Cowboys and Indies: The Epic History of the Record Industry (19 page)

Commercially, Tamla-Motown was quick to take off. In early 1961, a Smokey-Berry composition, “Shop Around,” went to No. 1 on the R&B charts and No. 2 on the pop charts. Their first No. 1 pop hit was “Please Mr. Postman” by the Marvelettes, a catchy ditty that skipped happily along to Marvin Gaye’s doo-wop drumbeat. A string of Marvelettes hits rolled off the production lines, in large part thanks to a prolific songwriting trio, Brian and Eddie Holland with Lamont Dozier—otherwise known as
H-D-H
.

With little else happening in Detroit, Hitsville held weekly auditions to screen the steady flow of local singers. Dropping in every day after school with an annoying persistence, “the girls,” as they became known, included a sixteen-year-old Diane Ross, accompanied by her friends Florence Ballard, Barbara Martin, and Mary Wilson. Another visitor was an eleven-year-old blind prodigy, Steveland Morris—signed up and renamed Little Stevie Wonder. As the stakes grew, Gordy ran competitions; to pick songs for the studio, a panel of A&R judges would be augmented by kids invited in from outside. In many instances, Gordy’s own songs were outvoted by the creations of his employees. A religious believer in meritocracy, he would always accept defeat with a fatherly smile.

When the weather was good, Berry Gordy would organize picnics for office staff and musicians on Belle Isle, an island park in the Detroit River, where they’d have sack races and games of football. Such was the sportive competition that A&R man Clarence Paul once broke an arm, and Marvin Gaye fractured a foot. On weekends, Berry would arrange get-togethers where they’d drink, eat barbecue, listen to records, and play marathon sessions of poker. Marvin Gaye remembers that Gordy would pick out two raindrops on a windowpane and bet against a bemused employee which drop would trickle to the bottom of the windowpane first—an early warning sign that Gordy’s playful side hid an addiction to gambling.

Launching their dormant ITC management company, Esther Gordy came up with a novel idea,
The Motortown Revue,
a rolling tour throughout the winter of 1962 showcasing all of Motown’s acts. She spent hours on the phone wearing down a dubious black promoter until he agreed to organizing nineteen dates over twenty-three days. With Motown’s sales manager, Barney Ales, appointed tour manager, forty-five people were squeezed into one bus and five cars. The older, more experienced session musicians, generally in their twenties and thirties, carried the shows, but Ales, wincing in the wings, saw that Motown’s young singers simply couldn’t command a live audience.

Although it was a baptism by fire, which saw Ales hospitalized after a serious car crash, the revue was a turning point for the label. Realizing that thousands of cash dollars could be generated from live shows, Barney Ales and Esther Gordy returned to Detroit with a plan. Thus began Motown’s ambitious artist development program, complete with trainers, stylists, and motivation coaches. In particular, Gordy’s favorite, Diane Ross, was enrolled at an expensive finishing school; glamorously dolled up in sequins and mascara, the giggling schoolgirl strode out a dark princess, renamed
Diana
.

As money poured in, the Gordys even took control of personal finances. “We try to help artists personally with their investment programs so they don’t wind up broke,” Berry Gordy explained to a journalist in 1963. “We are very much concerned with the artist’s welfare.” Employing some sixty-odd staffers in 1963, Motown was a booming business. Supervised by the prickly Esther Gordy, in-house lawyers were adding provisions for every imaginable circumstance. The contracts grew to over one hundred pages in length, among the most complex in the entire record business.

In 1963—the defining moment when so-called
doo-wop
exploded nationally into a pop genre—Motown’s chief competitor was a twenty-three-year-old named Phil Spector, who, despite his Napoleonic height, packed the biggest sonic punch. Such was the young man’s disdain for the market he wished to conquer, he barely regarded his singers and musicians as artistes. Modeling himself on classical composers,
he
was the genius. Clad in velvet suits, he conducted his puppet orchestra with a silver cane. In a vast marketplace where it was nearly impossible to keep track of all the one-hit wonders, his mad-scientist aura ensured the “produced by Phil Spector” stamp got his records delivered straight to the deejay’s turntable.

