MOTOWN AT 60
A full-access documentary on Motown’s Detroit years, three books, hit collections – the label’s 60th celebrations heat up.
Six decades on, Berry and Smokey are in extraordinary new doc Hitsville, while Mary Wilson and HollandDozier-Holland tell all in books. We talk to Mary and Hitsville co-director Gabe Turner.
MOTOWN’S 60TH anniversary, first celebrated in MOJO 306, passes its halfway stage with an explosion of goodies, the highlight being Hitsville: The Making Of Motown, a documentary by Ben and Gabe Turner, the brothers behind 2016 Usain Bolt movie I Am Bolt. The supporting cast is mighty, too: a 3-CD Motown Greatest Hits, plus Marvin Gaye and Jackson 5 repackages; books – by producer/ writers Brian and Eddie Holland, Lamont Dozier and Supreme Mary Wilson; events during a Motown 60 Weekend in Detroit in September; and, on November 28, label founder Berry Gordy’s 90th birthday.
“The music is timeless,” says Gabe Turner, “embedded in all of our lives. Songs like What’s Going On and I Heard It Through The Grapevine, any Stevie [Wonder] track and Baby Love, those songs are just there. In films, TV shows, lifts, malls and shopping centres, on the radio, your parents’ records, they’re just in your psyche. Most people probably know 10, 20, 30 Motown songs, without knowing what they are, how they know them.”
Opening up the Motown and Berry Gordy archives gave the Turners an extraordinary cache of material, some of it unseen and unheard, all supported by their own research. A recording of one of the label’s famed Quality Control Meetings, at which staff discussed the week’s releases, sets Hitsville’s tone. “This is serious business,” Gordy says, calling the meeting to order. A later extract, discussing the merits of The Temptations’ My Girl, reveals the sales guys unequivocally saying “hit” while others hesitate. But the documentary’s cement is the on-camera camaraderie between Gordy and Smokey Robinson, the singer, songwriter and producer who became Berry’s first major asset and abiding best friend. They are a terrific double act. “You get a register of what it might have been like, their relationship and friendship, that love,” says Gabe. “You see that first-hand. You’re not interviewing them, you’re just seeing them be them.”
Being black in the USA in the ’50s, Gordy’s first business lesson came as a child selling newspapers on a Detroit street corner. Successful in a black neighbourhood, he ventured onto a white street corner, made even more money, and persuaded a brother to join him. They sold nothing. Lesson: “One black kid is cute,” says Gordy, “two is a threat to the neighbourhood.” If meeting Robinson in the late ’50s would be pivotal, so was his experience on the Ford assembly line, and the Turners construct the film as a series of stages on a production line – Find, Sign, Develop; Writers & Producers; Unlock Potential; A&R; Artist Development and so on – at which we meet all the main characters.
As the film unfolds, business aphorisms – “a single has to grip the attention in the first 10 seconds” – flash by, strongly illustrated by an astonishing number of still-fresh 45s and legendary artists. Meanwhile, the film makes clear the significance of Gordy’s open-mindedness as an employer, a shot of the Motown backroom staff revealing a multiracial line-up with (even by today’s standards) a large number of women, many of whom held key roles at the company. Martin Luther King embraced Motown; the Black Panthers, says Gordy, had a grudgingly ambivalent respect for the label. Others in the black community criticised him for employing whites, but he insisted on giving the role to the person who’d do the best job.
Just as key was Gordy’s background in songwriting. “There weren’t many people running record companies who could write a song like he could,” says Turner. Indeed, it was outside the offices of the manager of his most notable pre-Motown client, Jackie Wilson, that Gordy first met Smokey. “If you’ve got a writer, first and foremost, who’s leading the business, creatively all those people there will feel it’s a great place to be,” Turner adds. “I think it’s Mary Wilson who says, ‘It was like Disneyland.’”
WILSON’S FELLOW Supreme, Diana Ross, is the most notable absence from the ranks of new interviewees in Hitsville, although she is very present in archive footage – up to the moment her success as the lead in the 1972 Billie Holiday biopic, Lady Sings The Blues, hardens Gordy’s determination to move Motown from Detroit to Hollywood. The move had been in the air since the 1967 Detroit riots unsettled the company’s staff.
