people did not find black women threatening, as they sometimes did find black men. All-female acts were in no way a break with tradition, since many stars of the blues were women, and they had a strong presence in gospel and in jazz singing. There were the all-girl bands such as Maurice King’s, and Phil Spector and other R&B producers were having great success with girl groups. Motown, to a large extent, was built on recruiting and developing teenage Detroit girls who became the young women in evening gowns known as “the Motown divas.”

  Motown’s first female star was Mary Wells, a local girl whose single mother supported her with housecleaning work. Mary, who suffered debilitating childhood illnesses, sometimes helped her mother clean. A serious science student, she graduated from that legendary factory for athletes and musicians, Northwestern High School, at the age of seventeen, but her dreams of being a scientist were deferred by the growing legend of Berry Gordy, Tamla Records, and Jackie Wilson.

  Wells found Gordy at the 20 Grand Club and tried to sell him a song she had written for Jackie Wilson. Gordy asked her to sing the song, and then recorded her, when she was still age seventeen. According to legend, he had her do more than twenty takes. Her song, “Bye Bye Baby,” made it to number 8 on the R&B chart and in 1961 reached number 45 on the white pop chart. This was what Gordy was looking for.

  That same year, Wells, now eighteen, became the first Motown female to make the Top 40 chart with “I Don’t Want to Take a Chance,” a song written by Gordy and Mickey Stevenson, which rose to number 33.

  The next female discovery was Kim Weston, who came from an infamous black ghetto by the Detroit River known as Black Bottom, which she still says “has the best spirit in Detroit.” She attended Miller High School, which produced Della Reese and jazz great Milt Jackson. There she attended girls’ voice class, instructed by George Shirley, the first black to sing tenor leads at the Metropolitan Opera. At Shirley’s classes she met fellow student Martha Reeves.

  Singing in a local church, she was invited to make a demo recording, which found its way into the hands of then singer, later Motown songwriter, Eddie Holland, who brought it to the attention of Mickey Stevenson, who signed her at age nineteen and later married her. Mickey Stevenson wrote her first hit, “Love Me All the Way,” which peaked at number 24 on the R&B chart and also made it to 88 on the pop chart.

  Martha Reeves’s parents lived in rural Alabama. Her father played guitar and her mother sang, and that was how they courted. They married at the age of fifteen and were sharecroppers, able to live in the shack they called home only as long as they delivered the required amount of harvested crops.

  They left and the father, Elijah, or E.J., worked various part-time agricultural jobs. When Martha, their first daughter and third child, was born, they were living in a two-family house in Eufaula, a cotton-trading town of about six thousand near the Georgia border. Jobs were scarce, and a cousin who had moved to Detroit sent word that there were good jobs to be found there. The Reeveses moved north when Martha was not quite a year old.

  The extended Reeves family all lived in a three-bedroom house—if you counted closets with beds—on Illinois Street on the Eastside. From a very early age, Martha’s parents took pride in her singing. At the age of three Martha and two brothers won chocolate-covered cherries in a singing contest. As early as the third grade Martha was getting the solo parts in school productions and was thrilled by her ability to please people with her singing. In high school she distinguished herself in the school choir, and in her senior year she sang the soprano solo in a performance of Handel’s Messiah to an audience of four thousand at Ford Auditorium.

  Martha recalled her high school days, unconsciously quoting from “Dancing in the Street,” which was something that occurred in her speech from time to time. She said, “There was music everywhere. Amateur clubs, parks, street corners. They taught how to read music in the public schools and gave you instruments to take home and practice on and taught how to sing and had choirs that performed. We jammed on street corners.”

  The high school kids loved to harmonize and practiced it on the street and in parks and lots. Some groups earned reputations. There was a well-known group called the Street Corner Gang, which really started on a street corner. A lot of groups formed around the city. Martha and her friends sang after school in a park across from the high school. They called themselves the Fascinations. Another group was called the Del-Phis. They were originally five girls. Then one left and was replaced by a man. The man left, and so did two other girls. Then it was down to Rosalind Ashford, Annette Beard, and Gloria Jean Williamson. Gloria invited Martha to join the group. This was fun for high school but did not earn a living for any of them when they graduated. Martha and the Del-Phis went their own ways.

