When Berry Gordy started out in the music business as a songwriter, he may have been dreaming of setting up his own recording label, his own music publishing company, a recording studio and much more. When he looked around Detroit in the late fifties, he saw an opportunity. He had already written a hit song (“Reet Petite” for Jackie Wilson) and produced a couple of hits that he had licenced to companies in New York or Chicago. But there were no big companies in Detroit, so he set out to create one.
Most of the existing record companies at that time were small, with limited resources. Fortune Records is a good example of what Gordy would have seen in the city. Fortune was a small family company set up in 1946 by Jack and Devora Brown, specialising in Doo-Wop and R&B but also releasing Gospel, early Rock & Roll and even the odd polka dance tune.
Andre Williams’ “Jail Bait”
Photo: No Trams To Lime Street (Wikimedia Commons)
They had a small studio and a shop, where they sold their records to the local community. In 1956, the company moved to a building on Third Avenue and stayed there until the mid-nineties. Most of the artists on the roster were just known locally, although some moved on to wider fame, among them Andre Williams, who later came to Motown. Fifty years in the business is clearly a success, but Gordy wanted much more.
A second model for him was the recording studio where he recorded songs with Marv Johnson and the Miracles in 1959. United Sound Systems was set up on Second Avenue by James Siracuse in 1939 and had seen a lot of visiting musicians over the first twenty years of trading there. It had become the primary studio in the city. Remarkably, it was housed in a 1916 family home that bore a close resemblance to Hitsville. Gordy seems to have drawn on the experience of working at United Sound to create his own studio.
United Sound Systems studio
Photo: Detroitsound (Wikimedia Commons)
He could have set up a company like Fortune, but he wanted to build something bigger. At this point, he took several important decisions, appointing several of his siblings to managerial roles, alongside experienced outsiders, such as Barney Ales and William “Mickey” Stevenson. He judged correctly that Ales would set up excellent distribution links and Mickey Stevenson would create a strong group of session musicians. They both knew the right people!
Al Abrams was brought in to run marketing. He had only a little experience but he had boundless energy and enthusiasm, which stood him in good stead when he went round to each and every radio station to “sell” the latest Motown release to the DJs. Abrams had ideas a-plenty about how to get Motown artists on to radio and TV and into the press, and Gordy loved them.
It didn’t pass unnoticed that Ales and Abrams were White, nor that for several years Ales recruited only White salesmen to his team (the first Black member of the sales team was appointed in 1969). Gordy was challenged about this and gave a very straightforward answer. He explained that his simple rule was always to choose the best person for the job, regardless of skin colour. Gordy was clear that these appointees were talented, hard-working and enthusiastic about making Motown a success.
Berry Gordy also thought carefully about the ways in which he could maximise the quality of Motown’s output and about the best ways to market the music. Everything started with the producers.
In 1959, the majority of the recordings were produced by Gordy himself or Mickey Stevenson. Slowly, other producers were trained in Studio A, including Smokey Robinson, Brian Holland, Robert Bateman, Lamont Dozier and Clarence Paul. Later came Harvey Fuqua and Johnny Bristol, Norman Whitfield and Ivy Jo Hunter, and others from the West Coast. Most of these producers were asked to work in pairs or threes. The concept of productive partnerships was very strong at Motown, and was clearly encouraged by Berry Gordy.
Songwriting was the most critical area of development, however, with a large number of staff members involved in writing songs, including all of the producers. It was a pattern that was to continue throughout Motown’s operation in Detroit, as many of the artists and other staff members got together to write songs. From the Gordy family down to the youngest staff members, everyone was free to pick up a pen.
Out of this open-ended system emerged groups that could compete with each other to write the best song, to create the best arrangement, to give the best performance or to make the best recording. Holland, Dozier, Holland rose to the top in 1963 and were allocated the acts that Berry Gordy thought were the best match for their style of songwriting and production. It was significant that the Motown songwriters usually knew who they were writing songs for, so they could generate lyrics, melodies and harmonies that exactly fitted a particular artist or group. Each song might be written in a particular key to suit the artist’s range. Lamont Dozier has described writing songs for the Four Tops that had a lead vocal pitched at the top of Levi Stubbs’ range, so that the voice would have a dramatic tension. Very little at Motown was left to chance.
