Ready For a Brand New Beat

by Mark Kurlansky

  He was angry only because Gordy would not help him with the $25,000 needed to place a Funk Brothers star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. “He let us down. . . . He won’t give a hand to the musicians who put him where he is. Twenty-five thousand dollars, that’s nothing for Berry. Now, that is sad.”

  The musicians each negotiated their own contract and, as with everything at Motown, were encouraged to compete with each other. Guitarist Joe Messina, who lived comfortably in a Detroit suburb, thanks in part to his investing money in a car-wash chain, said that he had secretly negotiated ten dollars per hour. “I was always very proud of getting that deal,” he said. The standard pay was five dollars per hour. A session like “Dancing in the Street” could be an hour or two, but some sessions were nine hours. It is possible that some of the musicians who played on “Dancing in the Street” earned as little as ten or fifteen dollars. “So long sessions were in favor,” said Messina. He estimated that he earned two hundred or more a week and thought he was one of the top-paid musicians. Maybe not. There were a lot of secret deals being made. Some musicians, such as Messina and pianist Earl Van Dyke, did well while others earned below the pay scale of the musicians’ union.

  Songwriters did not do much better. They were all required to sign a contract with Jobete, Gordy’s publishing company, which not only took a large piece of their earnings but also had a built-in mechanism to recover expenses from the record out of the writer’s royalties. There were constant accusations of songs being stolen and the real writers being neither credited nor paid royalties. Clarence Paul said that this was a frequent occurrence. Ivy Jo Hunter was not credited for songwriting on the early pressings of “Dancing in the Street.” Later, without any pressure from him, his name started appearing. “Someone must have put in a word for me,” he said.

  The artists were signed to the Gordy management company ITMI, which was supposed to look after their interests and preclude the necessity for any other representation. ITMI paid them salaries even on weeks when they produced nothing. Artists were grateful for this paycheck but then they realized that these salaries were later subtracted from their royalty earnings.

  Gordy was signing high school kids who had no representation. Mary Wilson said, “Looking back, people might wonder how Motown got away with this sort of thing or why so many artists just seemed to have accepted it. In truth, few of us knew anything at all about the business, and fewer still knew to have legal counsel for any business dealings or contracts.”

  Don Engel, a California lawyer who both opposed and defended Gordy in various contract disputes, was testifying before the California Senate Joint Committee on the music industry, denouncing the kind of contracts Motown had signed young artists to, and he was asked if these contracts had not been negotiated. He replied, “These young kids would have paid royalties to the companies to put out their records.”

  The royalties they agreed to were a major issue. This was why Mary Wells had left. Motown artists earned very little in royalties for hits that earned Motown millions. In 1966 Clarence Paul, Mickey Stevenson’s deputy, organized a meeting in his house for artists and producers to form a common front to demand better contracts. But they lost courage when they discovered that management was photographing their arrival from parked cars.

  In 1967 Mickey Stevenson and wife, Kim Weston, left Motown. Stevenson always insists that this was simply because MGM offered him a better deal in California. But Kim Weston made it clear that she was dissatisfied with Motown’s deals. Eventually she took Motown to court for a better share of the earnings on her songs, but divorced, impoverished, and in poor health, she settled for a small, fast paycheck. Said Weston, “They gave me ten thousand dollars for thirty years, and that’s all I got from Motown, but I was sick, so I settled.”

  As the family structure broke down and artists left their “Motown bubble,” they started thinking about their future and talking to artists from other companies.

  The Temptations even considered going on strike. In 1967 the Holland brothers and Lamont Dozier demanded an accounting of royalties for their twenty-eight Top 20 hits. Motown’s response was to sue them for $4 million, claiming they had failed to deliver on some contractual agreements. Gordy even got an injunction to stop them from working from 1969 to 1972. They wrote songs clandestinely under the name “Edythe Wayne.”

  Others followed the exodus from Motown, including Barrett Strong, one of their first stars from “Money (That’s What I Want),” and Brenda Holloway, the Miracles, Jimmy Ruffin, Eddie Kendricks, Gladys Knight and the Pips, the Four Tops, Maurice King, the Ashford and Simpson writing team, and Harvey Fuqua.

