Once in a Great City
Page 35
• • •
Far from the mean streets that Ofield Dukes walked in his canvassing of Detroit’s downtrodden, reports were coming one after another about how the Detroit auto companies were prospering. All the predictions and preliminary counts were on target: the Big Three had sold more cars and trucks in 1963 than ever before, were selling even more in the first quarter of the new year, and were reaping the dividends. Ford Motor Company announced that it had just set a net income record for the first quarter of 1964. Chrysler income was up 48 percent from the previous year, and GM topped them both. For those at the top and in the workforce, this seemed like good news all around, but not necessarily for President Johnson. In keeping with his conversation with McNamara about the small-car scheme to placate Reuther, LBJ had spent the early months of 1964 repeating his fear that the heady atmosphere in Detroit might lead to higher car prices and inflationary wage increases. With a season of new cars and the next round of contract negotiations both on the horizon, he was urging management and labor to be mindful of how their actions could spike inflation.
If he understood Johnson’s concern, Reuther turned it to his advantage, saying the responsibility rested primarily with the automakers. Following the dictum that the best defense is a strong offense, he made the argument that the car companies were so profitable the burden was theirs, not his. First he went after GM. “General Motors, for example, reported . . . that its profits before taxes for 1963 amounted to a staggering . . . more than $3.3 billion,” he wrote in a memo to LBJ. “Not including profits set aside to pay executive bonuses.” The company chairman, Frederic G. Donner, made $1.3 million in salary and bonuses in 1963, and more than fourteen thousand other GM executives shared in bonuses totaling more than $100 million, an unprecedented figure. GM had so much money, Reuther wrote, that “the joke going the rounds in Detroit is that General Motors Corp. is saving up to buy the Federal Government.” In fact the automaker, he further argued, made so much money that it could have lowered car prices and raised wages at the same time. “We earnestly hope the industry will reduce its prices, not only because the consumer is entitled to price reductions, but also because lower prices would increase car sales and thus provide more and steadier jobs for our members,” Reuther told the president. “Insofar as wages and other economic benefits for auto workers are concerned, you can be assured that the UAW will adhere to its traditional policy and will not press for gains that would create the necessity for price increases.”
From late January into March, Reuther refined his goals for the coming negotiations. His top priorities would be working conditions and job creation, he said, but it would be only fair that working men and women enjoyed some of the boom-year profits that were going to the executives. “Only a fool, only an economic moron, would believe that our equity in a year when industry turns out seven million cars is the same as a year when the industry turns out five million,” he told one union gathering. “The workers, equity is not a static thing . . . it grows with the stockholders, equity.” By the time the UAW gathered in Atlantic City for its annual convention, Reuther, facing pressure from his locals on the issue, added early retirement to his top goals. He continued his assault on the corporate elite, and in his opening speech at the convention turned away from GM and toward Ford and its owner. As delegates cheered wildly, he used as rhetorical fodder a recent speech that Henry Ford II had given in Chicago in which he complained that the failure of profits to keep pace with other economic indicators was a threat to industry growth. In other words, the men at the top needed more. “Now I know he spent a quarter of a million dollars in one coming out party in one night and I know that’s costly,” Reuther said, referring to an ostentatious debutante party in 1959 for Charlotte, one of his daughters, at the Country Club of Detroit that featured Frank Sinatra, Gary Cooper, Peter Lawford, and a decorator flown in from Paris who trimmed the chandeliers with exotic fruits. “I know he spent a half million dollars for his newest yacht and maybe he has some other expensive habits. This could be why he has trouble making ends meet. But I want to say this. [Last year] in salary and bonuses and in dividends from Ford stocks—which he did not earn, his great choice was he picked the right grandfather—what did he get? Four million, eight-hundred-ninety-five thousand and seven hundred and ninety nine dollars.” It would take an average Ford worker 729 years to earn as much as Henry Ford II earned in one year, Reuther noted. “I say to Henry as an old Ford worker, ‘You aren’t worth seven hundred and twenty-nine times the people we represent at the bargaining table in this union.’ ”
Two days later President Johnson spoke at the autoworkers’ convention, and while repeating his call for both sides to avoid a settlement that would “undermine the stability of our costs and our prices,” he noticeably demurred from placing a ceiling on union demands. To Reuther and other labor leaders, this omission was heartening. That same day LBJ’s top economic adviser, Walter W. Heller, left Washington to speak to the Economic Club of Detroit. Would the economy live up to its promise? “The answer for 1964,” Heller said, “will in significant measure have a Made in Michigan label.”
