Once in a Great City Read online

  During the first year of Motown, 1959, when Gordy was recording the Miracles and a handful of other artists under the Tamla label (a name he concocted from an unlikely inspiration, his adoration of the 1957 Debbie Reynolds song “Tammy”), Bradford contributed a key stanza to “Money (That’s What I Want),” one of the company’s first hits, sung by Barrett Strong. “Mr. Gordy was at the piano, getting the rhythm going, and that was one of the few days I did not go home early,” Bradford recalled. Going home early was one of her tricks. She would set the clock at West Grand an hour ahead, say it was quitting time, and then when she got to her place on Calvert Street call back and tell someone to reset it. “I was still there that day, and he got the track going, and said the title was something everybody wanted—money. And I think within fifteen minutes we had the song finished.” Her money line: “Your love give me such a thrill/But your love don’t pay my bills.”

  Three years into the enterprise, the bills were being paid, Tamla had morphed into Motown, and the studio, teeming with singers, band members, producers, arrangers, writers, technical engineers, and recording engineers, was pumping out music twenty-two hours a day, closing only for cleanup from eight to ten each morning. The all-night hours caught the eye of Anthony Fierimonte, a young cop who walked a beat in the 12th Precinct, whose territory stopped directly across the boulevard from Motown. “I get to the corner and see all these cars. . . . And make a note in my book. Blind Pig,” Fierimonte recalled. That meant he thought it was an illegal off-hours drinking establishment. “What I should have done is quit my job and asked for a job at Motown. How stupid can you get?” Motown had expanded down the street, with a closed-in passageway connecting two of the three houses. Most of the action was in Studio A, a retrofitted garage with a hole in the ceiling that produced a unique sound and was nicknamed “the snakepit.” The label on 45s and albums, originally pink with black lettering, had been changed—after some reluctance on Gordy’s part—to what would become an American icon: a dark blue band, below a map with Detroit denoted by a red star, and MOTOWN in rainbow lettering. West Grand was the place to be, where everyone was young and free. It felt like a cross between a college dormitory and an experimental laboratory. “We loved that house, until we’d spend more time there than home,” Smokey Robinson wrote later. “The house was our hangout. It was also our studio and recreation center. It had to be the most energetic spot on the planet.” Smokey, who had his own shortcut out of the place, driving from the back alley across the ridge of an open lot down from Mott’s Funeral Parlor, wrote a happy ditty that he and the Motown crew would sing:

  Oh, we have a very swinging company

  Working hard from day to day

  Nowhere will you find more unity

  Than at Hitsville, USA.

  The artists were underpaid and overworked, the operation violated the work standards of the local musicians’ union, the boss was a perfectionist and hypercritical, yet the overriding sense was that here anything was possible. Fame, money, and success had not yet redefined all the relationships.

  Lily Hart, a woman who lived across the boulevard, was brought in to cook lunch for the employees, who craved her special chili. Berry and his wife, Ray, lived above the studio. Pops Gordy had quit his plastering business to become Motown’s handyman. The four sisters were all part of the operation, their musical careers interwoven with their personal lives. Anna was with Marvin Gaye, the cool crooner who walked softly (corns and bunions on his feet) and talked softer. He had arrived at Motown as a five-dollar-a-session drummer and piano player but was now bursting into stardom with “Stubborn Kind of Fellow” and was soon to write “Pride and Joy,” a song about Anna, whom he would marry the following year, a notable event for many reasons, including their age difference (she was seventeen years older). Gwen was with Harvey Fuqua, the singer and songwriter who came to Motown after serving as Anna’s business partner at Anna Records and mentoring Gaye when he was a member of Harvey and the New Moonglows. Loucye was with Ron Wakefield, a saxophone player, and was taking care of Motown’s accounts. Esther’s husband, George H. Edwards (the black state representative, not to be confused with the white police commissioner of the same name but different middle initial), also helped out occasionally with the books. His son, Harry T. Edwards (Esther’s stepson), arrived that year to attend the University of Michigan Law School and spent the summer and spare moments thereafter trying to install a personnel system at Motown based on what he had learned as an undergraduate majoring in industrial relations at Cornell. He was only twenty-two, but there was a freedom at Motown that allowed people to use and develop their various talents with less emphasis on age and experience. Gordy told young Edwards that he could do what he wanted as long as he stayed away from the artistic side of the operation.

