And so, one day, the Parliaments packed into a 1956 Bonneville and went to Detroit. The car was a juiced-up specimen that belonged to a friend of ours, William “Stubbs” Pitt. That car was like a rocket. The cops would try to catch Stubbs racing around Plainfield, but they’d fail because all he had to do was drop the accelerator pedal. He was gone. The next day the cops would come to the barbershop and ask after him. “Where’s Stubbs?” they’d say. “We couldn’t catch him.” Sometimes, though, illegal drag races took place at night where the cops would look the other way. Sometimes they would even place bets on the racers. They all bet on Stubbs. On the drive to Detroit, I stayed in the front as a passenger, mostly because I was good at staying awake. Stubbs drove the whole way. Something happened to the transmission right outside of Toledo, Ohio, and he jumped out and went up under the car and fixed it. He put his jumpsuit on over the top of his suit. We were all wearing suits. That’s how you had to dress when you were going to make an impression at Motown. They were supercool, and we thought we were even supercooler.
We went from New Jersey to Michigan so fast it was like we were traveling by plane, and we came into Detroit just before daybreak and parked in front of the Motown offices on West Grand Boulevard. As the sun came up, we saw all the legendary acts coming to the front lawn: the Temptations, the Vandellas, Marvin Gaye. It was a dream parade, but also a nightmare. On the drive out we talked like we were the baddest shit around. We were sure we’d make it. But when you see the Contours and the Four Tops walking across a lawn, real as real life, your bravado evaporates quick.
They toured us through the building before our audition, past all these little rooms packed with the giants of soul music. The experience was like going into a museum and seeing the old masters painting on the canvases in the galleries. For part of the morning, we had to wait in the lobby because the Supremes were rehearsing in the room they wanted to use to see us. Finally, Martha Reeves herself came out. We were amazed to see her. All jaws dropped. She led us back into the building, opened a door, and there was Mickey Stevenson, another Motown giant. He wrote and produced and was more or less in charge of the house band, who would become known as the Funk Brothers. We sang a couple of our own songs along with a few Motown hits, “My Girl” and “Do You Love Me.” We had choreographed our routines beforehand and had good movement and good energy. When we finished, I had a sudden vision of what would happen when Motown signed us—we’d be in the company of all these other acts I idolized, learning from them, eventually working among them.
We had to wait again for much of the afternoon. Maybe the Supremes had a second rehearsal. Then Martha came back out to give us the news. They really liked us, she said, but they were going to pass. We sounded like a mix of two groups they already had on the label, the Contours and the Temps, and they didn’t really know what to do with us. Then there was the problem of appearance. I was about five foot nine and stocky, as was Grady. Calvin was much taller, and Fuzzy was even shorter. That unevenness fucked up the sense of visual perfection, and that kind of thing mattered then to Motown, because all kinds of perfection did. The Temptations were all six feet tall and thin and moved together like they were parts of a watch. Motown was a machine and we had a more obvious humanity. We were disappointed, but it wasn’t like the ride back to Jersey was a funeral. I kept my spirits up, more or less, and the rest of the guys took their cues from me. They went along when opportunity knocked, and they hung back when it stopped knocking. They weren’t as pushy as I was. For that matter, nobody we knew had cracked Motown coming in from outside of Detroit. We wanted to be the first, but it wasn’t as if we were passed over for someone we thought was worse.