• • •
Paul Riser had been in the same class with Diane Ross at Cass Tech. He did not know her well, but they stood near each other at graduation—sheer alphabetical luck. Like her, he had been hanging out at West Grand Boulevard before he finished high school. He became the kid trombonist in the studio band, an eighteen-year-old playing alongside fellow trombonist George Bohanon and the other Funk Brothers, veteran jazzmen, as ribald as they were talented, there for the money and music and collegiality but not the sorts to genuflect before the Chairman. By the first months of 1964, Riser had worked his way into the regular rotation for session work at least two or three days and nights a week. “Motown was literally a factory then, around the clock,” he recalled. The scene was so vivid that Riser could return to the studio fifty years later, long after its useful life but preserved as a museum, and in his mind’s eye see each of the Funk Brothers and where they sat and how they laughed and swore and sounded. Bohanon. Earl Van Dyke. Hank Cosby. Benny Benjamin. Chank Willis. Joe Messina, the white brother. James Jamerson. No one crustier than Jamerson, with his stool over there in the corner where he played his Fender precision bass, the master of counterpoint. If Jamerson thought they had it right, he would stomp his foot and stand up and say “That’s that,” refusing to play any more despite Berry Gordy’s instructions to try one more take. It was not just that Jamerson thought the session musicians were not getting paid what they deserved; he also thought too many takes took the spontaneity and soul out of a song.
Riser was awed by Jamerson and the older session men. He had come out of the black apostolic church, his family belonging to the Clinton Street Greater Bethlehem Temple, and was trained as a classical musician at Cass Tech, where they gave out letters for band that were worn on letter sweaters with at least as much pride as a football or basketball letter. What Riser saw and heard inside the Motown studio with the Funk Brothers was thrilling, different from anything he had experienced before. Another classmate at Cass Tech, Dale Warren, who played the cello, had recruited him to Motown even though at the time Riser “hated r & b, hated it, never listened to it.” Riser performed well and they kept calling him back until he became an employee. That was part of the Gordy magic that helped make Motown possible. Some might criticize the assembly-line nature of the place and the sound, but there was also a sense of freedom and opportunity and a willingness to try anything, take any talent, however it came in off the street, from the hungry Supremes to the ready-to-type-and-take-messages Martha Reeves to the proper high school trombonist Paul Riser. “How many major companies would accept someone seventeen or eighteen years old? Unheard of,” Riser said later. “The opportunity was there. The environment was right . . . the feeling was right. Berry never had a closed shop.” Riser could read music, comprehend arrangements, and follow scores faithfully, all of which was impressive if a bit too
uptight for his band mates. “What an awakening for me coming there. It was culture shock. The Funk Brothers, I don’t have to tell you, they were from the streets, hard core, totally hard core. And I was from a totally different background, spiritual, very straight arrow. No drinking. No carousing.” All that quickly changed. “They absolutely did corrupt me,” Riser cheerfully recalled. “They taught me everything I know. But it was all fun growing up. And I tell you it was like a rookie going into a football camp. You know how they haze a rookie? I took my discipline from high school . . . into the studio. It didn’t quite work. It was like trying to tame a den of untamed lions.”