The element of competition was strengthened by the weekly meetings that Gordy organised to carry out quality control. At the end of each week, on Friday mornings, a panel of “judges” listened to the week’s output from the studio. The panel was given a collection of acetate recordings that had been cut by the studio engineers and were asked to select the best of them for release. Gordy chose to use acetates because they created the sound that would be heard by people who bought the records. He could see no advantage in listening to master recordings on high-end studio speakers, if the object of the exercise was to pick the best songs for AM radio broadcasts or for home-listening on mass-produced low-fi record players. The panel’s recommendations went to Berry Gordy for final approval. It is instructive to find that the panel included a range of staff members, amongst whom were some of the youngest employees. Norman Whitfield, for example, joined the panel in the early days of Motown, when he was still a teenager.
It was all about creating the “Sound of Young America”!
The competitive spirit was also intensified by Gordy’s decision to move artists from one team to another, if he felt things weren’t working well or were going flat. The Temptations, for example, did very well working with Smokey Robinson as songwriter/producer, but they were switched to working with Norman Whitfield and Barrett Strong, as soon as sales began to drop.
Another frequent ploy was to give the same song to more than one artist to record. With a different voice, a different arrangement and different production, the various versions of the song were obviously going to sound very different. It was up to the quality control panel to pick the best of the bunch.
Some of the early employees found the competitive approach difficult to accept and duly moved on, but most of the staff realised that the quality of the output was critical and accepted the challenge. Many of the best-known Motown employees were very young when they joined Motown, but Gordy was never afraid of giving talented youngsters a chance. Most of them rose to the challenge exceptionally well.
It was common practice in recording studios during the sixties to record a demo of each song, so that artists and producers could hear what the song offered, especially as not everyone in the studio could read music. When artists and producers decided on a particular track, arrangements were often worked out in the studio. Motown’s recording strategy was usually to record the rhythm track first, then add horns and strings, and then finally the vocals would be overdubbed. Using this approach meant that not everyone had to be in the studio at the same time. It also gave producers the capacity to try different approaches for each element of the recording and undoubtedly raised the quality of the final version.
The second area of innovation at Motown relates to marketing. Berry Gordy has described the Motown operation as a kind of production line, with young amateurs arriving at the company, passing through the various stages of production and emerging as fully-fledged world-famous hit makers. Unlike the automobile industry, however, the Motown factory wasn’t turning out hundreds of identical products. What Gordy actually borrowed from the car industry, in addition to the quality-control concept described above, was the idea of artist development, as it could be applied to the young singers who entered Motown. He created specialist departments to deal with each aspect of an artist’s performance, so that young, inexperienced singers could acquire presence and polish, growing in confidence. Gordy realised that the look of his artists was critical, so he hired experts to manage what the artists wore and how they styled their hair. He wanted people’s first impression of a Motown artist to be one of amazement.
The visual impact came first, before any impression that the songs might create, and that also included how to move. In 1959, most singers stood at a microphone and sang. There was a distinct lack of movement or excitement. But by 1963, the Motown artists were touring regularly, with additional appearances on TV to massively increase the range of the visual impact they could make. As a result, the artists were taught how to move on stage and in the TV studio. Choreographer Cholly Atkins created many routines, especially for the groups, which involved slick footwork and expressive arm movements. Other staff members were recruited to look after the outfits that were specifically designed to make an impression. Suits for the boys and ball-gowns for the girls. The clothes and hair-styles were way outside the norm for the majority of the young singers who came to Motown, but they were trained to carry everything off with panache. For Gordy, it was all part of making Motown special, of ensuring respect for the artists and selling each song as powerfully as possible, and, of course, it worked! As a footnote, Marvin Gaye never attended the artist development sessions. It was his choice to go his own way (not for the only time!). Later, experienced performers like Junior Walker and Gladys Knight were also exempt.
When the Motown Revue came to Europe in 1965, the audiences were captivated by the stage presentation of each act. When the TV Special hosted by Dusty Springfield was aired, it created an enormous reaction in the UK. Even in black-and-white, it was impossible to miss the glamour of the girls and the chic of the boys, which marked Motown out as the music to buy.
There is no doubt regarding the importance of Motown’s music to a changing culture, one in which the Motown artists saw themselves as ambassadors for the company but also as entertainers who were bringing positivity and fun through their music. The respect they were accorded in the UK and other countries made a big impression them.
