Podcast appearances and mentions of berry gordy jr

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 23, 2021 63:01

Motown is synonymous with soul music. …… Motown, the label, was founded by Berry Gordy Jr. as Tamla Records in 1959, and became Motown Records in 1960. Motown artists achieved 79 records in the Top-10 of the Billboard Hot 100 chart between 1960 and 1969. Here are some of the Best of Motown to help you relax and to remember. *****Join the conversation on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100008232395712 or by email at dannymemorylane@gmail.comIn this episode you'll hear:1) Ain't Too Proud To Beg by The Temptations2) I Second That Emotion by Smokey Robinson & The Miracles3) Shake Me, Wake Me by The Four Tops4) Ask Any Girl by The Supremes5) Shoo-Be-Doo-Be-Doo-Da-Day by Stevie Wonder6) Just To Be Close To You by The Commodores7) My Baby Must Be A Magician by The Marvelettes8) I Love the Way You Love by Marv Johnson (with The Rayber Voices)9) Just to Keep You Satisfied by Marvin Gaye (with The Originals, backing vocals)10) If We Hold On Together by Diana Ross11) More Love by Smokey Robinson & The Miracles12) Reach Out I'll Be There by The Four Tops13) Signed, Sealed, Delivered (I'm Yours) by Stevie Wonder14) When The Lovelight Starts Shining Through His Eyes by The Supremes15) Got To Give It Up (Part 1) by Marvin Gaye16) Jimmy Mack by Martha & The Vandellas17) Destination: Anywhere by The Marvelettes18) Shop Around by The Miracles (with Smokey Robinson)19) We Can Work It Out by Stevie Wonder20) Remember Me by Diana Ross21) Still by The Commodores

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Episode 87: The Best of Motown #4

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 7, 2021 61:00

Motown is synonymous with soul music. …… Motown, the label, was founded by Berry Gordy Jr. as Tamla Records in 1959, and became Motown Records in 1960. Motown artists achieved 79 records in the Top-10 of the Billboard Hot 100 chart between 1960 and 1969. Here are some of the Best of Motown to help you relax and to remember. ***** Join the conversation on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100008232395712 or by email at dannymemorylane@gmail.com In this episode you’ll hear: 1) Dancing In The Street by Martha & The Vandellas 2) Uptight (Everything's Alright) by Stevie Wonder 3) You Send Me by The Supremes 4) It's Your Thing by The Isley Brothers 5) Dancing On The Ceiling by Lionel Richie 6) Love Hangover by Diana Ross 7) Ooh Baby Baby by The Miracles (with Smokey Robinson) 8) You're A Wonderful One by Marvin Gaye 9) Any Day Now by Chuck Jackson 10) I Heard It Through The Grapevine by Gladys Knight & The Pips 11) Back In My Arms Again by The Supremes 12) Too Many Fish In The Sea by The Marvelettes 13) Baby, Baby Don't Cry by Smokey Robinson & The Miracles 14) Function At The Junction by Shorty Long 15) Standing In The Shadows Of Love by The Four Tops 16) Upside Down by Diana Ross 17) Can I Get A Witness by Marvin Gaye 18) This Old Heart Of Mine (Is Weak For You) by The Isley Brothers 19) A Place In The Sun by Stevie Wonder 20) Going To A Go-Go by The Miracles (with Smokey Robinson) 21) Baby Love by The Supremes

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Episode 63: The Best of Motown #3

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 10, 2021 62:09

Motown is synonymous with soul music. …… Motown, the label, was founded by Berry Gordy Jr. as Tamla Records in 1959, and became Motown Records in 1960. Motown artists achieved 79 records in the Top-10 of the Billboard Hot 100 chart between 1960 and 1969. Here are some of the Best of Motown to help you relax and to remember. ***** Join the conversation on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100008232395712 or by email at dannymemorylane@gmail.com In this episode you’ll hear: 1) Stop! In The Name Of Love by The Supremes 2) Friendship Train by Gladys Knight & The Pips 3) Pride And Joy by Marvin Gaye 4) The Tracks Of My Tears by The Miracles (with Smokey Robinson) 5) Come And Get These Memories by Martha & The Vandellas 6) If I Were A Carpenter by The Four Tops 7) I'm Coming Out by Diana Ross 8) You Are The Sunshine Of My Life by Stevie Wonder 9) I Hear A Symphony by The Supremes 10) Penny Lover by Lionel Richie 11) How Sweet It Is (To Be Loved By You) by Marvin Gaye 12) Walk Away Renee by The Four Tops 13) When You Tell Me That You Love Me by Diana Ross 14) You've Really Got A Hold On Me by The Miracles (with Smokey Robinson) 15) (Love Is Like A) Heat Wave by Martha & The Vandellas 16) Superstition by Stevie Wonder 17) Playboy by The Marvelettes 18) Don't Look Back by The Temptations 19) Love Is Like An Itching In My Heart by The Supremes 20) I'll Be Doggone by Marvin Gaye 21) I Can't Help Myself (Sugar Pie Honey Bunch) by The Four Tops

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Episode 35: The Best of Motown #2

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 2, 2020 63:37

Motown is synonymous with soul music. …… Motown, the label, was founded by Berry Gordy Jr. as Tamla Records in 1959, and became Motown Records in 1960. Motown artists achieved 79 records in the Top-10 of the Billboard Hot 100 chart between 1960 and 1969. Here are some of the Best of Motown to help you relax and to remember. ***** Join the conversation on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100008232395712 or by email at dannymemorylane@gmail.com In this episode you’ll hear: 1) You Keep Me Hangin' On by The Supremes 2) I Just Called To Say I Love You by Stevie Wonder 3) Cruisin' by Smokey Robinson 4) Sweet Love by The Commodores 5) I Heard It Through The Grapevine by Marvin Gaye 6) In And Out Of Love by Diana Ross & The Supremes 7) Just My Imagination (Running Away With Me) by The Temptations 8) You Are by Lionel Richie 9) Beechwood 4-5789 by The Marvelettes 10) Just To See Her by Smokey Robinson 11) Don't Leave Me This Way by Thelma Houston 12) Send One Your Love by Stevie Wonder 13) You Can't Hurry Love by The Supremes 14) True To Your Heart by 98 Degrees & Stevie Wonder 15) First I Look At The Purse by The Contours 16) Too Busy Thinking About My Baby by Marvin Gaye 17) The Tears Of A Clown by Smokey Robinson & The Miracles 18) Heaven Must Have Sent You by The Elgins (with Saundra Mallett, vocal) 19) Let's Make Every Moment Count by Diana Ross

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The Best of Motown #1

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 4, 2020 62:52

Motown is synonymous with soul music. …… Motown, the label was founded by Berry Gordy Jr. as Tamla Records in 1959, and became Motown Records in 1960. Motown artists achieved 79 records in the Top-10 of the Billboard Hot 100 chart between 1960 and 1969. Here are some of the Best of Motown to help you relax and to remember. ***** Join the conversation on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100008232395712 ***** or by email at dannymemorylane@gmail.com ***** In this episode you’ll hear: 1) The Way You Do The Things You Do by The Temptations 2) Ain't No Woman (Like The One I Got) by The Four Tops 3) Let's Get It On by Marvin Gaye 4) The One Who Really Loves You by Mary Wells 5) With You I'm Born Again by Billy Preston and Syreeta 6) Ebony And Ivory by Stevie Wonder with Paul McCartney 7) My Girl by The Temptations 8) Your Precious Love by Marvin Gaye & Tammi Terrell 9) Quicksand by Martha & The Vandellas 10) Sail On by The Commodores 11) When She Was My Girl by The Four Tops 12) If I Were Your Woman by Gladys Knight & The Pips 13) All In Love Is Fair by Stevie Wonder 14) That Lady, Pts. 1 & 2 by The Isley Brothers 15) Someday We'll Be Together by Diana Ross & The Supremes 16) You're All I Need To Get By by Marvin Gaye & Tammi Terrell 17) It's Growing by The Temptations 18) Gotta Hold On To This Feeling by Junior Walker & The All Stars 19) Please Mr. Postman by The Marvelettes 20) Boogie On Reggae Woman by Stevie Wonder

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Motown: The History Of A Hit Factory

Play Episode Listen Later May 22, 2020 23:50

Shortly after Michael Jackson died in 2009, Helen Brown, a music critic for the Daily Telegraph wrote that the Jackson 5’s 1969 single “I Want You Back,” is “certainly the fastest man-made route to pure joy.” And while Michael, Tito, Jermaine, Marlon, and Jackie may have stolen the spotlight, the group - like so many others - emerged from a hit factory created by a man named Berry Gordy Jr. Gordy founded Motown after stints as a boxer and as a worker in a Lincoln-Mercury plant. And he quickly turned the label into a force to be reckoned with, drawing on a formula of quality control he had learned at the auto factory, taking raw talent like Diana Ross and Smokey Robinson, and refining them into international stars. As a result, Motown became one of the most successful black-owned music companies in American history. We talk to music journalist Adam White, author of “Motown: The Sound of Young America,” about Gordy’s meteoric rise and his lasting legacy.

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Episode 80: "Money" by Barrett Strong

