Unsung heroes of Motown hits machine

By DAVID USBORNE in DETROIT

Here is an old white Cadillac parked outside 2648 West Grand Boulevard in Detroit when we arrive. Four people are standing at the end of the short path leading to the squat white house. They are looking a bit disconsolate.

Apparently, they have just discovered what we already know - that this being a Monday, the house, nowadays a museum, is closed. All they are able to do is peer though the windows. They throw us an incurious glance, get back in their car and drive away.

They should have hung around a while longer. The tiny museum is better known as "Hitsville USA", the place where for 14 years, between 1958 and 1972, the countless hits of the legendary Motown record company were recorded.

All the big stars did their thing in here - Stevie Wonder, Diana Ross, Smokey Robinson, Marvin Gaye among them - thrilling the world to their special kind of groove. As did this 75-year-old man standing beside me. But how were the Cadillac folks to know that?

The man is Joe Messina, still fit-looking, with thin grey hair and round yellow glasses. For the past three decades he has been managing a chain of car-washes in the city.

As we climb to the porch of the house and look at the display of posters and 45rpm singles in the front window, he allows himself a brief moment of complaint. "You see," he says, pointing to the old photographs of the Supremes and Smokey's Miracles. "We are not there anywhere. Not even today."

In truth, this may be an oversight by the curators of the Motown Museum, because Messina is a Funk Brother. Or, to be more accurate, he was a Funk Brother and now, much to his surprise, he is a Funk Brother all over again.

Arguably, he and his dozen or so fellow band-members had as much (or more) to do with creating that distinctive Motown sound as any of the performers who have been household names in America and around the world for more than a generation. It is just that hardly anyone knew it. Until now.

The Funk Brothers were the session players hired by Berry Gordy, the founder of Motown Inc, to play the backing music on the records of the stars he was cultivating. Take almost any song from your collection (surely you have at least one Motown number) - whether it is I Heard it Through the Grapevine, My Guy, Uptight (Everything's Alright) or Heat Wave - and play it again.

Hear those notes in the background? That is the Funk Brothers. These men made more number one singles than any other group in history. They had more hits, in fact, than the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and the Beach Boys combined. Many more.

These were the Motown sidemen. Some of them went on the road occasionally with the star vocalists in the early days, but mostly they were confined to this little house and to the small garage space at the back that was Studio A or, as the boys themselves used to call it, "the Snakepit".

On some days, they cranked out three or four numbers. And for years they were paid $10 a song. They got no credit on the album covers. They hardly ever saw the stars themselves, who would record their parts on their own. The Funk Brothers were anonymous geniuses.

This is an intriguing enough story in itself. Add to this the fact that Gordy kept these men under contract for all those years because only they were capable of producing the exact sound that made Motown what it was. Nobody else could do it.

Most of the stars like Diana Ross had their own group of instrumentalists when they were on the road, but Berry never let them in the studio to make the records. Now, however, something new and quite inspirational is happening to Messina and his gang. Thirty years on, they are suddenly tasting long-delayed fame. And they are loving it.

It is all down to another musician they call Dr Licks. Licks, whose real name is Allan Slutsky, wrote a book in the 1980s about James Jamerson, a bass guitar player in the Funk Brothers who died in 1983. He called it Standing in the Shadows of Motown. Since its publication Jamerson has belatedly been elevated as one of the greatest musicians of the last century, posthumously inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2000.

In 1990, Licks came up with a new project: a film about all the Funk Brothers. It took 12 years, but the film was finally shot. Standing in the Shadows of Motown, the movie, came out in America last November and promptly received the Best Film of the Year Award (non-fiction) from the National Society of Film Critics.

For the first time the Funk Brothers are basking in the public's attention. They have placed their palms in cement in Hollywood. They sign autographs. They have fans. And, on the strength of it, they have started to play concerts.

