Once in a Great City Read online

  The tour was traumatic but had some saving graces. For the most part, the audiences, black and white, were young, large, energized, and ready to dance and sing along. “It was not horrible. If it was, we would not have stayed out there,” Claudette Robinson, who lived in New Orleans until she was eight and married Smokey when she was seventeen, recalled in an oral history compiled by Susan Whitall, the Motown expert at the Detroit News. One of the more memorable moments came in Birmingham while Smokey was still incapacitated by the flu. It was the night of November 9, the day back in Detroit that the Ford Rotunda burned down and police raided the Gotham Hotel. At first it seemed the timing of Smokey’s illness could not have been worse. That very day Motown released “You’ve Really Got a Hold on Me,” a soulful song he had written and produced and planned to introduce to the crowd at Birmingham’s municipal auditorium. But Claudette saved the evening by taking the lead herself, and as she recalled it, most could not tell the difference since they had never seen the Miracles before. Shouts from the audience. You treat me badly / I love you madly / You’ve really got a hold on me. More shouts and swoons: “Oooh, Smokey.”

  Eleven days later, the tour suffered a severe blow that had nothing to do with race. Eddie McFarland, a twenty-four-year-old roadie and driver, and Beans Bowles, the trip manager, had left Greenville, South Carolina, ahead of the Revue buses to prepare for the next stop, in Tampa. McFarland was at the wheel, Bowles in the cramped backseat, surrounded by instruments, including his flute, and a pouch holding $12,000 in receipts. They were exhausted from after-hours partying and drinking with the crew the night before. McFarland, who had stayed up all night, apparently dozed off as they were slicing across Florida near Gainesville on U.S. Rte. 301, and their station wagon veered into a truck. Bowles was found trapped in the backseat with serious injuries to his arms and legs and a gruesome puncture wound—the force of the crash dispatched his flute like a torpedo into his body under and through a shoulder until it protruded from his neck. He lived. McFarland was taken to the University of Florida Teaching Hospital, but died there. Janie Bradford, back at West Grand, took the call reporting the accident and spread the word through Motown. The rest of the traveling troupe did not know what had happened until they reached Tampa. “I remember Mrs. Edwards telling us at a meeting before the next show,” Martha Reeves said. “ ‘Brace yourself,’ she said. ‘Be strong. We had an accident,’ and then we had to swallow it up and perform.” Katherine Anderson Schaffner of the Marvelettes, the group McFarland drove for most often, recalled, “It was devastating when we were told that Eddie had died. We were all so young. You never think about death, and then . . .” Detroit’s major newspapers did not report the accident, but news spread swiftly in black Detroit. Esther Gordy returned home with her brother and McFarland’s mother, who had flown down to Gainesville the morning after the accident. Would the tour go on? Gordy was conflicted, but he had contracts to fulfill and could not turn away from the big reward waiting at the end: those ten days in New York City.

  McFarland was buried in Detroit the following Thursday after a wake the night before at the headquarters on West Grand. He left behind a young wife, Juanita, and two toddlers at their home on Melbourne Street on the east side.

  Smokey returned to the Revue in time for the Apollo, a musical polestar he had heard about since he was six or seven and living on Belmont Street. He already had his nickname by that early age, coined by an uncle, Claude, who first called him “Smokey Joe,” then shortened it. The name would be a reminder, Claude said, that despite his nephew’s light complexion “you won’t ever forget that you are black.” No more chance of that than of Smokey not liking music. Two older sisters and his mother, before she died when he was ten, flooded their home with music of all kinds, “from gospel to classical to gut-bucket blues, to my sisters playing music they called bebop, which included Charlie Parker. The first voice I ever remember hearing in my life is Sarah Vaughan, because my sisters loved Sarah Vaughan and Billy Eckstine.” They had an upright piano from Grinnell’s that he experimented on just as young Berry Gordy had over on St. Antoine, figuring out simple chord combinations. Then there was the music at the big house on Oakland Avenue where his childhood buddy Cecil lived. That was Cecil Franklin, son of the singing reverend, C. L. Franklin, brother of the singing sisters, including Aretha. Everything at the Franklin home was polished and ornate, including the baby grand that Smokey first saw Aretha play when she was only three. He was smitten from then on. “Not only was she a cutie pie, but her musical talent was phenomenal. . . . As a child, she played nearly as good as she plays now—that’s how advanced she was.”

