THANK YOU MR GORDY, FOR THE MUSIC

On a chilly night back in January 1959, a small, single- engine aircraft carrying three young musicians and a 21-year-old pilot picked off at an airstrip in Clear Lake in Iowa, US. It was doomed. The world wept. The global media went into a wild frenzy, calling the tragedy The End of Music. The bodies of Ricky Valence, Buddy Holly and J.P “Big Bopper” Richardson - three musicians rated among the greatest of their era – were discovered in the mangled wreck of steel and fumes of smouldering rubber. Seventeen-year-old Valence was Rock. Check his most successful recording, La Bamba, and you’ll get the drift. Holly himself was a musical phenomenon. And so was Big Booper. But heck, no. 1959, as things eventually turned out, was actually a good year for music. It was a year that heralded the Rebirth of Music. It was the year that saw the birth of Motown Records, a label that changed the face of popular music forever. It took one manwith a single-minded determination and the will to succeed. Berry Gordy was born in Detroit, Michigan, in a middle class family of professionals and merchants. From an early age his parents instilled discipline, hard work and self-reliance in young Berry. Finishing school in Grade 11, he pursued the Sport of the Gods, becoming a professional boxer, training and sharing bills with the masters of the leather, notably the Brown Bomber himself, the legendary Joe Louis. His career was cut short when he went to fi ght in Korea. On his return, he opened a jazz store that didn’t do as much as he would have liked.

Detroit was known as the Motor City and it was natural for Gordy to seek work at the auto-industry assembly lines while still fi guring a way out. A year or so later, he quit the job and started a series of small independent labels before one of his artists, Smokey Robinson, advised him to start Motown. Like most experiences in his life, Gordy imported the principles of car manufacturing assembly lines and turned them into the Motown culture and became the country’s Tao. “He took poor black kids from the streets of Detroit and taught them to talk, walk and dress as successful debutantes and debonair gentlemen,” according to one biographer. You might wear greasy work clothes at the assembly lines, but the end product must be a sleek shiny product the world would love. His musicians were his products. For the Supremes especially, he practised used auto factories methods to perfection. He assembled parts of a hit making machine that included standardised song-writing, an in-house rhythm section, a quality control process, selective promotion and a family atmosphere long perfected by Henry Ford. He then went on to call his music The Sound of Young America. He was right, considering that many of his artists first came knocking when they were very young, the likes of Diana Ross, Stevie Wonder and Michael Jackson. The line-up alone gives one the goose bumps. It included Marvin Gaye, Smokey Robinson, the Jackson 5, The Temptations, Isley Brothers, Lionel Richie, Rick James and Gladys Knight and The Pips. By the way, that is just creaming from the top. Talent alone doesn’t make one a hitmaker. Gordy hired the songwriting team of Brian Holland, Lamont Dozier and Eddie Holland in 1962. They were actually the people who invented the Sound of Young America. Always looking to be top of the heap, he had, by January 1959 established a stable of local talent. The stable was not called the Sound of Young America for nothing. Pop song, Shop Around, by Smokey and the Miracles, released in 1960, was Motown’s first smash hit. On the other side of town, there was a girl band, a duet called the Primettes, a backing band for the Primes. The trio was made of two sixteen-year-old teenyboppers named Florence Ballard and Mary Wilson.

They later became a trio when Betty Travis joined. When they wanted the fourth member, a young girl barely out of her puberty named Diana Ross came long. As fate would have it, Ross, who grew from Detroit’s Brewster Housing project, happened to be Smokey Robinson’s neighbour. The foursome auditioned for Smokey in the basement of the home of his girlfriend. Smokey was not overly impressed. The girls went knocking back to Motown. This time, Gordy relented and let them do There Goes My Baby, originally performed by The Drifters. They had not cracked it though. Gordy considered them too young, a sort of child labour, sent them packing with the words, “Come back after you have completed high school.” They never returned to class. In January 1961 Gordy signed them, but required them to change their name to the Supremes. Both Wilson and Ross initially disliked the name. Gordy overruled them. The Supremes’ fi rst single, issued on the Tampa label in April 1961, was I Want a Guy and the second was an R&B dance tune, Buttered Popcorn, with Ballard in the lead. By the fall of 1964, the Supremes had released eight singles with none even making the Top 20 and they were downgraded to singing background vocals and doing handclaps for Marvin Gaye. Things were going so badly that in the middle of 1962 Ross took a job in a department store in Detroit and Martin left to get married. Let it be said at this stage – Ballard, Wilson, and Ross could all sing lead, but Ballard’s voice was considered the best and most powerful. “Florence had a very strong gospel voice, and she was the original lead singer.

When the group came to Motown it was Flo’s group. She had formed it and named it”, a contemporary once remarked. Be that as it may, Ross, a scheming and overly ambitious songbird began chirping at the power to become the most supreme of the Supremes. She even went the ultimate route to get what she wanted…Berry Gordy was considered something of a ladies’ man. Despite the fact that he was married to a wife who bore him four children, he was, like most rich and powerful men, a philanderer and a heartbreaker. Being the boss’ baby propelled Diana to the top of the Supremes. A song, Where Did Our Love Go, immediately reached #1 on the charts, changing their fortunes overnight. Their songs were fl ying directly onto the stratosphere. In a matter of weeks the Supremes went from no billing to top billing. One of their major hits, Baby Love, followed in September 1964 and reached #1 on R&B and Pop charts in the U.K. With Baby Love the Supremes became the first all-girl group to reach number one in England. The Supremes also became the first American group to have three Number Ones from the same album when Come See About Me reached the top of the charts. With “Stop! In the Name of Love,” the Supremes became the first group to have four Number Ones in a row on the Billboard Hot 100. But while the Supremes were the Queens of Motown, so was Marvin Gaye the King. In fact, the Supremes, Gaye, Robinson, Stevie Wonder and later, Michael Jackson, were the royalty of Gordy’s empire. Rolling Stone magazine once described the young Michael as “a prodigy” with “overwhelming musical gifts”.