From "Hitsville USA", Joe and I drive to a slummy little bar in a mostly black neighbourhood on the southwestern edge of Detroit. The Downriver Lounge is a Motown shrine but it's no place for tourists. A sign on the door politely suggests that we leave all weapons outside. But this reporter is in safe hands.

Joe, who happens also to be white, is known and loved by everyone here. There are newspaper clippings about the film, the Funk Brothers and their sudden return to glory on the wall by the dimly lit pool table.

We are met there by another man, drummer Uriel Jones, also a Funk Brother. Unlike Joe, Uriel did play on the road with some of the stars: with Diana and Marvin and "Little Stevie", and in Britain on a Motown tour in 1964. And he played in this place, "So many hours, I couldn't count." It was in this dingy joint that the Temptations had their first gig. And Uriel, who is 69, played with them.

Before we talk, someone guides me to the jukebox. It is full of Motown singles, naturally. But front and centre in the glass display is the soundtrack from the film. It won "the Funks" two Grammy Awards, for Best Compilation Soundtrack Album and Best Traditional R&B Vocal Performance for a rendition of What's Going On with Chaka Khan.

And so it is with the Funks nowadays. The shadows have well and truly been lifted. In just a few months, they have completed a multi-state tour, playing everywhere from New York to Los Angeles and, of course, Detroit. They have formed a new corporation and are planning many more concerts, both in the US and in Europe. They were invited to the White House to meet President George Bush for an event linked to Black History Month.

Joe and Uriel are dazzled by the spotlight that has suddenly been shone on them. When Licks first came to them with the film idea, neither of them took him seriously.

"I don't think one of us thought it was going to get off the ground," Messina recalls.

"I couldn't really see the point of it." Uriel thought it was just a joke. "When he called me, I just asked how much money," he recalls, digging Joe in the ribs.

Uriel, who seems well in spite of recent bypass surgery, did have one distinct advantage. He had at least kept playing, doing the club circuit in Detroit into the mid-90s.

Poor old Joe, on the other hand, had barely picked up his guitar in 30 years, concentrating instead on his car-wash business. Licks made it clear that for the film they would all have to play together again. All who were still alive that is, which meant eight of the original 12-odd Funks.

Most notable among those who had departed, aside from Jamerson himself, was Benny Benjamin, also a drummer. "Jamerson and Benny Benjamin to me were the fuel of Motown," Uriel remarks. "They had more to do with creating the Motown sound than anyone else."

For the survivors, it was time to pick up their instruments again. But it really wasn't until Licks turned up in Detroit in late 2000 and informed them that they had three weeks of rehearsal to go before the start of shooting that Uriel realised there was no turning back. "All of a sudden he hit us. Bam! What in the hell are we going to do now? I still didn't believe it. I didn't believe it till he got here."

Joe assumed that the entire venture was doomed from the start. "I kept thinking this will never go off, I'm not going to practise. For 30 years, I hadn't been playing." But isn't it rather like getting back on a bicycle?

"No it is not," he replies firmly. "I thought it would be, but my fingers were sore and co-ordination was off. I was just a total wreck. Every day was a scuffle."

Their scepticism, in fact, was ingrained, dating from way before Licks came on the scene. Even back in the 1960s, when Joe and Uriel and the others were turning up sometimes seven days a week at "Hitsville USA" to churn out those hits, they never had much faith in Motown itself.

Joe considered it the least important of his three jobs - the others were as a staff orchestra player at a Detroit TV station and working with a company making jingles for commercials. And Uriel, in common with most of the guys in the band, was far more interested in jazz.

"We didn't know what was going on on the radio, because when we listened to it, we were listening to the jazz stations," Uriel notes. "It didn't matter. It wasn't hitting us."

For years they were barely aware of the impact that the Motown sound was starting to have.

"The Motown people would come into the studio sometimes and say, 'Hey, we're number one.' And we would say, 'Okay, so what!"' recalls Joe. If you ask these men today exactly how many number one singles they played on, they cannot give you an answer. They really don't have a clue.