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 27, 2020 33:31

Episode eighty of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at "Money" by Barrett Strong, the dispute over its authorship, and the start of a record label that would change music. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on "Alley Oop" by the Hollywood Argyles. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ ----more----Erratum I say “His name didn't appear on the label of the record.” I mean here that Strong's name didn't appear on the label as a songwriter. It obviously did appear as the performer. Resources As always, I've created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. You might want to listen again to the episode on Jackie Wilson, in which we looked at Berry Gordy's career to this point. I used six principal sources to put together the narrative for this one, most of which I will be using for most future Motown episodes. Where Did Our Love Go? The Rise and Fall of the Motown Sound by Nelson George is an excellent popular history of the various companies that became Motown. To Be Loved by Berry Gordy is Gordy's own, understandably one-sided, but relatively well-written, autobiography. Women of Motown: An Oral History by Susan Whitall is a collection of interviews with women involved in Motown, including Janie Bradford. I Hear a Symphony: Motown and Crossover R&B by J. Andrew Flory is an academic look at Motown. The Motown Encyclopaedia by Graham Betts is an exhaustive look at the people and records involved in Motown's thirty-year history. And Motown Junkies is an infrequently-updated blog looking at (so far) the first 693 tracks released on Motown singles. There is a Complete Motown Singles 1959-62 box available from Hip-O-Select with comprehensive liner notes, but if you just want the music, I recommend instead this much cheaper bare-bones box from Real Gone Music. And this set contains every recording that Barrett Strong made for Tamla as a performer. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Today, we're going to look at a record which was the first success for one of the most important record labels of all time, which has one of the most instantly recognisable riffs of any record ever, and which was the product of a one-hit wonder who would, several years later, go on to be a hugely important figure as a writer, rather than a performer. Along the way we're going to look at the beginnings of many, many, other careers we'll be seeing more of in the next couple of years. Today, we're going to look at "Money" by Barrett Strong: [Excerpt: Barrett Strong, "Money"] When we left Berry Gordy Jr, he had just stopped writing songs for Jackie Wilson -- while the songs he'd co-written with his sister Gwen and her boyfriend Roquel Davis had been massive hits for Wilson, Wilson's manager had believed that any songwriters could bring the same amount of success, and that Wilson's records were selling solely because of Wilson's performances. Davis and Gwen had started up a new record label with the help of another Gordy sister, Anna, after whom they named the label. But at the start, Berry Gordy had little involvement in that label. While Gwen had wanted Berry to become a partner in the business, Berry had soured on the idea of business partners after some of his other ventures had failed due to conflicts between him and his partners. Berry was going to work for himself. He would write and produce for his family's record labels, but he wasn't going to be a partner in their businesses. Instead, he focussed on a group he'd got to know. The Matadors were a vocal group he'd seen audition, and been mildly impressed with, but he had decided to work with them mostly because he was very attracted to one of their singers, Claudette Rogers. He'd worked with them for a few days before asking Claudette out, and she'd turned him down because she was seeing one of the other group members, William Robinson. But by that point Gordy had got to know Robinson, and to appreciate his talent, and his response was just to tell her how lucky she was to have a man like that. He took them on as a management project, and also decided to teach Robinson songwriting -- Robinson had written a lot of songs, which showed potential, but Gordy thought none of them were quite there yet. What impressed Gordy most was Robinson's attitude, every time Gordy told him what was wrong with a song -- Robinson would just go on to the next song, as enthusiastic as ever. Eventually, Robinson came up with a song that they thought could be a hit. At the time, the Silhouettes had a big hit with a song called "Get a Job": [Excerpt: The Silhouettes, "Get a Job"] Robinson had come up with an answer song, which he called "Got a Job". Gordy decided that that was good enough for him to produce a recording -- he'd recently started up a production company, which he primarily used to produce demos of his own songs, with singers like Eddie Holland. Gordy took the group into the studio, and got a deal with George Goldner's label End Records to distribute the single that resulted. The only thing was, Gordy still wasn't happy with the group's name -- The Matadors sounded too masculine for a group which had a woman in it. So they all chose other names, wrote them down, stuck them in a hat, and the one that came out was "the Miracles"; and so "Got a Job" by the Miracles came out on End Records on William “Smokey” Robinson's eighteenth birthday: [Excerpt: The Miracles, "Got a Job"] Gordy at this point was a songwriter first and foremost, but he wanted to make sure he was making money from the songs. He had already started his own publishing company, after having not been paid the royalties he was owed on several of his songs. He'd decided that he could use his production company to ensure his songs got a release -- he'd lease the recordings out to other labels, like End, or his sister's label Anna. The recordings themselves were just a way to get some money from the songs, which were his real business. He and his second wife Raynoma also used their production company, named Rayber as a portmanteau of their two names, in another way -- they would, for a fee, provide a full professional recording of anyone -- you could walk in and pay for an arrangement of your song by Berry Gordy, instrumental backing, vocals by the Rayber Singers (a fluid group of people that included Raynoma and Eddie Holland), and a copy of the record. If the amateur singer who came in was any good, the results would be quite listenable, as in "I Can't Concentrate" by Wade Jones, which they liked so much they later even released it properly: [Excerpt: "I Can't Concentrate", Wade Jones] But at this point, Gordy still wasn't making much money at all. In 1959, according to court papers around a claim for child support for his kids, he made $27.70 a week on average -- and almost all of that came from a single one-thousand-dollar cheque for writing "Lonely Teardrops" for Jackie Wilson. And producing the Miracles didn't add much to that -- when Gordy received his first royalty cheque from End Records for "Got a Job", he was astonished to see that it was only for $3.19. To add insult to injury, End Records tried to claim that the Miracles were now their artists, and they were going to record them directly, without the involvement of Gordy. This was a thing that many businesses connected with Morris Levy did, and they were usually successful, because if you get into an argument with the Mafia you'll probably not win. But in the case of Gordy, his family were so well-known and respected in Detroit's black community, and Gordy himself had enough cachet because of his work with Jackie Wilson, that a contingent of black DJs told End Records that they'd stop playing any of their records unless they backed off on the Miracles. But all this led Gordy to one conclusion -- one he didn't come to until Smokey Robinson pointed it out to him. He needed to start his own record label, just like his sisters had. The problem was that he had no money, and while his family was, for a black family at the time, very rich, they held their money in a trust and required a proper contract and unanimous approval from all eight siblings before they would provide one of the family with a business loan -- and Berry was regarded by his siblings as a useless drifter and underachiever. But eventually he managed to win them round, and they lent him $800. His original idea for the name of the label was "Tammy", after Debbie Reynolds' hit, to show that they weren't just aiming at the R&B market: [Excerpt: Debbie Reynolds, "Tammy"] However, it turned out that there was another label called Tammy, and so Gordy decided on Tamla instead. Tamla's first record was by a local singer called Marv Johnson, who had a very similar voice to that of Jackie Wilson, but who was known for having more of an ego than Wilson. There's an anonymous quote by someone who knew both men -- "The difference between Marv and Jackie Wilson was that Wilson would kiss all the women, especially the ugly ones, because he knew if he did they'd be with him forever. Marv only kissed the pretty ones, and that coldness came through in everything he did." One can argue about whether it's colder to cynically manipulate people's feelings or to show contempt for them, but it's definitely the case that Marv Johnson does not seem to have been well loved by many of the people who knew him. Johnson had recorded one previous single, "My Baby-O", on another record label: [Excerpt: Marv Johnson, "My Baby-O"] Some sources claim that Berry Gordy produced that track -- others that he was just present at the session, watching. Whatever Gordy's involvement with Johnson before signing him to Tamla, the first Tamla single, "Come to Me", was the start of something big. It was written by Johnson and Gordy, and featured a group of session players who would form the core of what would become known as the Funk Brothers -- James Jamerson, Benny Benjamin, Eddie Willis, Joe Messina, and Thomas “Beans” Bowles. On top of that, Brian Holland, who with his brother Eddie would later go on to become part of arguably the most important songwriting and production team of the sixties, was on backing vocals: [Excerpt: Marv Johnson, "Come to Me"] Johnson wrote that song himself, and Gordy polished it up, giving himself a co-writing credit. At the start, Tamla was a very, very small operation. Other than the musicians they employed, the team mostly consisted of Berry and Raynoma Gordy, Smokey Robinson acting essentially as Berry's apprentice and assistant, and Janie Bradford, a teenage songwriter with whom Gordy had collaborated on a couple of songs for Jackie Wilson: [Excerpt: Jackie Wilson, "The Joke (Is Not On Me)"] Bradford was given the official job title of receptionist, but she actually did almost all the admin at the label offices, doing everything from sorting out the contracts to mopping the floor, along with chipping in with songs when she had an idea. Because they were a shoestring operation, Gordy, Marv Johnson, and Robinson would do most of the legwork of getting the track to radio stations, and it only got local distribution. They followed up with a second Tamla record, three weeks later, written by Berry and sung by Eddie Holland, who had sung on Berry's demos for Jackie Wilson and also had a Wilson-esque voice: [Excerpt: Eddie Holland, "Merry Go Round"] Marv Johnson's record, "Come to Me", became a local hit, but as we've talked about before, when you're running an indie label the last thing you want is a hit -- you have to pay to get the records pressed, but then you have to wait months for the money to come in from the distributors. Becoming too big too fast could be a problem. Luckily, before the record got too big, United Artists stepped in. They wanted to buy the master for "Come to Me", and to buy both Johnson and Holland's contracts from Gordy. Gordy would continue writing and producing for them, but they would be United Artists performers rather than on Tamla. Gordy got enough money from that deal to continue running his label for a while longer, and United Artists got their first R&B star -- "Come to Me" ended up going top thirty on the pop charts and top ten on the R&B charts. Not bad at all for something put out on a little micro-label. Eddie Holland, on the other hand, didn't do so well on United Artists -- he wasn't ever a confident performer, and after two years he was back with Gordy's operation, this time working behind the scenes rather than as the main performer. So Tamla was ready to put out its third single, and Gordy may have had a plan for how his label was going to get much bigger. It's been suggested by several people that a few of the early acts he signed were intended as ways to get more famous relatives of those acts interested in the label. For example, the first female solo singer he signed to the label, Mable John, was the sister of Little Willie John, the R&B star. Mable was certainly good enough to be hired on her own merits, but at the same time the thought must have crossed Gordy's mind that it would be good to get her brother recording for him. In the same way, Smokey Robinson's favourite local group was Nolan Strong and the Diablos, who recorded the doo-wop classic "The Wind": [Excerpt: Nolan Strong and the Diablos, "The Wind"] Nolan Strong's cousin Barrett was also an aspiring singer, and Gordy signed him to Tamla, and wrote him a song with his sister Gwen and her then-boyfriend Roquel Davis, the same team with whom he'd collaborated on Jackie Wilson's hits: [Excerpt: Barrett Strong, "Let's Rock"] Unfortunately, "Let's Rock" wasn't a hit, and Gordy seemed to decide to try to throw a lot of records at the wall to see what would stick. Over the next few months, they put out a variety of odd singles, none of which charted, and none of which seem much like the music Gordy was generally known for. There was "Snake Walk", a jazz instrumental played by the Funk Brothers under the name The Swinging Tigers, with the songwriting credited to Gordy and Robinson: [Excerpt: The Swinging Tigers, "Snake Walk (part 1)"] There was "It", a novelty single about an alien, performed by Smokey Robinson and Ronnie White of the Miracles, under the name "Ron & Bill": [Excerpt: Ron & Bill, "It"] And a few more. But it wasn't until Barett Strong's second single, in August 1959, that Tamla hit the jackpot again. There are three very different stories about how "Money" was written. According to Berry Gordy, he came up with the music and the whole first verse and chorus himself, and played it to Janie Bradford, who suggested a couple of lines for the second verse, but he was impressed enough with her lines that he gave her fifty percent of the song, even though she didn't think she'd contributed very much. Barrett Strong came and sat down with them, uninvited, and started singing along, but didn't contribute anything to the writing of the song. According to Janie Bradford, Berry Gordy was playing the riff on the piano, but had no words or melody yet. He said to her, "I need a title, give me a title, something that everybody wants," and she replied "Money, that's what I want!" and the two of them wrote the lyrics together based on her lyrical idea. And according to Barrett Strong, who is backed up by the engineer and the guitarist on the session, *Strong* -- who played the piano on the session as well as singing -- was jamming the riff, having hit upon it while messing around with Ray Charles' "What'd I Say". Gordy only came into the session after Strong had already taught the instrumental parts to the musicians, and Gordy and Bradford only wrote the lyrics after the instrumental track was already completed. The initial filing of the song's copyright credited Strong for words and music, Gordy for words and music, and Bradford only for words. According to both Bradford and Gordy, that's because Bradford, who filled out the form, didn't understand the form and made a mistake. Three years later, Strong's name was taken off the copyright, and he wasn't informed of the change. His name didn't appear on the label of the record. Personally, I tend to believe Strong. The song simply doesn't sound that much like Gordy's other songs of the period, which were based far less on riffs, and which didn't tend to be twelve-bar blueses. Whoever wrote it, the result was a great record, and the first true classic to come out of the Gordy operation: [Excerpt: Barrett Strong, "Money"] The B-side isn't quite as good, but it's still a strong ballad, and if you're a fan of John Lennon's solo work you might find the middle eight very familiar: [Excerpt: Barrett Strong, "Oh I Apologize"] "Money" came out on Tamla and was initially fairly unsuccessful, because Tamla didn't have any national distribution. But Anna Records did. That label had partnered with Chess Records. Chess had sent Harvey Fuqua, who was working for Chess as an executive as well as a performer, over to work with Anna Records. Fuqua had brought with him another member of his latest lineup of the Moonglows, a young man named Marvin Gay, to work for Anna as a session drummer and part-time janitor, and Marvin soon got into a relationship with Anna Gordy. But Marvin wasn't the only one to get into a relationship with a Gordy sister. Harvey Fuqua had been dating Etta James, with whom he was having a few hits as a duet act on Chess: [Excerpt: Etta James and Harvey Fuqua, "Spoonful"] But he soon struck up a relationship with Gwen Gordy. He split up with James, Gwen Gordy split up with Roquel Davis -- and then Berry and Gwen Gordy and Roquel Davis wrote a song about the splits, which Etta James performed for Chess, back as a solo artist again: [Excerpt: Etta James, "All I Could Do Was Cry"] That became a hit in June 1960, and that was also the month that "Money" finally became a hit, nearly a year after it was released. The Tamla record had been a local hit, but Tamla still didn't have any national distribution, so Berry Gordy leased the recording to his sisters' label. It was rereleased on Anna Records, distributed through Chess, and became the first national hit for one of the Gordy family of labels, reaching number two on the R&B charts and number twenty-three on the pop charts. The Gordy family of labels was starting to have some real success: [Excerpt: Barrett Strong, "Money"] Unfortunately, that would be Barrett Strong's only hit as a performer. Over the next eighteen months he would release a whole variety of singles, none of which had any success, eventually trying the desperate tactic of recording a follow-up to "Money", titled "Money and Me", with the writing credited to Berry Gordy, Janie Bradford, Smokey Robinson, and Robert Bateman -- a singer who was one of the Rayber singers: [Excerpt: Barrett Strong, "Money and Me"] That didn't work, and Strong ended up going back to work on the Chrysler production line, giving up his singing career. But that won't be the last we'll see of him -- he'll be back with a new job in a few years' time. But in late 1959, they didn't know yet that "Money" would even be a hit, let alone a classic that would be remembered more than sixty years later. Indeed, the biggest success that had come out of the Gordy operation was still Marv Johnson, and while he was signed to United Artists, he was still making records with Berry Gordy. Gordy was writing and producing his records, and now they were also being recorded at Gordy's home -- he and Raynoma had bought a house with a recording studio in the back in August 1959. They named the house Hitsville USA, and it became the headquarters for the Gordy family of labels. Berry and Raynoma lived in a flat upstairs, while the recording studio downstairs was open twenty-two hours a day. Eventually they would buy all the other nearby houses, and turn them into offices for their recording, publishing, and management empire. The whole family pitched in to make the company a success. Berry's sister Esther took over the finances of Tamla, with the assistance of her accountant husband. Their other sister Loucye took charge of the record manufacturing side of the business -- liaising with pressing plants, overseeing cover art, and so on. Raynoma managed Jobete, the publishing company named after Berry's first three children, Joy, Berry, and Terry. The Hitsville studio was primitive at first -- the echo chamber was also the toilet, and someone had to stand guard outside it while they were recording to make sure no-one used it during a session -- but it was good enough for Gordy to use it to make hit records for Marv Johnson, like "You Got What It Takes": [Excerpt: Marv Johnson, "You Got What It Takes"] That went top ten on both the pop and R&B charts, as did the follow-up, "I Love The Way You Love": [Excerpt: Marv Johnson, "I Love the Way You Love"] But those hits were on someone else's label. Berry Gordy was still looking to expand his own record business, and so he decided he was going to start a second label, to go along with Tamla. Smokey Robinson had still not had a hit, though he was writing a lot of material, but then Smokey brought Berry a song he thought was a guaranteed hit, "Bad Girl": [Excerpt: The Miracles, "Bad Girl"] Gordy decided that he was going to start up a new label just for groups, while Tamla would be for solo artists, and "Bad Girl" was going to be the first release on it. But once again, he didn't have a proper national distributor for his record, so after it started selling around Detroit, he licensed the record to Chess Records, who reissued it. "Bad Girl" went to number ninety-three on the Hot One Hundred, proving that Smokey Robinson did indeed have the potential to make a real hit. But, as was so often the way, Chess didn't pay Gordy's company the proper royalties for the record, and so Gordy decided that his new label was going to have to have national distribution. He wasn't going to let any more of its records come out on Chess or United Artists. From now on, either they were on Tamla, or they were coming out on the new label, Motown.

