“All of them white.” Local deejays had been spinning Motown records all week, and at that tense moment, one of the songs was playing on a poolside radio. “And all these other people started jumping out,” Wilson says. It had a pool! Hot, dusty and weary, the travelers dove in. We found out that there were places we couldn’t go.” She recalled the day when their bus pulled into the Heart of the South Motel in South Carolina. “As we started touring we started understanding what our parents had been telling us about the South. “In Detroit, we didn’t encounter a lot of segregation,” Mary Wilson says. One hot day in New Orleans, Mary Wells drew stares as she leaned into a drinking fountain and giddily assumed she had been recognized - until she looked up and saw the “Whites Only” sign. On tour in America, the Motown artists faced a different sort of culture clash. Her coaching did help prepare the Supremes, who grew up in Detroit’s Brewster-Douglas projects, to meet England’s “queen mum” and navigate the formal etiquette of Japan. Wardrobe, grooming, diction - Miss Powell had it covered. Motown’s public face - its artists - got dance and voice training, as well as mandatory style and comportment lessons, in Motown’s fabled Artist Development department, run by Miss Maxine Powell. I might see a producer dragging in bike chains or getting a whole group of people stomping on the floor.” Gordy confessed, “We would try anything to get a unique percussion sound: two blocks of wood slapped together. Studio A - also known as the Snakepit - had walls so flimsy that a sentinel was stationed outside the nearby bathroom, lest the roar of a flush ruin a take. Motown’s equipment and facilities were basic and often improvised. A stable of staff songwriters kept the hits coming. Motown’s repetitive hooks burrowed into teen brains, and its thumping backbeat was something even the most rhythm-challenged kids could dance to. The music was heavy on studio-stamped style and far lighter in spirit than the unvarnished soul of Aretha Franklin (who recorded her biggest hits on Atlantic) and the Memphis vamps of Otis Redding and other Stax/Volt stars. Create a place where a kid off the street could walk in one door an unknown, go through a process and come out a star.”Īt Motown he built himself a Ford-tough quality control process that scrutinized every release. “What a great idea! Maybe I could do the same with my music. “Every day I’d watch how a bare metal frame rolling down the line would become a spanking brand-new car,” he has said. He hated the work, but the plant’s precision and efficiency left a lasting impression. How did Gordy achieve his audacious crossover dream? He declined to be interviewed for this story, but he has often credited his business model to his short tenure as an $86.40-a-week worker on a Lincoln-Mercury assembly line. Reimagined as “The New Definition of Soul,” its artists include the protean Grammy-winning Erykah Badu and a rowdy posse of hip-hop acts: Lil Yachty, Lil Baby and social media star turned rapper Cuban Doll. Today the label is modest in size, part of the giant Universal Music Group. Polygram bought it for nearly five times that, $301 million, in 1993. He fretted that he had set his price too low, and that proved true. As for the label itself, Gordy sold it to MCA and Boston Ventures in 1988 for $61 million.
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