City Kid

by Nelson George

  The amount of money that black Hollywood had (or was it the flashy way they spent it?) always knocked me out. I became friendly with a smart, young black A&R dude out there named John. He was plugged into the young Motown crowd, but had landed a job at a rival label, where he’d go on to develop a major young black female pop star. He had crazy sports cars, a pad in Westwood that looked like the set from American Gigolo, and a taste for superexpensive clothes. I rolled with him one afternoon to a Beverly Hills boutique, where he dropped about ten grand on clothes. When he offered to treat me to a fifteen-hundred-dollar sweater, I passed, but it shocked me how cavalier he was about his cash.

  Coming from the hard streets of BK, the LA lifestyle was a serious culture shock for me. I knew there were gangs in LA, and hardworking folks scrambling to make it. But my initial eighties experiences out there had a lot more to do with Fred Siegel’s boutique on Melrose than with Bloods and Crips. This was the era of Michael Jackson and Lionel Richie, a time when black pop was about being as mainstream as could be.

  I was kind of a curiosity to the folks I met out there. They read me, first at Record World and then at Billboard, on a weekly basis. They always thought I was older than I looked. I think they were amused by my fascination/disdain with how they handled their money and their smooth vibe of entitlement. I recall spending a long afternoon with Quincy Jones at his Bel Air home. Q was, and remains, the most charming man I’ve ever met. You spend five minutes with him, and you realize why he’s been able to work successfully with so many artists. You immediately want to please him, because he really put you at ease.

  We had lunch, and I asked for some apple juice. Well, his cook brought out a glass of freshly squeezed apple juice. I was stunned. I mean, damn, they actually ground up the apple in the kitchen. It says a lot about how limited my experience with healthy eating was at that time that, now, decades later, I can still clearly see that glass of pulpy juice being placed in front of me. Quincy, who I am sure was amused by my reaction, just smiled, probably having introduced scores of young black folks to “the good life” over the years.

  At one point I asked Q what separated the great stars from the near greats he’d worked with. “Ass power” was his reply. To illustrate his point, Q compared Michael Jackson to another well-known vocalist he’d produced. The other singer, an artist with an immense voice and an insatiable appetite for cocaine, would come to the studio, maybe lay down a scratch vocal, and then wander off for hours. Jackson, in contrast, would come to the studio, record a strong lead vocal, work on the stacked vocal harmonies that distinguished his work, and practice where to place those ad-libs that were his trademark.

  “His ass power,” Q said, “would keep him in the studio until he felt he’d accomplished something that day. That ability to focus, to stay in that chair in the studio, listening to playback and then going back in to record some more—that’s what separates the good from the great.”

  From then on, “ass power” became an integral part of my vocabulary. I invoked it whenever I had a deadline to meet or was encouraging friends in their efforts. If “ass power” was what Quincy Jones and Michael Jackson used to record masterful music, I needed a bit myself.

  At the end of a long, beautiful interview about everyone from Frank Sinatra to Dinah Washington, I was sitting with Q in his living room when a tall, willowy, Swedish blonde appeared. She was a young actress/model/singer who looked a lot like one of Q’s ex-wives. Felt like this was a cue to call a taxi. Instead he told me to stay. We sat on a sofa, and the young woman sat on the floor before us, holding up her portfolio of photos for us to peruse. At the time, I’d never really contemplated dating a white woman, and certainly never kissed one, so it was crazy watching her down at my feet. Q, of course, took it all in stride.

  If that wasn’t enough, Q told the blonde that she needed to have dinner with me that night. And she agreed. Q winked at me, and I got the hell out of there. That night I sat with the young lady at a Sunset Boulevard hot spot, Carlos ’n Charlie’s, a restaurant with a popular upstairs disco. I was way out of my league with this lady. Aside from being “friends” with Q, she was already friends with the actor/musician Dudley Moore and a few other high-profile gents.

  Nothing went down between the blonde and me, but the day with Q did crystallize the black eighties Hollywood experience for me. If you could push and claw yourself into the LA celebrity machine, you could live a lifestyle unmatched by any previous generation of blacks. The money was there. The women were available. There were more opportunities emerging throughout the decade.