  Smokey’s advancement was more measured. He sang with the Five Chimes at Northern High, then formed a group called the Matadors and caught the attention of Gordy, who changed their name to the Miracles and taught Smokey how to transform poetry into winning lyrics. Now he had top billing at the Apollo, and as the Revue caravan reached Harlem, memories of his first appearance at the legendary theater washed over him. It was four years earlier, in 1958. He was eighteen. Gordy was his manager. The Miracles had cut one record for Gordy so far, “Bad Girl.” Everything about the trip to New York seemed intimidating. “First of all, we grew up in Detroit, and I don’t think any of us had ever been out of Detroit, you know, other than going to Ypsilanti or Ann Arbor or somewhere like that in Michigan that’s very close by,” he recalled in an interview about the Apollo conducted for the Columbia University Libraries Center for Oral Histories. “But we were on our way to New York City, which in itself was . . . oooh, man! Not only were we going to New York City, we were going to play at the Apollo Theater, which was oooh, man, because you know we’d heard about the Apollo Theater and we thought there was this guy waiting backstage with a hook, and if you weren’t good enough he’d pull you offstage. Because we’d heard about the amateur shows and blah blah all that. And not only that, one of my singing idols was the headliner, Ray Charles.”

  Wednesday morning, seven o’clock, they appeared onstage for rehearsal. They would go on the Ray Charles show following the one-legged tap dancer Peg Leg Bates. Charles (Honi) Coles, a noted tap dancer, ran the theater then. The Miracles knew nothing about how to rehearse for a professional show. They arrived only with what were called onionskins—chord sheets of their records but no arrangements for the band. “Comes our time to go over our music with the band. We’ve only got these onionskins. Honi Coles hit the ceiling,” Robinson recalled. “ ‘What do you mean by coming here with these? What are you doing? How dare Berry Gordy send you here!’ And on and on, he’s just raising hell. So for some reason or other, which he didn’t have to be there, Ray comes in that morning. Ray came in and Honi’s raising hell because we don’t have arrangements.

  “So Ray said, ‘What’s going on, Honi?’

  “ ‘These kids come in from Detroit, Berry Gordy sent them here, and they don’t have arrangements.’

  “Ray says, ‘That’s okay, man. Don’t worry about it.’ And I’m in awe because I’m looking at Ray Charles, man! So he says, ‘Any of you kids know how to play your music?’

  “So I said, ‘Yes, Mr. Charles, I can play it on the piano.’

  “He said, ‘Okay.’ He said, ‘Come over here and sit down beside me and play it.’ So I sat down and I started to play it and I started singing ‘She’s not a bad girl,’ and after I’d sung about one verse of the song, Ray said, ‘Okay, baby, I got it,’ and he started playing it like he wrote it. I mean he just started playing it like he knew it already and he had written it and I was singing what he had written, you know, and I’m singing and he’s playing.

  “He says, ‘Okay, saxophones, write this down. I want you to play [this]. Write that down.’ So they wrote it down. ‘Trumpets, I want you to play [this]. Write that down.’ So they wrote that down. ‘Bass player, play [this].’ And he sat there and he did an arrangement to both of our songs that morning right there, and they wrote it down and he did it. From that moment on, I could h
ave been in Timbuktu and they called me and said, ‘Okay, Smoke, you got one day off, but we’re giving something for Ray Charles in New York, we want you to come,’ I would have come. Because not only was he a musical idol to me, I’m in awe of Ray Charles, but he was that kind of man that he would sit down and do something like that for us, and we’re just teenagers. We’re standing there scared to death, and he sat there and did that. So that was one of the greatest musical gestures in the history of music, so far as I’m concerned.”

