The Supremes: A Saga of Motown Dreams, Success, and Betrayal (13 page)

“Wow, this is great!” was his excited reaction. “We sure can use it.” If indeed Berry Gordy was a common street pimp, it mattered not a whit to the hopelessly hooked Liles—yet another example of his irresistible good/bad-but-not-evil charm. Within a year, they married and, after first suffering a miscarriage, became parents of a son.

In late 1958, Gordy, looking ahead to a self-sustaining font of royalties from songs written under his aegis, formed a publishing company called Jobete, a conjunction of his three childrens’ names. In this way he attempted to build, for now on a small scale, a model of the Brill Building power structure—an alliance of song publishers that so dominated the source material of American popular music that by the early

’60s it had become a cartel, its uncrowned leader being Don Kirshner, 0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:05 AM Page 56

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whose stable of writers such as the Goffin-King and Mann-Weil teams churned out songs that were the mother’s milk of the pop charts. Running in the canyons of Broadway as much as he did, Gordy soaked up the Brill mentality and method, marking time. Then, in early January 1959, he and Smokey Robinson were in his office and a royalty check for “Got a Job” came in the mail.

Opening the envelope with great anticipation, he pulled out a check for exactly $3.19. Both men nearly sank to the floor, and for Gordy it was all he could stand. For that year, he would claim on his tax return a salary of $27.20 a week and a bank account of $100; his net income was $4.85. His child-support payments to Thelma were sporadic at best, and when his son Berry IV had to be hospitalized with rheumatic fever, he could not pay the bills.

Smokey saw him staring at the check in disbelief. “You might as well start your own label,” he told him. “You couldn’t do any worse than this.”

Jobete was the prelude for Tamla Records, a name that has led many people to think it had some kind of African connotation. Yet, in actuality, it derived from the anything-but-African 1957 Debbie Rey-nolds movie
Tammy and the Bachelor
, the name and title song of the flick he dug. Wanting to call the label Tammy, he found he couldn’t because of copyright laws, and altered it to the inscrutable Tamla, not minding the racial speculation one bit.

Having his own label meant he would need to finance it. Doing the math, he figured he needed at least $800 to get it off the ground. At first, almost comically, he went to two banks for a loan, only to be shown the door for lack of any appreciable collateral. And so once again he beat a path to the family door. The pot of gold for him was the Gordy savings fund, known as Ber-Berry after Pops and Bertha. All of the children had for several years been contributing $10 a month for the purpose of investing in real estate. Now, he wanted them to invest in
him
.

Gathering the entire clan around their parents’ dinner table, he proposed an $800 loan. Yet another sister, Esther, a prominent businesswoman married to a Michigan state legislator, pointedly brought up his many failures and wondered aloud how he’d pay the loan back. Loucye, a firsthand witness to his profligate lifestyle, demanded to know, “If you’re so smart, why aren’t you rich?”

Gwen and Anna, by rote, sided with him, and they prevailed on the family to proffer the loan. An agreement was signed on January 12, 1959, at the sweetheart interest rate of only $48, payable within two 0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:05 AM Page 57

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years. Berry signed away his share of the fund—$113—and added a handwritten addendum reiterating that any “future earnings” would be covering the debt.

The first Tamla release went not to the Miracles but, rather, to a young tenor he met in a record store, Marvin Johnson, who’d cut some sides for the Kudo label and had written a song called “Come to Me” that Gordy liked and polished up, earning a writer’s credit. Then he turned to cutting it. Johnson brought in some musicians from his previous studio sessions—who’d been assembled by Beans Bowles, the sax player from Maurice King’s house band at the Flame Show—and a vocal group called the Royal Holidays. Everybody, including of course the Rayber Voices gang, crowded into Detroit’s United Studios for the session, and in retrospect, there was much about it that had historical significance, as the raw material of the Motown sound was in that room.

The rhythm section was the most significant, led by the same funky bass player who’d emerged in that early El Domingoes session, James Jamerson, who played his upright bass according to the voices in his head—and plucked all the strings, remarkably, with only his index finger, a digit he called “The Hook.” The others were Eddie “Chank” Willis and Joe Messina on guitars (the latter known for being the bandleader on a local TV show hosted by comedian Soupy Sales) and drummer Benny Benjamin, a baleful-looking cat with a pistol on his hip and a wicked wit.