  Yet I was unsure if all this was for me. I was a bookish guy, more scholar than player, more observer than hustler. My obsessions had more to do with knowledge than power. Still, LA tugged at me, like the Hyde side of Dr. Jekyll, and I’ve always wondered what would happen if I gave in to its pull.

  FROM MOTOROLA TO MOTOWN

  As I noted earlier, my mother’s Motorola played a huge role in my life. Moreover, like so many who’d been reared on the sixties’ music, I was fascinated with the Motown sound. Like all black folks, I’d read studiously about Berry Gordy, Diana Ross, and all the label’s other stars in Ebony and Jet. As I grew older, graduating to more serious music mags, like Rolling Stone and Circus, my interest in how this black institution had conquered the music world intensified. I had tons of questions about how and why it worked, and very few satisfying answers. There were useful articles here and there. Most of the best had been published in UK publications like Black Music.

  But there was no single book that told the whole story and sated my curiosity. So when I was seventeen or eighteen I decided I’d write the book I wanted to read, and I kept that goal in mind all through my struggling freelance days, and into my years at Billboard . I’d always been a pack rat (a habit I picked up from my mother), clipping items from newspapers, making little notes in black and white composition books.

  I’d interview Smokey Robinson for a story on “Being with You,” or Diana Ross for a piece on her RCA hit “Why Do Fools Fall in Love,” or Lionel Richie about his success with ballads, and I’d always make sure I slipped in questions about the label’s 1960s peak and seventies transformation, looking for a fresh tidbit or confirmation of an oft-told tale. Even The Michael Jackson Story, my first book, a paperback quickie I wrote in a furious two months in summer ’83, was in my mind really just an excuse to dig for Motown gold and make some much-needed cash.

  As I talked to old R&B heads who’d been around when Joe and Katherine Jackson brought their brood from Gary, Indiana, to Detroit, I actually became more interested in the world they had entered into by joining Motown than with the headlining family itself. I’d been writing regularly for Musician magazine, so in 1983 I pitched them a profile of the Motown session men. Except for the names of legendary bassist James Jamerson and drummer Benny Benjamin, the session players behind the hits were faceless. They were often praised by the singers but rarely by name, whereas producers like Holland-Dozier-Holland, Norman Whitfield, and Smokey had a near mythic status.

  Unlike Booker T & the MGs (the Memphis Group) or Philly’s MFSB, the Motown session cats didn’t have catchy handles. Hidden behind the Motown marketing machine, they were as obscure as an old-time Delta bluesman to even dedicated music fans. Through my contacts among musicians I was able to run down a phone number for Anne Jamerson, the wife of James. I’d heard Jamerson was gravely ill. To my surprise, Anne thought it was a great idea for her husband to talk with me, and put me in contact with him at a hospital in California. From what she told me, medication had messed with his ability to play and sent him into a depression. Others suggested he’d suffered from drug and alcohol abuse brought on by the loss of the support system he’d had back in Detroit.

  I wasn’t allowed to go see him, but she set up a phone call on a Sunday afternoon. His voice was weak and weary, and his tone bittersweet. He guided me through sessions, told me the studio group’s nickname, the Funk Brothers, and gave me the
kind of sensual detail about the making of Motown’s hits that had been lacking in interviews with the producers and artists over the years. He related that his works were inspired by life, noting, for example, that the percolating riff that anchored “Standing in the Shadows of Love” came from watching the hips of a woman strolling down a Detroit avenue.

  For me it was a revelatory experience, putting me close to the creation of the sounds that had flowed from Ma’s Motorola. As crucial as that conversation was, it was just a gateway to a world that could only truly be explored by trips to one of the most vilified cities in America—Detroit, Michigan.

  In the early eighties the nighttime streets of downtown Detroit were empty, save the occasional tumbleweed sighting by Cobo Hall. Okay, I exaggerate, but not a whole lot. Aside from the nights Cobo filled with suburban Red Wing fans (many from across the border in Canada), or for a concert, pedestrians were scarce. Sometimes even cars, the spine and pride of the Motor City, could be few and far between.