  In the making of Motown, then, there is a place for the grace of Ray Charles. And a few things more. Ray’s full name was Ray Charles Robinson. Smokey’s father ran away from home in Alabama when he was twelve and knew nothing about his relatives. He looked like Ray Charles. Smokey used to joke with Ray, “I think you’re my uncle.” And it turned out that Honi Coles had a connection to Motown as well. For many years, his tap dance partner was Charles Sylvan Atkinson, who went by the stage name Cholly Atkins. Atkins & Coles was their team. By 1962 Cholly Atkins was a noted rhythm and blues choreographer who was working with Smokey and the Miracles on their dance moves when they came to the Apollo in December with the Motortown Revue. Berry Gordy and Harvey Fuqua were so impressed that they later brought Atkins in to become Motown’s chief choreographer. The Temptations, the Miracles, the Four Tops, Gladys Knight and the Pips—the joyous moves that helped define Motown came mostly from Cholly Atkins. His old partner, Honi Coles, who had been so hard on the greenhorn Miracles that first rehearsal, decades later became Smokey’s good golfing pal.

  The temperatures in New York City were in the teens for most of the ten days of the Apollo run that December. The troupe stayed at the Hotel Theresa in Harlem, New York’s version of Detroit’s Gotham. Ron Brown, who later became commerce secretary under President Clinton, had grown up in the Theresa, where his father was the manager. Fidel Castro had stayed there when he visited the United Nations in 1960. Like the Gotham, the Theresa had once earned the praise of Langston Hughes, but now appeared past its prime. The nearby Apollo also seemed in decline; the dressing rooms were cold, scattered, and rat-infested. The famed marquee had the Miracles and Mary Wells on the top row, the Marvelettes and Marvin Gaye in the next row, then “The Motor-town Revue” in red on the third row with the Contours, and Stevie Wonder and the Supremes on the bottom. Berry Gordy had recorded live performances before, but never a full album of his signature stars. This was the first: Recorded Live at the Apollo in New York. The program was oriented toward the latest hits, featuring “Two Lovers” and “You’ve Really Got a Hold on Me.” But what stood out on the recording was the raw energy and youthfulness of the audience members, especially the girls, who could be heard singing and chanting and shouting all the way through.

  In his last Michigan Chronicle column of the year, Ziggy Johnson took note of Motown’s success in 1962 and made predictions for 1963: “There will be more live shows hitting the road. Sepias will be cast in better roles in the movie industry. Television will open its doors to an all-Negro weekly show. Detroit will attract more tourists and the big buildings will continue to go up. The Temptations will move up as one of the leading singing groups. Aretha Franklin will come into her own.” The Temptations were indeed moving up. They had just landed their first weeklong gig at the 20 Grand’s Driftwood Lounge, joined by the comedian Billy Murry and an exotic dancer named Roxanne. The rest of Motown’s artists had one final performance that year. It was on New Year’s Eve and represented their only ensemble show in Detroit, a reprieve of their journey but in familiar territory. The Motortown Revue had taken Detroit to the nation and served as a powerful booster rocket in Motown’s rise. Now they would entertain the home crowd. The concert was at the coliseum out at the Michigan State Fairgrounds at Woodward and Eight Mile. Esther Edwards made the arrangements. Mary Wells, the Miracles, Little Stevie, Marvin Gaye, the Marvelettes, all there, along with the singer who got Berry Gordy started, Jackie Wilson. Advance tickets were available at one outlet downtown. You could buy them at Grinnell’s.

  Chapter 5

  * * *

  PARTY BUS

  HERE WAS THE LINDELL Cocktail Bar in the first days of 1963. The joint was on the edge of Detroit’s skid row, at the corner of Cass and Bagley, attached to the seedy, four-story Lindell Hotel. Like all of skid row, the building was soon to be a goner, slated for demolition in the name of urban renewal. Jimmy and John Butsicaris were about to move their establishment down a few blocks to a spot at Cass and Michigan. At the suggestion of Doc Greene, a sports columnist at the Detroit News, they would bless their relocated bar with a revised name, calling it the Lindell A.C., the letters standing for—or mocking the idea of—Athletic Club. There was a noted A.C. in Detroit already, the Detroit Athletic Club, which could not have been less like the Lindell. One was the exclusive redoubt of the city’s ruling class; the other the after-hours hangout of pro athletes and scribes and hangers-on of various sorts, including gamblers.