Gordy recalled that he did little that session other than allow the band to “improvise off my little handwritten chord sheets.” The product was an honest R&B track featuring yet another Jackie Wilson soundalike (Gordy surely had the market cornered on this curious copy-catting) and a mix bottomed out by Jamerson’s spontaneously edgy bass line and topped out by a mob of background voices and Raynoma Liles’s tambourine accents.

Gordy mixed the record for days, then released it with the catalog entry Tamla 101. He would need to show strong local sales to get it picked up by a national label for distribution, so he went to work as he had with Smokey Robinson, hand-delivering copies of it to soul stations like WJLB and WCHB, and to disc jockeys like Bristol Bryant, Frantic Ernie Durham, and Larry Dixon. But he didn’t stop there; even then, he knew he’d have to court the white jocks too, to get the crossover that always made or broke any record. The go-to guy among them was Robin Seymour of WKNR, who went on the air at the station in the late ’40s and didn’t go off until the early ’70s.

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ROBIN SEYMOUR: [Gordy] came to me a lot back then, and for years after, because I
had
no set playlist. You could do that back then, at least in Detroit. I mean, I would go from playing Mantovani to Smokey Robinson to Johnny Cash to Frank Sinatra. There were three big white jocks there—Jack the Bell-boy, Bill Williams, and me—and we all did the same thing. We never needed to be told or begged to play the “race records,” or as we called them, “
sepia
records.” And I couldn’t wait to get my hands on Berry Gordy’s records because they were so damn good, they always got a buzz going.

I was good to Berry and he was good to me. All the record companies and the distributors were. I’ll tell you one thing, my living room was filled up with gifts every Christmas. My kids used to love it. Now, I guess you can refer to that as payola. But it wasn’t nutso money. It was tokens of friendship. Because, like I said, Berry never had to buy a favor, not in Detroit.

He was the man. There were a couple of huge song publishing guys from New York, Murray Deutsch and Lucy Karl, who came in one day. They knew me from industry functions and they called and asked me, “You know Berry Gordy?” They had heard about what he was doing in Detroit and they had a proposition for him, and asked me to set up a meeting. I told Berry and we met them at the Statler downtown, in their posh suite, and they pitched him a deal where they’d form a label with him. They said, “It’ll be your label, Berry. We’ll finance it and we’ll split the publishing down the middle.” Well, Berry heard them out and we all walked to the elevator and he told them, most graciously, “Gentlemen, thank you very much, I’ll think about it.” Then, with just me on the ride down, he shook my hand and said, “Robin, I want to thank you for arranging this. But I’m not going to go into business with anybody else.” When we said goodbye in the lobby—

God, I remember this like it was yesterday—he looked me in the eye and said, “I’ll never forget you, Robin.” And he never did. I always got first crack at a new Motown record. And in the early ’60s I also became host of a TV show,
Swing Time
, a teenage rock and roll party thing, so he needed me, too, to get face time for the acts, and we did put all of them on.

But then there were the things no one knew about. For example I got a call from him in 1967, I believe, when he asked 0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:05 AM Page 59

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me to come over to Motown because the Supremes were cutting a track for a Coca-Cola commercial and the director decided he wanted a spoken intro. He just asked me to wing it, and I did a dumb Mr. Deejay thing, oozing something like

“Here are the swingin’ Supremes for Coca-Cola!” It took about eight seconds—and that eight seconds made me $47,000 in royalties.

The interesting part of that gig was that I got to see up close what a Supremes recording session must have been like, even if in a scaled-down way. I was standing in the control room with Berry after my bit was done—in one take, mind you—and we were watching Diana singing, and they kept having to do it over and over because she couldn’t get it right when to start singing while listening to the music. Berry had to keep telling her through the intercom, “Now! Now!”and she kept screwing up, she couldn’t follow anything. She couldn’t get the feel of it on her own. Even on a little thing like this, he had to spoon-feed her. That was a real eye-opener. I could only imagine how much work she needed to sound the way she did on all those great records.

When “Come to Me” broke out in Detroit, United Artists moved in and leased it for national release. By April 1959 it was sitting at No. 6

on the R&B charts and at No. 30 on the pop charts. UA then bought out Tamla’s interest in Johnson and gave Gordy a $1,000 advance to produce his future work; they also leased the record Gordy had released as Tamla 102—Eddie Holland’s “Merry Go Round,” which, despite going nowhere (unlike Marv Johnson’s 1961 cover that hit No. 66 on the charts), earned Holland a two-year contract with the label.

