KEY POINTS:
"This was it," says Smokey Robinson, with his arms open and a shrug that suggests he still finds it slightly unbelievable, himself. "People who think about the music that came out of here would think that this place was huge. Think it was this huge recording studio where we had all these people ... but everyone was crammed in here ... and we were making music, we were jamming."
"It" is the converted garage of a small frame house at 2648 West Grand Boulevard, Detroit, Michigan. Detroit being the home of the automobile, it's only appropriate that this story should revolve around a garage. This is the Motor City, and the house, christened Hitsville USA, is the birthplace of Motown Records. The garage at the rear is Studio A, one of the most revered recording studios in history. It was in this room that Barrett Strong, on Motown's first national hit, declared "Money (That's What I Want)", where Smokey Robinson cried his "Tears of a Clown", the Four Tops promised "Reach Out, I'll Be There", Martha Reeves and the Vandellas sent a call out around the world, asking "are you ready for a brand new beat?" and Diana Ross and the Supremes demanded "Stop! In the Name of Love".
It was within these four walls that little Stevie Wonder recorded his first songs and, later, as the 60s faded, Marvin Gaye asked "What's Going On?" Between 1961 and 1971, Motown had a staggering 110 Top 10 hits in the US, more than half of which were million-sellers, and most of them were recorded in this converted garage, barely big enough to house a Lincoln Continental. Motown is about to celebrate its 50th anniversary - the label was founded by Berry Gordy Jr as Tamla Records on January 12, 1959, then incorporated as the Motown Record Corporation in 1960.
Downstairs in Hitsville is the reception area, the control room and Studio A. Upstairs was originally the living quarters for Gordy and his family, before Motown's success allowed them to move out into a home of their own. The building remains much as it was in its heyday. Smokey, now 68 and based in LA and Las Vegas, hasn't been back for a couple of years himself. "This is a very spiritual room for me," he explains. "There's a lot of energy. So many things happened in here ..." Does it really feel like 50 years, I ask.
"No, it doesn't, it doesn't seem like 50 years. [They] have gone by in an instant; like that," says Smokey, clicking his fingers. "It just seems like yesterday that this stuff was going on, when Berry Gordy first came and saw this house and envisaged this garage being a studio.
"I always relate it to when I was a kid - I would be watching television and I would see Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin and Sammy Davis and those guys and they would say 'Oh man, we've been doing this for 20 years' and I'd think, 'God, how can someone have been doing something for 20 years?' But I see now, because 50 years have gone by, like that." He clicks his fingers again.
"Just overnight, you know ... 50 years ... God, that's half a century." That half a century covers an extraordinary tale of love and loss - the remarkable dream of one man and the creation of a label that produced an unrivalled succession of hits, and the desperate decline of the city that was once at the heart of the American dream. It was 1913 when Henry Ford pioneered the use of a moving assembly line for mass production at his factory in the Highland Park district, then on the northern fringes of the city, and by the 1920s Detroit had already been christened the Motor City.
The promise of employment in the car plants meant that Detroit overtook Chicago as the favoured destination for black families migrating from the South, and the city's population swelled to over two million, making it the fourth biggest city in America. By the 1950s, 80 per cent of the world's cars were built in America, and most of those in Detroit. The city was the manufacturing centre of the America, and thus the world.
Born in 1929 in Detroit - his parents had migrated north from Georgia - by the mid-50s Berry Gordy Jr, the seventh of eight children, was still searching for his way in life. Having dropped out of high school, he attempted to make it as a professional boxer before being drafted for the war in Korea. Back in Detroit, in 1953, he married Thelma Gorman and decided to pursue a career in music.
In a rare interview in 1984 - the 78-year-old isn't giving any to coincide with Motown's 50th anniversary, although he has been working on a documentary which should surface next year - Gordy told the Los Angeles Times how seeing an advert for a battle of the bands when he was in a Detroit gym gave him a wake-up call. He noticed the stark juxtaposition of "young fighters who were 23 but looked like 50, all scarred and beat-up ... then I saw the musicians who were 50 and they looked 23".