Episode 80: “Money” by Barrett Strong

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 27, 2020

Episode eighty of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Money” by Barrett Strong, the dispute over its authorship, and the start of a record label that would change music. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on “Alley Oop” by the Hollywood Argyles. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt’s irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ —-more—-Erratum I say “His name didn’t appear on the label of the record.” I mean here that Strong’s name didn’t appear on the label as a songwriter. It obviously did appear as the performer. Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. You might want to listen again to the episode on Jackie Wilson, in which we looked at Berry Gordy’s career to this point. I used six principal sources to put together the narrative for this one, most of which I will be using for most future Motown episodes. Where Did Our Love Go? The Rise and Fall of the Motown Sound by Nelson George is an excellent popular history of the various companies that became Motown. To Be Loved by Berry Gordy is Gordy’s own, understandably one-sided, but relatively well-written, autobiography. Women of Motown: An Oral History by Susan Whitall is a collection of interviews with women involved in Motown, including Janie Bradford. I Hear a Symphony: Motown and Crossover R&B by J. Andrew Flory is an academic look at Motown. The Motown Encyclopaedia by Graham Betts is an exhaustive look at the people and records involved in Motown’s thirty-year history. And Motown Junkies is an infrequently-updated blog looking at (so far) the first 693 tracks released on Motown singles. There is a Complete Motown Singles 1959-62 box available from Hip-O-Select with comprehensive liner notes, but if you just want the music, I recommend instead this much cheaper bare-bones box from Real Gone Music. And this set contains every recording that Barrett Strong made for Tamla as a performer. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Today, we’re going to look at a record which was the first success for one of the most important record labels of all time, which has one of the most instantly recognisable riffs of any record ever, and which was the product of a one-hit wonder who would, several years later, go on to be a hugely important figure as a writer, rather than a performer. Along the way we’re going to look at the beginnings of many, many, other careers we’ll be seeing more of in the next couple of years. Today, we’re going to look at “Money” by Barrett Strong: [Excerpt: Barrett Strong, “Money”] When we left Berry Gordy Jr, he had just stopped writing songs for Jackie Wilson — while the songs he’d co-written with his sister Gwen and her boyfriend Roquel Davis had been massive hits for Wilson, Wilson’s manager had believed that any songwriters could bring the same amount of success, and that Wilson’s records were selling solely because of Wilson’s performances. Davis and Gwen had started up a new record label with the help of another Gordy sister, Anna, after whom they named the label. But at the start, Berry Gordy had little involvement in that label. While Gwen had wanted Berry to become a partner in the business, Berry had soured on the idea of business partners after some of his other ventures had failed due to conflicts between him and his partners. Berry was going to work for himself. He would write and produce for his family’s record labels, but he wasn’t going to be a partner in their businesses. Instead, he focussed on a group he’d got to know. The Matadors were a vocal group he’d seen audition, and been mildly impressed with, but he had decided to work with them mostly because he was very attracted to one of their singers, Claudette Rogers. He’d worked with them for a few days before asking Claudette out, and she’d turned him down because she was seeing one of the other group members, William Robinson. But by that point Gordy had got to know Robinson, and to appreciate his talent, and his response was just to tell her how lucky she was to have a man like that. He took them on as a management project, and also decided to teach Robinson songwriting — Robinson had written a lot of songs, which showed potential, but Gordy thought none of them were quite there yet. What impressed Gordy most was Robinson’s attitude, every time Gordy told him what was wrong with a song — Robinson would just go on to the next song, as enthusiastic as ever. Eventually, Robinson came up with a song that they thought could be a hit. At the time, the Silhouettes had a big hit with a song called “Get a Job”: [Excerpt: The Silhouettes, “Get a Job”] Robinson had come up with an answer song, which he called “Got a Job”. Gordy decided that that was good enough for him to produce a recording — he’d recently started up a production company, which he primarily used to produce demos of his own songs, with singers like Eddie Holland. Gordy took the group into the studio, and got a deal with George Goldner’s label End Records to distribute the single that resulted. The only thing was, Gordy still wasn’t happy with the group’s name — The Matadors sounded too masculine for a group which had a woman in it. So they all chose other names, wrote them down, stuck them in a hat, and the one that came out was “the Miracles”; and so “Got a Job” by the Miracles came out on End Records on William “Smokey” Robinson’s eighteenth birthday: [Excerpt: The Miracles, “Got a Job”] Gordy at this point was a songwriter first and foremost, but he wanted to make sure he was making money from the songs. He had already started his own publishing company, after having not been paid the royalties he was owed on several of his songs. He’d decided that he could use his production company to ensure his songs got a release — he’d lease the recordings out to other labels, like End, or his sister’s label Anna. The recordings themselves were just a way to get some money from the songs, which were his real business. He and his second wife Raynoma also used their production company, named Rayber as a portmanteau of their two names, in another way — they would, for a fee, provide a full professional recording of anyone — you could walk in and pay for an arrangement of your song by Berry Gordy, instrumental backing, vocals by the Rayber Singers (a fluid group of people that included Raynoma and Eddie Holland), and a copy of the record. If the amateur singer who came in was any good, the results would be quite listenable, as in “I Can’t Concentrate” by Wade Jones, which they liked so much they later even released it properly: [Excerpt: “I Can’t Concentrate”, Wade Jones] But at this point, Gordy still wasn’t making much money at all. In 1959, according to court papers around a claim for child support for his kids, he made $27.70 a week on average — and almost all of that came from a single one-thousand-dollar cheque for writing “Lonely Teardrops” for Jackie Wilson. And producing the Miracles didn’t add much to that — when Gordy received his first royalty cheque from End Records for “Got a Job”, he was astonished to see that it was only for $3.19. To add insult to injury, End Records tried to claim that the Miracles were now their artists, and they were going to record them directly, without the involvement of Gordy. This was a thing that many businesses connected with Morris Levy did, and they were usually successful, because if you get into an argument with the Mafia you’ll probably not win. But in the case of Gordy, his family were so well-known and respected in Detroit’s black community, and Gordy himself had enough cachet because of his work with Jackie Wilson, that a contingent of black DJs told End Records that they’d stop playing any of their records unless they backed off on the Miracles. But all this led Gordy to one conclusion — one he didn’t come to until Smokey Robinson pointed it out to him. He needed to start his own record label, just like his sisters had. The problem was that he had no money, and while his family was, for a black family at the time, very rich, they held their money in a trust and required a proper contract and unanimous approval from all eight siblings before they would provide one of the family with a business loan — and Berry was regarded by his siblings as a useless drifter and underachiever. But eventually he managed to win them round, and they lent him $800. His original idea for the name of the label was “Tammy”, after Debbie Reynolds’ hit, to show that they weren’t just aiming at the R&B market: [Excerpt: Debbie Reynolds, “Tammy”] However, it turned out that there was another label called Tammy, and so Gordy decided on Tamla instead. Tamla’s first record was by a local singer called Marv Johnson, who had a very similar voice to that of Jackie Wilson, but who was known for having more of an ego than Wilson. There’s an anonymous quote by someone who knew both men — “The difference between Marv and Jackie Wilson was that Wilson would kiss all the women, especially the ugly ones, because he knew if he did they’d be with him forever. Marv only kissed the pretty ones, and that coldness came through in everything he did.” One can argue about whether it’s colder to cynically manipulate people’s feelings or to show contempt for them, but it’s definitely the case that Marv Johnson does not seem to have been well loved by many of the people who knew him. Johnson had recorded one previous single, “My Baby-O”, on another record label: [Excerpt: Marv Johnson, “My Baby-O”] Some sources claim that Berry Gordy produced that track — others that he was just present at the session, watching. Whatever Gordy’s involvement with Johnson before signing him to Tamla, the first Tamla single, “Come to Me”, was the start of something big. It was written by Johnson and Gordy, and featured a group of session players who would form the core of what would become known as the Funk Brothers — James Jamerson, Benny Benjamin, Eddie Willis, Joe Messina, and Thomas “Beans” Bowles. On top of that, Brian Holland, who with his brother Eddie would later go on to become part of arguably the most important songwriting and production team of the sixties, was on backing vocals: [Excerpt: Marv Johnson, “Come to Me”] Johnson wrote that song himself, and Gordy polished it up, giving himself a co-writing credit. At the start, Tamla was a very, very small operation. Other than the musicians they employed, the team mostly consisted of Berry and Raynoma Gordy, Smokey Robinson acting essentially as Berry’s apprentice and assistant, and Janie Bradford, a teenage songwriter with whom Gordy had collaborated on a couple of songs for Jackie Wilson: [Excerpt: Jackie Wilson, “The Joke (Is Not On Me)”] Bradford was given the official job title of receptionist, but she actually did almost all the admin at the label offices, doing everything from sorting out the contracts to mopping the floor, along with chipping in with songs when she had an idea. Because they were a shoestring operation, Gordy, Marv Johnson, and Robinson would do most of the legwork of getting the track to radio stations, and it only got local distribution. They followed up with a second Tamla record, three weeks later, written by Berry and sung by Eddie Holland, who had sung on Berry’s demos for Jackie Wilson and also had a Wilson-esque voice: [Excerpt: Eddie Holland, “Merry Go Round”] Marv Johnson’s record, “Come to Me”, became a local hit, but as we’ve talked about before, when you’re running an indie label the last thing you want is a hit — you have to pay to get the records pressed, but then you have to wait months for the money to come in from the distributors. Becoming too big too fast could be a problem. Luckily, before the record got too big, United Artists stepped in. They wanted to buy the master for “Come to Me”, and to buy both Johnson and Holland’s contracts from Gordy. Gordy would continue writing and producing for them, but they would be United Artists performers rather than on Tamla. Gordy got enough money from that deal to continue running his label for a while longer, and United Artists got their first R&B star — “Come to Me” ended up going top thirty on the pop charts and top ten on the R&B charts. Not bad at all for something put out on a little micro-label. Eddie Holland, on the other hand, didn’t do so well on United Artists — he wasn’t ever a confident performer, and after two years he was back with Gordy’s operation, this time working behind the scenes rather than as the main performer. So Tamla was ready to put out its third single, and Gordy may have had a plan for how his label was going to get much bigger. It’s been suggested by several people that a few of the early acts he signed were intended as ways to get more famous relatives of those acts interested in the label. For example, the first female solo singer he signed to the label, Mable John, was the sister of Little Willie John, the R&B star. Mable was certainly good enough to be hired on her own merits, but at the same time the thought must have crossed Gordy’s mind that it would be good to get her brother recording for him. In the same way, Smokey Robinson’s favourite local group was Nolan Strong and the Diablos, who recorded the doo-wop classic “The Wind”: [Excerpt: Nolan Strong and the Diablos, “The Wind”] Nolan Strong’s cousin Barrett was also an aspiring singer, and Gordy signed him to Tamla, and wrote him a song with his sister Gwen and her then-boyfriend Roquel Davis, the same team with whom he’d collaborated on Jackie Wilson’s hits: [Excerpt: Barrett Strong, “Let’s Rock”] Unfortunately, “Let’s Rock” wasn’t a hit, and Gordy seemed to decide to try to throw a lot of records at the wall to see what would stick. Over the next few months, they put out a variety of odd singles, none of which charted, and none of which seem much like the music Gordy was generally known for. There was “Snake Walk”, a jazz instrumental played by the Funk Brothers under the name The Swinging Tigers, with the songwriting credited to Gordy and Robinson: [Excerpt: The Swinging Tigers, “Snake Walk (part 1)”] There was “It”, a novelty single about an alien, performed by Smokey Robinson and Ronnie White of the Miracles, under the name “Ron & Bill”: [Excerpt: Ron & Bill, “It”] And a few more. But it wasn’t until Barett Strong’s second single, in August 1959, that Tamla hit the jackpot again. There are three very different stories about how “Money” was written. According to Berry Gordy, he came up with the music and the whole first verse and chorus himself, and played it to Janie Bradford, who suggested a couple of lines for the second verse, but he was impressed enough with her lines that he gave her fifty percent of the song, even though she didn’t think she’d contributed very much. Barrett Strong came and sat down with them, uninvited, and started singing along, but didn’t contribute anything to the writing of the song. According to Janie Bradford, Berry Gordy was playing the riff on the piano, but had no words or melody yet. He said to her, “I need a title, give me a title, something that everybody wants,” and she replied “Money, that’s what I want!” and the two of them wrote the lyrics together based on her lyrical idea. And according to Barrett Strong, who is backed up by the engineer and the guitarist on the session, *Strong* — who played the piano on the session as well as singing — was jamming the riff, having hit upon it while messing around with Ray Charles’ “What’d I Say”. Gordy only came into the session after Strong had already taught the instrumental parts to the musicians, and Gordy and Bradford only wrote the lyrics after the instrumental track was already completed. The initial filing of the song’s copyright credited Strong for words and music, Gordy for words and music, and Bradford only for words. According to both Bradford and Gordy, that’s because Bradford, who filled out the form, didn’t understand the form and made a mistake. Three years later, Strong’s name was taken off the copyright, and he wasn’t informed of the change. His name didn’t appear on the label of the record. Personally, I tend to believe Strong. The song simply doesn’t sound that much like Gordy’s other songs of the period, which were based far less on riffs, and which didn’t tend to be twelve-bar blueses. Whoever wrote it, the result was a great record, and the first true classic to come out of the Gordy operation: [Excerpt: Barrett Strong, “Money”] The B-side isn’t quite as good, but it’s still a strong ballad, and if you’re a fan of John Lennon’s solo work you might find the middle eight very familiar: [Excerpt: Barrett Strong, “Oh I Apologize”] “Money” came out on Tamla and was initially fairly unsuccessful, because Tamla didn’t have any national distribution. But Anna Records did. That label had partnered with Chess Records. Chess had sent Harvey Fuqua, who was working for Chess as an executive as well as a performer, over to work with Anna Records. Fuqua had brought with him another member of his latest lineup of the Moonglows, a young man named Marvin Gay, to work for Anna as a session drummer and part-time janitor, and Marvin soon got into a relationship with Anna Gordy. But Marvin wasn’t the only one to get into a relationship with a Gordy sister. Harvey Fuqua had been dating Etta James, with whom he was having a few hits as a duet act on Chess: [Excerpt: Etta James and Harvey Fuqua, “Spoonful”] But he soon struck up a relationship with Gwen Gordy. He split up with James, Gwen Gordy split up with Roquel Davis — and then Berry and Gwen Gordy and Roquel Davis wrote a song about the splits, which Etta James performed for Chess, back as a solo artist again: [Excerpt: Etta James, “All I Could Do Was Cry”] That became a hit in June 1960, and that was also the month that “Money” finally became a hit, nearly a year after it was released. The Tamla record had been a local hit, but Tamla still didn’t have any national distribution, so Berry Gordy leased the recording to his sisters’ label. It was rereleased on Anna Records, distributed through Chess, and became the first national hit for one of the Gordy family of labels, reaching number two on the R&B charts and number twenty-three on the pop charts. The Gordy family of labels was starting to have some real success: [Excerpt: Barrett Strong, “Money”] Unfortunately, that would be Barrett Strong’s only hit as a performer. Over the next eighteen months he would release a whole variety of singles, none of which had any success, eventually trying the desperate tactic of recording a follow-up to “Money”, titled “Money and Me”, with the writing credited to Berry Gordy, Janie Bradford, Smokey Robinson, and Robert Bateman — a singer who was one of the Rayber singers: [Excerpt: Barrett Strong, “Money and Me”] That didn’t work, and Strong ended up going back to work on the Chrysler production line, giving up his singing career. But that won’t be the last we’ll see of him — he’ll be back with a new job in a few years’ time. But in late 1959, they didn’t know yet that “Money” would even be a hit, let alone a classic that would be remembered more than sixty years later. Indeed, the biggest success that had come out of the Gordy operation was still Marv Johnson, and while he was signed to United Artists, he was still making records with Berry Gordy. Gordy was writing and producing his records, and now they were also being recorded at Gordy’s home — he and Raynoma had bought a house with a recording studio in the back in August 1959. They named the house Hitsville USA, and it became the headquarters for the Gordy family of labels. Berry and Raynoma lived in a flat upstairs, while the recording studio downstairs was open twenty-two hours a day. Eventually they would buy all the other nearby houses, and turn them into offices for their recording, publishing, and management empire. The whole family pitched in to make the company a success. Berry’s sister Esther took over the finances of Tamla, with the assistance of her accountant husband. Their other sister Loucye took charge of the record manufacturing side of the business — liaising with pressing plants, overseeing cover art, and so on. Raynoma managed Jobete, the publishing company named after Berry’s first three children, Joy, Berry, and Terry. The Hitsville studio was primitive at first — the echo chamber was also the toilet, and someone had to stand guard outside it while they were recording to make sure no-one used it during a session — but it was good enough for Gordy to use it to make hit records for Marv Johnson, like “You Got What It Takes”: [Excerpt: Marv Johnson, “You Got What It Takes”] That went top ten on both the pop and R&B charts, as did the follow-up, “I Love The Way You Love”: [Excerpt: Marv Johnson, “I Love the Way You Love”] But those hits were on someone else’s label. Berry Gordy was still looking to expand his own record business, and so he decided he was going to start a second label, to go along with Tamla. Smokey Robinson had still not had a hit, though he was writing a lot of material, but then Smokey brought Berry a song he thought was a guaranteed hit, “Bad Girl”: [Excerpt: The Miracles, “Bad Girl”] Gordy decided that he was going to start up a new label just for groups, while Tamla would be for solo artists, and “Bad Girl” was going to be the first release on it. But once again, he didn’t have a proper national distributor for his record, so after it started selling around Detroit, he licensed the record to Chess Records, who reissued it. “Bad Girl” went to number ninety-three on the Hot One Hundred, proving that Smokey Robinson did indeed have the potential to make a real hit. But, as was so often the way, Chess didn’t pay Gordy’s company the proper royalties for the record, and so Gordy decided that his new label was going to have to have national distribution. He wasn’t going to let any more of its records come out on Chess or United Artists. From now on, either they were on Tamla, or they were coming out on the new label, Motown.