Offers began to pour in for Johnson to tour, with Gordy demanding his other acts be included on the shows. All of them piled into a twenty-nine-seat Volkswagen van and set out on the first tour, which had stops in Philadelphia for Johnson to do
American Bandstand
and in New York at Carnegie Hall and, the big one, Harlem’s famed Apollo Theater, where Berry had been before with Jackie Wilson, but never as an entrepreneur.

Royalties from “Come to Me” were pouring in, as were those from the third Johnson single, “You’ve Got What It Takes,” a flippant 0306815867_ribowsky:6.125 x 9.25 4/22/09 11:05 AM Page 60

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New Orleans–style R&B tune that hit No. 10 and spent twenty-two weeks on the charts. As if dispensing gumdrops at a candy store, an imperious Gordy leased masters of six new songs in one shot to Chess Records, one being the Miracles’ “Bad Girl.” That cemented a gig at the Apollo Theater for Smokey and his group—at which they sang so poorly and danced so clumsily that the crowd jeered them and the Apollo’s owner, Frank Schiffman, demanded Gordy repay the $750 he’d fronted them to travel to New York.

Berry talked Schiffman out of it, telling him he’d soon be begging to get the Miracles back. With the group busted in New York, he wired them more money. Indeed, his faith in Smokey was infinite. When a local label he’d leased some previous Miracles’ records to insisted that it owned the group, Gordy procured vows from the local deejays to boycott the label if it didn’t back down; it did, within two days.

Smokey would soon enjoy a dubious honor, courtesy of his mentor and patron. Late in 1959 Gordy branched out again with a sister label for Tamla. He called it Motown Records, appropriating and abridging the street-jive cognomen for the city of Detroit—“Motor Town.” His plan was for the solo acts to be placed on Tamla; and the groups, on Motown. When he was ready to go with Motown product a year later, he test-pressed another version of the Miracles’ “Bad Girl.” There would be more pressings on the label in 1960, several by the Satintones, before Gordy was ready to go with a Motown release—the forgettable

“I’ve Got a Notion”/“We Really Love Each Other” (Motown 1005) by Henry Lumpkin in early January 1961. Well before that signal benchmark moment, however, Gordy had realized the commercial kick of the name and broadened its role from label to overall company identity, incorporating the still piddling operation under the banner of Motown Recording Company, Inc.

With the birth of Gordy’s new son in June 1959, the need for a new home for his family coincided with the need to find a home for his dream that Motown would become an empire. He could by then afford such a move by writing off any major expense as a liability against income. Even a year later, with Motown established, when Thelma sued him for back child support, he could declare assets of $32,600 against liabilities of $32,500, and thus claim he was still unable to afford the payments. He did, however, lend some valuable advice to his ex-wife when she started up a small R&B label that year, Thelma Records.

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Still, as was his habit, Gordy was living large on all those “liabilities.” One example was a $4,800 Cadillac he’d bought with a down payment of $1,300. But a much bigger one was the new digs where he and Raynoma relocated that spring—the future landmark of American music at 2648 West Grand Boulevard. Situated on the west end of Paradise Valley, it squatted midway down a relatively well-to-do block bordered by Henry Ford Hospital to the east and dotted with other small black-owned businesses—Sykes Hernia Control Service, Your Fair Lady Boutique and Wig Room, and right next door, Coles’ Funeral Home.

The house, a two-story, twice-foreclosed property that had been used most recently as a residence/photo studio, was purchased with $3,000

down and a $23,000 mortgage.

It needed a lot of work, but it suited Gordy’s needs, personal and professional. Typically, it also became a reclamation project for the entire Gordy clan. In fact, well before it was anything close to a landmark, 2648 West Grand Boulevard was the new Gordy Arms. Members of the family were all over the place, many in official capacities. For example, Berry named Esther vice-president, though all that meant at the time was doing bookkeeping. Loucye came on to do billings, sales, and graphics, and to write liner notes for projected Motown albums. Both sisters were given upstairs offices next to Gordy’s bedroom and an open den where Raynoma had put her piano. Berry’s office was on the ground floor beside the reception area, and Raynoma had a smaller one down the hall.