  When Harry was not in Ann Arbor studying, he lived with his father and stepmother in their big house at 87 Woodland, up near the border with Highland Park. He had grown up with his mother in New York and had not known much about his father’s life, or his father’s second wife, before reaching Michigan, but quickly came to realize there was much going on beneath her deliberate demeanor. “She was just very, very savvy about how to hold together operations and she was very shrewd with people,” he recalled five decades later during an interview in his Washington office, where he served as senior circuit judge for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. “She fooled people a lot because she wouldn’t say a lot. She talked very slowly. And I knew after a while what she was doing. She was gathering information. So she was giving some people the impression that she didn’t know anything, because she wasn’t shooting her mouth off. She talked slowly and she ate slowly. She drove me crazy because the meal would be on the table for three hours after she served. She would come back and nibble. But she was always a multitasker, always doing several things. She took what she did very seriously and she usually did it quite well. She was a no-nonsense person.”

  The decision to send Motown artists on the road together in the final months of 1962 seemed obvious to Berry Gordy after he analyzed what he had seen at the Regal Theater in Chicago earlier that year: a packed house, a night overflowing with music, and every performer except one belonging to his company. Why not make it all Motown all the time, reinforcing the brand, taking it places it had never gone before, selling records along the way, and have his no-nonsense big sister make sure things did not get out of control? Easier said than done, that last part. Even with Esther and other chaperones nearby, there was no effective way to tamp down the free-for-all, fun-seeking, competitive, sexually charged sensibility of this fleet of young men and women traveling together across the country for so long, if that had ever been a priority. Card games, drinking, ribald joking, heaters breaking, toilets overflowing, the sweet scent of pot, frequent hookups of various Contours and Marvelettes and Temptations and Supremes; Diana Ross, the most ambitious Supreme, alternately playing that game, squealing on others, and squabbling jealously with the lead singer of the Marvelettes—all part of the scene. “I remember sitting on that cramped up bus,” recalled Martha Reeves, who was twenty-one that fall. “Every seat filled. I slept mostly at the window when I could get a window seat. Everyone on the same bus. The band members and male groups talked too bad so they were in the back and we were in the front. Esther Gordy said they were talking too bad and she was trying to teach us to be proper ladies.”

  Little Stevie Wonder sat nearby, annoying Reeves and anyone around him by drumming, humming, improvising on his harmonica, constantly making a racket no matter the time of night, which he said meant nothing to him because he was blind and could not see daylight anyway. Stevland Morris—born two months prematurely in Saginaw, instructed in Braille at Detroit’s Fitzgerald School for the Blind, brought to Motown by Ronnie White, one of the Miracles, and looked after now by Esther and his musical arranger, Clarence Paul—was so talented and effervescent that no one could stay mad at him long. His colleagues often joked that he did not se
em nearly as blind as he claimed to be. How was it that Little Stevie could always find the spare dimes people left on top of the candy machine in the front office at West Grand and use them to buy his favorite Baby Ruth bars? And how could he steal the pennies Janie Bradford saved on her desk for her baby son back home and run away from her so deftly? “He would be outside before I could catch him,” Bradford recalled. “So he claims to be blind but can really see. I think he knew where the furniture was in the office so he knew how to navigate his way out of there better than we could seeing. I would chase him and eventually catch him and his response would be, ‘Oh, taking money from a poor blind boy!’ ” Where was the line between blind innocence and wide-eyed lechery when he entered the office of publicist Al Abrams and stumbled around feeling the walls until, as Abrams later remembered it, “somehow his groping always brought him straight to Rosie [Abrams’s secretary] and her breasts. He’d stand there copping a feel with his hands on her breasts with a grin on his face and say, ‘Now I know I’m in the right office.’ ” On the other hand, as Billboard’s Nelson George, a leading expert on black music, pointed out, Stevie was blind enough to break several tape recorders and ruin recording sessions now and then by barging into the studio, unaware that the red light was on.