But they didn't complain. They got decent money that got more decent as Motown grew. (Motown Inc by the end of the 60s was the richest black-owned company in the world.) And if the public didn't appreciate them, the stars did.

In fact, according to Uriel, they held them in awe. "When we were playing clubs in the evening, mostly all the big-time entertainers, when they were staying in town, they would find out the club where we were playing and that's where they would go. They used to follow us. We didn't feel like we was left out. They looked up to us."

And more than that, stars lucky enough to tour with some of the Brothers often came to them for help. Like Diana Ross. "She would come to the musicians and say, 'How do I do this, how do I do that?' If she turned to anyone for advice it was the musicians. They were kids, you know. Most of them were much younger than we were. So it was more like everybody was on the same level."

Still, they have to admit that the film and its effect on audiences have opened their eyes a bit, even if it is three decades too late. Back then, they never craved celebrity, but they never fully understood how indispensable they were to Gordy either. "You know, when we recorded, it was just a job," muses Joe. "We got paid for doing a job and the money was compensation enough. We had no idea this was going to happen!" And if they had? "Had we known then what we know now, we'd all be rich," replies Uriel with a chuckle. "We all lived good lives, we lived the lives we wanted, sent our kids to school and stuff. But, had we known, we'd have been much better off."

How are they enjoying their belated stardom? Joe tries to keep his tired feet on the ground. He suggested to his wife that they place each of the pair of Grammies in the two bathrooms in their home, but she wasn't impressed. "It was exciting to have them there at first, but really only for 15 minutes."

As for his meeting with President Bush, it didn't go especially well. "I said, 'Hello Mr President', but he didn't say a word. Not a single word. I think maybe it was because no one had written him a script. It was kind of rude, don't you think? Maybe he was surprised because I was white. He did look sort of startled."

"I don't know what to think. I figure we deserve it," is Uriel's response. The best thing, he says, has been the rediscovery of the bonds between the Funks, musically and personally. They have found that they can play together again and that they still get along. "It seemed like you got something and you use it for so long and then it comes to an end. But you take it and freeze it and put it in storage. When you thaw it, it starts right back where it was. When we got back together, we didn't think we would get that sound. But when we started rehearsing we saw that it started coming on. We can play that stuff."

The only sadness is that not everyone has won the fight against time. Among others already gone, aside from Jamerson and Benjamin, is Earl Van Dyke, a keyboard player who was informally considered the leader of the band. Worse still, two of the Brothers who appear in the film - Johnny Griffith (keyboards) and Richard "Pistol Allen" (drums) - have since died.

On top of the film's success has been the warm reception audiences have given the Brothers as they have toured, bringing with them guest vocalists including Joan Osborne, Bootsy Collins and Maxi Priest. And it is not just older fans who come, but young people too. In April, they brought the house down at the Opera House in Detroit, a city they feared more than any other, precisely because it is the cradle of Motown.

"The performance," wrote a critic in the Detroit Free Press, "was loose around the edges - the old fingers aren't as nimble anymore, wrists don't snap as quickly - but the magic was intact." He added, less kindly, that they looked like "grateful old-timers new to the fame game".

What can you call this phenomenon? Is it a revival when the artists in question were never famous in the first place? To understand how extraordinary their story is, consider this: Joe Messina had never toured before in his life. In other words, the first time he climbed on to a stage he was already 75 years old. That makes the Rolling Stones seem young. April, with three weeks on a bus crisscrossing the country non-stop, was gruelling, he admits. "Oh, we had a rough time, because I am not used to travelling."

How long, I ask him, can the Funk Brothers keep it up before they fade back into their own, now thoroughly updated, history? "Maybe a year, a year and a-half," he answers. "But not much longer."

- INDEPENDENT

* Standing in the Shadows of Motown is released on Thursday.