Few noticed at the time that behind Phil Spector’s arrogance lay a haunted soul. When he was eight, his severely depressed father, crippled by financial worries, ran a hose from his exhaust pipe into the car and slowly asphyxiated himself on a Brooklyn street in broad daylight. Bullied, small, overweight, suffering severe asthma, Phil grew up troubled by his mother’s maiden name, Spector. Feeling a dark secret hanging over his house, he realized his parents might have been cousins.

Success came early for the “
Tycoon of Teen.
” Aged seventeen, he woke up from a nightmare of seeing the epitaph on his father’s gravestone, “To know him is to love him.” Picking up his guitar, he weaved the words into an interesting chord sequence. The ensuing 1958 single, performed by the Teddy Bears, snowballed into a No. 1, selling a total of 1.4 million copies. Too nervous to perform live, within a year Spector became a record producer. He eventually relocated to New York, where he came into contact with R&B through hit-writing duo of Jerry Lieber and Mike Stoller. With the financial assistance of Los Angeles producer Lester Sill, Spector then formed Philles Records.

Having produced on both coasts, Spector felt the brightest sound in America was inside Gold Star, a Los Angeles studio whose recording equipment and acoustics had been custom-designed by its talented co-owner David Gold. The pure tone of the echo chambers was due to their trapezoid-shaped rooms, about twenty feet long, built in a specially formulated cement plaster. Incoming sounds entered through a two-foot-square trapdoor and were miked back into the control room. Another of David Gold’s handy innovations was a small radio transmitter, enabling producers to hear their mixes on any car radio parked outside.

The term
wall of sound
had first been used by American journalists at the turn of the century to describe the sonic totalitarianism of Wagner—Spector’s greatest musical influence as a boy. Spector packed the studio full of musicians—as many as five guitarists, two bass players, two drummers, three pianists, and various strings. He was obsessed with percussive feel, often squeezing up to ten percussionists into the crowded room to play shakers, chimes, castanets, bells, tambourines, maracas, any kind of high-frequency sparkle. Before rolling any tape, he would usually spend hours moving between the control room and studio suggesting subtle changes. As the musicians got tired and began trundling along in unison like migrating caribou, Gold Star’s echo chambers created a sonic picture as wide-screen as classical music.

In awe of Spector’s massive-sounding hits with the Ronettes, Motown retaliated in the summer of 1963 with Martha & the Vandellas, whose lead singer, Martha Reeves, was a Motown secretary. By January 1964, the Supremes finally got their first pop chart appearance.

Culturally, it’s hard to say for sure when
the sixties
really began. Television imagery, flashing between JFK’s assassination, Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream,” and the Ronettes singing “Be My Baby,” always suggests that somewhere around that
pop-crossover
year of 1963, a sea change was under way. As Bob Dylan saw it, “the early sixties, up to maybe ’64–’65, was really the fifties, the late fifties. They were still the fifties—still the same culture.”

What’s for sure, this wasn’t really about Vietnam or miniskirts. America had seen it all before—Korea, flappers, you name it. What was different in the sixties was the underlying baby boom. Never before did pop music fit so neatly into age strata. Viewed from a demographic angle, it’s easy to see why early-sixties pop was so juvenile and why it matured so rapidly throughout the decade. That sacred cow of the postwar memory,
the sixties,
was in fact the diary of a lucky generation—growing up and taking over.

12. THE INVASION

After two world wars that never reached its shores, America woke up on February 7, 1964, to the sound of screaming. Just four months after JFK’s assassination, the door of Pan Am flight 101 opened—then
Beatlemania
swept across the land like the outburst of a deadly virus.

Wearing helmets made of hair, the four invaders were quickly reinforced by the Dave Clark Five, Manfred Mann, Herman’s Hermits, the Animals, the Rolling Stones, the Kinks, Them, and the Who. In several successive waves, British bands came, conquered, and changed American tastes forever.

Phil Spector, ever the client prospector, accompanied the Beatles on their historical flight across the Atlantic. Who knows what he was hoping for? The beat boom abruptly ended his brief reign over the teen kingdom; the Beatles made doo-wop as cold as an old toy on Christmas morning. From here on in, only Motown would be strong enough to hold back these lovable pranksters from Liverpool, who at one point in April 1964 held all of the Top 5 positions on America’s
Billboard Hot 100
.

