Cowboys and Indies: The Epic History of the Record Industry (18 page)

Once again, the oldest tree in the vinyl jungle was in bloom. Thanks to the towering reputation of this prolific war baby named Bob Dylan, younger Columbia producers, such as Tom Wilson, were introduced to a network of singer-songwriters whose autobiographical long-playing records would, in time, outsell and outshine all of the throwaway pop singles of the early sixties. As the old proverb goes, fortune favors the brave.

11. NUMBERS

Something was stirring in the modern world—but was it really political awareness?

The elephant in the room was sitting on the floor watching television. Across the land, babies had boomed from an average of three per family in 1950 to over three and a half by 1960. Road-weary adults who’d grown up through the Great Depression and World War II were gratefully spending their unfamiliar prosperity on the 76 million American children born between 1945 and 1965.

Just as color television was poised to replace black-and-white, kids were voting in unstoppable numbers for the end of segregation in pop music. In 1963, as a result of so many crossover hits making separate listings unworkable,
Billboard
suspended its R&B chart. Thus began a new era of multicolored, televisual American pop. While several labels and producers contributed to the phenomenon, the most interesting was Tamla-Motown, the only black-owned R&B pioneer selling millions of records to white teenagers.

With big cars symbolizing the era, it was perhaps fitting that Detroit provided the setting for this historical event. Behind this self-confident music was the story of a clan whose
can-do
philosophy was neither political nor religious. The Gordy family were devout followers of Booker T. Washington’s philosophy of personal advancement through education and hard work. In his 1901 autobiography,
Up from Slavery,
Washington argued, “Nothing ever comes to me, that is worth having, except as a result of hard work.” A controversial thinker among NAACP adherents, he had advised cooperation with white society, predicting that confrontation over what later became known as “civil rights” could spell disaster for the vastly outnumbered black population of America.

The Gordy family covenant reached three generations deep to a time before the Civil War. The personal mission for Motown founder Berry Gordy was simply to do in the record industry what his father and grandfather had achieved in other businesses.

The amazing legacy traces back to a cotton plantation in Oconee County, Georgia, where the first Berry Gordy was born in 1854, the illegitimate son of slave owner Jim Gordy and his lover, Esther Johnson, a black slave. As was common in that time and place, the mulatto boy was given better chances than a black child would have been; he was even taught to read and write. Working his way out of servitude, Berry Gordy grew cotton, corn, potatoes, peanuts, okra, cabbage, collard greens, sugarcane, and fruits. While most of his illiterate tenant-farmer neighbors spent their entire lives in debt—and even relied on white crop buyers to keep their paperwork, Berry Gordy was such an assiduous bookkeeper, he filed every receipt, loan statement, invoice, and deed—enabling him to purchase a 168-acre farm in the 1890s.

He married a half-black, half-Indian woman, Lucy Hellum. Of their nine children, Berry II, born in 1888, was a solitary soul who preferred to hang around the kitchen listening to conversations about crop prices. From the age of ten, he began accompanying his father into town; his job was to calculate the value per pound of the family’s cotton. Berry senior bought his chosen heir a law book and regularly quizzed the boy on its contents.

The hardworking family’s well-run business was generating sufficient profits to buy another 100-acre tract of land with a big house, a general store, and a well-stocked barn. Becoming a local entrepreneur, Gordy senior even set up a blacksmith shop in town, earning himself jealousy and admiration as a “big dog.” One spring day in 1913, the sky turned black over the farm. Sprinting back to the house as an electrical storm hit, the fifty-nine-year-old was struck down by a bolt of lightning. His funeral was attended by both blacks and whites from the area.

Barely twenty-four and lacking the sharp eye his father possessed, Berry II took over the family business. The tradition in the South was for a bereaved black family to appoint a white administrator to handle succession, but wisely, the Gordy family appointed themselves. Within days, Berry II was being hounded by salesmen of all descriptions trying to get him to sign on to various purchase schemes with monthly repayments. He consulted his law book and learned that if he failed to honor monthly payments, debtors could seize assets, in particular the farm. Vultures were hovering over the family estate. Understanding his father’s obsession with detail, Berry II realized that just one rogue clause in a contract could lose you everything. Thanks to their impeccable records, in the months after his father’s death, he and his mother even won a court case against a white businessman. Gradually, the dubious salesmen stopped dropping by.