  Between the 1967 riots and its early eighties notoriety as the United States’ murder capital, not much had gone right in Detroit. Its anemic downtown nightlife was just one of the results. In fact, even during the day Detroit didn’t resemble Chicago or Boston. But to be walking through Detroit at night must have seemed particularly foolhardy to the locals. Yet there I was, in a brown leather jacket and wool cap, armed only with a notebook, seeking one of the city’s remaining musical oases.

  Slipped in between the empty streets and the haunted avenues were clubs and bars where nocturnal culture still thrived. I’d enter and be met by the sound of jazz, and on the bandstand, playing for a middle-aged crowd, would be the men who made the Motown sound. You’d see pianist Earl Van Dyke or Johnny Griffith tapping ivories on “Green Dolphin Street”; Uriel Jones or Pistol Allen using brushes on “Stella by Starlight.” No matter that they’d played on scores of pop anthems, at heart they’d been jazzmen, and, since these gigs were as much for their pleasure as for money, it’s jazzmen they remained.

  But I didn’t just go to Detroit to see the players. Wrapped around the Motown sound was a network of workers, the people who on a daily basis executed Berry Gordy’s vision, and you’d see them at these clubs as well. Motown Records left Detroit in 1972, but the fellowship the company had engendered was still palpable.

  So was their bitterness. No matter how wonderful the memories of individual moments were, the overall tone of those who remained behind was tart, like the taste of a lemon had replaced that of an orange. The longer you talked to these men and women (all the musicians were male) you understood that the ex-Motowners shared the same sense of abandonment that filled the city itself.

  My conversation with Jamerson and the publication of the Musician article (titled “Standing in the Shadows of Motown”) gave me entrée to the community of players and employees in Detroit, and encouraged me to keep pursuing this dream. It also let some of the label’s highly protective representatives know I was digging around in uncharted territory. As a result, I was supported by those no longer associated with Motown, and faced harassment from folks who currently worked there.

  Several people, including a girlfriend, asked me why I would even attempt such an undertaking. I’d asked this young lady, who was attending law school, to look over some of the Motown contracts and let me know whether they looked as abusive as some artists contended. Instead, she gave me a lecture on leaving black institutions alone, that I shouldn’t be negative. So I asked her to leave my apartment and never spoke to her again. I was on a mission now. I couldn’t have that “negative” energy around me.

  Moreover, the musicians wanted me to do it. All the great players left in Detroit, and the others I spoke to on either coast, wanted their story told. They were part of history too, yet they’d been left out. Most of these men were old enough to be my father, a couple could have been my grandfather, and that connection drew me to them as well. One of the pleasures of being in journalism is the time you get to spend with people you’d otherwise never meet. These Motown musicians had had full lives, lives that enriched the music and made them great storytellers.

  I learned a lot about perseverance and patience from them, and about the beauty of collaboration. Learning to mesh your talents with the skills of other gifted people is a glorious thing. It’s not easy to learn and very difficult to sustain. At this time I was very much a lone wolf when it came to work. I listened to my editors. I took advice here and there. But I usually kept my own counsel. I debated myself in my notebooks, but didn’t let too many people, be they friend or lover, into my creative process. I didn’t know it then, but these genius musicians would, by lesson and example, teach me how to work well with other artists, something that would filter into my filmmaking years later.

  Visiting 2648 West Grand Boulevard, the original home of Motown Records, was a revelation. For all its mystique and history, this legendary building is just a nice two-story home on a quiet midwestern street. Its staircases are narrow, and you wonder how the long-limbed Temptations and Four Tops made it up and down them. The famous studio, site of the Motown sound, was an expanded basement, big by East Coast standards, perhaps, but in no way exceptional. The smallness of the place made what was achieved there all the more impressive.