After the failure of his first musical venture, the 3-D Record Mart store, Gordy was forced to find work on the Lincoln-Mercury production line of the Ford plant to support his family. Now writing songs, he was introduced to the R 'n' B singer Jackie Wilson, a fellow ex-boxer, who recorded one of Gordy's compositions Reet Petite, then several more over the next couple of years.
Gordy, however, became quickly disillusioned with the industry when he realised the labels in Chicago and New York distributing these songs were the ones making serious dollars. In the offices of Wilson's manager one day, Gordy met the Matadors, fronted by a 16-year-old with sparkling green eyes and light skin called William "Smokey" Robinson. Gordy persuaded the group to change their name to the Miracles and on Robinson's 18th birthday, their first single Got a Job, written and produced by Gordy, was released on New York's End Records. Gordy began to dream of building his own label, an equivalent to Ford's assembly lines, a hit factory. It was Smokey who persuaded Gordy that he needed to stop leasing records, and go national himself.
"We recorded this record, the Miracles and me, called Way Over There and it broke out really big here in Detroit and so we re-recorded it and put violins on it and I just told him: 'We might as well take this record national. Nobody's paying us anyway so we might as well take the chance on doing it ourselves.' So that's what we did." Spurred on by Smokey, and his sisters Gwen and Anna Gordy, who had already started Anna Records with Billy Davis, Gordy borrowed $800 from his family and started the label in January 1959.
"On the very first day, when Berry decided to start Motown, he sat down and said, 'Hey, you guys, I wanted to tell you something: we are not going to make black music, we're going to make world music, we're going to make music for everybody. We're going to make great music, we're going to have some great stories, make some great beats' - and that's what we set out to do," Smokey recalls. Though Gordy's ambition always stretched much further than Detroit city limits - the label called itself "the sound of young America" - he still wanted its name to show its roots.
"Detroit was known as 'The Motor City'," says Smokey. "Berry wanted to name the label something that sounded familiar. First, he was going to call it 'Mocity' but he decided that 'town' was more homely, more family-sounding, so he called it 'Motown'. In his determination to build a hit factory, Gordy employed various songwriters. The best known were Holland-Dozier-Holland, aka Laurent Dozier and brothers Brian and Eddie Holland. Other notables included Norman Whitfield, William "Mickey" Stevenson and Smokey himself, whom Gordy made vice-president. The producers' mantra was "KISS" - keep it simple, stupid. Most of the records were also recorded with the same studio session musicians - a tight-knit group known as the Funk Brothers.
The 2002 documentary Standing in the Shadows of Motown claimed that in 14 years, they "played on more No.1 hits than the Beach Boys, the Rolling Stones, Elvis and the Beatles combined". Gordy now had the hit factory that he had dreamed of. He introduced weekly quality control meetings to ensure a consistent procession of hits. "We had Monday morning meetings, they started at 9 o'clock, and at 9 o'clock and five seconds you were locked out," says Smokey. "You had to be there at 9 o'clock in order to get your stuff heard.
All the creative people were in those meetings, the writers, the producers. We would play our stuff for each other, critique each other's stuff and make suggestions on each other's stuff to make it better. We were very competitive but we still pulled for each other to be creatively strong." Several timeless tracks - including Marvin Gaye's Heard it Through the Grapevine - were initially rejected by Gordy. "Absolutely," confirms Smokey. "Many of the tracks were sent back and re-worked, and re-worked, until they became the hits that they became." The label was a strong and highly visible example of black empowerment when the civil rights movement was gathering pace.
In her 1999 book, Dancing in the Street, Suzanne Smith points out that Gordy was "extremely wary about affiliating his business with any organisation or movement that might negatively influence his company's commercial success". What Gordy cared about was record sales. "Nevertheless," Smith adds, "both Motown's music and its entrepreneurial acumen emerged from an urban black community that regularly asserted its 'politics' through cultural and economic means."