Berry II took another leaf from his father’s book by marrying an educated girl—a schoolteacher, Bertha Ida Fuller. Their romance was interrupted by America’s entry into the First World War when Berry II was conscripted and sent to a training camp in Newport, Virginia. He was so worried his family would be dispossessed of their farm, he faked walking as if he had palsy, went to sick call all the time, and pretended he could neither read nor write. His muscular spasms were so convincing, he was discharged within three months. Once he got home to the farm, he was relieved to find that all the surrounding farmers had held firm to the agreed plan to maintain a high cotton price. With wartime demands so high, the bumper harvest of 1917 enabled the Gordys to pay off their mortgage.

In 1922, the Gordy family made a deal so big it jolted the family destiny right out of Georgia. When they sold a load of timber stumps for $2,600, suddenly, out of nowhere, white businessmen began coming around with investments and other proposals. Afraid even to deposit it in the local bank, Berry II hid the check, but the fear of being burgled, or even lynched, proved too great for the entire family. At church one Sunday, they convinced Berry to cash the check in Detroit, where his brother John had already moved.

So Berry II, the grandfather of Motown, was driven directly from the church to the station and boarded a train. Seated in the black compartment, he gazed out the window, realizing that a chapter was being turned. Past Memphis, around Lake Erie, and northward to Michigan—this route had been taken by so many black families before him, millions fleeing poverty and racism in the South. The Gordys were leaving Georgia because they had become too wealthy for their own safety.

When the train arrived in Detroit and Berry II glimpsed its giant factories and black faces everywhere, it was love at first sight. Nevertheless, adjusting to city living proved difficult. The big dog became a hapless lamb; he was ripped off on a property investment, then struggled to find a job. Realizing he needed a useful new trade, he agreed to work as a plasterer’s apprentice for a meager $2 a day. Gradually “Pops,” as he now liked to be called, began to replicate his father’s methodical progress in Georgia. In honor of the family’s intellectual guide, he opened the Booker T. Washington Grocery Store. During the Depression, he also set up a plastering and carpentry business and eventually a printing shop. Even in hard times, Berry II was able to accumulate wealth and provide jobs for his many children—one of whom was Berry III, born in 1929.

Pops was almost religious about teaching the merits of hard work and family values. Listening to his stories around the kitchen table about Georgia and the Depression, the third generation of Gordys grew up with a deep sense of history and a belief in entrepreneurship. Leading by example, when the teenagers no longer needed full-time mothering, Bertha Gordy enrolled in various universities, studying retail management and commerce until in 1945 she cofounded an insurance company and became actively involved in the Democratic Party.

Compared to his brothers and sisters, Berry III at first struggled to find his path—boxing professionally, joining the army, then getting married too young. Musically inclined, he began hanging out at Detroit’s many jazz clubs and in 1953 set up his own record shop, 3-D Record Mart, dedicated entirely to bebop. It was too much of a niche business for Detroit and it had to be closed within two years. Berry Gordy III found himself with no job, no money, and a wife and baby to support.

He took a job in a Ford factory for $86 a week fastening chrome strips and nailing upholstery to Lincoln-Mercurys. The backbreaking tedium troubled his marriage almost immediately. Although Ford was once considered the best employer in the land for African Americans, by the 1950s jokes circulated that if you saw a black man asleep on the bus in the evening, he was a Ford worker. There was even a genre of jokes about the sexual infidelities of Ford workers’ wives. In Gordy’s case, his wife, Thelma, filed for divorce in 1956 claiming he stayed out late, refused to speak for evenings on end when he was home, and had once struck her in the face.

Hitting rock bottom, the boxer found salvation in music. He hummed melodies on the factory line and began going out to a happening club, the Flame Show Bar, where his sisters Anna and Gwen had just landed the photo and cigarette concession. “He’s a songwriter,” they’d tell the local big shots. Night after night, the beaten-down factory worker lugged around his homemade tapes, in search of that elusive life changer.