Episode 80: “Money” by Barrett Strong

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 27, 2020

Episode eighty of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Money” by Barrett Strong, the dispute over its authorship, and the start of a record label that would change music. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on “Alley Oop” by the Hollywood Argyles. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt’s irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ —-more—-Erratum I say “His name didn’t appear on the label of the record.” I mean here that Strong’s name didn’t appear on the label as a songwriter. It obviously did appear as the performer. Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. You might want to listen again to the episode on Jackie Wilson, in which we looked at Berry Gordy’s career to this point. I used six principal sources to put together the narrative for this one, most of which I will be using for most future Motown episodes. Where Did Our Love Go? The Rise and Fall of the Motown Sound by Nelson George is an excellent popular history of the various companies that became Motown. To Be Loved by Berry Gordy is Gordy’s own, understandably one-sided, but relatively well-written, autobiography. Women of Motown: An Oral History by Susan Whitall is a collection of interviews with women involved in Motown, including Janie Bradford. I Hear a Symphony: Motown and Crossover R&B by J. Andrew Flory is an academic look at Motown. The Motown Encyclopaedia by Graham Betts is an exhaustive look at the people and records involved in Motown’s thirty-year history. And Motown Junkies is an infrequently-updated blog looking at (so far) the first 693 tracks released on Motown singles. There is a Complete Motown Singles 1959-62 box available from Hip-O-Select with comprehensive liner notes, but if you just want the music, I recommend instead this much cheaper bare-bones box from Real Gone Music. And this set contains every recording that Barrett Strong made for Tamla as a performer. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Today, we’re going to look at a record which was the first success for one of the most important record labels of all time, which has one of the most instantly recognisable riffs of any record ever, and which was the product of a one-hit wonder who would, several years later, go on to be a hugely important figure as a writer, rather than a performer. Along the way we’re going to look at the beginnings of many, many, other careers we’ll be seeing more of in the next couple of years. Today, we’re going to look at “Money” by Barrett Strong: [Excerpt: Barrett Strong, “Money”] When we left Berry Gordy Jr, he had just stopped writing songs for Jackie Wilson — while the songs he’d co-written with his sister Gwen and her boyfriend Roquel Davis had been massive hits for Wilson, Wilson’s manager had believed that any songwriters could bring the same amount of success, and that Wilson’s records were selling solely because of Wilson’s performances. Davis and Gwen had started up a new record label with the help of another Gordy sister, Anna, after whom they named the label. But at the start, Berry Gordy had little involvement in that label. While Gwen had wanted Berry to become a partner in the business, Berry had soured on the idea of business partners after some of his other ventures had failed due to conflicts between him and his partners. Berry was going to work for himself. He would write and produce for his family’s record labels, but he wasn’t going to be a partner in their businesses. Instead, he focussed on a group he’d got to know. The Matadors were a vocal group he’d seen audition, and been mildly impressed with, but he had decided to work with them mostly because he was very attracted to one of their singers, Claudette Rogers. He’d worked with them for a few days before asking Claudette out, and she’d turned him down because she was seeing one of the other group members, William Robinson. But by that point Gordy had got to know Robinson, and to appreciate his talent, and his response was just to tell her how lucky she was to have a man like that. He took them on as a management project, and also decided to teach Robinson songwriting — Robinson had written a lot of songs, which showed potential, but Gordy thought none of them were quite there yet. What impressed Gordy most was Robinson’s attitude, every time Gordy told him what was wrong with a song — Robinson would just go on to the next song, as enthusiastic as ever. Eventually, Robinson came up with a song that they thought could be a hit. At the time, the Silhouettes had a big hit with a song called “Get a Job”: [Excerpt: The Silhouettes, “Get a Job”] Robinson had come up with an answer song, which he called “Got a Job”. Gordy decided that that was good enough for him to produce a recording — he’d recently started up a production company, which he primarily used to produce demos of his own songs, with singers like Eddie Holland. Gordy took the group into the studio, and got a deal with George Goldner’s label End Records to distribute the single that resulted. The only thing was, Gordy still wasn’t happy with the group’s name — The Matadors sounded too masculine for a group which had a woman in it. So they all chose other names, wrote them down, stuck them in a hat, and the one that came out was “the Miracles”; and so “Got a Job” by the Miracles came out on End Records on William “Smokey” Robinson’s eighteenth birthday: [Excerpt: The Miracles, “Got a Job”] Gordy at this point was a songwriter first and foremost, but he wanted to make sure he was making money from the songs. He had already started his own publishing company, after having not been paid the royalties he was owed on several of his songs. He’d decided that he could use his production company to ensure his songs got a release — he’d lease the recordings out to other labels, like End, or his sister’s label Anna. The recordings themselves were just a way to get some money from the songs, which were his real business. He and his second wife Raynoma also used their production company, named Rayber as a portmanteau of their two names, in another way — they would, for a fee, provide a full professional recording of anyone — you could walk in and pay for an arrangement of your song by Berry Gordy, instrumental backing, vocals by the Rayber Singers (a fluid group of people that included Raynoma and Eddie Holland), and a copy of the record. If the amateur singer who came in was any good, the results would be quite listenable, as in “I Can’t Concentrate” by Wade Jones, which they liked so much they later even released it properly: [Excerpt: “I Can’t Concentrate”, Wade Jones] But at this point, Gordy still wasn’t making much money at all. In 1959, according to court papers around a claim for child support for his kids, he made $27.70 a week on average — and almost all of that came from a single one-thousand-dollar cheque for writing “Lonely Teardrops” for Jackie Wilson. And producing the Miracles didn’t add much to that — when Gordy received his first royalty cheque from End Records for “Got a Job”, he was astonished to see that it was only for $3.19. To add insult to injury, End Records tried to claim that the Miracles were now their artists, and they were going to record them directly, without the involvement of Gordy. This was a thing that many businesses connected with Morris Levy did, and they were usually successful, because if you get into an argument with the Mafia you’ll probably not win. But in the case of Gordy, his family were so well-known and respected in Detroit’s black community, and Gordy himself had enough cachet because of his work with Jackie Wilson, that a contingent of black DJs told End Records that they’d stop playing any of their records unless they backed off on the Miracles. But all this led Gordy to one conclusion — one he didn’t come to until Smokey Robinson pointed it out to him. He needed to start his own record label, just like his sisters had. The problem was that he had no money, and while his family was, for a black family at the time, very rich, they held their money in a trust and required a proper contract and unanimous approval from all eight siblings before they would provide one of the family with a business loan — and Berry was regarded by his siblings as a useless drifter and underachiever. But eventually he managed to win them round, and they lent him $800. His original idea for the name of the label was “Tammy”, after Debbie Reynolds’ hit, to show that they weren’t just aiming at the R&B market: [Excerpt: Debbie Reynolds, “Tammy”] However, it turned out that there was another label called Tammy, and so Gordy decided on Tamla instead. Tamla’s first record was by a local singer called Marv Johnson, who had a very similar voice to that of Jackie Wilson, but who was known for having more of an ego than Wilson. There’s an anonymous quote by someone who knew both men — “The difference between Marv and Jackie Wilson was that Wilson would kiss all the women, especially the ugly ones, because he knew if he did they’d be with him forever. Marv only kissed the pretty ones, and that coldness came through in everything he did.” One can argue about whether it’s colder to cynically manipulate people’s feelings or to show contempt for them, but it’s definitely the case that Marv Johnson does not seem to have been well loved by many of the people who knew him. Johnson had recorded one previous single, “My Baby-O”, on another record label: [Excerpt: Marv Johnson, “My Baby-O”] Some sources claim that Berry Gordy produced that track — others that he was just present at the session, watching. Whatever Gordy’s involvement with Johnson before signing him to Tamla, the first Tamla single, “Come to Me”, was the start of something big. It was written by Johnson and Gordy, and featured a group of session players who would form the core of what would become known as the Funk Brothers — James Jamerson, Benny Benjamin, Eddie Willis, Joe Messina, and Thomas “Beans” Bowles. On top of that, Brian Holland, who with his brother Eddie would later go on to become part of arguably the most important songwriting and production team of the sixties, was on backing vocals: [Excerpt: Marv Johnson, “Come to Me”] Johnson wrote that song himself, and Gordy polished it up, giving himself a co-writing credit. At the start, Tamla was a very, very small operation. Other than the musicians they employed, the team mostly consisted of Berry and Raynoma Gordy, Smokey Robinson acting essentially as Berry’s apprentice and assistant, and Janie Bradford, a teenage songwriter with whom Gordy had collaborated on a couple of songs for Jackie Wilson: [Excerpt: Jackie Wilson, “The Joke (Is Not On Me)”] Bradford was given the official job title of receptionist, but she actually did almost all the admin at the label offices, doing everything from sorting out the contracts to mopping the floor, along with chipping in with songs when she had an idea. Because they were a shoestring operation, Gordy, Marv Johnson, and Robinson would do most of the legwork of getting the track to radio stations, and it only got local distribution. They followed up with a second Tamla record, three weeks later, written by Berry and sung by Eddie Holland, who had sung on Berry’s demos for Jackie Wilson and also had a Wilson-esque voice: [Excerpt: Eddie Holland, “Merry Go Round”] Marv Johnson’s record, “Come to Me”, became a local hit, but as we’ve talked about before, when you’re running an indie label the last thing you want is a hit — you have to pay to get the records pressed, but then you have to wait months for the money to come in from the distributors. Becoming too big too fast could be a problem. Luckily, before the record got too big, United Artists stepped in. They wanted to buy the master for “Come to Me”, and to buy both Johnson and Holland’s contracts from Gordy. Gordy would continue writing and producing for them, but they would be United Artists performers rather than on Tamla. Gordy got enough money from that deal to continue running his label for a while longer, and United Artists got their first R&B star — “Come to Me” ended up going top thirty on the pop charts and top ten on the R&B charts. Not bad at all for something put out on a little micro-label. Eddie Holland, on the other hand, didn’t do so well on United Artists — he wasn’t ever a confident performer, and after two years he was back with Gordy’s operation, this time working behind the scenes rather than as the main performer. So Tamla was ready to put out its third single, and Gordy may have had a plan for how his label was going to get much bigger. It’s been suggested by several people that a few of the early acts he signed were intended as ways to get more famous relatives of those acts interested in the label. For example, the first female solo singer he signed to the label, Mable John, was the sister of Little Willie John, the R&B star. Mable was certainly good enough to be hired on her own merits, but at the same time the thought must have crossed Gordy’s mind that it would be good to get her brother recording for him. In the same way, Smokey Robinson’s favourite local group was Nolan Strong and the Diablos, who recorded the doo-wop classic “The Wind”: [Excerpt: Nolan Strong and the Diablos, “The Wind”] Nolan Strong’s cousin Barrett was also an aspiring singer, and Gordy signed him to Tamla, and wrote him a song with his sister Gwen and her then-boyfriend Roquel Davis, the same team with whom he’d collaborated on Jackie Wilson’s hits: [Excerpt: Barrett Strong, “Let’s Rock”] Unfortunately, “Let’s Rock” wasn’t a hit, and Gordy seemed to decide to try to throw a lot of records at the wall to see what would stick. Over the next few months, they put out a variety of odd singles, none of which charted, and none of which seem much like the music Gordy was generally known for. There was “Snake Walk”, a jazz instrumental played by the Funk Brothers under the name The Swinging Tigers, with the songwriting credited to Gordy and Robinson: [Excerpt: The Swinging Tigers, “Snake Walk (part 1)”] There was “It”, a novelty single about an alien, performed by Smokey Robinson and Ronnie White of the Miracles, under the name “Ron & Bill”: [Excerpt: Ron & Bill, “It”] And a few more. But it wasn’t until Barett Strong’s second single, in August 1959, that Tamla hit the jackpot again. There are three very different stories about how “Money” was written. According to Berry Gordy, he came up with the music and the whole first verse and chorus himself, and played it to Janie Bradford, who suggested a couple of lines for the second verse, but he was impressed enough with her lines that he gave her fifty percent of the song, even though she didn’t think she’d contributed very much. Barrett Strong came and sat down with them, uninvited, and started singing along, but didn’t contribute anything to the writing of the song. According to Janie Bradford, Berry Gordy was playing the riff on the piano, but had no words or melody yet. He said to her, “I need a title, give me a title, something that everybody wants,” and she replied “Money, that’s what I want!” and the two of them wrote the lyrics together based on her lyrical idea. And according to Barrett Strong, who is backed up by the engineer and the guitarist on the session, *Strong* — who played the piano on the session as well as singing — was jamming the riff, having hit upon it while messing around with Ray Charles’ “What’d I Say”. Gordy only came into the session after Strong had already taught the instrumental parts to the musicians, and Gordy and Bradford only wrote the lyrics after the instrumental track was already completed. The initial filing of the song’s copyright credited Strong for words and music, Gordy for words and music, and Bradford only for words. According to both Bradford and Gordy, that’s because Bradford, who filled out the form, didn’t understand the form and made a mistake. Three years later, Strong’s name was taken off the copyright, and he wasn’t informed of the change. His name didn’t appear on the label of the record. Personally, I tend to believe Strong. The song simply doesn’t sound that much like Gordy’s other songs of the period, which were based far less on riffs, and which didn’t tend to be twelve-bar blueses. Whoever wrote it, the result was a great record, and the first true classic to come out of the Gordy operation: [Excerpt: Barrett Strong, “Money”] The B-side isn’t quite as good, but it’s still a strong ballad, and if you’re a fan of John Lennon’s solo work you might find the middle eight very familiar: [Excerpt: Barrett Strong, “Oh I Apologize”] “Money” came out on Tamla and was initially fairly unsuccessful, because Tamla didn’t have any national distribution. But Anna Records did. That label had partnered with Chess Records. Chess had sent Harvey Fuqua, who was working for Chess as an executive as well as a performer, over to work with Anna Records. Fuqua had brought with him another member of his latest lineup of the Moonglows, a young man named Marvin Gay, to work for Anna as a session drummer and part-time janitor, and Marvin soon got into a relationship with Anna Gordy. But Marvin wasn’t the only one to get into a relationship with a Gordy sister. Harvey Fuqua had been dating Etta James, with whom he was having a few hits as a duet act on Chess: [Excerpt: Etta James and Harvey Fuqua, “Spoonful”] But he soon struck up a relationship with Gwen Gordy. He split up with James, Gwen Gordy split up with Roquel Davis — and then Berry and Gwen Gordy and Roquel Davis wrote a song about the splits, which Etta James performed for Chess, back as a solo artist again: [Excerpt: Etta James, “All I Could Do Was Cry”] That became a hit in June 1960, and that was also the month that “Money” finally became a hit, nearly a year after it was released. The Tamla record had been a local hit, but Tamla still didn’t have any national distribution, so Berry Gordy leased the recording to his sisters’ label. It was rereleased on Anna Records, distributed through Chess, and became the first national hit for one of the Gordy family of labels, reaching number two on the R&B charts and number twenty-three on the pop charts. The Gordy family of labels was starting to have some real success: [Excerpt: Barrett Strong, “Money”] Unfortunately, that would be Barrett Strong’s only hit as a performer. Over the next eighteen months he would release a whole variety of singles, none of which had any success, eventually trying the desperate tactic of recording a follow-up to “Money”, titled “Money and Me”, with the writing credited to Berry Gordy, Janie Bradford, Smokey Robinson, and Robert Bateman — a singer who was one of the Rayber singers: [Excerpt: Barrett Strong, “Money and Me”] That didn’t work, and Strong ended up going back to work on the Chrysler production line, giving up his singing career. But that won’t be the last we’ll see of him — he’ll be back with a new job in a few years’ time. But in late 1959, they didn’t know yet that “Money” would even be a hit, let alone a classic that would be remembered more than sixty years later. Indeed, the biggest success that had come out of the Gordy operation was still Marv Johnson, and while he was signed to United Artists, he was still making records with Berry Gordy. Gordy was writing and producing his records, and now they were also being recorded at Gordy’s home — he and Raynoma had bought a house with a recording studio in the back in August 1959. They named the house Hitsville USA, and it became the headquarters for the Gordy family of labels. Berry and Raynoma lived in a flat upstairs, while the recording studio downstairs was open twenty-two hours a day. Eventually they would buy all the other nearby houses, and turn them into offices for their recording, publishing, and management empire. The whole family pitched in to make the company a success. Berry’s sister Esther took over the finances of Tamla, with the assistance of her accountant husband. Their other sister Loucye took charge of the record manufacturing side of the business — liaising with pressing plants, overseeing cover art, and so on. Raynoma managed Jobete, the publishing company named after Berry’s first three children, Joy, Berry, and Terry. The Hitsville studio was primitive at first — the echo chamber was also the toilet, and someone had to stand guard outside it while they were recording to make sure no-one used it during a session — but it was good enough for Gordy to use it to make hit records for Marv Johnson, like “You Got What It Takes”: [Excerpt: Marv Johnson, “You Got What It Takes”] That went top ten on both the pop and R&B charts, as did the follow-up, “I Love The Way You Love”: [Excerpt: Marv Johnson, “I Love the Way You Love”] But those hits were on someone else’s label. Berry Gordy was still looking to expand his own record business, and so he decided he was going to start a second label, to go along with Tamla. Smokey Robinson had still not had a hit, though he was writing a lot of material, but then Smokey brought Berry a song he thought was a guaranteed hit, “Bad Girl”: [Excerpt: The Miracles, “Bad Girl”] Gordy decided that he was going to start up a new label just for groups, while Tamla would be for solo artists, and “Bad Girl” was going to be the first release on it. But once again, he didn’t have a proper national distributor for his record, so after it started selling around Detroit, he licensed the record to Chess Records, who reissued it. “Bad Girl” went to number ninety-three on the Hot One Hundred, proving that Smokey Robinson did indeed have the potential to make a real hit. But, as was so often the way, Chess didn’t pay Gordy’s company the proper royalties for the record, and so Gordy decided that his new label was going to have to have national distribution. He wasn’t going to let any more of its records come out on Chess or United Artists. From now on, either they were on Tamla, or they were coming out on the new label, Motown.

women money rock fall nashville detroit wind miracles robinson holland mafia personally bob dylan djs john lennon chess elvis presley i love bradford motown excerpt tom petty george harrison smokey tilt ray charles rock music concentrate marv smokey robinson roy orbison spoonful etta james merry go round gordy debbie reynolds bad girl everly brothers berry gordy weavers jeff lynne united artists silhouettes sam phillips diablos jackie wilson chet atkins fuqua alley oop moonglow bob moore chess records tamla funk brothers matadors brian holland barrett strong nelson george william robinson james jamerson motown sound marvin gay hitsville little willie john joe messina morris levy monument records robert bateman hitsville usa berry gordy jr fred foster nashville a team tilt araiza