  The old Lindell had a brick front with masonry gone awry like a bad set of teeth, some bricks protruding, others crumbling. A grimy picture window faced the downtown street, but patrons were cloaked behind drawn venetian blinds. Neon lettering was attached to the window, and in front of the blinds the owners had arranged a display window of a basketball and autographed photos of Detroit athletes. Inside, the bar’s counter ran thirty feet down one wall. In the back, in dim light, stood two pool tables. Word was that Ron Kline, a journeyman right-handed pitcher for the Tigers, had lost his shirt in a pool game the previous year and paid off on the spot. The side walls met a high ceiling and were splotched with bar grime, at least where the wall could be seen amid athletic mementoes: baseball bats sliced lengthwise, helmets, gloves, balls, and rows of photographs of Lions, Tigers, Red Wings, Pistons, and favorite players from other cities. In the fifties it had been a nightlife home away from home for fabled Yankees Mickey Mantle, Whitey Ford, and Billy Martin, the bad boy credited with inspiring the sports decor. If you were in Detroit to play ball, you likely found your way to the Lindell. But on this first week of January 1963, the bar was attracting agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the National Football League as well, all sniffing for information about the clientele and the Detroit Lions lineman who had invested $50,000 as a part owner.

  That was Alex Karras, the talented all-pro defensive tackle, twenty-six years old, six-foot-two, 260 pounds of irascibility, son of a Greek doctor, hammy, intelligent, sarcastic, freewheeling, hard-drinking, and beloved by Detroit sports fans, who placed him in their modern-day pantheon with baseball’s Al Kaline, hockey’s Gordie Howe, and football’s Night Train Lane. Karras was a born grappler and actor whose mayhem inspired one of the Lindell’s famous brawls, when he and William Fritz Afflis, aka Dick the Bruiser, a pro wrestler and former NFL lineman for the Green Bay Packers, commenced demolition on one another and the establishment. A Lion of such talents eventually found his way to Hollywood, where his many roles included that of the imbecilic brute Mongo in Mel Brooks’s Blazing Saddles. The Lindell was his kind of place.

  Bars, jocks, mobsters, gambling—those were the four corners of a Detroit story that broke on January 5 but had been in the works since the previous August. The Lindell became part of the story mostly because of Karras’s connection to it. Karras became part of the story mostly because of his connection to the Party Bus, which was a story in itself.

  The Party Bus was the movable feast of the local mob. It was an erstwhile Department of Street Railways coach registered under the name of Odus Tincher, a convicted gambler with the look of a milquetoast bank teller who fronted an illegal barbut game (a Turkish variation of craps) out of the private Lesod Club. Lesod was an acronym for Lower East Side of Detroit, although the operation had long since moved downtown, brazenly situated on West Columbia across the street from the Detroit Women’s Club. Tincher worked for the Giacalone brothers, Anthony and Vito, familiarly known as Tony Jack and Billy Jack, who were rising powers in the Detroit mob an
d used the Party Bus as their occasional means of good-times transportation. The bus was painted blue and silver, the colors of the football Lions, and had garish yellow curtains and upholstery inside, along with a well-stocked bar and bunk beds. On nights when the Party Bus was rolling through Detroit and over to the Grosse Pointes and back, it was usually followed by the vice squad. The police knew all about it. In off-hours at their own favorite hangout, Sindbad’s, down by the Detroit River, cops would talk about the time the Party Bus cozied up to a strip joint with Billy Jack at the wheel, captured the barmen and all the entertainers inside along with a supply of liquor, and rumbled off into the night.