After more than a year getting nowhere, but at least getting better at songwriting, a door opened. In 1957, he heard through the grapevine that a talent scout who frequented the club, Al Greene, was looking for material for R&B singer Jackie Wilson. When Gordy realized he had boxed against Wilson in the forties and told him so, he won the artist’s immediate trust. Gordy duly provided Wilson with a hit, “Reet Petite,” No. 11 on the R&B charts. Then, through Wilson’s manager, one summer’s day in 1958, Gordy met a group led by the seventeen-year-old Smokey Robinson.

They met in a café, and Berry went through Smokey’s poetry notebook. Although the writing lacked structure, Berry saw the makings of a poet. More importantly, the human chemistry clicked. Smokey’s mother had died when he was ten years old, and because his father was a truck driver, he had been largely raised by his older sister, who had ten children of her own. When Smokey was first invited to the Gordy home, he was adopted as a member of the extended family. A father-son relationship formed that endured for decades.

Through their show business connections, Berry’s sisters, Anna and Gwen, had just set up a record label, Anna Records, complete with a distribution deal with Leonard and Phil Chess in Chicago. Not only were they careful to retain full ownership of their masters, their first hit, “Money (That’s What I Want),” was penned by Berry. Crippled by financial problems and encouraged by Smokey Robinson, Berry Gordy III arrived at the daunting conclusion that he had no choice but to set up his own label.

He got considerable help from Pops, Anna, Gwen, and his eldest sister Esther, who now had Anna Records to learn from. The family’s brainstorming was helped by an independent producer called Harvey Fuqua whom Gwen was dating and would marry in 1961. Fuqua had extensive experience in music production, having sung in the Moonglows and worked for Chess Records as a talent scout and recording supervisor. Back in Detroit, he was making extra cash as a radio plugger for Anna Records while continuing his own projects as an independent producer. Like many other people who orbited the family, Fuqua was fascinated by the Gordy clan, in particular how Esther was grooming her husband, George Edwards, to be a state legislator. In equal measure, Berry Gordy, whenever he spent time at his sister’s house, admired Fuqua’s discipline as a talent coach. In Esther’s basement, he would force his artists to rehearse to the point of exhaustion.

Ultimately it was Fuqua’s labors as a lone record man that inspired Tamla-Motown’s complex business plan. Fuqua’s problem was always cash flow. Too small and too black to borrow money from banks, he was stuck between record pressers, who insisted on being paid up front, and distributors, who operated on ninety-day consignment as standard, though it was generally longer by the time they actually paid. As a result, one of Fuqua’s 400,000-copy hits had almost put him in the hospital. Pops, Esther, and Gwen understood the only solution was to set up various interrelated companies—records, publishing, and management. They also felt that Berry’s label would probably be better off with a white-skinned insider to schmooze these all-powerful distributors.

Set up with family capital, Berry Gordy found a house at 2648 West Grand Boulevard. The plan was to use upstairs as a residence, the basement for offices, and the back garden for a studio. The studio was called Hitsville U.S.A.; the record company was Motown Record Corp., owner of the Motown and Tamla trademarks. Jobete Music Publishing would handle author/composition royalties, while a separate company, International Talent Management Inc. (ITMI), would cover a range of artist management and booking functions. Needless to say, the lucky artists would have to sign with all these companies.

Not surprisingly, Motown became a family affair. The hardheaded Esther took on the group’s business administration, while brothers George and Fuller and sister Loucye joined the administrative staff. Her husband, Ron Wakefield, a saxophonist, joined as staff arranger. Another brother, Robert, became a sound engineer. Harvey Fuqua handled radio plugging and recruited an old friend, Marvin Gaye, who in due course married Anna Gordy and became the in-house drummer.

Their industry insider was Barney Ales, a sales representative formerly at Capitol and Warner whose job involved chasing down checks from distributors. Although he was the only white face in the office, Barney Ales fit right in. Like Berry Gordy, he was a high-powered street fighter who loved playing the game. When he wasn’t selling theatrically over the telephone, office hours were spent with Gordy battling it out over table tennis. Enjoying a salary of $125 per week with a company Cadillac and the title of vice president, Ales never had it so good.