Episode Sixty-Four: “Reet Petite” by Jackie Wilson

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 6, 2020

Episode sixty-four of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Reet Petite” by Jackie Wilson, and features talent contests with too much talent, the prehistory of Motown, a song banned by the BBC, and a possible Mafia hit. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on “Get a Job” by the Silhouettes. —-more—- Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. I used three main books to put together the narrative for this one. Where Did Our Love Go? The Rise and Fall of the Motown Sound by Nelson George is an excellent history of the various companies that became Motown. To Be Loved by Berry Gordy is Gordy’s own, understandably one-sided, but relatively well-written, autobiography. And Jackie Wilson: Lonely Teardrops by Tony Douglas is the closest thing out there to a definitive biography. There are dozens of compilations of Wilson’s fifties material, as it’s in the public domain, but for around the same price as those you can get this three-CD set which also has his later hits on, so that’s probably the place to start when investigating Wilson’s music. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Today, we’re going to have a look at one of the most important people in the history of popular music, and someone we’ll be seeing a lot more of as the series goes on. There are very few people in the world who can be said to have created an entire genre of music, and even fewer who were primarily record company owners rather than musicians, but Berry Gordy Jr was one of them. Gordy didn’t start out, though, as a record executive. When he first got into the music industry, it was as a songwriter, and today we’re going to look at his early songwriting career. But we’re also going to look at a performer who was massively important in his own right, and who was one of the most exciting performers ever to take to the stage — someone who inspired Elvis, Michael Jackson, and James Brown, and who provides one of the key links between fifties R&B and sixties soul: [Excerpt: Jackie Wilson, “Reet Petite”] I’m afraid that this episode is another case where I have to point you to the disclaimer I did in the early weeks of the show. Jackie Wilson was an admirable musician, but he was in no way an admirable human being, particularly in his treatment of women – he’s been credibly accused of at least one sexual assault, and he fathered many children by many different women, who he abandoned, and was known for having a violent temper. As always, this podcast is not about his reprehensible acts, but about the music, but again, it should not be taken as an endorsement of him as a person when I talk about his artistic talent. Wilson started out as a boxer in his teens, but he quickly decided to move into singing instead. He would regularly perform at talent contests around Detroit, and he was part of a loose association of musicians and singers including Wilson’s cousin Levi Stubbs, the Royals, who would later become Hank Ballard and the Midnighters, and the blues singer Little Willie John. They would all perform on the same talent shows and would agree among themselves who was going to win beforehand – Wilson would tell Stubbs “you win this week, I’ll win next week”. On one occasion, Johnny Otis happened to be in the audience, when the Royals, Little Willie John, and Wilson were all on the same bill, and on that particular show Wilson came third. Otis was working as a talent scout for King Records at the time, and tried to get all three acts signed to the label, but for reasons that remain unclear, King decided they only wanted to sign the Royals (though they would sign Little Willie John a couple of years later). As a result, a song that Otis had written for Wilson was recorded instead by the Royals: [The Royals, “Every Beat of My Heart”] Wilson kept performing at the amateur nights for a couple of years, until at the age of seventeen he was signed to Dee Gee Records, a small label co-owned by the jazz trumpet player Dizzy Gillespie. There he cut two singles, under the name Sonny Wilson. Wilson’s favourite song to sing in talent contests was “Danny Boy”, which would remain in his setlists until late in his life, and he would use that song as a way to show off his vocal virtuosity, ornamenting it to the point that the melody would become almost unrecognisable, and so that was, of course, one of the two singles: [Excerpt: Sonny Wilson, “Danny Boy”] Neither single was particularly successful, but Wilson continued performing in nightclubs around Detroit and built up something of a local following. But in 1953 he got a big break, when he auditioned for Billy Ward and his Dominoes. We’ve talked about the Dominoes before, back in the episode on “Money Honey”, but as a bit of a recap, they were the biggest black vocal group of the early fifties, and they were led by Billy Ward, a vocal coach who was not their lead singer. The lead singer in the early fifties was Clyde McPhatter, but McPhatter was getting restless. There are several different stories about how Wilson came to be picked for Ward’s group, but one that sticks out in my mind is one that Ward used to tell, which is that one reason Wilson was picked for the group is that his mother begged Ward, saying that she was scared for the life of her son, as he was getting into trouble on the streets. Certainly, she had every reason to be worried for him – Wilson had recently been stabbed in the chest by a sex worker. But Ward noted that Wilson was a diamond in the rough, and could have a great deal of success with the right amount of polishing. He decided to get Wilson into the group as a replacement for McPhatter, though McPhatter and Wilson were in the group together for a while, as McPhatter served out his notice with the group. Over the next few weeks, Wilson studied what McPhatter was doing, until he was able to take McPhatter’s place. Ward taught him breath control, and became something of a father figure, giving him some discipline for the first time in his life. McPhatter’s were very big shoes to fill, but Wilson soon won the audiences over, both with his vocals and his dancing. While Wilson was not regarded as a good dancer by most of the people who knew him – he couldn’t dance with a partner at all – he had a unique way of moving all his own, which he had learned in the boxing ring, where he’d learned to slide, sidestep, and duck away from other fighters, and to come at them from unexpected angles. He soon became one of the most riveting performers on stage, jumping up, throwing his mic in the air, doing mid-air splits, and completely dominating the stage. As well as teaching him to perform, Ward made one other major change. Up to this point, Wilson had always been known either as Jack or as Sonny. Ward thought that being called Sonny smacked of Uncle Tommery, and decided that from this point on, Wilson’s stage name was going to be Jackie. Wilson was not happy with this at first, but later decided that Ward had been right – though he was still always “Jack” or “Sonny” to those who knew him. Wilson’s first recording with the group as lead singer came just after he turned nineteen, when he went into the studio with them to cut “You Can’t Keep a Good Man Down” for King Records — the same label that had turned him down when Johnny Otis had put him forward: [Excerpt: Billy Ward and the Dominoes, “You Can’t Keep a Good Man Down”] Four months later, they went back into the studio to cut eleven songs in a single day — a mammoth session which really allowed Wilson to show off his vocal versatility. From that session, their version of “Rags to Riches”, which had been a massive hit for Tony Bennett earlier in the year, went to number two on the R&B chart, though it didn’t dent the pop chart: [Excerpt: Billy Ward and the Dominoes, “Rags to Riches”] But after this, the Dominoes started to have less success in the charts — their records weren’t selling as well as they had been when Clyde McPhatter was the group’s lead singer, and in 1954 they had no hits at all. But in some ways that didn’t really matter — the group weren’t just looking to have success as recording artists, but as live performers, and they got a two-year residency in Las Vegas, supporting Louis Prima and Keely Smith. The group were getting five thousand dollars a week — a massive amount of money in those days — though most of that went to Ward, and Wilson was on a salary of only ninety dollars a week. It was while he was performing in Las Vegas that Wilson first came to the notice of someone who would later become a good friend — Elvis Presley. In 1956 Elvis made his own first trip to perform in Vegas, although he was far, far less successful there than he would be thirteen years later. While he was there, he watched with amazement as Jackie Wilson performed Elvis’ own hit “Don’t Be Cruel” much better than Elvis did himself — and in the famous Million Dollar Quartet tapes, you can hear Elvis raving about Wilson to Johnny Cash, Carl Perkins, and Jerry Lee Lewis: [Excerpt: Elvis talking about Jackie Wilson] It’s quite funny listening to those recordings, as the others keep trying to drag Elvis on to other topics of conversation, and Elvis keeps insisting on telling them just how good this singer with Billy Ward and the Dominoes, whose name he hadn’t caught, was. But Vegas wasn’t a good fit for Wilson. He chafed at the discipline of the Dominoes, and at staying in one place all the time. After a couple of years of disappointing record sales, the Dominoes switched labels to Decca, and for the first time Jackie Wilson hit the pop charts as a lead singer, when “St. Therese of the Roses” made number thirteen on the pop charts and number twenty-seven on the hot one hundred: [Excerpt: Billy Ward and the Dominoes, “St. Therese of the Roses”] Incidentally, over in the UK, where American chart records were often covered for the domestic market by British acts, that was recorded by Malcolm Vaughan, a pop tenor who wanted to be England’s answer to Dean Martin: [Excerpt: Malcolm Vaughan, “St. Therese of the Roses”] That version actually became a massive hit over here, reaching number three, after being banned by the BBC. Yes, you heard that right. That song was banned, because it was “contrary both to Roman Catholic doctrine and to Protestant sentiment”. The ban caused enough controversy that the record sold half a million copies. Vaughan would later go on to have a minor hit with a cover version of another Jackie Wilson record, “To Be Loved”. In 1957, Jackie decided to leave Billy Ward and the Dominoes. It had become apparent that Ward had no bigger ambitions than to keep playing Las Vegas forever, and keep making vast amounts of money without having to travel or work especially hard. Jackie Wilson wanted something more, and he went back to Detroit. At first he was going to join a vocal group that had been performing for a few years, the Four Aims, which featured his cousin Levi Stubbs and another distant relative, Lawrence Payton. Unfortunately, they found that Jackie’s voice didn’t blend well with the group — he sounded, according to Wilson’s first wife Freda, too similar to Stubbs, though I don’t hear that much of a vocal resemblance myself. Either way, the attempt to work together quickly fizzled out, and the Four Tops, as they became, had to find their own success without Jackie Wilson in the group. Around this time, Wilson also became obsessed with the singer Mario Lanza. Lanza was an Italian-American pop singer who sang in a pseudo-operatic style, rather than in the more casual crooning style of contemporaries like Frank Sinatra and Tony Bennett, and Wilson was a huge fan of Lanza’s 1951 film The Great Caruso, in which he played the opera singer Enrico Caruso: [Excerpt: Mario Lanza, “The Loveliest Night of the Year”] Wilson studied Lanza’s performances, and he tried to emulate Lanza’s diction and projection. But at the same time, he was, at heart, an R&B performer, and he also knew that as a black singer in Detroit in the early fifties, R&B was what he needed to do to make money. And making money was what Wilson needed to do more than anything else, and so he got an audition at the Flame Bar, which was owned and run by a local mobster, Al Green. Green was a big name in the local music business — he managed Johnnie Ray, one of the biggest names in white pop music at the time, and also LaVern Baker, who had had a string of R&B hits. Wilson got the audition through his friend Roquel Davis, who went by the name Billy Davis, who was Lawrence Payton’s cousin and had performed with him in an early lineup of the Four Aims. Davis had also written songs for the Four Aims, but more importantly for this purpose, his girlfriend, Gwen Gordy, worked with her sister Anna at the Flame Bar. Through these connections, Wilson got himself a regular spot at the Flame — and he also got to meet Gwen and Anna’s little brother Berry. Berry Gordy Jr was someone who would go on to be one of the most important people in the history of twentieth century music — someone without whom none of the rest of this story would happen. He was as important to the music of the sixties as Sam Phillips was to the fifties, if not more important. Gordy was born, the seventh of eight children, to a poor family in Detroit. As a child, he was taught some of the rudiments of the piano by an uncle, who tried to get him to learn to play in the proper manner — learning scales and arpeggios, and how to read music. But young Berry was easily bored, and soon figured out that if you play the first three notes of an arpeggio together, you can get a simple triad chord. A diversion here, just for those of you who don’t know what I’m talking about — an arpeggio is a musical term that literally means “like a harp”, and it’s used for a type of scale where you pick out the individual notes of a chord. You know the sound, even if you don’t know the term. So when you arpeggiate a C major chord, you play the notes C, E, and G, sometimes in multiple octaves: [Demonstrates on guitar] When you play those notes together, that’s a C major chord: [Demonstrates on guitar] Once young Berry Gordy Jr figured out how to play the chords C, F, and G, he was able to start playing boogie-woogie piano by ear. His favourite boogie record was “Hazel Scott’s Boogie Woogie”: [Excerpt: Hazel Scott, “Hazel Scott’s Boogie Woogie”] From an early age, he also became a fan of a particular type of vocal group performance, especially when the singers were singing touching songs about loneliness. He loved “Paper Doll” by the Mills Brothers: [Excerpt: The Mills Brothers, “Paper Doll”] and “We Three” by the Ink Spots: [Excerpt: The Ink Spots, “We Three”] But in his early years, Gordy was unsure whether he wanted to become a musician, or if instead he wanted to become a boxer like his hero Joe Louis — and in this way his career was paralleling that of Jackie Wilson, though he didn’t know Wilson at the time. He actually had a reasonable amount of success as a boxer, up until a point in 1950 where he saw two posters next to each other. One of them, on top, was advertising a battle of the bands between Stan Kenton and Duke Ellington, while the other was advertising a fight. He noticed two things about the posters. The first was that the bandleaders could work every night and make money, while he knew that boxers would go weeks or months between fights. And the second was that the bandleaders “were about fifty and looked twenty-three”, while the boxers “were about twenty-three and looked fifty”. He knew what he was going to do, and it wasn’t boxing. His attempts at a music career were soon put on the back-burner when he was drafted to fight in the Korean War. After he got out of the military, he had a variety of short-term jobs, but he was regarded by his family more or less as a bum — he never held down a steady job and he was a dreamer who saw himself as becoming a successful songwriter and a millionaire, but had never quite managed to make anything of his dreams. That was, at least, until he met Billy Davis, who at the time was a struggling songwriter like him, but one who had had slightly more success. Davis had managed to persuade Chess Records to sign up the Four Tops, as they were now called, and release a single with Davis credited as the songwriter: [Excerpt: The Four Tops, “Kiss Me Baby”] I say Davis was credited as the songwriter, because that song bears more than a little resemblance to the Ray Charles song from a few years earlier, “Kissa Me Baby”: [Excerpt: Ray Charles, “Kissa Me Baby”] But Chess hadn’t really been interested in the Four Tops themselves — they’d instead been interested in Billy Davis as a songwriter, and they quickly used songs he’d written for the Four Tops, and cut them instead with the Moonglows: [Excerpt: The Moonglows, “See Saw”] and the Flamingos: [Excerpt: The Flamingos, “A Kiss From Your Lips”] Neither of those had been a big hit, but the result was that Billy Davis was, in Gordy’s eyes at least, someone with a track record and connections. The two men hit it off musically as well as personally, and they decided that they’d start to collaborate on songs, along with Gordy’s sister Gwen, who was dating Davis. Anything any of them wrote on their own would also get credited to them as a group, and they’d pool whatever they got. And they were going to write songs for Jackie Wilson. Davis tried to get Wilson signed to Chess Records, but they weren’t interested in Wilson’s sound — they wanted a harder blues sound, rather than Wilson’s more soulful sound. But then Al Green took on Wilson’s management, and managed to persuade Bob Thiele at Decca Records, who had just signed Buddy Holly and the Crickets, to sign Wilson — not so much for Wilson’s own talent, though Thiele was impressed by him, but because Green promised that he could also sign LaVern Baker when her contract with Atlantic expired. As it turned out, though, Thiele would never get to sign Baker, as the day before Wilson’s contract was meant to be signed, Al Green died suddenly. More by chutzpah than anything else, Nat Tarnopol, an office boy who had been employed by Green, managed to take over Wilson’s management, just by saying that he was in charge now. He got the contracts signed, and got Wilson signed to Brunswick, the Decca subsidiary that put out rock and roll records. Over the next few years Tarnopol would manage to get himself made a co-owner of Brunswick, by using the leverage he got as Wilson’s manager. The first record Wilson put out as a solo artist was a song that Billy Davis had originally come up with when he was sixteen, inspired by a Louis Jordan song titled “Reet, Petite, and Gone”: [Excerpt: Louis Jordan, “Reet, Petite, and Gone”] Davis and the Gordys reworked his original idea into a new song called “Reet Petite”, which became Wilson’s first solo single since leaving the Dominoes. When Wilson took the song to Dick Jacobs, the arranger assigned to the session, Jacobs was impressed with the song, but became worried — he sat down with Wilson to work out what key to record the song in, and Wilson kept telling him to take it higher, and higher, and higher. Wilson couldn’t demonstrate what he meant during the preparations for the session, as he had laryngitis, but he kept insisting that he should sing it a full octave higher than Jacobs initially suggested. Jacobs went to Bob Thiele, and Thiele said it didn’t really matter, they’d only signed Wilson in order to get LaVern Baker, and just to do what he wanted. Jacobs hired some of the best session players in New York, including Panama Francis on drums and Sam “the Man” Taylor on saxophone, reasoning that if he had the best players around then the record wouldn’t end up too bad, whatever the singer sounded like. I’ll now quote some of Jacobs’ description of the session itself: “I got him behind the microphone and said a silent prayer that this aerial key he’d picked to sing in would be okay, and that this guy was a reasonable approximation of a singer. “Jackie Wilson opened his mouth and out poured what sounded like honey on moonbeams, and it was like the whole room shifted on some weird axis. The musicians, these meat and potatoes pros, stared at each other slack-jawed and goggle-eyed in disbelief; it was as if the purpose of their musical training and woodshedding and lickspitting had been to guide them into this big studio in the Pythian Temple to experience these pure shivering moments of magic. Bob Thiele and I looked at each other and just started laughing, half out of relief and half out of wonder. I never thought crow could taste so sweet.” [Excerpt: Jackie Wilson, “Reet Petite”] The record wasn’t a massive hit in the US — it only went to number sixty-two on the pop charts — but it was a much bigger hit in the UK, reaching number six, and over here it became a much-loved classic, so much so that it went to number one for four weeks when it was reissued in 1986. At one show, where he was Dinah Washington’s support act, he rolled his “r” on the title of the song, like he did on the record, and his two front dentures went flying off. He never sang the song live again. “Reet Petite” was the start of a run of songs that Davis and the Gordys wrote for Wilson, most of them big hits and several of them classics. Most notably, there was Wilson’s second solo single, “To Be Loved”. That song was written by Berry Gordy and Davis, after Gordy found out his wife was divorcing him. Gordy went round to his sister Gwen’s house, where Davis also was, and started playing the piano, after Gwen reassured him that even though his wife had left him, he still had the love of his children and his siblings. The result was a gorgeous ballad that went to number seven on the R&B charts and number twenty-two on the pop charts: [Excerpt: Jackie Wilson, “To Be Loved”] They also wrote what became Wilson’s biggest early it, “Lonely Teardrops”, which went to number one on the R&B charts: [Excerpt: Jackie Wilson, “Lonely Teardrops”] That had originally been written as a ballad, but was reworked into a more danceable song in the studio. Berry Gordy and Davis hated it when they first heard the finished record, but grew to appreciate it as it became a hit. However, from that point on, they started to take more interest in the production side of Wilson’s recordings, and they developed a routine where Davis and Gordy would rehearse Wilson, with Gordy on the piano, and they’d teach him the song and record a demo, which Jacobs would then use to write the arrangements — Dick Jacobs wasn’t the only arranger on Wilson’s early records, but they soon learned that he was the one who could best capture the sound they wanted. The three men would then supervise in the studio. (Gwen Gordy is also credited as a co-writer on several of the records, but her contributions tend to be played down by the others, and she doesn’t appear to have been involved in the production side. How much of that is her not contributing as much, and how much is just misogyny in how the story is told, is hard to say.) But eventually, they fell out with Nat Tarnopol, after they figured out that Tarnopol was putting songs to which he owned the copyright on the B-sides of all Wilson’s records, so he could get royalties from the sales. Gordy and Davis insisted that they should get to write the songs on both sides of the singles, so that they could get a fair share of the money — especially as they were effectively producing the sessions, without either a credit or royalties. Tarnopol disagreed — as far as he was concerned, Jackie Wilson could be a star with anyone writing his material, and he didn’t need these songwriters. Their days as Jackie Wilson’s hit factory were over. Davis and Gwen Gordy went off to found their own record label, along with Gwen and Berry’s sister Anna. Anna Records, as it was called, didn’t have the most propitious start, with its first single being a Davis and Gwen Gordy song “Hope and Pray”, performed by the Voice Masters: [Excerpt: The Voice Masters, “Hope and Pray”] But it would later put out some much more influential records. Berry, meanwhile, decided to groom another young artist for stardom — he saw a lot of possibilities in a young man called William Robinson, who everyone referred to as Smokey, and his group the Miracles. We’ll pick up on the Gordys and their business ventures in a few months’ time. Jackie Wilson continued having hits for several years, although his career dipped in the early sixties with the British Invasion. He then had a revival in 1967, when he recorded what would end up being his biggest hit, “Higher and Higher”: [Excerpt: Jackie Wilson, “Higher and Higher”] Wilson continued having occasional hits through to 1970, and remained a popular live artist for years afterwards, but then in 1975, in the middle of performing “Lonely Teardrops”, right after singing the line “my heart is crying”, he clutched his chest and collapsed. At first people thought it was part of the act, but he didn’t get back up. Cornell Gunter of the Coasters gave him mouth to mouth, and possibly saved his life, but some would question whether that was, in retrospect, a bad idea — Wilson was in a coma from which he would never fully recover. For the next eight and a half years, Wilson was institutionalised. There are some people who claim that he gained a little bit of awareness during that time, but by most accounts he was in a persistent vegetative state. At first, the music business rallied round and helped pay for his treatment — there are some reports that Jackie’s old friend Elvis Presley anonymously donated a lot of the money for his medical bills, though these obviously can’t be verified. The Detroit Spinners held a benefit concert for him, and donated $5000 of their own money. Al Green (the singer, not Wilson’s ex-manager) performed at the concert and gave ten thousand dollars, Stevie Wonder gave five thousand, Gladys Knight gave two thousand five hundred, Michael Jackson ten thousand, Richard Pryor twelve hundred. James Brown sent a one thousand dollar cheque, which bounced, but he coughed up the actual money when Jackie’s common-law wife said she was going to tell Jet magazine about the bouncing cheque. Nat Tarnopol and Brunswick Records, on the other hand, gave nothing. In fact, they did worse than nothing — they lied to Blue Cross/Blue Shield, claiming that Wilson hadn’t had any earnings from them in the year prior to his collapse, when he’d been in the studio and was owed regular union rates for recording sessions. If they’d told the truth, his medical bills would have been covered by the insurance, but they weren’t. There are many hypotheses as to why Wilson collapsed on stage that day, including that he used to drink salt water before going on stage to make himself sweat, and that this caused him to have a heart attack due to induced hypertension. But several people close to Wilson believed that his collapse was somehow caused by Nat Tarnopol having him poisoned. Wilson had been due to testify against Tarnopol in front of a grand jury ten days after his collapse, and Tarnopol was very involved with the Mafia — at one point he’d tried to have Carl Davis, who produced “Higher and Higher” killed, and it was only Davis’ friendship with another mobster with ties to Brunswick, Tommy Vastola, that saved him. Johnny Roberts, Wilson’s manager in the seventies and another mobster, actually faked his own death in the eighties and had a funeral, and then reappeared once Tarnopol himself died in 1987, while some of those close to Wilson think it’s no coincidence that Cornell Gunter, who had been there when Wilson collapsed and had always thought there was something strange about it, was murdered himself in 1990, in Las Vegas, by an unknown gunman — though if that murder did have anything to do with Wilson’s collapse, it can’t have been Tarnopol himself who ordered that murder, of course. Jackie Wilson finally died of pneumonia on January 21, 1984, after having been hospitalised since September 29, 1975. He was buried in an unmarked grave, but three years later funds were raised for a headstone, which reads “no more lonely teardrops”.

american new york history uk man las vegas england fall british green pray nashville detroit bbc miracles atlantic cd michael jackson elvis rock and roll ward roses mafia bob dylan riches flame frank sinatra jacobs royals elvis presley stevie wonder johnny cash jet james brown motown protestant tom petty petite roman catholic george harrison vaughan smokey ray charles korean war crickets mixcloud my heart tony bennett italian americans rags richard pryor lanza brunswick rock music duke ellington buddy holly al green gladys knight stubbs roy orbison dominoes british invasion blue cross blue shield demonstrates gordy seesaw dizzy gillespie money honey coasters four tops danny boy everly brothers thiele berry gordy weavers decca sixty four jeff lynne silhouettes carl perkins sam phillips joe louis boogie woogie jackie wilson chet atkins louis prima dinah washington louis jordan paper dolls decca records reet bob moore chess records million dollar quartet stan kenton good man down be cruel carl davis mario lanza billy davis nelson george william robinson midnighters hazel scott sonny wilson to be loved lavern baker king records motown sound levi stubbs billy ward keely smith johnny otis little willie john johnnie ray monument records clyde mcphatter we three every beat berry gordy jr fred foster detroit spinners nashville a team