  This precocious kid, not even in his teens, who wanted to be just like the rest of them, from songs to sex to stage, a place that if he had his way he would never leave. At least once before, Clarence Paul had had to drag Little Stevie and his harmonica and electric piano off the stage, and it would happen again on this tour. Fans thought it was part of the act. Not really. Stage time was too competitive for that.

  The bus was no place for the Chairman, so Berry Gordy caught a flight from Detroit to Washington to attend opening night at the Howard Theater. Three days earlier, standing on the sidewalk next to his big sister, he had delivered a final pep talk, saying that they were representing not only Motown but all of Detroit, and now he wanted to see his troops in action. He had a complicated relationship with the opening act, the Supremes, and their lead singer, Diana Ross. She was only eighteen, a recent graduate of Cass Tech, where her classmates knew her as Diane. Gordy had suggested changing the final e to an a to give her name another syllable and more style. The Primettes became the Supremes for the same reason. Gordy was protective of Diana, if not obsessed with her. She and her singing companions had been hanging out at West Grand Boulevard for eighteen months already, pushing to get their chance, and Gordy, who had a keen sense of talent, could now see something special in this skinny girl. In his notion of Motown as an assembly line, he saw her as raw material that could be transformed into a top-of-the-line vehicle for his musical dreams, sleek and sophisticated. She was at that point a vast distance from perfection, but that was his vision for her, and he sometimes afforded her special treatment. Just to relent to her pleas and let the Supremes go on this first tour was a rare instance where his bottom-line business instincts were overtaken by sentiment. He did not think they were ready. Before the Revue buses had motored away from Detroit, he had spent several hours fiddling with mixes of “Let Me Go the Right Way,” a single he hoped would earn Diana, Mary Wilson, and Florence Ballard some measure of recognition and erase the nickname they still carried in Motown: the No-Hit Supremes.

  But as Gordy watched in dismay at the Howard, their one song went badly—no energy, little sex appeal, the crowd eager to move on to the flamboyant Contours, the vibrant Martha Reeves and the Vandellas, the hometown fellow, Marvin Gaye (whose last name was Gay when he left Washington five years earlier), and Mary Wells, who was winning them over with “Two Lovers,” a Smokey-written hit released nationally on the third day in D.C. that climbed the charts for the rest of the tour. If the Supremes did not improve, Gordy said, they would be sent home. To that degree, the Revue was a meritocracy. The Miracles had earned their way to top billing through record sales and national renown, but beyond that the marquee could be rearranged depending on who was getting the hottest response from audiences along the way.

  During their five days in Washington, the troupe stayed at a boardinghouse near the theater. Smokey Robinson started off feeling ill and got sicker day by day, his temperature rising dangerously over 103 degrees. Late at night, after the performances, Claudette took him to Howard University Hospital, where he was iced down in a device that he said “looked like a laundry basket.” Doctors determined that he was suffering from the Asian flu, the third virulent strain to ricochet through America since 1957. Now the billing on marquees would change, at least for a time. Smokey was sent back to Detroit to recover.

  Just in time, perhaps, for the tour from then on became a physical and mental endurance test. Sixteen cities in sixteen days before a one-day break on November 19, then another fifteen cities in fifteen days until a second day off. First a northern swing to the Franklin Park Theater in Boston, the old New Haven Arena, and the Aud in downtown Buffalo, then a long stretch below the Mason-Dixon line, starting in Raleigh and on through the heart of the old Confederacy, zigzagging from North Carolina to South Carolina, Georgia, and Alabama, and back for a return gig in Washington, then down again to Florida, the Carolinas, Kentucky, Tennessee, and Virginia before a final turn north for a pre-Christmas ten-day climax at the famed Apollo in Harlem. Two busloads of young black men and women rambling through segregated territory in the fall of 1962, with the civil rights movement fully engaged, did not go unnoticed or without incident. This was a time when there were challenges to Jim Crow in state after state, from the Congress of Racial Equality systematically seeking to integrate Howard Johnson’s restaurants in North Carolina to James Meredith breaking the color line at Ole Miss in Oxford, a breakthrough earlier that fall that precipitated a white riot and required the protection of three thousand federal troops.