“Post-’71,” says Turner, “when What’s Going On comes out, there is a shift in terms of what the music is about and where the artists are going and things change in the company and they become a much bigger entertainment conglomerate.” That’s when Hitsville ends. Late in the film, a reflective Gordy readily admits some missteps. He had not been a fan of Norman Whitfield’s
“You’re just seeing them be them.” GABE TURNER HITSVILLE CO-DIRECTOR
‘psychedelic soul’ productions of The Temptations, particularly Cloud Nine, and tried to block Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On album. In archive footage, Gaye describes his “fight for creative freedom”. “I was not right,” Gordy admits today.
Both the Hitsville doc and Mary Wilson’s third book, Supreme Glamour (Thames & Hudson), a hefty publication focusing on the trio’s iconic fashion choices, underline the transformative effect that the sight of The Supremes on US TV’s Ed Sullivan Show in December 27, 1964 had on thousands of young black women, Oprah Winfrey and Whoopi Goldberg notable among them.
“Of course we were aware of it,” says Wilson, sharing a cab with MOJO to the Victoria & Albert Museum where she is to discuss The Supremes’ couture. “We grew up when you couldn’t drink out of a public water fountain or stay in any hotel, so why wouldn’t we understand the significance of now being acceptable worldwide? Every time we walked out the door [as children] our parents would say, ‘Make sure you’re on your best behaviour because you’re representing the black community.’ Being black in those days was not a good thing.
Not just in the South, everywhere.”
At the peak of Motown’s mid-’60s commercial success, The Supremes were a harmonious team: “I thought we were the perfect trio,” says Wilson. “We matched each other, what one didn’t have the other had.” But over-reliance on Diana Ross as the lead voice was a destabilising factor.
“It got to a point where a ballad came along and I would want to sing it and, ‘Oh, I’m not gonna sing that one?’” Wilson recalls. “Not an angry or jealous thing – we had so much love between us. We were trying not to be hurt.”
Eventually, after Florence Ballard was sacked and Ross left, peace-maker Wilson had sung background for so long, she’d almost forgotten how to lead. “I had to re-learn how to sing,” she tells MOJO with a smile.
As senior, and sole, Supreme, Wilson said no when Gordy wanted Syreeta to join. “Syreeta Wright was a great singer, but I also knew she wanted to be a star, a lead singer. I wanted someone to come in and sing, not someone who was trying to be on their own. When I said I didn’t want Syreeta, Berry said, ‘Well, I wash my hands of you.’”
The Supremes’ demise and other contentious schisms, such as the departure of the label’s irreplaceable soul-pop songwriting/production team Holland-Dozier-Holland, are not central to Hitsville’s generally joyous tone. Deeper explanation is to be found in two essential additions to the Motown bookshelf – long-anticipated memoirs by H-D-H, architects of so many hits for The Supremes, The Four Tops and others. In Come And Get These Memories: The Story Of Holland-DozierHolland, Motown’s Incomparable Songwriters by Brian And Eddie Holland With Dave Thompson, elder Holland Eddie explains how unsuccessful negotiations with Gordy for a larger royalty rate for Brian led to H-D-H asking for a label within Motown, like the Soul, VIP or Gordy subsidiaries, which Berry also mentions in the film. He declined, leading H-D-H to walk away. Interestingly, Eddie says he’d written Where Did Our Love Go for Mary Wilson, and campaigned hard for her to sing the lead. Brian and Lamont argued no, which led to Eddie coaxing a Number 1 pop vocal from Ross, the first of many.
The second book is How Sweet It Is: A Songwriter’s Reflections On Music, Motown And The Mystery Of The Muse by Lamont Dozier with Scott Bomar.
Hitsville director Gabe Turner accepts that his telling of Motown’s story, at this particular point in time, can’t help but be polemical.
“What we were trying to do was make a film that showed how incredible this situation was,” he says, “how in this incredible time and place, phenomenal writers, producers and creative people made something that has stood the test of time and influenced world music culture in such a phenomenal way. We were trying to make a really positive, uplifting film.
“I think the world needs to see [films] like this now,” he adds, “because it’s a polarising time and in polarising times you need to see things that unite people in common interest – things that are born out of love and tolerance and respect and beauty and unity. Motown was a beacon of that.”
“Berry said, ‘Well, I wash my hands of you’.” MARY WILSON, THE SUPREMES