A founder member of the Jackson Five, he has spent almost his entire life on the spotlight. From early on, his dance moves where modelled around James Brown’s, portraying self-confi dence on stage that was out of sync with his shy and very private personality. The Jackson Five were delivered to Motown by another stable legend, Gladys Knight. They signed for the label in 1968 before Michael could even celebrate his tenth birthday. Some of the group’ successful early releases include I Want you Back, ABC and I’ll Be There. In 1970 a rival studio MGM Records launched the Osmonds to take on the Jackson Five, singling out their 13-yearold Donny Osmond for a solo career. This was a direct challenge to Michael Jackson who was then the lead singer in their group. Motown replied in kind. Michael Jackson’s fi rst release as a solo performer was the aching ballad, Got To Be There, a major trans-Atlantic hit. Rockin’ Robin, a revival of Rock ‘n’ Roller Bobby went to number 2 on the US charts. That was in 1972, while the sentimental film theme Ben topped the charts later in the year. Motown capitalised on Jackson’s popularity with a series of hurried albums, which mixed material angled towards the teenage market with a selection of the label’s standards. He re-entered the public eye with a starring role in the film musical The Wiz, collaborating on the soundtrack album with Quincy Jones. Their partnership was renewed in 1979 when Jones produced Off The Wall, a hugely successful collection of contemporary soul material that introduced the world to the adult Michael Jackson.

The album topped the charts in the USA and UK, and contained two US number 1 singles, Don’t Stop ‘Till You Get Enough (for which Jackson won a Grammy Award) and Rock With You. Despite this global success and adoration, he was increasingly portrayed as a fi gure trapped in an eternal childhood, surrounded by toys and pet animals, and insulated from the traumas of the real world. In 1982, Thriller, Jackson’s second album with Quincy Jones, was released, and went on to become one of the most commercially successful albums of all time. Michael Jackson is still regarded as the greatest entertainer of all time. There have been allegations of child abuse along the way. And he has been ridiculed for a series of plastic surgeries that has disfigured his once handsome African features. But all that cannot take away from his contribution to the history of pop music. But to understand that power, packed in a brittle and almost emaciated body, go no further than an award-winning South African photographer. Sometime in the eighties rumour circulated that Michael would be doing his last public gig at New York’s Madison Square Garden before bowing out of the public eye forever. Years later, photojournalist Thomas Khosa would tell a story I wouldn’t tell anybody had it happened to me. You see, a number of South African newspapers clubbed together to send Khosa to New York to capture that moment in history when the King of Pop was to close the curtains of an illustrious
career.

A jazz fanatic, pop was something he didn’t really care about. But then along came Jackson and Khosa didn’t know what hit him. “For almost an hour, I stood there, hypnotised by the sheer brilliance of the performance.” When it was all over and Michael retreated backstage, Khosa only recalled his reason for being there. He stooped to pick up his camera. But it was all over. To chronicle the history of Motown would fi ll tomes. But even with space constraints, it would be criminal to leave out Marvin Gaye. To paraphrase Gaye’s life is to look at his infl uence in popular culture before and after his tragic death in the hands of his own father. Rock group, Spandau Ballet’s 1983 breakthrough single features the line, ‘Listening to Marvin all night long’. Together with his daughter, Nona Gaye, he features in the novel, Just a Baby, by Dell Black. In Stephen King’s horror novel, The Dark Tower 111: The Waste Lands, Jake’s father has a Marvin Gaye picture hanging in his study. In Tupac’s hit song, Keep Head Up, the rapper sings, “I remember Marvin Gaye used to sing to me/ he had me feeling like black was the thing to be...” In the song, Horst Du Mich? a German hip hop band Fettes Brot, the fi rst song is dedicated to Gaye. But then we can go on and on…His personal musical body of work at Motown is stuff of true legends. His early success was between the years 1962 and 1966.

Before then, he was just an addition for The Moonglows during his days as sideman and drummer for Motown. His fi rst major success came between 1970 and 1972 when he recorded monster hits like I Heard It Through the Grapevine. Then followed songs that became the soundtracks for a generation – What’s Going On? and Sexual Healing. When he left Motown in 1981 that was in effect the end of an era. From 1967 the Berry Gordy empire had started a slow decline. It was a sad time for the Motown family. Up to that stage the company was grossing millions a year, had spewed out 14 number one pop singles, 66 #1 singles on the R&B charts and Top 15 R&B singles. In 1966 alone, 75 of Motown releases made the charts. The decline was preceded by unfortunate incidents. First, Gordy fi red Ballard days before a big scheduled Supremes performance, alleging that she was jealous of Ross. Then he fi red David Ruffi n of The Temptations. He then quarrelled over royalties with pillars of Motown songwriting team of Holland-Dozier-Holland. They quit and filed a suit against Motown. More defections followed.Martha Reeves left, so did Gladys Knight and The Pips. In 1975 the Jackson Five went to Epic. Michael followed three years later. The Miracles, without Smokey, defected to Columbia. The Temptations opted for Atlantic. A dream had run its course. In the eighties, Gordy sold the baby he sired. Happy 50th anniversary Motown! And thanks Mr Gordy for the music.

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