Episode Sixty-Four: “Reet Petite” by Jackie Wilson

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 6, 2020

Episode sixty-four of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Reet Petite” by Jackie Wilson, and features talent contests with too much talent, the prehistory of Motown, a song banned by the BBC, and a possible Mafia hit. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on “Get a Job” by the Silhouettes. —-more—- Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. I used three main books to put together the narrative for this one. Where Did Our Love Go? The Rise and Fall of the Motown Sound by Nelson George is an excellent history of the various companies that became Motown. To Be Loved by Berry Gordy is Gordy’s own, understandably one-sided, but relatively well-written, autobiography. And Jackie Wilson: Lonely Teardrops by Tony Douglas is the closest thing out there to a definitive biography. There are dozens of compilations of Wilson’s fifties material, as it’s in the public domain, but for around the same price as those you can get this three-CD set which also has his later hits on, so that’s probably the place to start when investigating Wilson’s music. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Today, we’re going to have a look at one of the most important people in the history of popular music, and someone we’ll be seeing a lot more of as the series goes on. There are very few people in the world who can be said to have created an entire genre of music, and even fewer who were primarily record company owners rather than musicians, but Berry Gordy Jr was one of them. Gordy didn’t start out, though, as a record executive. When he first got into the music industry, it was as a songwriter, and today we’re going to look at his early songwriting career. But we’re also going to look at a performer who was massively important in his own right, and who was one of the most exciting performers ever to take to the stage — someone who inspired Elvis, Michael Jackson, and James Brown, and who provides one of the key links between fifties R&B and sixties soul: [Excerpt: Jackie Wilson, “Reet Petite”] I’m afraid that this episode is another case where I have to point you to the disclaimer I did in the early weeks of the show. Jackie Wilson was an admirable musician, but he was in no way an admirable human being, particularly in his treatment of women – he’s been credibly accused of at least one sexual assault, and he fathered many children by many different women, who he abandoned, and was known for having a violent temper. As always, this podcast is not about his reprehensible acts, but about the music, but again, it should not be taken as an endorsement of him as a person when I talk about his artistic talent. Wilson started out as a boxer in his teens, but he quickly decided to move into singing instead. He would regularly perform at talent contests around Detroit, and he was part of a loose association of musicians and singers including Wilson’s cousin Levi Stubbs, the Royals, who would later become Hank Ballard and the Midnighters, and the blues singer Little Willie John. They would all perform on the same talent shows and would agree among themselves who was going to win beforehand – Wilson would tell Stubbs “you win this week, I’ll win next week”. On one occasion, Johnny Otis happened to be in the audience, when the Royals, Little Willie John, and Wilson were all on the same bill, and on that particular show Wilson came third. Otis was working as a talent scout for King Records at the time, and tried to get all three acts signed to the label, but for reasons that remain unclear, King decided they only wanted to sign the Royals (though they would sign Little Willie John a couple of years later). As a result, a song that Otis had written for Wilson was recorded instead by the Royals: [The Royals, “Every Beat of My Heart”] Wilson kept performing at the amateur nights for a couple of years, until at the age of seventeen he was signed to Dee Gee Records, a small label co-owned by the jazz trumpet player Dizzy Gillespie. There he cut two singles, under the name Sonny Wilson. Wilson’s favourite song to sing in talent contests was “Danny Boy”, which would remain in his setlists until late in his life, and he would use that song as a way to show off his vocal virtuosity, ornamenting it to the point that the melody would become almost unrecognisable, and so that was, of course, one of the two singles: [Excerpt: Sonny Wilson, “Danny Boy”] Neither single was particularly successful, but Wilson continued performing in nightclubs around Detroit and built up something of a local following. But in 1953 he got a big break, when he auditioned for Billy Ward and his Dominoes. We’ve talked about the Dominoes before, back in the episode on “Money Honey”, but as a bit of a recap, they were the biggest black vocal group of the early fifties, and they were led by Billy Ward, a vocal coach who was not their lead singer. The lead singer in the early fifties was Clyde McPhatter, but McPhatter was getting restless. There are several different stories about how Wilson came to be picked for Ward’s group, but one that sticks out in my mind is one that Ward used to tell, which is that one reason Wilson was picked for the group is that his mother begged Ward, saying that she was scared for the life of her son, as he was getting into trouble on the streets. Certainly, she had every reason to be worried for him – Wilson had recently been stabbed in the chest by a sex worker. But Ward noted that Wilson was a diamond in the rough, and could have a great deal of success with the right amount of polishing. He decided to get Wilson into the group as a replacement for McPhatter, though McPhatter and Wilson were in the group together for a while, as McPhatter served out his notice with the group. Over the next few weeks, Wilson studied what McPhatter was doing, until he was able to take McPhatter’s place. Ward taught him breath control, and became something of a father figure, giving him some discipline for the first time in his life. McPhatter’s were very big shoes to fill, but Wilson soon won the audiences over, both with his vocals and his dancing. While Wilson was not regarded as a good dancer by most of the people who knew him – he couldn’t dance with a partner at all – he had a unique way of moving all his own, which he had learned in the boxing ring, where he’d learned to slide, sidestep, and duck away from other fighters, and to come at them from unexpected angles. He soon became one of the most riveting performers on stage, jumping up, throwing his mic in the air, doing mid-air splits, and completely dominating the stage. As well as teaching him to perform, Ward made one other major change. Up to this point, Wilson had always been known either as Jack or as Sonny. Ward thought that being called Sonny smacked of Uncle Tommery, and decided that from this point on, Wilson’s stage name was going to be Jackie. Wilson was not happy with this at first, but later decided that Ward had been right – though he was still always “Jack” or “Sonny” to those who knew him. Wilson’s first recording with the group as lead singer came just after he turned nineteen, when he went into the studio with them to cut “You Can’t Keep a Good Man Down” for King Records — the same label that had turned him down when Johnny Otis had put him forward: [Excerpt: Billy Ward and the Dominoes, “You Can’t Keep a Good Man Down”] Four months later, they went back into the studio to cut eleven songs in a single day — a mammoth session which really allowed Wilson to show off his vocal versatility. From that session, their version of “Rags to Riches”, which had been a massive hit for Tony Bennett earlier in the year, went to number two on the R&B chart, though it didn’t dent the pop chart: [Excerpt: Billy Ward and the Dominoes, “Rags to Riches”] But after this, the Dominoes started to have less success in the charts — their records weren’t selling as well as they had been when Clyde McPhatter was the group’s lead singer, and in 1954 they had no hits at all. But in some ways that didn’t really matter — the group weren’t just looking to have success as recording artists, but as live performers, and they got a two-year residency in Las Vegas, supporting Louis Prima and Keely Smith. The group were getting five thousand dollars a week — a massive amount of money in those days — though most of that went to Ward, and Wilson was on a salary of only ninety dollars a week. It was while he was performing in Las Vegas that Wilson first came to the notice of someone who would later become a good friend — Elvis Presley. In 1956 Elvis made his own first trip to perform in Vegas, although he was far, far less successful there than he would be thirteen years later. While he was there, he watched with amazement as Jackie Wilson performed Elvis’ own hit “Don’t Be Cruel” much better than Elvis did himself — and in the famous Million Dollar Quartet tapes, you can hear Elvis raving about Wilson to Johnny Cash, Carl Perkins, and Jerry Lee Lewis: [Excerpt: Elvis talking about Jackie Wilson] It’s quite funny listening to those recordings, as the others keep trying to drag Elvis on to other topics of conversation, and Elvis keeps insisting on telling them just how good this singer with Billy Ward and the Dominoes, whose name he hadn’t caught, was. But Vegas wasn’t a good fit for Wilson. He chafed at the discipline of the Dominoes, and at staying in one place all the time. After a couple of years of disappointing record sales, the Dominoes switched labels to Decca, and for the first time Jackie Wilson hit the pop charts as a lead singer, when “St. Therese of the Roses” made number thirteen on the pop charts and number twenty-seven on the hot one hundred: [Excerpt: Billy Ward and the Dominoes, “St. Therese of the Roses”] Incidentally, over in the UK, where American chart records were often covered for the domestic market by British acts, that was recorded by Malcolm Vaughan, a pop tenor who wanted to be England’s answer to Dean Martin: [Excerpt: Malcolm Vaughan, “St. Therese of the Roses”] That version actually became a massive hit over here, reaching number three, after being banned by the BBC. Yes, you heard that right. That song was banned, because it was “contrary both to Roman Catholic doctrine and to Protestant sentiment”. The ban caused enough controversy that the record sold half a million copies. Vaughan would later go on to have a minor hit with a cover version of another Jackie Wilson record, “To Be Loved”. In 1957, Jackie decided to leave Billy Ward and the Dominoes. It had become apparent that Ward had no bigger ambitions than to keep playing Las Vegas forever, and keep making vast amounts of money without having to travel or work especially hard. Jackie Wilson wanted something more, and he went back to Detroit. At first he was going to join a vocal group that had been performing for a few years, the Four Aims, which featured his cousin Levi Stubbs and another distant relative, Lawrence Payton. Unfortunately, they found that Jackie’s voice didn’t blend well with the group — he sounded, according to Wilson’s first wife Freda, too similar to Stubbs, though I don’t hear that much of a vocal resemblance myself. Either way, the attempt to work together quickly fizzled out, and the Four Tops, as they became, had to find their own success without Jackie Wilson in the group. Around this time, Wilson also became obsessed with the singer Mario Lanza. Lanza was an Italian-American pop singer who sang in a pseudo-operatic style, rather than in the more casual crooning style of contemporaries like Frank Sinatra and Tony Bennett, and Wilson was a huge fan of Lanza’s 1951 film The Great Caruso, in which he played the opera singer Enrico Caruso: [Excerpt: Mario Lanza, “The Loveliest Night of the Year”] Wilson studied Lanza’s performances, and he tried to emulate Lanza’s diction and projection. But at the same time, he was, at heart, an R&B performer, and he also knew that as a black singer in Detroit in the early fifties, R&B was what he needed to do to make money. And making money was what Wilson needed to do more than anything else, and so he got an audition at the Flame Bar, which was owned and run by a local mobster, Al Green. Green was a big name in the local music business — he managed Johnnie Ray, one of the biggest names in white pop music at the time, and also LaVern Baker, who had had a string of R&B hits. Wilson got the audition through his friend Roquel Davis, who went by the name Billy Davis, who was Lawrence Payton’s cousin and had performed with him in an early lineup of the Four Aims. Davis had also written songs for the Four Aims, but more importantly for this purpose, his girlfriend, Gwen Gordy, worked with her sister Anna at the Flame Bar. Through these connections, Wilson got himself a regular spot at the Flame — and he also got to meet Gwen and Anna’s little brother Berry. Berry Gordy Jr was someone who would go on to be one of the most important people in the history of twentieth century music — someone without whom none of the rest of this story would happen. He was as important to the music of the sixties as Sam Phillips was to the fifties, if not more important. Gordy was born, the seventh of eight children, to a poor family in Detroit. As a child, he was taught some of the rudiments of the piano by an uncle, who tried to get him to learn to play in the proper manner — learning scales and arpeggios, and how to read music. But young Berry was easily bored, and soon figured out that if you play the first three notes of an arpeggio together, you can get a simple triad chord. A diversion here, just for those of you who don’t know what I’m talking about — an arpeggio is a musical term that literally means “like a harp”, and it’s used for a type of scale where you pick out the individual notes of a chord. You know the sound, even if you don’t know the term. So when you arpeggiate a C major chord, you play the notes C, E, and G, sometimes in multiple octaves: [Demonstrates on guitar] When you play those notes together, that’s a C major chord: [Demonstrates on guitar] Once young Berry Gordy Jr figured out how to play the chords C, F, and G, he was able to start playing boogie-woogie piano by ear. His favourite boogie record was “Hazel Scott’s Boogie Woogie”: [Excerpt: Hazel Scott, “Hazel Scott’s Boogie Woogie”] From an early age, he also became a fan of a particular type of vocal group performance, especially when the singers were singing touching songs about loneliness. He loved “Paper Doll” by the Mills Brothers: [Excerpt: The Mills Brothers, “Paper Doll”] and “We Three” by the Ink Spots: [Excerpt: The Ink Spots, “We Three”] But in his early years, Gordy was unsure whether he wanted to become a musician, or if instead he wanted to become a boxer like his hero Joe Louis — and in this way his career was paralleling that of Jackie Wilson, though he didn’t know Wilson at the time. He actually had a reasonable amount of success as a boxer, up until a point in 1950 where he saw two posters next to each other. One of them, on top, was advertising a battle of the bands between Stan Kenton and Duke Ellington, while the other was advertising a fight. He noticed two things about the posters. The first was that the bandleaders could work every night and make money, while he knew that boxers would go weeks or months between fights. And the second was that the bandleaders “were about fifty and looked twenty-three”, while the boxers “were about twenty-three and looked fifty”. He knew what he was going to do, and it wasn’t boxing. His attempts at a music career were soon put on the back-burner when he was drafted to fight in the Korean War. After he got out of the military, he had a variety of short-term jobs, but he was regarded by his family more or less as a bum — he never held down a steady job and he was a dreamer who saw himself as becoming a successful songwriter and a millionaire, but had never quite managed to make anything of his dreams. That was, at least, until he met Billy Davis, who at the time was a struggling songwriter like him, but one who had had slightly more success. Davis had managed to persuade Chess Records to sign up the Four Tops, as they were now called, and release a single with Davis credited as the songwriter: [Excerpt: The Four Tops, “Kiss Me Baby”] I say Davis was credited as the songwriter, because that song bears more than a little resemblance to the Ray Charles song from a few years earlier, “Kissa Me Baby”: [Excerpt: Ray Charles, “Kissa Me Baby”] But Chess hadn’t really been interested in the Four Tops themselves — they’d instead been interested in Billy Davis as a songwriter, and they quickly used songs he’d written for the Four Tops, and cut them instead with the Moonglows: [Excerpt: The Moonglows, “See Saw”] and the Flamingos: [Excerpt: The Flamingos, “A Kiss From Your Lips”] Neither of those had been a big hit, but the result was that Billy Davis was, in Gordy’s eyes at least, someone with a track record and connections. The two men hit it off musically as well as personally, and they decided that they’d start to collaborate on songs, along with Gordy’s sister Gwen, who was dating Davis. Anything any of them wrote on their own would also get credited to them as a group, and they’d pool whatever they got. And they were going to write songs for Jackie Wilson. Davis tried to get Wilson signed to Chess Records, but they weren’t interested in Wilson’s sound — they wanted a harder blues sound, rather than Wilson’s more soulful sound. But then Al Green took on Wilson’s management, and managed to persuade Bob Thiele at Decca Records, who had just signed Buddy Holly and the Crickets, to sign Wilson — not so much for Wilson’s own talent, though Thiele was impressed by him, but because Green promised that he could also sign LaVern Baker when her contract with Atlantic expired. As it turned out, though, Thiele would never get to sign Baker, as the day before Wilson’s contract was meant to be signed, Al Green died suddenly. More by chutzpah than anything else, Nat Tarnopol, an office boy who had been employed by Green, managed to take over Wilson’s management, just by saying that he was in charge now. He got the contracts signed, and got Wilson signed to Brunswick, the Decca subsidiary that put out rock and roll records. Over the next few years Tarnopol would manage to get himself made a co-owner of Brunswick, by using the leverage he got as Wilson’s manager. The first record Wilson put out as a solo artist was a song that Billy Davis had originally come up with when he was sixteen, inspired by a Louis Jordan song titled “Reet, Petite, and Gone”: [Excerpt: Louis Jordan, “Reet, Petite, and Gone”] Davis and the Gordys reworked his original idea into a new song called “Reet Petite”, which became Wilson’s first solo single since leaving the Dominoes. When Wilson took the song to Dick Jacobs, the arranger assigned to the session, Jacobs was impressed with the song, but became worried — he sat down with Wilson to work out what key to record the song in, and Wilson kept telling him to take it higher, and higher, and higher. Wilson couldn’t demonstrate what he meant during the preparations for the session, as he had laryngitis, but he kept insisting that he should sing it a full octave higher than Jacobs initially suggested. Jacobs went to Bob Thiele, and Thiele said it didn’t really matter, they’d only signed Wilson in order to get LaVern Baker, and just to do what he wanted. Jacobs hired some of the best session players in New York, including Panama Francis on drums and Sam “the Man” Taylor on saxophone, reasoning that if he had the best players around then the record wouldn’t end up too bad, whatever the singer sounded like. I’ll now quote some of Jacobs’ description of the session itself: “I got him behind the microphone and said a silent prayer that this aerial key he’d picked to sing in would be okay, and that this guy was a reasonable approximation of a singer. “Jackie Wilson opened his mouth and out poured what sounded like honey on moonbeams, and it was like the whole room shifted on some weird axis. The musicians, these meat and potatoes pros, stared at each other slack-jawed and goggle-eyed in disbelief; it was as if the purpose of their musical training and woodshedding and lickspitting had been to guide them into this big studio in the Pythian Temple to experience these pure shivering moments of magic. Bob Thiele and I looked at each other and just started laughing, half out of relief and half out of wonder. I never thought crow could taste so sweet.” [Excerpt: Jackie Wilson, “Reet Petite”] The record wasn’t a massive hit in the US — it only went to number sixty-two on the pop charts — but it was a much bigger hit in the UK, reaching number six, and over here it became a much-loved classic, so much so that it went to number one for four weeks when it was reissued in 1986. At one show, where he was Dinah Washington’s support act, he rolled his “r” on the title of the song, like he did on the record, and his two front dentures went flying off. He never sang the song live again. “Reet Petite” was the start of a run of songs that Davis and the Gordys wrote for Wilson, most of them big hits and several of them classics. Most notably, there was Wilson’s second solo single, “To Be Loved”. That song was written by Berry Gordy and Davis, after Gordy found out his wife was divorcing him. Gordy went round to his sister Gwen’s house, where Davis also was, and started playing the piano, after Gwen reassured him that even though his wife had left him, he still had the love of his children and his siblings. The result was a gorgeous ballad that went to number seven on the R&B charts and number twenty-two on the pop charts: [Excerpt: Jackie Wilson, “To Be Loved”] They also wrote what became Wilson’s biggest early it, “Lonely Teardrops”, which went to number one on the R&B charts: [Excerpt: Jackie Wilson, “Lonely Teardrops”] That had originally been written as a ballad, but was reworked into a more danceable song in the studio. Berry Gordy and Davis hated it when they first heard the finished record, but grew to appreciate it as it became a hit. However, from that point on, they started to take more interest in the production side of Wilson’s recordings, and they developed a routine where Davis and Gordy would rehearse Wilson, with Gordy on the piano, and they’d teach him the song and record a demo, which Jacobs would then use to write the arrangements — Dick Jacobs wasn’t the only arranger on Wilson’s early records, but they soon learned that he was the one who could best capture the sound they wanted. The three men would then supervise in the studio. (Gwen Gordy is also credited as a co-writer on several of the records, but her contributions tend to be played down by the others, and she doesn’t appear to have been involved in the production side. How much of that is her not contributing as much, and how much is just misogyny in how the story is told, is hard to say.) But eventually, they fell out with Nat Tarnopol, after they figured out that Tarnopol was putting songs to which he owned the copyright on the B-sides of all Wilson’s records, so he could get royalties from the sales. Gordy and Davis insisted that they should get to write the songs on both sides of the singles, so that they could get a fair share of the money — especially as they were effectively producing the sessions, without either a credit or royalties. Tarnopol disagreed — as far as he was concerned, Jackie Wilson could be a star with anyone writing his material, and he didn’t need these songwriters. Their days as Jackie Wilson’s hit factory were over. Davis and Gwen Gordy went off to found their own record label, along with Gwen and Berry’s sister Anna. Anna Records, as it was called, didn’t have the most propitious start, with its first single being a Davis and Gwen Gordy song “Hope and Pray”, performed by the Voice Masters: [Excerpt: The Voice Masters, “Hope and Pray”] But it would later put out some much more influential records. Berry, meanwhile, decided to groom another young artist for stardom — he saw a lot of possibilities in a young man called William Robinson, who everyone referred to as Smokey, and his group the Miracles. We’ll pick up on the Gordys and their business ventures in a few months’ time. Jackie Wilson continued having hits for several years, although his career dipped in the early sixties with the British Invasion. He then had a revival in 1967, when he recorded what would end up being his biggest hit, “Higher and Higher”: [Excerpt: Jackie Wilson, “Higher and Higher”] Wilson continued having occasional hits through to 1970, and remained a popular live artist for years afterwards, but then in 1975, in the middle of performing “Lonely Teardrops”, right after singing the line “my heart is crying”, he clutched his chest and collapsed. At first people thought it was part of the act, but he didn’t get back up. Cornell Gunter of the Coasters gave him mouth to mouth, and possibly saved his life, but some would question whether that was, in retrospect, a bad idea — Wilson was in a coma from which he would never fully recover. For the next eight and a half years, Wilson was institutionalised. There are some people who claim that he gained a little bit of awareness during that time, but by most accounts he was in a persistent vegetative state. At first, the music business rallied round and helped pay for his treatment — there are some reports that Jackie’s old friend Elvis Presley anonymously donated a lot of the money for his medical bills, though these obviously can’t be verified. The Detroit Spinners held a benefit concert for him, and donated $5000 of their own money. Al Green (the singer, not Wilson’s ex-manager) performed at the concert and gave ten thousand dollars, Stevie Wonder gave five thousand, Gladys Knight gave two thousand five hundred, Michael Jackson ten thousand, Richard Pryor twelve hundred. James Brown sent a one thousand dollar cheque, which bounced, but he coughed up the actual money when Jackie’s common-law wife said she was going to tell Jet magazine about the bouncing cheque. Nat Tarnopol and Brunswick Records, on the other hand, gave nothing. In fact, they did worse than nothing — they lied to Blue Cross/Blue Shield, claiming that Wilson hadn’t had any earnings from them in the year prior to his collapse, when he’d been in the studio and was owed regular union rates for recording sessions. If they’d told the truth, his medical bills would have been covered by the insurance, but they weren’t. There are many hypotheses as to why Wilson collapsed on stage that day, including that he used to drink salt water before going on stage to make himself sweat, and that this caused him to have a heart attack due to induced hypertension. But several people close to Wilson believed that his collapse was somehow caused by Nat Tarnopol having him poisoned. Wilson had been due to testify against Tarnopol in front of a grand jury ten days after his collapse, and Tarnopol was very involved with the Mafia — at one point he’d tried to have Carl Davis, who produced “Higher and Higher” killed, and it was only Davis’ friendship with another mobster with ties to Brunswick, Tommy Vastola, that saved him. Johnny Roberts, Wilson’s manager in the seventies and another mobster, actually faked his own death in the eighties and had a funeral, and then reappeared once Tarnopol himself died in 1987, while some of those close to Wilson think it’s no coincidence that Cornell Gunter, who had been there when Wilson collapsed and had always thought there was something strange about it, was murdered himself in 1990, in Las Vegas, by an unknown gunman — though if that murder did have anything to do with Wilson’s collapse, it can’t have been Tarnopol himself who ordered that murder, of course. Jackie Wilson finally died of pneumonia on January 21, 1984, after having been hospitalised since September 29, 1975. He was buried in an unmarked grave, but three years later funds were raised for a headstone, which reads “no more lonely teardrops”.