Motown must have heard something in the originals we sang for them, because they offered me a writing job through Berry’s sister, Lucy Wakefield. At that time, I had a partnership with a cat named Sidney Barnes. Sidney looked like Little Anthony from the Imperials, right down to (or up to) his pompadour. He sang in a group called the Serenaders—they had recorded with MGM and Rae Cox and Gemini and would even be on Motown a little later for a minute and a half—and he used to come around the barbershop to get his hair did. He was going with Gloria Gaynor at the time, long before she became the reigning disco queen with “I Will Survive.” Sidney and I had similar ideas about songwriting, and we became a team, working with people like Gene Redd and Cecil Holmes, experienced producers who would surface later in our career. Soon enough, we were working under Raynoma, who was Berry Gordy’s wife at the time. She was his partner from even before Motown, when they started Rayber publishing, and she was one of the main people encouraging him to start Motown. They got married, had a son, Kerry, and almost immediately Berry started running around with Margaret Norton, which brought the marriage to an end quick. Berry and Margaret had a son, too, Kennedy, who became better known as the musician Rockwell, who had a hit in the eighties with “Somebody’s Watching Me.” Even though the marriage fell apart, Ray and Berry stayed business partners, and in their hasty settlement, he took the record company and convinced her to move to New York to run the East Coast office for Jobete, their publishing company. What he didn’t realize at the time was that the real growth industry was in publishing. A record company could only press and sell records. A publishing company had a portable asset, and it could place songs with all kinds of crossover artists, from Frank Sinatra to Ray Charles. If you could get Tony Bennett to cover “For Once in My Life”—which, as it turned out, you could—you were making money through an entirely different channel. Ray Gordy was hanging with a man named Eddie Singleton, who she later married, and there was a small staff that included Sidney Barnes, George Kerr, and myself. As it turned out, Ray was a publishing shark—very good at the business, very sharp, earned respect from everybody around. Screen Gems was the biggest in the business, but Jobete came in so hard and fast that soon you couldn’t keep up with them.
Despite the fact that Jobete was making money, they weren’t current with basic funds for the company’s operation. They couldn’t keep the lights on. The Jobete office was about to go under until Ray decided to press up some of her own copies of “My Guy,” the Mary Wells song, to raise funds. We were making extra records and selling them off the books. We used to do it out of the trunk of the car. One day, I was walking on one side of the street when I saw them on the other side, with their “My Guy” car, and then a few guys in dark suits crossing over to meet them. I stayed on my side of the street. It was the FBI, or maybe some fake FBI guys that Berry had hired to put a scare in them. He was none too happy about Eddie Singleton—even though he and Ray were split up, he didn’t like the idea of her hanging out with this fast-talking dude—and the game that was being run on him. At that point, she had a profitable company, so he had to settle with her. He gave her a healthy amount of cash, reabsorbed Jobete, and that was the end of Ray Gordy’s publishing career at Motown.
That was the end of mine fairly soon, too. Motown was looking for a new wave of talent after Mary Wells and Martha Reeves, and one of the groups they had their eye on was the Velvelettes, a trio of girls who went to college at Western Michigan University with Berry’s nephew. We tried to sell them songs but failed, and they went on to work with Mickey Stevenson (who recorded “There He Goes” with them) and then Norman Whitfield (who steered them into some big hits, “Needle in a Haystack” and “He Was Really Saying Something”). My time as a Motown writer didn’t bear much fruit, but like everything else, it put more branches on the tree. Years later, when they tore down the Graystone Ballroom building in Detroit, someone found some of the original paperwork for my contracts with Motown and sold them on eBay. A pair of twins from Holland bought the papers and sent them back to my daughter.
Gene Redd was a producer at King Records, which had started as a country-music label specializing in hillbilly records and evolved into an important R&B label: they released music by James Brown, and Roy Brown, and Otis Williams, and lots of other people. Somehow Gene got himself
a deal out in Detroit, where Sidney and I were traveling regularly as a result of the Jobete work. One of the weekends we were out there, we met Ed Wingate. Mr. Wingate was in his early forties then, and he was one of the richest men in Detroit. In addition to being the main man for running numbers in town, Mr. Wingate had lots of legitimate business interests: all the cabs in town, all the motels, real estate that stretched from Woodward to Dexter. He also owned Golden World Records, a small label whose office was about ten blocks down from Motown. Detroit was filled with music men, but Mr. Wingate was a unique case. He wasn’t a natural, really. He was a sweet guy, a man with money who was trying to find a way to be popular. And it worked: everybody loved him, because he knew enough to know that he didn’t know enough, and that encouraged him to put people into place to help him. Golden World was a small label, but it made some waves along the way—his biggest successes came in the mid-sixties, with Edwin Starr, who sang “Double O-Soul” and wrote “Oh, How Happy” for Shades of Blue. And he had an instrumental called “Hungry for Love” that was credited to Barbara Mercer, though really it was the Funk Brothers moonlighting as an anonymous backing band.