Although a surprise attack for American record companies, the British Invasion woke up the market from a period of relative cooling. Industry sales figures had risen sharply from $213 million in 1954 to $603 in 1959, thanks to the combined success of LPs and rock ’n’ roll. That spurt had leveled off to below $700 million in 1963, suggesting that early sixties teen-pop hadn’t been able to maintain the same public excitement as Elvis. Now, as tens of millions of American teenagers entered their most turbulent years,
Beatlemania
spun the record business faster than ever before.

To this day, the Beatles remain holders of arguably the greatest achievement in pop music: twenty-seven No. 1 singles in America. Behind this extraordinary phenomenon was an unusual kind of record man, more than a studio producer—George Martin. Having joined Parlophone in 1950 and signed the Beatles in 1962, he’s the key eyewitness of the British record industry’s mutation from insular classical to global pop. Needless to say, most of George Martin’s studio exploits have become museum exhibits, especially in Britain, where he is a national hero. For some reason, though, even the British have largely ignored his personal story—a humbling tale of self-becoming that makes the Beatles legend all the more providential.

Despite his gentlemanly mannerisms, George Martin was born, in 1926, on the wrong side of Britain’s class divide. A family of four, the Martins lived in a two-room apartment in Drayton Park—no electricity, no bathroom, no kitchen, no water. His mother cooked on a stove on the landing and gave him baths in a tin tub. One toilet on the ground floor was shared by all three families in the building. Martin senior was a carpenter, a simple craftsman, who in the Great Depression was without any income for eighteen long months until he found a job selling newspapers in Cheapside. In later years, George Martin vividly recalled the sight of his forlorn father standing in the rain at his newsstand. The Martin family, to put it bluntly, barely fit the description of working class.

As a boy, however, George Martin understood he had a special gift. Although there were no musicians in his family and no instruments at home, he began playing on any piano he could find, teaching himself scales, chord progressions, and diminished chords and their inversions. Born with perfect pitch, he could recognize notes and figure out Chopin pieces by ear.

His first quasi-religious awakening occurred at a school concert at which the BBC Symphony Orchestra performed Debussy’s
L’après-midi d’un faune.
Its abstract textures lifted George Martin’s young imagination into the heavens. For the rest of his life, the French piece brought him back to that old school hall where he was first kissed on the head by the gods of music.

Chasing his muse through his teenaged years, he formed his own dance band, the Four Tune Tellers, and reinvested his earnings into classical piano lessons. However, with the outbreak of war and his school’s move to the North of England, he was forced to work as an errand boy in the War Office. At the age of seventeen, in summer 1943, he broke his mother’s heart by joining the naval air force. While training in the South of England, he had his first of several lucky encounters. At the end of a concert in Portsmouth given by a pianist called Eric Harrison, he waited for the crowd to disperse and, when nobody was left in the hall, began playing on the piano. Eventually he felt a presence in the room.

“What was that you were playing?” asked the musician.

“One of the things I’ve been writing myself,” replied Martin with embarrassment.

“Oh, you compose, do you?”

“Well, I try to, though I haven’t had much training.”

“I think you should do something about it,” the musician suggested while writing down the name of a contact at a state-funded music organization called the Committee for the Promotion of New Music.

Throughout these formative years moving from base to base, Martin was teaching himself how to read and write music. Sailing across the Atlantic on a Dutch liner with three thousand German prisoners locked in the hold, he briefly saw the skyscrapers of Manhattan before being dispatched to Trinidad. In the suffocating heat, while being taught how to operate amphibious aircraft, he began writing a Debussy-like symphony. As part of his pilot training, he was taught social etiquette at banquets in the beautiful Painted Hall in Greenwich. During the two-week course, one eccentric officer constantly reminded the trainees that a true gentleman imposes strict hygiene and regularity on his bowel movements. Undisciplined eating habits were the slippery slope to slobbery.

Back in England as the Allies closed in on Berlin, Martin received a three-page letter analyzing the composition he had mailed to the mysterious address. “You must write more of this,” concluded its author, Sidney Harrison, professor of piano at the Guildhall School of Music in London. “Keep sending it to me, and we’ll correspond.” George Martin had found the man he later called his “fairy godfather.”