american new york history uk man las vegas england fall british green pray detroit bbc miracles atlantic cd michael jackson elvis rock and roll ward roses mafia riches flame frank sinatra jacobs royals elvis presley stevie wonder johnny cash jet james brown motown protestant petite roman catholic vaughan smokey ray charles korean war crickets mixcloud my heart tony bennett italian americans rags richard pryor lanza brunswick rock music duke ellington buddy holly al green gladys knight stubbs dominoes british invasion blue cross blue shield demonstrates gordy seesaw dizzy gillespie money honey coasters four tops danny boy thiele berry gordy decca sixty four silhouettes carl perkins sam phillips joe louis boogie woogie jackie wilson louis prima dinah washington louis jordan paper dolls decca records reet chess records million dollar quartet stan kenton good man down be cruel carl davis mario lanza billy davis nelson george william robinson midnighters hazel scott sonny wilson to be loved lavern baker king records motown sound levi stubbs billy ward keely smith johnny otis little willie john johnnie ray clyde mcphatter we three every beat berry gordy jr

Episode Sixty-Four: "Reet Petite" by Jackie Wilson

Success Talks With Rodney Saulsberry

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 6, 2020 44:36

Episode sixty-four of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at "Reet Petite" by Jackie Wilson, and features talent contests with too much talent, the prehistory of Motown, a song banned by the BBC, and a possible Mafia hit. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on "Get a Job" by the Silhouettes. ----more---- Resources As always, I've created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. I used three main books to put together the narrative for this one. Where Did Our Love Go? The Rise and Fall of the Motown Sound by Nelson George is an excellent history of the various companies that became Motown. To Be Loved by Berry Gordy is Gordy's own, understandably one-sided, but relatively well-written, autobiography. And Jackie Wilson: Lonely Teardrops by Tony Douglas is the closest thing out there to a definitive biography. There are dozens of compilations of Wilson's fifties material, as it's in the public domain, but for around the same price as those you can get this three-CD set which also has his later hits on, so that's probably the place to start when investigating Wilson's music. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Today, we're going to have a look at one of the most important people in the history of popular music, and someone we'll be seeing a lot more of as the series goes on. There are very few people in the world who can be said to have created an entire genre of music, and even fewer who were primarily record company owners rather than musicians, but Berry Gordy Jr was one of them. Gordy didn't start out, though, as a record executive. When he first got into the music industry, it was as a songwriter, and today we're going to look at his early songwriting career. But we're also going to look at a performer who was massively important in his own right, and who was one of the most exciting performers ever to take to the stage -- someone who inspired Elvis, Michael Jackson, and James Brown, and who provides one of the key links between fifties R&B and sixties soul: [Excerpt: Jackie Wilson, "Reet Petite"] I'm afraid that this episode is another case where I have to point you to the disclaimer I did in the early weeks of the show. Jackie Wilson was an admirable musician, but he was in no way an admirable human being, particularly in his treatment of women – he's been credibly accused of at least one sexual assault, and he fathered many children by many different women, who he abandoned, and was known for having a violent temper. As always, this podcast is not about his reprehensible acts, but about the music, but again, it should not be taken as an endorsement of him as a person when I talk about his artistic talent. Wilson started out as a boxer in his teens, but he quickly decided to move into singing instead. He would regularly perform at talent contests around Detroit, and he was part of a loose association of musicians and singers including Wilson's cousin Levi Stubbs, the Royals, who would later become Hank Ballard and the Midnighters, and the blues singer Little Willie John. They would all perform on the same talent shows and would agree among themselves who was going to win beforehand – Wilson would tell Stubbs "you win this week, I'll win next week". On one occasion, Johnny Otis happened to be in the audience, when the Royals, Little Willie John, and Wilson were all on the same bill, and on that particular show Wilson came third. Otis was working as a talent scout for King Records at the time, and tried to get all three acts signed to the label, but for reasons that remain unclear, King decided they only wanted to sign the Royals (though they would sign Little Willie John a couple of years later). As a result, a song that Otis had written for Wilson was recorded instead by the Royals: [The Royals, "Every Beat of My Heart"] Wilson kept performing at the amateur nights for a couple of years, until at the age of seventeen he was signed to Dee Gee Records, a small label co-owned by the jazz trumpet player Dizzy Gillespie. There he cut two singles, under the name Sonny Wilson. Wilson's favourite song to sing in talent contests was "Danny Boy", which would remain in his setlists until late in his life, and he would use that song as a way to show off his vocal virtuosity, ornamenting it to the point that the melody would become almost unrecognisable, and so that was, of course, one of the two singles: [Excerpt: Sonny Wilson, "Danny Boy"] Neither single was particularly successful, but Wilson continued performing in nightclubs around Detroit and built up something of a local following. But in 1953 he got a big break, when he auditioned for Billy Ward and his Dominoes. We've talked about the Dominoes before, back in the episode on "Money Honey", but as a bit of a recap, they were the biggest black vocal group of the early fifties, and they were led by Billy Ward, a vocal coach who was not their lead singer. The lead singer in the early fifties was Clyde McPhatter, but McPhatter was getting restless. There are several different stories about how Wilson came to be picked for Ward's group, but one that sticks out in my mind is one that Ward used to tell, which is that one reason Wilson was picked for the group is that his mother begged Ward, saying that she was scared for the life of her son, as he was getting into trouble on the streets. Certainly, she had every reason to be worried for him – Wilson had recently been stabbed in the chest by a sex worker. But Ward noted that Wilson was a diamond in the rough, and could have a great deal of success with the right amount of polishing. He decided to get Wilson into the group as a replacement for McPhatter, though McPhatter and Wilson were in the group together for a while, as McPhatter served out his notice with the group. Over the next few weeks, Wilson studied what McPhatter was doing, until he was able to take McPhatter's place. Ward taught him breath control, and became something of a father figure, giving him some discipline for the first time in his life. McPhatter's were very big shoes to fill, but Wilson soon won the audiences over, both with his vocals and his dancing. While Wilson was not regarded as a good dancer by most of the people who knew him – he couldn't dance with a partner at all – he had a unique way of moving all his own, which he had learned in the boxing ring, where he'd learned to slide, sidestep, and duck away from other fighters, and to come at them from unexpected angles. He soon became one of the most riveting performers on stage, jumping up, throwing his mic in the air, doing mid-air splits, and completely dominating the stage. As well as teaching him to perform, Ward made one other major change. Up to this point, Wilson had always been known either as Jack or as Sonny. Ward thought that being called Sonny smacked of Uncle Tommery, and decided that from this point on, Wilson's stage name was going to be Jackie. Wilson was not happy with this at first, but later decided that Ward had been right – though he was still always "Jack" or "Sonny" to those who knew him. Wilson's first recording with the group as lead singer came just after he turned nineteen, when he went into the studio with them to cut "You Can't Keep a Good Man Down" for King Records -- the same label that had turned him down when Johnny Otis had put him forward: [Excerpt: Billy Ward and the Dominoes, "You Can't Keep a Good Man Down"] Four months later, they went back into the studio to cut eleven songs in a single day -- a mammoth session which really allowed Wilson to show off his vocal versatility. From that session, their version of "Rags to Riches", which had been a massive hit for Tony Bennett earlier in the year, went to number two on the R&B chart, though it didn't dent the pop chart: [Excerpt: Billy Ward and the Dominoes, "Rags to Riches"] But after this, the Dominoes started to have less success in the charts -- their records weren't selling as well as they had been when Clyde McPhatter was the group's lead singer, and in 1954 they had no hits at all. But in some ways that didn't really matter -- the group weren't just looking to have success as recording artists, but as live performers, and they got a two-year residency in Las Vegas, supporting Louis Prima and Keely Smith. The group were getting five thousand dollars a week -- a massive amount of money in those days -- though most of that went to Ward, and Wilson was on a salary of only ninety dollars a week. It was while he was performing in Las Vegas that Wilson first came to the notice of someone who would later become a good friend -- Elvis Presley. In 1956 Elvis made his own first trip to perform in Vegas, although he was far, far less successful there than he would be thirteen years later. While he was there, he watched with amazement as Jackie Wilson performed Elvis' own hit "Don't Be Cruel" much better than Elvis did himself -- and in the famous Million Dollar Quartet tapes, you can hear Elvis raving about Wilson to Johnny Cash, Carl Perkins, and Jerry Lee Lewis: [Excerpt: Elvis talking about Jackie Wilson] It's quite funny listening to those recordings, as the others keep trying to drag Elvis on to other topics of conversation, and Elvis keeps insisting on telling them just how good this singer with Billy Ward and the Dominoes, whose name he hadn't caught, was. But Vegas wasn't a good fit for Wilson. He chafed at the discipline of the Dominoes, and at staying in one place all the time. After a couple of years of disappointing record sales, the Dominoes switched labels to Decca, and for the first time Jackie Wilson hit the pop charts as a lead singer, when "St. Therese of the Roses" made number thirteen on the pop charts and number twenty-seven on the hot one hundred: [Excerpt: Billy Ward and the Dominoes, "St. Therese of the Roses"] Incidentally, over in the UK, where American chart records were often covered for the domestic market by British acts, that was recorded by Malcolm Vaughan, a pop tenor who wanted to be England's answer to Dean Martin: [Excerpt: Malcolm Vaughan, "St. Therese of the Roses"] That version actually became a massive hit over here, reaching number three, after being banned by the BBC. Yes, you heard that right. That song was banned, because it was "contrary both to Roman Catholic doctrine and to Protestant sentiment". The ban caused enough controversy that the record sold half a million copies. Vaughan would later go on to have a minor hit with a cover version of another Jackie Wilson record, "To Be Loved". In 1957, Jackie decided to leave Billy Ward and the Dominoes. It had become apparent that Ward had no bigger ambitions than to keep playing Las Vegas forever, and keep making vast amounts of money without having to travel or work especially hard. Jackie Wilson wanted something more, and he went back to Detroit. At first he was going to join a vocal group that had been performing for a few years, the Four Aims, which featured his cousin Levi Stubbs and another distant relative, Lawrence Payton. Unfortunately, they found that Jackie's voice didn't blend well with the group -- he sounded, according to Wilson's first wife Freda, too similar to Stubbs, though I don't hear that much of a vocal resemblance myself. Either way, the attempt to work together quickly fizzled out, and the Four Tops, as they became, had to find their own success without Jackie Wilson in the group. Around this time, Wilson also became obsessed with the singer Mario Lanza. Lanza was an Italian-American pop singer who sang in a pseudo-operatic style, rather than in the more casual crooning style of contemporaries like Frank Sinatra and Tony Bennett, and Wilson was a huge fan of Lanza's 1951 film The Great Caruso, in which he played the opera singer Enrico Caruso: [Excerpt: Mario Lanza, "The Loveliest Night of the Year"] Wilson studied Lanza's performances, and he tried to emulate Lanza's diction and projection. But at the same time, he was, at heart, an R&B performer, and he also knew that as a black singer in Detroit in the early fifties, R&B was what he needed to do to make money. And making money was what Wilson needed to do more than anything else, and so he got an audition at the Flame Bar, which was owned and run by a local mobster, Al Green. Green was a big name in the local music business -- he managed Johnnie Ray, one of the biggest names in white pop music at the time, and also LaVern Baker, who had had a string of R&B hits. Wilson got the audition through his friend Roquel Davis, who went by the name Billy Davis, who was Lawrence Payton's cousin and had performed with him in an early lineup of the Four Aims. Davis had also written songs for the Four Aims, but more importantly for this purpose, his girlfriend, Gwen Gordy, worked with her sister Anna at the Flame Bar. Through these connections, Wilson got himself a regular spot at the Flame -- and he also got to meet Gwen and Anna's little brother Berry. Berry Gordy Jr was someone who would go on to be one of the most important people in the history of twentieth century music -- someone without whom none of the rest of this story would happen. He was as important to the music of the sixties as Sam Phillips was to the fifties, if not more important. Gordy was born, the seventh of eight children, to a poor family in Detroit. As a child, he was taught some of the rudiments of the piano by an uncle, who tried to get him to learn to play in the proper manner -- learning scales and arpeggios, and how to read music. But young Berry was easily bored, and soon figured out that if you play the first three notes of an arpeggio together, you can get a simple triad chord. A diversion here, just for those of you who don't know what I'm talking about -- an arpeggio is a musical term that literally means "like a harp", and it's used for a type of scale where you pick out the individual notes of a chord. You know the sound, even if you don't know the term. So when you arpeggiate a C major chord, you play the notes C, E, and G, sometimes in multiple octaves: [Demonstrates on guitar] When you play those notes together, that's a C major chord: [Demonstrates on guitar] Once young Berry Gordy Jr figured out how to play the chords C, F, and G, he was able to start playing boogie-woogie piano by ear. His favourite boogie record was "Hazel Scott's Boogie Woogie": [Excerpt: Hazel Scott, "Hazel Scott's Boogie Woogie"] From an early age, he also became a fan of a particular type of vocal group performance, especially when the singers were singing touching songs about loneliness. He loved "Paper Doll" by the Mills Brothers: [Excerpt: The Mills Brothers, "Paper Doll"] and "We Three" by the Ink Spots: [Excerpt: The Ink Spots, "We Three"] But in his early years, Gordy was unsure whether he wanted to become a musician, or if instead he wanted to become a boxer like his hero Joe Louis -- and in this way his career was paralleling that of Jackie Wilson, though he didn't know Wilson at the time. He actually had a reasonable amount of success as a boxer, up until a point in 1950 where he saw two posters next to each other. One of them, on top, was advertising a battle of the bands between Stan Kenton and Duke Ellington, while the other was advertising a fight. He noticed two things about the posters. The first was that the bandleaders could work every night and make money, while he knew that boxers would go weeks or months between fights. And the second was that the bandleaders "were about fifty and looked twenty-three", while the boxers "were about twenty-three and looked fifty". He knew what he was going to do, and it wasn't boxing. His attempts at a music career were soon put on the back-burner when he was drafted to fight in the Korean War. After he got out of the military, he had a variety of short-term jobs, but he was regarded by his family more or less as a bum -- he never held down a steady job and he was a dreamer who saw himself as becoming a successful songwriter and a millionaire, but had never quite managed to make anything of his dreams. That was, at least, until he met Billy Davis, who at the time was a struggling songwriter like him, but one who had had slightly more success. Davis had managed to persuade Chess Records to sign up the Four Tops, as they were now called, and release a single with Davis credited as the songwriter: [Excerpt: The Four Tops, "Kiss Me Baby"] I say Davis was credited as the songwriter, because that song bears more than a little resemblance to the Ray Charles song from a few years earlier, "Kissa Me Baby": [Excerpt: Ray Charles, "Kissa Me Baby"] But Chess hadn't really been interested in the Four Tops themselves -- they'd instead been interested in Billy Davis as a songwriter, and they