  That building on Detroit’s West Grand Boulevard is an object lesson that world-changing events are so often created by small groups of like-minded individuals. Almost all major artistic movements (and most political as well) come out of small communities of folks linked by geography and shared values. Often they are based in seemingly unlikely places—Seattle or the South Bronx or Detroit—that only afterward seem like the perfect place for something new to burst out of.

  Being at 2648 West Grand didn’t make it nostalgic as much as it opened me up to the richness of the possibilities around me. What this community of black folks accomplished out of a house in Detroit was amazing, but it wasn’t out of reach for other generations—my generation—to achieve in their own way, on their own terms.

  It’s not well remembered now, in our gangsta-celebrating era, that Motown suffered from an unsavory reputation dating back to the 1960s. Rumors floated around showbiz circles for years that Motown was actually owned not by Berry Gordy but by underworld figures. In my research (and in others’) those rumors have never been substantiated. However, there’s no doubt in my mind that Berry had some Detroit bad boys in his employ over the years.

  As word of my book filtered out, I was subjected to different pressures from Motown loyalists. The most graphic example of harassment was at a Motown-produced TV special taped at the Apollo Theater in the early eighties. I was told I’d be denied access to the theater, the press viewing area, and the gala after-party behind the Apollo in a tent on 126th Street. Just to be contrary, I hung outside the press area, set up in a nearby school, and sneaked in carrying a TV camera to obscure my face. Then I was spotted by a member of Motown’s publicity staff, who had security escort me out. Later, I slipped into the after-party, where I had a brief, funny conversation with Bobby Brown.

  That veiled gangster mystique played a huge role in eliminating my chief competitor in chronicling Motown’s history. A hot young white music critic had landed a book deal about the same time as I, and, in fact, had made contact with many of the same interview subjects, plus a few I hadn’t gotten to yet.

  So I was quite surprised when he asked me to meet him at an Upper West Side restaurant. I’ll never forget that day, both because of the bizarre tale he told and because he gave me a clear lane to finish my book. The writer related that he’d received threats for “asking too many questions” by an ex-Motown executive. Yet what really freaked him out was a phone call he received after a trip to Detroit.

  He claimed that a male voice told him, “We know where you live,” as a helicopter appeared outside his Riverside Drive apartment window and hovered menacingly outside. To the writer this strange occurrence (if it happened as he described) meant, stay out of
Detroit and drop this book. The idea that someone might have threatened him didn’t seem far-fetched. Detroit was, after all, murder capital USA.

  Ultimately, whether this was a paranoid fantasy or some incredible bit of staged intimidation, I didn’t really care. Not only was he going to stop working on a rival Motown book, but he would sell me all his research. A deal was struck, and boxes of interviews and other materials joined the stack in my bedroom. Looking through the writer’s interviews and notes, I realized his mistake. Number one, he had been quite blunt in asking for information about any Motown/Mob connections, as if they’d just spill whatever they knew simply because he asked them.

  Moreover, he was a New York City white man interviewing mostly working-class black Midwesterners, and hadn’t worked hard enough to dampen their natural suspicion. There was no doubt that the thrust of his interviews had gotten back to certain individuals in Detroit, who decided to test him. But a helicopter hovering over Riverside Drive? Still don’t know what to make of that.

  When I returned to Detroit I tried to push this writer’s fear out of my mind. But one night, alone in my Renaissance Center Hotel room, I had a freak-out, worried that some hit man would break into my room, smack me around, and steal my interview tapes. I placed a chair under the doorknob, crumpled up newspapers on the floor, and talked animatedly on the phone to friends in New York until near dawn.

  The paranoia passed, due largely to the fellowship of two men—longtime Motown keyboardist and bandleader Earl Van Dyke and musician and talent manager “Beans” Boles. Van Dyke was a tough, no-bullshit, brown-skinned man, with no illusions about the humanity of showbiz executives and the warmth of his fellow man. I recall driving with him through Detroit on two occasions when he pulled out his revolver and placed it on the seat of his car, because someone had cruised behind him a little too close. Some of the best observations in my book Where Did Our Love Go?, about Marvin Gaye’s inner demons, Diana Ross’s temperament, and Stevie Wonder’s artistic development, came from Earl.