We're going to talk about the music of Motown now, or Hitsville, USA, as Motown called itself and then came to be called. Motown was a record label established by Berry Gordy, Jr. in Detroit in 1959. Berry Gordy, Jr. is a very important figure in the history of the rise of black business in this country. At one time, I'm not quite sure if it's still true, but Motown Records was the most successful black-owned business in the country. And so, a record label that started out as a kind of a small indie label, in a lot of ways, regional indie label became a very big force in the world of pop music. And that's partly because of the excellence of the artists and other people who were involved with him. Partly the vision of Berry Gordy, Jr. who from the very beginning had these ideas, we said in the opening lecture, of taking the label and trying to reach out, cross over to white audiences and get the biggest possible audience for his groups. Berry Gordy, Jr, a little bit about his personal story. He was actually a pro boxer, hung out with boxers and also sort of hung out with jazz musicians at Detroit's jazz club. Again, Motown being associated, of course, with Detroit, Michigan. And so between hanging out with the boxers in the gym and the jazz musicians in the clubs, that was sort of his basic milieu. He also worked on one of the assembly lines for the car companies at one time. Berry Gordy, Jr. started a record store, his first foray into music, or one of his first forays was a record store that specialized in jazz music. Like a lot of people who like music, he got this idea, well, jazz music is the best music, so that's what I'll sell. Well, it turns out that a lot of times people aren't always so interested in buying the music that fans or connoisseurs would think is the best music. You really make your money selling the most popular music. And what Berry Gordy says that he learned from the jazz orchestra, which eventually failed, is towards the end of it when it was too late to sort of save it he realized that the real money was in selling pop music or R&B music and not so much in jazz. And so he adjusted but kept it in his mind that the money is in pop. Berry Gordy, Jr. continues to stay involved with music by writing songs. He started writing songs with Jackie Wilson, for Jackie Wilson, the singer. Reet Petite from 1957 was one of those records that was released. Lonely Teardrops was a number one hit on the R&B charts. It crossed over to the pop charts to number seven in 1958. And That's Why I Love You was a number two R&B chart hit in 1959. These were all records that featured Berry Gordy Jr. as a songwriter, often together working with other people. There's a story that has been told to me by people close to Jerry Leiber that Berry Gordy, Jr. at one point had a discussion with Jerry Leiber of the Lieber and Stoller song writing production team. And said that he really wanted to be involved in the Brill Building scene that was starting to coalesce in the late 50s, and of course, it came into bloom in the late 60s, as we've talked about a couple of weeks ago. And Jerry Leiber said, Berry, why would you want to pick up stakes and come to New York and start all over here? You've already got a good thing going in Detroit. Why don't you just do what you want to do in Detroit? And so the story is that Berry Gordy, Jr. took that advice very much to heart, and so established Motown in 1959. And Motown is, in many ways, a parallel structure to the Brill Building structure that we talked about a few weeks ago. With the exception that by 63, 64, and 65, most of what's happening in the Brill Building has really kind of broken down from what it was at the beginning of the 60s, as we talked about last week. A lot of those people were moving to the West Coast, Don Kirshner and people like that were focused in Los Angeles. But during this period, the middle of the 60s, the end of the 60s, that's when Motown taking the Brill Building model and establishing it in Detroit. Really that's when Motown really sort of hits its stride. And so, very much based on this Brill Building model. Some of the early hits that Berry Gordy had on Motown Records was a song by Barrett Strong called Money, which was a number two R&B hit in 1960. So we're still talking about a time that's parallel to what was happening in New York with Brill Building. The Marvellettes, a girl group with Please Mr. Postman, that was number one on both the pop and the R&B charts in 1961. So a big hit for a very small regional label, a fantastic success for him. The Contours had a track called, Do You Love Me? Which was number one in the R&B charts and number three in the pop charts in 1962. Early on, when Berry Gordy was releasing these records, in many ways they were imitations of things that other people were doing. So you see the Marvellettes are basically a girl group from 1961. The Contours sound an awful lot like the Isley Brothers from 1962. And so, at the beginning he's sort of following the lead of others, Berry Gordy is. Now, let's talk a little bit more about this idea of crossing over and pursuing a white audience. We said a bit about it as well in the first video. This is the idea that if you just as a business person look at the lay of the land and see where the disposable income is. Where are the people who've got money to spend recreationally for a record? It's no mystery that most of that money resides in the white community. So Berry Gordy decided very early on, as I said from the story with the jazz record store, he decided if he was going to have a successful business, that's where he had to go. But the thing is, he had artists, many of whom came from very modest and challenged economic backgrounds. And they were not the kinds of people who, without a certain amount of training, could really mix in polite society, that kind of thing. So he had to do something to help kind of shape the artist and shape the image of Motown to make it acceptable for crossover. As I said before a lot of people have criticized this as being a kind of selling out. But really, it's no different from what Chuck Berry did when he decided he was going to write his songs directly for a white teen audience in 1955, 56, 57. So that these songs wouldn't need to be covered and the lyrics changed. So in many ways, I think when we think about Motown during those early years, we can think of it as taking the Chuck Barry philosophy and applying the Brill Building practices. So taking these two sort of established models and putting them together, and starting what turned out to be a very, very successful label in Detroit, Michigan. Let's talk a little bit about what we might call the etiquette and choreography of Motown. What was different