Early on, Mr. Wingate used to fly me out to Detroit and let me stay at his house, a huge place on Edison. A little while later, we phased over to one of his motels. We were charged with a fairly simple task. Make music. Mr. Wingate wanted me and Sidney to be his go-to writing and production team, and he had visions of us leading him to heights the same way that the Motown production teams had elevated that label. I remember once I was sleeping in one of his motels, and I came awake to the sight of Mr. Wingate standing over my bed like a big black ghost. He had a gleam in his eyes that made it look like he was going to kiss me. “I have an idea,” he said. There was a woman on the radio in Detroit, on WJLB, who called herself Martha Jean the Queen. She had a hook phrase she used to say on the air all the time: “I’m into something, I can’t shake it loose, and I’ll bet you.” Mr. Wingate wanted us to make that into a song. He had a singer all picked out, a woman named Theresa Lindsey who had been at another label called Correc-Tone. “Make a song for her,” he said. I was still in bed, but when I got out of it I told him I was pretty sure that there were two songs in Martha Jean the Queen’s catchphrase. “I’m into something and I can’t shake it loose” sounded like one, and “I’ll bet you” sounded like another. He laughed. “Y’all gonna be my Holland-Dozier-Holland,” he said. To make sure we were, he went out and bought us a piano for the motel. It was a big-ass Steinway, and he had to break the walls down to get it into the room. It was a small group then—me and Sidney and Mike Terry and a woman named Pat Lewis, who had been in the Adorables and would later be a backup singer for Isaac Hayes and Aretha Franklin. We were in that room coming up with lyrics and melody lines for hours. Eventually, we had both songs: “Can’t Shake It Loose” for Pat and “I’ll Bet You” for Theresa Lindsey. Later on, with Funkadelic, we repossessed and remade both of them, and they were also covered by Motown groups: “Can’t Shake It Loose” by the Supremes and “I’ll Bet You” by the Jackson 5.
Did Motown notice us? Not at first, maybe, but they started to come around when they had to share access to radio stations. And Golden World was only one constellation in a sky that was beginning to fill with independent record labels. Mr. Wingate and his partner, Joanne Bratton, also had Ric-Tic Records. Ollie McLaughlin, who started as a DJ up in Ann Arbor, came down and started Ruth Records. LeBaron Taylor had his Revilot label, which was just his middle name, Toliver, in reverse. Those years with Golden World were wall-to-wall work, mostly for other artists. I learned every aspect of the business, from writing and arranging to how to oversee recording sessions to getting the records out to local radio stations. If I had gone to work at Motown, that would have been one kind of education, where I was sitting at the knee of these industry giants. Golden World was another kind of education, where I was sitting at my own knee, and skinning it often. It was hectic and stressful and exhilarating, and since I was only in Detroit for weekends, mostly, there wasn’t much time for anything else, really: no parties and no women. Besides, Mr. Wingate didn’t play that. I used to like Pat Lewis, but he stopped that cold. “George,” he said, “you can’t have my girl Pat.” She was his artist. He wanted us to respect work limits. And Mr. Wingate also saw that I was, in some way, a family man; I was always a favorite of his because I always sent whatever money I did have home to New Jersey.
I loved working for Mr. Wingate, and working with Sidney and Mike and Pat. I was starting to get a handle on Detroit, which was becoming my second home after New Jersey. That’s not to say there wasn’t a culture clash, and a fairly major one at that. Out there in the Midwest, I started running into a pimp element. I had always seen those kinds of guys back East, but this was different. In New Jersey, the word was never spoken. Pimps had a certain life that they lived with style and even a certain dignity—much later, when we invented the character of Sir Nose, we’d find out how New Yorkers felt about pimp culture. In Detroit, though, it was straight raw. Girls were choosing their pimps at twelve years old, or having pimps chosen for them. There was a farm system and not very much chance of escaping it. The shit was commercial and it was nasty. Detroit was a strange mix, country but also real slick, with Motown and the car companies. The result was a style that was about a half step back. Out in Detroit, they had their hair processed but didn’t get it combed out. You might see a dude rolling down Hastings Street behind the wheel of a deuce and a quarter—that was the Buick Electra 225, which was named for the overall length of the car in inches. That was considered a top-flight ride there, but it would have been laughable in New York, where the minimum requirement would have been a Cadillac Eldorado. The clothes were the final thing. Detroit pimps wore store-bought suits. In New York, you couldn’t be pimping and buy no goddamn store-bought suit. We had our clothes made from grade school, and we handed them down to younger kids. But Detroit was off the rack. Even Motown artists bought their clothes that way.