quickly used songs he'd written for the Four Tops, and cut them instead with the Moonglows: [Excerpt: The Moonglows, "See Saw"] and the Flamingos: [Excerpt: The Flamingos, "A Kiss From Your Lips"] Neither of those had been a big hit, but the result was that Billy Davis was, in Gordy's eyes at least, someone with a track record and connections. The two men hit it off musically as well as personally, and they decided that they'd start to collaborate on songs, along with Gordy's sister Gwen, who was dating Davis. Anything any of them wrote on their own would also get credited to them as a group, and they'd pool whatever they got. And they were going to write songs for Jackie Wilson. Davis tried to get Wilson signed to Chess Records, but they weren't interested in Wilson's sound -- they wanted a harder blues sound, rather than Wilson's more soulful sound. But then Al Green took on Wilson's management, and managed to persuade Bob Thiele at Decca Records, who had just signed Buddy Holly and the Crickets, to sign Wilson -- not so much for Wilson's own talent, though Thiele was impressed by him, but because Green promised that he could also sign LaVern Baker when her contract with Atlantic expired. As it turned out, though, Thiele would never get to sign Baker, as the day before Wilson's contract was meant to be signed, Al Green died suddenly. More by chutzpah than anything else, Nat Tarnopol, an office boy who had been employed by Green, managed to take over Wilson's management, just by saying that he was in charge now. He got the contracts signed, and got Wilson signed to Brunswick, the Decca subsidiary that put out rock and roll records. Over the next few years Tarnopol would manage to get himself made a co-owner of Brunswick, by using the leverage he got as Wilson's manager. The first record Wilson put out as a solo artist was a song that Billy Davis had originally come up with when he was sixteen, inspired by a Louis Jordan song titled "Reet, Petite, and Gone": [Excerpt: Louis Jordan, "Reet, Petite, and Gone"] Davis and the Gordys reworked his original idea into a new song called "Reet Petite", which became Wilson's first solo single since leaving the Dominoes. When Wilson took the song to Dick Jacobs, the arranger assigned to the session, Jacobs was impressed with the song, but became worried -- he sat down with Wilson to work out what key to record the song in, and Wilson kept telling him to take it higher, and higher, and higher. Wilson couldn't demonstrate what he meant during the preparations for the session, as he had laryngitis, but he kept insisting that he should sing it a full octave higher than Jacobs initially suggested. Jacobs went to Bob Thiele, and Thiele said it didn't really matter, they'd only signed Wilson in order to get LaVern Baker, and just to do what he wanted. Jacobs hired some of the best session players in New York, including Panama Francis on drums and Sam "the Man" Taylor on saxophone, reasoning that if he had the best players around then the record wouldn't end up too bad, whatever the singer sounded like. I'll now quote some of Jacobs' description of the session itself: "I got him behind the microphone and said a silent prayer that this aerial key he'd picked to sing in would be okay, and that this guy was a reasonable approximation of a singer. "Jackie Wilson opened his mouth and out poured what sounded like honey on moonbeams, and it was like the whole room shifted on some weird axis. The musicians, these meat and potatoes pros, stared at each other slack-jawed and goggle-eyed in disbelief; it was as if the purpose of their musical training and woodshedding and lickspitting had been to guide them into this big studio in the Pythian Temple to experience these pure shivering moments of magic. Bob Thiele and I looked at each other and just started laughing, half out of relief and half out of wonder. I never thought crow could taste so sweet." [Excerpt: Jackie Wilson, "Reet Petite"] The record wasn't a massive hit in the US -- it only went to number sixty-two on the pop charts -- but it was a much bigger hit in the UK, reaching number six, and over here it became a much-loved classic, so much so that it went to number one for four weeks when it was reissued in 1986. At one show, where he was Dinah Washington's support act, he rolled his "r" on the title of the song, like he did on the record, and his two front dentures went flying off. He never sang the song live again. "Reet Petite" was the start of a run of songs that Davis and the Gordys wrote for Wilson, most of them big hits and several of them classics. Most notably, there was Wilson's second solo single, "To Be Loved". That song was written by Berry Gordy and Davis, after Gordy found out his wife was divorcing him. Gordy went round to his sister Gwen's house, where Davis also was, and started playing the piano, after Gwen reassured him that even though his wife had left him, he still had the love of his children and his siblings. The result was a gorgeous ballad that went to number seven on the R&B charts and number twenty-two on the pop charts: [Excerpt: Jackie Wilson, "To Be Loved"] They also wrote what became Wilson's biggest early it, "Lonely Teardrops", which went to number one on the R&B charts: [Excerpt: Jackie Wilson, "Lonely Teardrops"] That had originally been written as a ballad, but was reworked into a more danceable song in the studio. Berry Gordy and Davis hated it when they first heard the finished record, but grew to appreciate it as it became a hit. However, from that point on, they started to take more interest in the production side of Wilson's recordings, and they developed a routine where Davis and Gordy would rehearse Wilson, with Gordy on the piano, and they'd teach him the song and record a demo, which Jacobs would then use to write the arrangements -- Dick Jacobs wasn't the only arranger on Wilson's early records, but they soon learned that he was the one who could best capture the sound they wanted. The three men would then supervise in the studio. (Gwen Gordy is also credited as a co-writer on several of the records, but her contributions tend to be played down by the others, and she doesn't appear to have been involved in the production side. How much of that is her not contributing as much, and how much is just misogyny in how the story is told, is hard to say.) But eventually, they fell out with Nat Tarnopol, after they figured out that Tarnopol was putting songs to which he owned the copyright on the B-sides of all Wilson's records, so he could get royalties from the sales. Gordy and Davis insisted that they should get to write the songs on both sides of the singles, so that they could get a fair share of the money -- especially as they were effectively producing the sessions, without either a credit or royalties. Tarnopol disagreed -- as far as he was concerned, Jackie Wilson could be a star with anyone writing his material, and he didn't need these songwriters. Their days as Jackie Wilson's hit factory were over. Davis and Gwen Gordy went off to found their own record label, along with Gwen and Berry's sister Anna. Anna Records, as it was called, didn't have the most propitious start, with its first single being a Davis and Gwen Gordy song "Hope and Pray", performed by the Voice Masters: [Excerpt: The Voice Masters, "Hope and Pray"] But it would later put out some much more influential records. Berry, meanwhile, decided to groom another young artist for stardom -- he saw a lot of possibilities in a young man called William Robinson, who everyone referred to as Smokey, and his group the Miracles. We'll pick up on the Gordys and their business ventures in a few months' time. Jackie Wilson continued having hits for several years, although his career dipped in the early sixties with the British Invasion. He then had a revival in 1967, when he recorded what would end up being his biggest hit, "Higher and Higher": [Excerpt: Jackie Wilson, "Higher and Higher"] Wilson continued having occasional hits through to 1970, and remained a popular live artist for years afterwards, but then in 1975, in the middle of performing "Lonely Teardrops", right after singing the line "my heart is crying", he clutched his chest and collapsed. At first people thought it was part of the act, but he didn't get back up. Cornell Gunter of the Coasters gave him mouth to mouth, and possibly saved his life, but some would question whether that was, in retrospect, a bad idea -- Wilson was in a coma from which he would never fully recover. For the next eight and a half years, Wilson was institutionalised. There are some people who claim that he gained a little bit of awareness during that time, but by most accounts he was in a persistent vegetative state. At first, the music business rallied round and helped pay for his treatment -- there are some reports that Jackie's old friend Elvis Presley anonymously donated a lot of the money for his medical bills, though these obviously can't be verified. The Detroit Spinners held a benefit concert for him, and donated $5000 of their own money. Al Green (the singer, not Wilson's ex-manager) performed at the concert and gave ten thousand dollars, Stevie Wonder gave five thousand, Gladys Knight gave two thousand five hundred, Michael Jackson ten thousand, Richard Pryor twelve hundred. James Brown sent a one thousand dollar cheque, which bounced, but he coughed up the actual money when Jackie's common-law wife said she was going to tell Jet magazine about the bouncing cheque. Nat Tarnopol and Brunswick Records, on the other hand, gave nothing. In fact, they did worse than nothing -- they lied to Blue Cross/Blue Shield, claiming that Wilson hadn't had any earnings from them in the year prior to his collapse, when he'd been in the studio and was owed regular union rates for recording sessions. If they'd told the truth, his medical bills would have been covered by the insurance, but they weren't. There are many hypotheses as to why Wilson collapsed on stage that day, including that he used to drink salt water before going on stage to make himself sweat, and that this caused him to have a heart attack due to induced hypertension. But several people close to Wilson believed that his collapse was somehow caused by Nat Tarnopol having him poisoned. Wilson had been due to testify against Tarnopol in front of a grand jury ten days after his collapse, and Tarnopol was very involved with the Mafia -- at one point he'd tried to have Carl Davis, who produced "Higher and Higher" killed, and it was only Davis' friendship with another mobster with ties to Brunswick, Tommy Vastola, that saved him. Johnny Roberts, Wilson's manager in the seventies and another mobster, actually faked his own death in the eighties and had a funeral, and then reappeared once Tarnopol himself died in 1987, while some of those close to Wilson think it's no coincidence that Cornell Gunter, who had been there when Wilson collapsed and had always thought there was something strange about it, was murdered himself in 1990, in Las Vegas, by an unknown gunman -- though if that murder did have anything to do with Wilson's collapse, it can't have been Tarnopol himself who ordered that murder, of course. Jackie Wilson finally died of pneumonia on January 21, 1984, after having been hospitalised since September 29, 1975. He was buried in an unmarked grave, but three years later funds were raised for a headstone, which reads "no more lonely teardrops".

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El Jazzensor 71. Motown 60: Jazz covers (1)

El Jazzensor

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 7, 2019 61:04

Motown, el emporio musical y discográfico fundado por Berry Gordy Jr., ha cumplido 60 años. Su influencia en la música popular es indeleble y sigue vigente en la actualidad. Además, sus éxitos fueron sustrato para la normalización de las relaciones interraciales en la norteamérica de la década de 1960. Hemos recopilado una selección de versiones en clave de Jazz. Grandes del Jazz para canciones universales. Son tantísimas las canciones memorables y tantos los artistas reunidos bajo el sello Motown, que nos ha salido un episodio tan largo que lo hemos dividido en dos, los cuales publicaremos en dos semanas consecutivas. En el primero nuestros invitados son: Maceo Parker (ABC); Mario Biondi (My Girl); Tuck & Patti (All this love); Nnenna Freelon (Bird of Beauty); New York Voices (Don't you Worry 'Bout a Thing); Manhattan Transfer (Where Did Our Love Go); The James Taylor Quartet & Donna Gardier (Come See About Me); James Taylor ((I'm A) Road Runner); Lee Ritenour & George Benson & Gerald Albright (Inner City Blues); Maceo Parker (Let's Get It On); Youn Sun Nah (Mercy Mercy Me (The Ecology)); Dianne Reeves (Just My Imagination (Running Away With Me)); Urban Knights (Got to Give It Up); U-Nam & Marva King (Dancing In The Street).

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051 - Motown Records Founder - Berry Gordy

Play Episode Listen Later May 12, 2019 6:32

Voice Over Actor, Singer and Author Rodney Saulsberry narrates this bio feature on Berry Gordy, founder of Motown Records, the most successful black owned music company in the history of the United States. Born in 1929 in Detroit, Berry Gordy Jr. founded Motown Records in 1959. The 1960s and '70s saw popular artists who Gordy developed—including the Supremes, the Jackson 5, Stevie Wonder and Marvin Gaye —dominate the music scene. Gordy sold the company in 1988. He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame that same year. Though Gordy couldn't read music or play an instrument, he had the musical chops to create the sound of Motown and to promote an incredible roster of talent. Gordy had dubbed his label's output "the sound of young America," but today Motown's music is beloved by people of all ages from around the globe.

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Motown: The History Of A Hit Factory

Oprah’s Master Class: The Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later May 10, 2019 24:16

Shortly after Michael Jackson died in 2009, Helen Brown, a music critic for the Daily Telegraph wrote that the Jackson 5’s 1969 single “I Want You Back,” is “certainly the fastest man-made route to pure joy.” And while Michael, Tito, Jermaine, Marlon, and Jackie may have stolen the spotlight, the group - like so many others - emerged from a hit factory created by a man named Berry Gordy Jr. Gordy founded Motown after stints as a boxer and as a worker in a Lincoln-Mercury plant. And he quickly turned the label into a force to be reckoned with, drawing on a formula of quality control he had learned at the auto factory, taking raw talent like Diana Ross and Smokey Robinson, and refining them into international stars. As a result, Motown became one of the most successful black-owned music companies in American history. We talk to music journalist Adam White, author of “Motown: The Sound of Young America,” about Gordy’s meteoric rise and his lasting legacy.

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107 Marvin Gaye (with Gavin)

Doghair Presents

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 23, 2019 55:39

This week on Doghair Presents, Rory is joined by Gavin Quinn to talk about one of Rory's favourite musical artists, who lived a very sad and interesting life and died a very sad and interesting death; Marvin Gaye. If you can spare a bit of cash, you should know that Gavin is running the London Marathon in aid of Teenage Cancer Trust, and a small donation can go a long way: https://uk.virginmoneygiving.com/fundraiser-display/showROFundraiserPage?userUrl=GavinQuinn2019Londonmarathon&pageUrl=1 If you want get in touch with the show for any reason, tweet us @doghairnetwork or Rory @RoryMSpence or email us thedognetwork@gmail.com Go to https://www.doghairnetwork.com for everything you've ever wanted out of life* You can also buy some sweet Doghair Network merch at https://www.teepublic.com/user/thedoghairnetwork or support us on patreon at https://www.patreon.com/doghair *provided all you've ever wanted is podcasts

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Berry Gordy, Jr.

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 28, 2019 34:26

Berry Gordy Jr. forever changed the music scene with a new sound he called Motown Records. Under Berry’s guidance, the Motown record label pumped out #1 hits for The Jackson 5, The Temptations, Stevie Wonder, Diana Ross and the Supremes, the Four Tops and Smokey Robinson. Berry talks about his childhood growing up in Detroit, his love affair with Diana Ross and how he turned $800 and a small Detroit studio into Motown's first headquarters.

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Motown: The History Of A Hit Factory

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 16, 2018 24:27

Shortly after Michael Jackson died in 2009, Helen Brown, a music critic for the Daily Telegraph wrote that the Jackson 5’s 1969 single “I Want You Back,” is “certainly the fastest man-made route to pure joy.” And while Michael, Tito, Jermaine, Marlon, and Jackie may have stolen the spotlight, the group - like so many others - emerged from a hit factory created by a man named Berry Gordy Jr. Gordy founded Motown after stints as a boxer and as a worker in a Lincoln-Mercury plant. And he quickly turned the label into a force to be reckoned with, drawing on a formula of quality control he had learned at the auto factory, taking raw talent like Diana Ross and Smokey Robinson, and refining them into international stars. As a result, Motown became one of the most successful black-owned music companies in American history. We talk to music journalist Adam White, author of “Motown: The Sound of Young America,” about Gordy’s meteoric rise and his lasting legacy.

american history michael jackson tito motown diana ross daily telegraph smokey robinson gordy adam white i want you back young america hit factory helen brown berry gordy jr

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