  By 1969, Martha Reeves’s relationship with Motown had grown thorny, in large part because, like other female singers, she had been shunted aside by Gordy’s near obsession with Diana Ross. According to Mary Wells, Ross got into spats with all the female stars of Motown but fought the most with Martha Reeves. Wilson said, “Things happened faster for Martha and her group than they did for us, and this only fueled the rivalry between Martha and Diane. Both had drive and charisma, and neither would ever back down.”

  Wilson pointed out that Gordy used to refer to all the female acts as “the girls,” but in the mid-1960s he started using the word to refer only to the Supremes. By 1969, Martha Reeves’s standing was already in decline, but then, according to Reeves, she became one of the first to question where the money was going. “Yet after several years of million-selling records and sold-out concerts, in 1969 I realized that my personal income was but a fraction of what it should have been.” She dared to question Gordy, even to argue with him and his sisters in a candid way that outraged the Gordys, and then she could feel herself being distanced from the family—worked with less, even talked to less.

  Reeves often tells the story of how she learned of Motown leaving Detroit. With hurt still in her voice she said:

  I was recuperating from giving birth to my son. There is no maternity leave for singers. When I was ready for my next assignment I called and was told that the company had moved to LA. It was now called Mo West—an insult to people in Detroit. They had taken the Temptations, Four Tops, Stevie Wonder, Michael Jackson, and the Jackson 5. Picked up a lot of East Coast people. Left a lot behind, including the Supremes. I was told my contract was up. I didn’t know it, but it was. I had signed a ten-year contract, 1962 to ’72. He didn’t have to say anything to me and he didn’t.

  For all her criticism, Reeves seemed lost without her professional family, and struggled with performance and with substance abuse, but came through it to live a comfortable life in her home city, spending a great deal of her time touring. She and the Vandellas settled a lawsuit for their royalties in 1991. She usually speaks lovingly of Gordy and visibly glowed at a chance meeting. “He’s still an all right guy,” she said. “He made us famous. I didn’t think I would ever be famous.”

  Even Diana Ross left for RCA in 1981, and Gordy sold Motown in 1988 for $61 million, but kept his cash-cow publishing company, Jobete.

  • • •

  Gordy could not avoid the sense that what he did, who he was, and his kind of music were out of place in more radical times. Magnificent Montague saw it when Gordy hired him to work with deejays and advise him on promotion in his Los Angeles office. Montague wrote in his autobiography:

  Motown was beginning to lose its advantage; you could almost chart it from the day Dr. King was assassinated in ’68. Black music quickly began to surrender its melodic core to the service of rhythm, a funkier rhythm, a fiercer rhythm, one bent on making a statement of independence. This change contradicted the blander way Motown had been producing itself, and there was nothing Berry could do about it. He had enjoyed a window of only a few years—maybe 1963 to 1966, to be arbitrary—in which there was a rough consensus between young blacks and whites, an unverbalized understanding of what America might be, of what was right and what was wrong. It could not last.

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nbsp; And yet as Motown faded, “Dancing in the Street” endured. In 1971 Little Richard thought “Dancing in the Street” might be the right vehicle to revive his career. His producer, H. B. Barnum, was asked why he chose that particular song:

  We just picked songs we like. I loved that song. It’s a great song. The intro sets it up. You know what’s coming. It’s got so much energy. It’s one of those songs that brings everybody together on the dance floor. It just makes everybody happy. The intro peps you up right out of the box. When you do that song, you don’t have to fix it. There is nothing to change.

  The same year, Laura Nyro recorded the song with Labelle, including Sarah Dash, who in 1971 thought “Dancing in the Street” was a great way to promote the emerging wave of feminism. What Nyro and Labelle had in common was that they were forever looking for new and different ways of doing things. Patti LaBelle’s group—Patti LaBelle and the Bluebelles—started as a typical R&B girl group. Then in 1971 the three stopped dressing alike and called themselves Labelle. Laura Nyro, a Bronx native born of one Sicilian and one Jewish parent, and the cherished niece of notable artists William Meyerowitz and Theresa Bernstein, was always a little different from everyone else on the music scene. A white interpreter of R&B who first came to public attention at Adler’s 1967 Monterey Pop Festival, she was said to be “too intense.”