In other words, the success of the black-owned Motown was a powerful statement in itself. Gordy may have been wary about Motown becoming overly politicised, but the label decided to release its first spoken-word recording in August 1963: a recording of Martin Luther King's speech at the Great March to Freedom in June that year. King declared the Detroit march "the largest and greatest demonstration for freedom ever held in the United States", and his speech that day included an early version of his "I Have a Dream" oration.
The record was deliberately released on August 28, the same day King appeared at the March on Washington, and Gordy spoke of how "the Negro revolt of 1963 will take its place historically with the American Revolution" and how "this album belongs in the home of every American and should be required listening for every American child, white or black". "There is no way that you could be a black person in the United States in the 60s and not be affected," says Smokey, when I ask him about the civil rights movement.
"Dr Martin Luther King came to visit us here at Motown. He was such a dynamic, incredible person. "We all experienced it [racism]. We'd go to the South and we'd be shot at and run out of places and all kinds of stuff just for being black. But the music transcended all of that. We'd go to the South and, at first, even though the white kids would have our music, the audiences would be separated: white people on one side, black people on the other side; white people upstairs, black people downstairs or vice-versa, no mingling or any of that.
After the music became so popular a year or two later we'd go to the same places and the black and white kids would be together and they'd be dancing, having a good time, singing, holding hands and mingling and talking. The music bridged a lot of gaps." In the early years, Motown was as much a family as a record label. Several of Gordy's own family worked within the company, and in the early days half the artists and groups were thrown together in one bus when they went on the road as the Motown Revue.
Remarkably, three secretaries at Motown - Janie Bradford, Martha Reeves and Diana Ross - went on to be stars. "When people talk about the Motown family, people think, 'That's mythical, they couldn't possibly have been like that,' but it wasn't and it isn't mythical." "When we first got here we could feel the difference right away; we was family," explains the Four Tops' Abdul "Duke" Fakir.
"On another label you just went and in and did a session and you were out, you didn't meet other artists. But [at Motown] you were talking to the Supremes, the Temptations, the Miracles and you were having fun, and you felt like you were part of something. And you knew that they were on their way."
The Four Tops went on to be Motown's longest standing group, keeping the same line-up for more than four decades. Levi Stubbs died shortly after I met Fakir, who is now the only surviving member.
Most of Motown's output still sounds fresh and vibrant today, but the Motor City itself hasn't aged quite as well. By the early 60s, the city and its car industry were already in decline. The population drain from American inner cities which began after the Second World War was already more pronounced in Detroit than elsewhere.
The city had suffered race riots in 1863 and 1943 but the 12th Street riot in 1967, which ignited after a raid on a speakeasy, grew into the biggest riot in modern American history, lasting five days and leaving 43 dead, with 7200 arrests and 2000 buildings burned down. This hastened the "white flight", many of whom fled a lot further than the suburbs. Over the next two decades the population of Detroit halved to around 900,000, leaving swaths of the inner city derelict and desolate.
As Detroit entered these desperate times, Gordy made the decision, in 1972, to uproot Motown to the sunshine of the West Coast, a devastating blow to Detroit's already crumbling civic pride. The reclusive Gordy had increasingly spent time in Los Angeles and Las Vegas, and decided that Motown needed to branch out and become an entertainment company, and in order to do that it needed to be in LA. "I was the biggest protester about us moving," stresses Smokey. "I was born here in Detroit.
Motown was born here in Detroit and I told Berry this. I explained all of this to him: 'Berry, this is our roots, we started here' and he explained to me that he wanted to become a record complex. He said we could stay in Detroit and be a record company but LA is where entertainment is centralised. I bought him books on earthquakes and smog and everything you can think of, trying to get him not to move, but finally he said, 'Look, you're vice-president of the company, get your family, come on out here because you've got to' and so I moved out there." Not everyone followed.
Several artists including the Four Tops, Gladys Knight & the Pips, Martha Reeves and the Funk Brothers either remained in Detroit or left Motown for other reasons. "It left a hole in Detroit, absolutely," says Fakir. "People still don't understand why he left. I understand, because he was looking for bigger things and Hollywood is where everything happens. But I always felt you should leave at least the foundation of what you started here. Just like Ford. He didn't need to leave Detroit to be a global industry giant." To drive around Detroit - and really, you need to drive - is to pass block after block of untended wasteland and forlorn shells of buildings, many of which have stood empty for decades, the halving of the city's population reducing the need for refurbishment or regeneration.