  Some Motown performers had not experienced such overt segregation before, though Detroit was hardly devoid of racial barriers and frictions. Esther Gordy Edwards was among the handful of people on the trip old enough to remember what happened in Detroit during three violent days in June 1943, when the city, extolled as the Arsenal of Democracy for its crucial role in the war effort, exploded in a race riot that left thirty-four dead and hundreds injured, most of them black citizens. The riots were sparked by a confrontation between white sailors and black youths on the bridge leading out to Belle Isle, the jewel of the city’s park system, but the causes ran much deeper: a combustible mix of whites from Appalachia and blacks from the Deep South who had migrated to Detroit since the start of World War II; the competition among those newcomers for jobs in the auto and defense industries and for government housing; a series of muggings by young black men; the race-based actions of a white police force; and racial fearmongering among white laborers. (“I’d rather see Hitler and Hirohito win than work next to a nigger!” one white spokesman shouted over a loudspeaker at a Packard plant where the assembly line for aircraft engines had been recently integrated.)

  Twenty years later these points of tension were far from resolved. Mayor Cavanagh, who was swept into office in 1961 with overwhelming black support, had been pushing racial progress, implementing an affirmative action plan in city government, appointing a black accountant, Alfred Pelham, as the city’s first black comptroller, and, with the selection of Commissioner Edwards, trying to change the police culture. But there remained in the black community a deep distrust of the cops and a countervailing sensibility on the overwhelmingly white force that tended to associate blacks with trouble. There were fewer confrontations in the workplace, but more in schools and neighborhoods, as widespread urban renewal and the blockbusting tactics of unscrupulous real estate operators dramatically reshaped Detroit’s social geography.

  “Negro Home Terrorized in Northwest Community,” blared a headline in the Michigan Chronicle days before the Motortown Revue left Detroit. The article detailed the plight of Mr. and Mrs. Leroy Church, a black couple who moved into a previously all-white block on Tuller Street between Livern
ois and Wyoming and were greeted by a mob of white youths “believed urged on by adult agitators working behind the scenes,” who “yelled insults, broke out several windows, and started a rubbish fire.” This was not an isolated incident. In The Origins of the Urban Crisis, a classic study of the decline of postwar Detroit, social historian Thomas J. Sugrue calculated that white Detroiters, usually affiliated with or inspired by neighborhood community associations, “instigated over two hundred incidents against blacks moving into formerly all-white neighborhoods, including harassment, vandalism, and physical attacks” in the postwar era. There were notable spikes in such violence during two periods, first during an economic slump in the midfifties and again during the early sixties, the period of this book. These clashes, according to Sugrue, who was born in Detroit, were “political acts, the consequence of perceptions of homeownership, community, gender, and race deeply held by white Detroiters.”

  What the troubadours of Motown experienced during their swing through the South differed mostly in the ubiquity of racism. The theaters where they performed were segregated, either all of one race or the races separated by partitions. So were the hotels, swimming pools, restaurants, and gas stations. There are no documents confirming their most trying moments, but oral histories and recollections of various artists center around a few commonly told incidents in which the versions depart from one another only in minor details, including a time when bullets were sprayed into the Motortown Revue banner on the side of a bus. Martha Reeves, whose family came to Detroit from Eufaula, Alabama, and often returned to the South during the summers of her childhood, was accustomed to the affronts she and her colleagues faced. She noted that the buses had Michigan plates, and the troupe was often mistaken for a band of Freedom Riders. “I knew about what was to be expected,” Reeves recalled. “Once we stopped at a gas station in a remote area [near Macon, Georgia]. Dust everywhere. Two guys went ahead to see if we could use the restroom. ‘Hey, man, can we use your bathroom?’ And the gentleman behind the counter was frightened. ‘What y’all niggers want? Where you come from?’ He thought we might be Freedom Riders. ‘Get out of here!’ And they said, ‘Man, you don’t know who we are? We are the Contours and Miracles.’ We had ridden maybe five or six hours without stopping. I got off and a double-barreled shotgun was pointed in my face. We got back on the bus and I went later in the bush, I am not ashamed to say.”