That didn’t mean the Motown groups didn’t have it going on. The best looking and the best dressed were the Four Tops, who were a conspicuous exception to the off-the-rack way of living. Part of it came from the fact that they had been around the block a number of times. Even though they were from Detroit—Levi Stubbs and Duke Fakir had gone to Pershing High, and Obie Benson and Lawrence Payton had gone to Northern High—they had gone away, first to Chess Records in the mid-fifties, then to Riverside, then to Columbia. They hadn’t found their way back to Motown until 1963, but when they got there, they got there in style. They were the kind of dudes who came to the show in a suit clean as hell and wouldn’t leave afterward until they put on a fresh suit. There could be girls six deep waiting outside the stage door. They didn’t give a fuck. They would take their time to look fine. They got that kind of respect for the look from a Las Vegas tour they had done with Dinah Washington before coming to Motown.
When I first went out to Detroit, I used to see the Tops all the time around town, along with other Motown acts. We’d all go to a club, and somebody would be playing there. Dennis Edwards, before he got in the Temps, might be singing. Or maybe it was the Contours, or a young group trying to break into the big time. The 20 Grand was the hottest place around; it was at Fourteenth and Warren, and there was a main stage and a jazz lounge and a bowling alley and even a big hall where they could serve banquets or host conventions. The main performance space was called the Driftwood Lounge, and everyone played there, from Maxine Brown to Chuck Jackson to the Flamingos to Brook Benton to Bill Doggett. Everyone. I can remember seeing Diana Ross there, and Berry Gordy’s sisters. There’s a rumor that Mick Jagger saw B.B. King for the first time there in the early sixties. P-Funk played there later on. Mr. Wingate owned the 20 Grand Motel, which was right next door to the club, and that did quite a productive business as a result of the club. If you had a late night and couldn’t quite find your way home, whether as a result of alcohol or newly acquired comp
any, you might end up sleeping off your evening at the motel.
At that time, Motown dominated the scene. I was still in awe of the label, but running parallel to them—and running parallel means you’re on a different track. That difference between us, that distance, would become even clearer in the years ahead. But I had another life, too, back in Jersey, at the Silk Palace. Things were humming along there. Heads were being cut. Ernie, Wolfgang, Grimes, and the rest of them were holding down the fort. For my part, I was away as often as I was there, leaving regularly to work on music: maybe with the Boyce brothers in town, maybe with Vivian Lewis in Perth Amboy. I was always doing something with somebody, though even when I was in the shop I tried to keep the focus on music. We had a jukebox in the shop. It wasn’t the first time. In Newark, at the Uptown Tonsorial Palace, there had been a machine, too, but someone had to come and service the machine—by someone, I mean the gangsters who had those concessions, pinball and jukeboxes and other entertainments. In Plainfield, though, we owned the box, and I put the records on it and changed them whenever I wanted, and though this was technically a violation, nobody ever gave us any trouble. The jukebox gave us access to all the regional R&B and soul scenes that were cropping up across the country. There was the Philly sound, with the Orlons and Lee Andrews and the Hearts. Chicago had the Orioles, the Dells, and the Dukays. If you listened closely enough and read the labels for writer and producer credits, you could start to sort them by subtle differences and figure out which groups were from St. Louis and which ones were from Cleveland.
Even when I was on the move, I was immersed in music. I still technically lived in Newark, even though the shop was in Plainfield, and I had to take a bus to work every day. Sometimes there was radio on the bus, sometimes not, but there were always radios you could hear as you went through town, blasting out of the front windows of houses or from stores. Every day I listened to the urban network, with songs changing as I went crosstown. One song would be hanging on and I’d drift into the next block and another song would surge to replace it. It was a real-life cross-fade. And then when I got to work, it was wall-to-wall. The jukebox took care of it inside the shop, and whenever I was outside, I was in somebody’s car. It was hard to get away from music, which was good, because it was nothing I wanted to get away from.
Brothas Be, Yo Like George, Ain't That Funkin' Kinda Hard on You?: A Memoir Page 4