  The four women were planning on an album of R&B songs, mostly from Motown. Combining a white singer and a black group was still a little startling in 1971, but not as much as in 1964, when the Rolling Stones had toured the United States with Patti LaBelle and the Bluebelles and Adam Faith had sung with the Isley Brothers. Since the early days of Glenn Miller and Maurice King, blacks were slowly showing up in white bands—Billy Preston, who had played keyboard for Sam Cooke and Ray Charles and whose “natural” Afro hair eventually became far larger than his head, played with the Beatles in their famous 1969 sessions. But Nyro and LaBelle were white and black costars—equals. The album was called Gonna Take a Miracle. The title song, a 1965 hit for the Royalettes, was one of the few non-Motown cuts. Among the songs was Curtis Mayfield’s “Monkey Time,” which was Major Lance’s first hit in 1963, and “Dancing in the Street.” Nyro had the idea, looking for a different approach, to combine the two in one song. The cut begins with the Mayfield song, and about a minute and a half later it evolves into “Dancing in the Street.” Both songs had to do with dancing and possibly more serious things. Much is made of the way this recording changes “Can’t forget the Motor City” to “Don’t forget the Motor City,” which is often interpreted as “Remember Detroit and the 1967 uprising.” The line is sung as a loud reprise for the backup, which is known in songwriting as a “drive.”

  In 1975, folksinger Joan Baez decided to try her hand at “Dancing in the Street.” Though R&B was not her usual fare, Baez has always been courageous about trying different genres. She had built her reputation partly on the black gospel music of the civil rights movement, so she was associated with black music. Now Baez, one of the most political of singers, put “Dancing in the Street” on a program of black political music. She went on tour with James Jamerson on bass; David Briggs, who often recorded and toured with Elvis Presley, on keyboards; Danny Ferguson on electric guitar; and Jim Gordon, who had played for the Everly Brothers and the Beach Boys, on drums. The concert tour with this distinguished band began with the freedom song “Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Around” and went on to more of the usual Baez repertoire, such as “Boulder to Birmingham,” “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” and the gospel song “Oh, Happy Day.” She would then sing the Bob Dylan song “Forever Young,” and then wind up the evening with that great closer “Dancing in the Street.” But even with James Jamerson himself setting the groove, Baez’s brave attempt to growl and affect other African American blues vocal styles came off as hopelessly white, and the finale failed to be rousing.

  This was near the end of James Jamerson’s life. Jamerson, one of the few musicians to follow Gordy to California, felt alone and lost there. Guitarist Eddie Willis, the last Funk Brother to see Jamerson, had stopped by with bongo player Eddie Brown. Jamerson wept to see two from the old band. Always suffering from alcoholism, he deteriorated further in LA and died of cirrhosis of the liver in 1983. His famous Fender bass had been stolen from his home days before his death.

  • • •

  By the mid-1970s it seemed everyone was doing “Dancing in the Street,” from reggae to psychedelic. The Royals, a Jamaican group that came up in the 1960s with the Bob Marley–led reggae craze, recorded a not-at-all reggae version of “Dancing in the Street,” although it is striking how much the hard downbeat of Motown resembles the slower drop beat of reggae.

  In 1976 Michael Bolton recorded “Dancing in the Street” for his second RCA album of R&B music. Bolton achieved stardom in the 1980s with his hard rock band Blackjack and in the 1990s with softer ballads, but he started his career as a white R&B singer named Michael Bolotin from New Haven, Connecticut. He began as a teenager in New Haven and in 1976 was still only twenty-three years old. Few remember that his early R&B was performed with top jazz musicians including the great bassist Wilbur Bascomb, who played with notables from Bo Diddley to James Brown. “No one outside of my family noticed,” Bolton quipped about his early R&B career. Looking back as a mature, experienced performer and songwriter, he says about his somewhat rash decision to cover what was already recognized as one of the all-time greatest popular music recordings, “I was too young, too naïve to be intimidated. I was too unaware of what to be intimidated by.

  “In 1976 we were simply looking for songs that would feel good and I would sound good.” Bolton had the kind of strong tenor that this song could showcase, as it did for Reeves’s strong soprano. “‘Dancing in the Street’ feels good and upbeat and Martha nailed it. I wanted to do the same thing—an upbeat celebration . . . you love something someone else has done, love the way it makes you feel, and then ask how does it feel for your voice? When you are looking for songs that will make the body of work feel good, those factors become overriding.