  The Reeves family by now had their own Eastside house. E.J. had worked in a Packard factory and then landed a solid job with the city waterworks. When Martha graduated from high school, she took a job with a local dry cleaner, City Wide Cleaners, which had six locations around Detroit, all of which she worked at as a substitute clerk, filling in for the days off of the regular clerks.

  In 1961, now twenty years old, Martha entered a talent contest. The prize she won was an appearance for three nights at the 20 Grand during the 5:00 to 8:00 happy hour. She was well aware that careers had been made at the 20 Grand. And, adding to her excitement, for three nights she had her own private dressing room.

  On her last night, Mickey Stevenson, whom Reeves described as the “knight in shining armor” of her career, came to the club. He would go to such amateur happy hours looking for young talent.

  Martha was a bit depressed that night, thinking of going back to the dry cleaner, standing in the light with a friend’s ID because she was underage. Mickey heard her sing a two-song set with no R&B—Bart Howard’s 1954 pop standard “Fly Me to the Moon” and “Gin House Blues,” a blues classic first sung by Bessie Smith. When she finished the set, she was heading back to the dressing room, her final treat before the dry cleaner, when a tall, suave stranger held out his hand to help her down the backstage steps and said, “Your name is Martha. Martha what?”

  She said, “La Vaille,” which was how she had been billing herself—Martha La Vaille. He handed her a card and told her to come see him. The card said “William Stevenson, A&R director, Hitsville U.S.A., 2648 West Grand Boulevard.”

  She had never heard of Hitsville or of Motown. In 1961, not many people had. She actually knew a lot of their records from Detroit radio. Martha listened to R&B on WCHB, one of the first black-owned stations in the country. But she also listened to CKLW, a Detroit Top 40 station, and the ABC affiliate WXYZ. All three were abuzz with Motown songs, and Martha had become a fan of Mary Wells, the Miracles, and the Marvelettes, even though she did not know who produced them.

  All Martha knew at that moment was that this man, Stevenson, in his tailored silk suit, looked “as if he had just starred in a movie.” He looked like her ticket out of dry cleaning. The man told her to come to Hitsville U.S.A. for an audition. He said, “I think you have something.”

  She tucked his card into the bodice of her dress and walked coolly to her fabulous temporary private dressing room, and was careful to close the door before dancing and shrieking with excitement. On her way home, she decided to quit her job at the dry cleaner. She woke up early the next morning and took the bus across that dangerous Woodward Avenue border to the Westside.

  She was surprised to see that the company was simply a Detroit house not unlike the one she lived in, except that it had that carved blue-lettered sign announcing Hitsville U.S.A. In
the cramped reception area Mickey Stevenson was called and told that she was here to see him. Martha could hear his response: “Who?”

  Mickey explained to her that she was not supposed to just show up. She was supposed to call the number on the card and make an appointment for an audition. They were held on the third Thursday of every month.

  But then the phone rang and he asked her to answer it as he ran out of his office. She answered a number of calls, met singer-producer Clarence Paul, settled a pay dispute for James Jamerson and drummer Benny Benjamin, and by the end of the day, when Paul drove her home in his Cadillac, she was the new A&R secretary.

  Mickey Stevenson told the story differently. He did not like auditioning but did it constantly:

  I used to have auditions at one time almost every day. . . . I would audition everybody . . . but at the time, I didn’t know how to audition. You start with a song that’s terrible and I’d say, get out of here. That ain’t no song. I was rude. I was inconsiderate, but not intentionally. I didn’t know how to handle it. I learned over a period of time to say, “That’s a nice song but we’re not ready for you right now.” One of those kinds of lines. I used to say, “Get out of here. What is this?” Or your song ain’t nothing, but your voice is good. By the end of the week I’d be going through a hundred people, or a hundred fifty people. . . . They came from all over. They started in Detroit, but as we got larger, they would come from Chicago, Ohio, all the way from New York they would come to join this black company. They have a chance to do something here. So it became that. It became a way out. Well, I couldn’t turn them down when they came from all over the place. I had to stop and listen. But to some of them I would say, “Let me ask you a question. You got in your car and drove three hundred miles to bring me this bullshit?” I look back, boy, was I terrible. But out of every hundred of them, and I’m tired of listening, somebody would walk in there and blow me out the box.