Many rows of buildings look like the front teeth of an old bluesman - for every one still standing true, there are two missing and two askew. Driving up Woodward Avenue, one of the main arteries leading northwards from downtown, a flickering sign outside the Little Rock Baptist Church meekly suggests "Give thanks ... it could be worse".
The Queen of Motown is Martha Reeves. If one image sums up Motown, it's that of Martha and the Vandellas filmed on the production line at Ford, miming to Dancing in the Street from the back of a Mustang. Reeves is now a city councillor, and we meet in her office at City Hall, looking out over the Detroit river towards Canada.
The walls are adorned with certificates and pictures of herself with Bruce Springsteen, who invited her on stage to sing Dancing in the Street when he played Detroit. She exudes civic pride and is keen to cement Motown's legacy. After winning a council seat in 2005 she successfully campaigned to have West Grand Boulevard changed to Berry Gordy Jr Boulevard and is now planning to have statues of Motown greats erected downtown.
"The city struggled because it was deserted," she admits, before adding bullishly: "But Detroit is on the rebound. We're working diligently to get the city moving again and I see it happening." After leaving Reeves, I meet Gloria Jones at the Foxtown Grille. Jones was coined the "queen of northern soul" after her 1965 classic Tainted Love, later covered by Soft Cell. She joined Motown in 1968 as a singer and songwriter, penning songs for Gladys Knight, the Four Tops and the Jackson Five. She was a backing singer for T. Rex and had a son, Rolan, with Marc Bolan. She was driving the car on the day of Bolan's fatal crash.
"At Motown, we were writing 10 songs a day, and good songs," she recalls, "because we had all these fantastic artists to write for. Mr Gordy stressed to us to write a standard and we were so young, we were like, 'What's a standard?' and he said, 'A song that someone like Frank Sinatra would cover 50 years later', which was such fantastic advice. Which is why I'm still getting royalties from songs I wrote 30 years ago."
Many of the Motown artists are still performing, in Detroit's clubs, cabarets and casinos. One night I drive out to the suburbs to meet Joe Billingslea from the Contours, at the home of fellow band member Charles "Chuck" Davis. The Contours signed to Motown in 1960 and scored a hit with the Berry Gordy-penned Do You Love Me?, which later featured in Dirty Dancing, before leaving Motown over a disagreement about money.
Billingslea was then on the production line at Chrysler for four years, before joining the police. He got the Contours back together in 1971 and has been performing ever since. "I remember Stevie Wonder running around the studio," he says. "He'd be running and then stop right before hitting a wall. I said,'That guy can see, who you fooling?' Stevie has always been a nice guy, but, to me, the icon of Motown is Smokey Robinson. He is still the same guy I met back in '59. Smokey's just a nice guy."
Despite the bullish statements of Martha Reeves, Detroit's plight has worsened. The credit crunch has bitten GM and Ford, with car sales plunging and warnings that even the biggest automobile firms could face bankruptcy. The situation could hardly be bleaker for what is left of Detroit's car industry. "I can't think of a worse scenario short of a war in America," declared veteran industry analyst John Casesa. "But maybe that would be better because we would need tanks from Detroit." I stop off at the Henry J. Ford museum.
Built on a scale only Americans understand, its exhibits include the Lincoln in which President Kennedy was shot, built by Ford here in Dearborn. I find myself drawn to the part of the museum that depicts the late 1950s, that golden age of car design and the American dream. All the imagery suggests that Detroit and Michigan must have felt like the centre of the world, a place of endless possibilities. The comparison with modern, post-industrial ghost town Detroit could not be more stark.
The words of Marvin Gaye - originally Motown's fourth-choice drummer, who became one of its greatest stars - come to mind. "Detroit turned out to be heaven," said Gaye, "but it also turned out to be hell."
- OBSERVER
* For full details of Motown's anniversary releases see www.motown50.com