  “Martha’s track was a great track but the singer has to tell the story—breathe life into the song. I didn’t know that back then. I just thought, ‘I got to do that.’ I didn’t know enough to be intimidated and I’m glad.” He was glad because he liked his recording. But looking back he said, “I like mine but . . . it’s nowhere near the class of Martha’s record, with her vocal delivery and that staggering band.”

  It was not until 1986, when he was recording a cover of Otis Redding’s great “(Sittin’ On) The Dock of the Bay,” that he began reflecting on this idea of covering great songs. His team had reassured him that he was “a white Otis Redding,” which may be the ultimate reverse crossover compliment, but then, “Someone asked how are people going to feel about something embraced reverentially?” This was an intimidating notion. But he did record the song and had a hit. He then had another hit with his recording of the Hoagy Carmichael song “Georgia on My Mind,” which no one could possibly sing better than did Ray Charles in 1960. In 1991 Bolton dared to cover Percy Sledge’s “When a Man Loves a Woman,” a 1966 number 1 hit and recording legend. Sledge’s bass player, Calvin Lewis, and his organist, Andrew Wright, had given him the tune with no lyrics or title. Sledge, reeling from his girlfriend’s decision to leave him for a modeling career, stepped into the studio and improvised the words, setting them to the song’s rhythm. Bolton won a Grammy award for his cover.

  It seemed that if you could capture the spirit of the song and make it work for your voice, covering a classic could be a hit. But neither Bolton nor most of the others who tried were able to accomplish this with “Dancing in the Street.” Artists hear the Reeves recording, love it, and want to do it, too, but it is not easy to “nail it” the way Martha did.

  In 1977, the Grateful Dead, who had previously performed several versions of the song, recorded a psychedelic cover that has a long drum a
nd organ introduction and drifts for eight minutes, which is five minutes and twenty-five seconds longer than the original Motown recording. In 1979, the gravelly voiced balladeer Neil Diamond, whose music was a long way from R&B, did his own “Dancing in the Street.” Diamond was pushing forty, attracting an older crowd, and though unarguably unhip, well on his way to ending the twentieth century as the third top-selling artist of the century on Billboard charts, behind the equally unhip Barbra Streisand and Elton John. The top sellers are seldom hip because neither is most of the public. Diamond begins “Dancing in the Street” by shouting out to the audience “Are you ready to let it happen tonight?” and a female crowd, who may or may not have decided what “it” referred to, shouts back, whereupon Diamond tries for a soulful sound with grunts that sound like something accompanying karate chops, and then sings with neither the driving rhythm nor the sense of melody of the original.

  More artists covered the song in the 1980s, including Tim Curry, Van Halen, and Kingfish, on their 1985 Alive in Eighty Five album, which featured a number of other R&B classics. But for all the copies, variations, and homages, only Van Halen made the charts with the song, although never rising above number 38. Only the original Martha and the Vandellas had made it to the Top 10. But then, in 1985, there was a fund-raiser for starving Ethiopia, Live Aid.

  Bob Geldof, the Irish singer who created Live Aid, the star-studded fund-raising concert, wanted the two superstars Mick Jagger and David Bowie to record a duet to be played at the concert, which took place in overlapping time slots in London and Philadelphia. Bowie was in London, working on his Absolute Beginners film, and Jagger was in New York. Jagger, still an R&B enthusiast, chose “Dancing in the Street.” The plan was for Bowie and Jagger to sing the duet by satellite. The concert specialized in such transatlantic gimmickry. Phil Collins appeared at both venues, hopping a Concord supersonic jet in between. Think of it, two of the biggest stars in pop music singing a transatlantic duet via satellite. But the flair for show business was not matched by technological acumen. It turned out that between London and New York there is a one-second delay in satellite transmissions. For a brief time they contemplated having one of them placed on a space shuttle. Though this seems ridiculous now, at the time NASA was looking for ways to send non-astronauts on space shuttle rides. Bob Geldof actually claimed that he called NASA to ask if they had “any rockets going up. We’d like one to put Mick Jagger on.”