about Motown, and people have loved to talk about Motown as being some kind of an assembly line. And this is partly, I suppose, because Motown being in Detroit and Detroit being, at that time, the home of the auto industry. Anybody's talking about Detroit back in those days would have thought about Ford, GM, Chrysler, these big car companies. That the idea of music that being made through a certain kind of specialization of different kind of jobs would be thought of as a kind of an assembly line. Of course, it was no more of an assembly line than the Brill Building or most New York labels had used, but the name has kind of stuck. One thing that was interesting though about this was that as I said before, Berry Gordy Jr. was concerned about the image and the behavior of his stars in public. And so he hired a woman by the name of Maxine Powell to start something which the artists called the Charm School. And Maxine Powell had actually run a charm school in Detroit in the 50s. And her job was to take these people, many of whom as I have said before had come from challenged backgrounds. And teach them how to sit at a table and use the right silverware. How to speak in a way that is elegant and appropriate. How to move to a certain extent and walk. To teach the women when they get into a car they have to be careful about keeping their legs together. This kind of thing. Teaching some these folks to sort of, if they need this kind of instruction to eat with their mouth closed. Various kinds of things that parents teach their kids all the time. Not to say that this was a particular sort of problem for all of the artists, but what Berry Gordy said is that his goal was for all of his artists to be presentable in two places. Either the White House or Buckingham Palace. So we're not talking about teaching etiquette so that they could come hang out with your family or my family, or something like that. It's more like, if these people are sitting at the table with the President of United States or the Queen of England, they should be presentable and sort of up to the standard of elegance that goes with that. So that's what he set out to do. And Maxine Powell's job, to a certain degree, was to work with all of the Motown artists to be sure they had that level of polish. The artists who were mostly just young kids at the time hated it. But years later many of them have come back and said they really appreciated the training that they got from Maxine Powell, because it really helped a lot in their subsequent careers. The other thing he did is he hired a guy by the name of Cholly Atkins who had been a Broadway dance choreographer and got him to do choreography for all the acts. So every move that you see these different groups make, The Supremes, The Four Tops, to a certain extent The Temptations but we'll deal with that later. All of these moves were chartered out and worked out by Cholly Atkins. So you've got the etiquette covered by a kind of a central person. You've got the choreography covered by a single person. And then Motown also handled the management for its artists. Which allowed it to coordinate promotion and coordinate releases and coordinate Motown tours where they put a bunch of their groups together at one time. And so Berry Gordy really had created a shop where he had a lot of control over shaping the careers of these artists. Now the Motown assembly line, the musical end of it, consisted of on one hand songwriters and producers, and on the other hand a studio band that well, various members from a sort of large extended studio band that played on all the records. Now, imitating the Brill Building model, Berry Gordy had a whole group of songwriters and producers and they would all write songs and vie to get the next record. And they would have these sort of, these meetings where he would pull everybody together and they would all talk about which song that they had. And Berry Gordy's famous line was, if you only had a dollar would you buy this record, or buy a sandwich? So the record that he released that week or whatever, or the one that they decided to take into the studio, that record would have to be good enough that somebody would be willing to skip lunch in order to buy that record because they just had to have it so bad. So that was the way he tried to discriminate between the records that could be good and those that were really excellent. And so all these different songwriters and producers were vying with each other to get that record each week. And to get a record with one of different artists. And as long as they had a success with an artist, they got to keep that artist. When they began to fail, he'd give somebody else a shot of that artist and in order to keep the artists at the top of the chart. So some of the producers and songwriters we're talking about is Berry Gordy, Jr. himself, Mickey Stevenson, Smokey Robinson, were all important songwriters. The songwriting team of Brian Holland, Lamont Dozier, Eddie Holland, or we'll often talk about the Holland, Dozier, Holland, or simply, HDH, and Norman Whitfield. All of these people were writing songs, producing during the heyday of Motown in the 1960s. Then they also had a studio band. They were called The Funk Brothers, and they were Detroit's version of LA's Wrecking Crew. The Wrecking Crew were the sort of top flight studio musicians that played on the Phil Spector records, played on The Byrds' Mr. Tambourine Man. Played on the Beach Boys' record, that kind of thing. Well, in Detroit, it was the Funk Brothers working exclusively for Motown. You may know the film, Standing in the Shadows of Motown, from 2002. That really is a documentary about these sort of unsung heros of Motown. They worked very closely with the songwriters and producers and artists, so that there were not often a lot of arrangements written out. They would just sort of go in with the tunes and start working parts out. We're talking people like James Jamerson on bass, Bennie Benjamin on drums, Earl Van Dyke on piano, and many others who were sort of part of this group. Motown had its own devoted studio, and that studio was in use almost constantly. So there was more work in that studio than one particular band could do. But they were a central group of players and others who replaced them when those players needed a break or had other gigs elsewhere in town. And so it was a combination of the songwriters and the studio band and the etiquette and the choreography and the management, all of that together that was considered the Motown Assembly Line. Of course, the only piece that we haven't talked about is the actual performers themselves and the very thing that the audiences would see. And it's the performers in Motown that we turn to next.