The work at Motown inadvertently changed Riser’s life on a summer day in 1963 when he left the studio after a recording session and drove west along the boulevard. Even with Gordy’s stingy salaries for the studio musicians, Riser had worked so many sessions by then that he had earned enough money to place a down payment on a new car, and not just any car but a 1963 Buick Riviera, the inaugural model. It was sleek and black. He was nineteen, looking fine, black on black, he would say. At the intersection with Linwood, he turned right, in the direction of C. L. Franklin’s church. “And this cute young girl was crossing the street. Sixteen years old. And the rest is history. Two kids and four grandkids. I spotted her. She was going to the store right across the street. I said, ‘I will wait and take you home’—a half block! The timing was to the second. . . . When I made that turn off the boulevard going north, there was my future wife going across. She was cute, I had a shiny car—the two came together.”
Riser went on the road with Marvin Gaye at the start of 1964. Four days in Cleveland in the dead of winter in a drafty hotel out on Euclid Street with snow blowing in through the windowsill—enough glamorous road work for him. He went back to the studio. By March he was with the session band working on another Smokey Robinson tune written for Mary Wells. “My Guy,” it was called. Smokey grew up surrounded by women and was confident he could think like one. In this case he decided to channel Mary Wells and imagine what it would be like for an established star like her to be unyieldingly faithful to a factory worker, maybe at Ford’s River Rouge plant. Author David Ritz later memorialized it as “a fluttering study in fidelity.” Riser considered Smokey one of three geniuses at Motown, along with Stevie Wonder and Marvin Gaye. Wonder and Gaye shared a creative energy that could be frustrated by the commercial expectations of Berry Gordy, he thought, but Robinson worked right at the Motown sweet spot.
March 13 was one of those long Fridays in the Motown studio. The Funk Brothers were there all day with Smokey and the technicians and their eight-track tapes, working to get the introduction to the song just right. Wells loved the melody and the lyrics from the moment she heard it, and recorded it with a soft, sultry ease, even evoking a bit of Mae West at the end with a stuttering come-on: “There’s not a man ta-DAY who could take me away from my guy.” Along with Robert White’s tripping triplets on the guitar and Earl Van Dyke’s churchy chord progressions, a lovely high trombone thread ran through it, drawing on the talented embouchures of Bohanon and Riser, but the introduction seemed off until, very late in the session, with the Funk Brother veterans getting antsy, the trombonists realized that they could mimic an opening riff from “Canadian Sunset,” a jazz number from the fifties. A galloping western left-hand rhythm under high trombones sounding a plaintive melodic love call: Daaaa . . . da-da d-daaa—C . . . C-A-G-A. And they had it, with a slight revision to avoid copyright suits. “Smokey said, ‘Oh, I like that.’ ” So did the public. Before the spring was out, Mary Wells and “My Guy” were at the top of the Billboard chart.
“Modest Mary Sinks the Beatles,” read the headline in the Detroit News. The story noted that she was the first female vocalist “to top the Beatles in record sales since Beatlemania hit America”—with the extra kick that the Beatles themselves sent a telegram to West Grand Boulevard exclaiming, “We like Mary Wells.” That represented a thawing in a cold war of words between Detroit and the Fab Four. As the Beatles were landing on American soil on February 7, some students at the University of Detroit started a “Stamp Out the Beatles” campaign. This had more to do with style than sound. It was not to promote Motown over the Brits that these students took up their cause, but more a hirsute dispute, flattops versus flop tops. In any case, when the Beatles were asked about the movement in Detroit, the rejoinder was “We’re going to stamp out Detroit.” Just looking at the newspapers, it seemed that might happen. There was more coverage in the Detroit Free Press and News about the Beatles during their first week in the United States than Motown had received over its five-year existence. But in fact, rather than stamp out Detroit, the Beatles more often honored Detroit, covering several Motown songs in their repertoire, beginning with “Money (That’s What I Want),” the early Motown hit written by Berry Gordy and Janie Bradford and first sung by Barrett Strong.
