Posted on Mon, May. 12, 2003
Berry Gordy's incredible ride to music's top
Motown founder began with $800
RON CHEPESIUK
Special to The Observer
MOTOWN: Music, Money, Sex
and Power
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By Gerald L. Posner. Random House. 256 pages. $25.95.
In 1959 Berry Gordy was a 29-year old dreamer going nowhere in life when he decided to start a record company. It looked like another losing venture for the would-be entrepreneur.
A dilapidated house in a run-down district of Detroit was an unlikely setting for a place that Gordy dubbed Hitsville. Gordy's closely-knit family had its doubts about the venture, but loaned him $800 anyway to get it started.
A lawyer acquaintance warned Gordy that his fledgling company was under-capitalized and doomed to failure. In the late 1950s, the American music industry was segregated and dominated by a few large companies. Gordy was an African American, a minnow who would have to swim among the sharks.
Yet, such is the stuff from which the American Dream is attained. Gordy named his company Motown -- a play on Detroit's nickname of Motor City -- worked hard, and clawed his way to fame and fortune. Today, he is an American legend, and there isn't a better known recording company in pop music history.
Investigative reporter Gerald Posner, author of the best-selling "Case Closed: Lee Harvey Oswald and the Assassination of JFK," gives us a fascinating and absorbing inside look at the turbulent history of Motown, and the many artists and legends in their own right. The list included Smokey Robinson, The Four Tops, Marvin Gaye, Diana Ross and the Supremes, The Temptations, Stevie Wonder and Michael Jackson, among many others who made the recording company phenomenally successful.
Posner concedes that researching the book, which took four years to complete, wasn't easy. As the subtitle of the book indicates, Motown was as much about money, sex and power as it was about music, and Motown's legacy is still dominated by jealousies, grudges and bitter rivalries.
Almost every major Motown artist eventually took Gordy to court. That's because he was able to sweet-talk entertainers into signing long-term contracts without having a lawyer to review it. One day the stunned artists awoke to find out they were out thousands of dollars, if not millions, that could have been theirs if they had paid more attention to legal details.
The Temptations did get a lawyer recommended by friends, but he knew nothing about entertainment law. It's a standard contract, so go ahead and sign it, the lawyer advised the group. Later Temptations singer, Otis Williams, lamented, "What he (the lawyer) didn't know would haunt us for years."Gordy repeatedly refused Posner's request to be interviewed. Two of Motown's luminaries asked for money. All of them wanted the right to review the author's manuscript prior to publication or to veto what he wanted to use from their interview. Two dozen sources spoke on condition of anonymity.
The records crammed in the vintage model file cabinets housed in Detroit's Wayne County courthouse turned out to be the author's most important source of information. Twenty of the file cabinets were stuffed with records from lawsuits involving Gordy versus the Holland brothers and Lamont Dozier, Motown's most successful song writing team, which eventually left Motown to strike out on its own.
Gordy has been portrayed as the American music industry's devil incarnate, sleazy and cutthroat, but Posner's research shows that he was a complex individual, who had good as well as bad qualities. He was devoted to his immediate family. Forty years later, he still maintains a brother-like relationship with Smokey Robinson. And despite the gossip, Gordy really did care for Diana Ross, even though their long affair ended badly.
Gordy was color blind when it came to hiring. Motown's sales department, for instance, was mostly white, and whites held many key executive positions during the company's long history.
As for the faults, "Gordy was obsessive about gambling on anything," Posner says. But "Motown" is not a hatchet job. The author lays to rest the long standing suspicion that the mafia took control of Motown after Gordy crossed some shady and dangerous characters to whom he owed money because of his gambling.
In the beginning, the Motown atmosphere was like family, but by the 1970s sex, drugs, greed, egos and in-fighting, not business, began to dominate the company's affairs.
It was painful for Gordy to watch his incredible ride to the top of the music world come to a slow, excruciating end. In the 1980s and 1990s, the hit songs were hard to come by, and most of the stars who had made Motown a musical dynasty were long gone. Even Gordy's pal Smokey left in 1991.
A burned-out Gordy began to sell off parts of Motown, as well as its fabulous catalog of songs. In 1998 Universal, Motown's new owners, decided that "Motown" was a brand name worth keeping, and it launched a new subsidiary, Universal/Motown.
The label's artist roster included names like Erykah Badu and Chico Debarge, who were not familiar to many longtime Motown fans, but Universal knew what it was doing. At the turn of the 20th century, a Harvard Business School study found that Motown, along with Playboy and Disney, were the world's three most recognized American brand names.
Posner's excellent chronicle is highly recommended for those who want a good look at the story behind the incomparable Motown sound.
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Ron Chepesiuk is currently in Bangladesh working as a Fulbright Scholar and Visiting Professor of Journalism at Chittagong University. His 18th book, "The Bullet or the Bribe; The Inside Story of Colombia's Cali Cartel and Law Enforcement's Biggest Takedown," will be published this fall.
Courtesy of The Charlotte Observer
www.charlotte.com/mld/observer/news/5840367.htm
. The quote highlighted by Jonel, for instance (about the Temptations and a lawyer) is straight out of Otis's book, which I'm re-reading (because it is now officially signed by the author! :laughing: )