For Al Abrams, the Motown publicist, the most important thing about the Mary Wells article in the Free Press was simply its existence. “It marked the first time a Motown artist was receiving the kind of attention in one of our two hometown daily newspapers that usually was reserved for sports heroes and movie stars, almost all of whom were white,” he noted later. There were two other aspects to the “My Guy” legacy, for better and worse. It was such a success that it inspired Smokey Robinson to write a companion tune for the Temptations that later became their first No. 1 hit and one of the most memorable Motown songs of all time, “My Girl.” And it was such a success that Mary Wells and people whispering in her ear thought she should be getting more money and credit, pushing her to break free from Motown and go out on her own, never to shine as bright again. She had only four years at Motown, from 1960 to 1964, and by the end she was being overtaken by the Supremes, who had sung backup on some of her early records. But Mary Wells came first, and her achievements on West Grand lasted. Her voice had a distinct poetry to it, as did her point of view. In a line that Philip Levine, Detroit’s poet of the working class, could have used as his own, she once described her young days as the daughter of a cleaning woman by defining misery as “Detroit linoleum in January.”
Unfinished business. The Four Tops were still trying to find their place in the Motown firmament during those early months of 1964. Although they were more experienced and polished than most of the other groups at West Grand Boulevard, and as well known locally as any of them, they were the newest group in Berry Gordy’s domain and not yet on the national charts. Gordy had spent several years trying to pry them away from Columbia and other recording labels and finally was able to sign them late in 1963 after they came to watch the Motortown Revue make its second appearance at the Apollo Theater in Harlem. “We went and saw that and said, Wow, they are good!” recalled Abdul (Duke) Fakir, who sang tenor. “We need to be there.”
They were regarded as balladeers, four-part harmonizers, comfortable with a wide range of popular and traditional songs, and Gordy’s first notion was to have them cut an album that featured the American songbook. His first love had been jazz, and he saw his fortune at the nexus of soul and rock and roll, but he always had a soft spot for standard melodies and at various times encouraged artists ranging from the Supremes to Marvin Gaye and Stevie Wonder to perform and record songs like Johnny Mercer’s “Moon River” and Leonard Bernstein’s “Somewhere.” The Four Tops seemed to fit that niche better than the others, and they spent their first few months at Motown with producer Mickey Stevenson and the studio musicians recording old standards. But before an album could be completed, Gordy decided that it was not commercial and turned the quartet in another direction. Following the pattern he used for the Supremes, he put them in the hands of Holland-Dozier-Holland and at the same time changed the group dynamics to one lead, in this case the powerfully searing, searching voice of Levi Stubbs, and three backup singers. In most instances—including with the Supremes and Temptations, and to some extent the Marvelettes and Vandellas—this transformation proved suc
cessful musically but discombobulating psychologically, creating jealousies and eventual dysfunction. The Four Tops were different, from the beginning.
The soul of the group was the deep friendship of Stubbs and Abdul Fakir, known as Duke. They both came from Detroit’s east side, Stubbs from the projects at Six Mile and Fakir in a single-family house farther north near Pershing High. They became so close that before their junior year in high school Duke invited Levi to come live with his family; the basement was cleaned out and they shared it as a bedroom. Both young men had musical backgrounds. Duke’s father was an immigrant from the Asian subcontinent, an area that later became part of Bangladesh. He played the sitar and sang on the streets until he had earned enough money to get to London, where he worked as a cook, before finally reaching America. He settled in the north end of Detroit, where he got a job in the Briggs factory making auto body parts and met Duke’s mother, the daughter of an African Methodist Episcopal minister who had brought his family up to Detroit from Georgia. Duke grew up in a church resounding with music. He sang in the choirs at church and school until the year he turned ten and his voice changed. “They would not let me in because my voice was in between,” Fakir recalled. “It was like I lost a brother or sister I was so hurt. There was music everywhere. When you were walking down the street you could hear beautiful music everywhere you went. There was music in the neighborhood. All the boys were singing. I must have sung in five or six different groups, just messing around until Levi and I became close.”