Motown: The Star Making Production Line

by Sheldon Rocha Leal

I’ve always been a big admirer of the Motown sound and the man behind the whole Motown formula, Berry Gordy. As a child, I was naturally and organically attracted to the sound of Motown. I was brought up listening to Stevie Wonder, Marvin Gaye, Diana Ross and The Supremes, Michael Jackson and The Jackson 5, Lionel Richie and The Commodores, Martha and The Vandellas, and the list goes on and on.

Only in later years, whilst reflecting back on the music of my youth did I start putting the pieces together and realizing that the music I enjoyed most, came from the Motown stable and that there was one man behind the formula, Mr Berry Gordy.

The man: Berry Gordy

Genres like Pop, Rock, Jazz and Blues, were tastes that I only developed in later years. Initially it was all Motown for me. I guess the catchy melodies and almost nursery rhyme like songs work for a child, like ABC or Stop In The Name of Love or Rockin’ Robin or Heard It Through The Grapevine. They are all melodies to which a child can easily attach significance. Nice easy beats, rhythms, melodies and harmony.

The older I grew the more fascinated I became with the method behind Berry Gordy’s madness, and I started to research and interrogate, what made Motown so great.

Diana Ross was the main diva at Motown

What fascinated me the most was that this guy made Black Music a mainstream bankeable commidity in a country that had placed barriers to entry on black talent, and what fascinated me even more was that the Motown songs dominated US charts for almost three decades. What did Berry do, to allow black music to transcend the racial barriers imposed in the US, how did he make black music so cool, that everyone wanted to be part of the trend, how did he make music that was so enticing and irresistible that everyone wanted a piece of it and how did he break down racial barriers in the US?

Stevie Wonder was probably one of the most awarded artists at the label and one of the few that had creative freedom, which he only attained after he left the company and won 8 Grammy Awards

The recipe was part of the success and eventual demise of Motown and it was as easy and as difficult as Control. Berry Gordy controlled the whole process. His star making formula changed the way in which the music industry conducted business, changed race relations in the USA and altered the R&B music making formula forever.

Berry Gordy was a musician and a worker on the Ford production line in Detroit in the 1950s. His observations of the happenings on the production line, on which he worked, resulted in the creation of the Motown Star Making Formula. He also realised that in order to generate a substantial income in the US market, he needed to create a sound and stars that could easily cross over the racial divides imposed in the country. Similar to what Elvis had already achieved in the 1950s by fusing R&B, Blues, Gospel and Country to create a new genre known as Rock ‘n Roll.

Michael Jackson went on to become one of the world’s biggest selling artists of all time. Michael’s song “Ben” won a Golden Globe for best original song written for a motion picture, whilst he was at Motown.

With crossing over as his main mission to eventual success, Berry Gordy started putting the building blocks together to generate that success. He assembled a group of musicians, songwriters and producers that would do his bidding. He reformulated the R&B formula, by minimizing some of the harsher R&B elements and assimilating more Pop elements into the music and constructed a star making production line, that would create the stars he wanted to represent his new sound and brand. These artists became the Ambassadors of Soul, spreading the Gospel of Soul and R&B Music around the world.

Lionel Richie kept the company going until 1988 when it was sold. He composed one of the biggest selling charity singles of all time, We Are The World, with Michael Jackson.

His production line consisted of Talent Scouts, Songwriters, Musicians, Backing Vocalists, Producers, Arrangers, Stylists, Elocution specialists, Designers, Artists, Choreographers and Etiquette specialists, who all worked with incoming talent, to convert them into stars. Very much like the story of My Fair Lady. The beauty of the process is that Berry Gordy controlled the product from beginning to end. He had weekly quality assurance meetings in which he instructed his songwriting and production crews to KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid). The problem, however, was that if an artist wanted to express themselves creatively, through the creation of their own content or production, they were not given the freedom to do so, because Berry did not want to delegate control to anyone else. Also because he took all the financial risk (because he paid the whole production line a salary), he also took all the gain. Which personally, I have no problem with, considering that the financial risk experienced by the production line was minimal as they hadn’t really invested financially in the process and if anything went wrong Berry had everything to lose whilst the people in the production line had little to lose but their jobs. This is a yardstick artists should use when negotiating a deal with a record company or with anybody for that matter: if the company is taking all he financial risk, don’t expect that you will make a whole load of money if the product you release generates considerable income.

Marvin Gaye was one of the company’s first big stars and he was one of the few with creative freedom. He was tragically murdered by his father in a domestic altercation in the 1980s.

The formula worked amazingly and brought Black music to the forefront of American Culture in the USA in the 1960s. Many starts were born at the company: Michael Jackson, Diana Ross, Gladys Knight, Lionel Richie, Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder, The Temptations…the list goes on and on. Between 1961–1985, the studio scored with 53 No1 hit singles on the USA Billboard Hot 100 (the main chart), between 1961–1971, they scored with 110 hit singles on the charts and sold millions of albums and singles. The Motown stable of artists were honoured by every major award ceremony in the USA, but all was not well at the company. In the 1970s Berry changed his focus to movies and the stars all eventually started leaving the record company, from the songwriters to the talent themselves. I guess they started realizing that they could make the money Berry was generating, by doing it on their own. Some artists did very well, like Michael Jackson and others crashed and burned, like Mary Wells (who? Exactly!!!)

Smokey Robinson was one of the founders of Motown and helped Berry get the $800 which funded the commencement of the record label

In the end the record company was sold to MCA in 1988 for $61million, and a few years later the publishing catalogue, containing 15000 songs (of which Berry wrote 240), was sold to Polydor for $330million. That’s a total of just under $400million, not too shabby for an initial financial outlay of $800 (that’s the amount Berry loaned to start the company).

The impact the company had on popular music and culture is far greater than the money it generated. If one listens to Pop music today, it is evident that R&B music has infiltrated the creation of our modern sounds, artists like Justin Timberlake, Justin Bieber, Christina Aguilera, Selena Gomez, Britney Spears, One Direction, Charlie Puth, Ed Sheeran, Adele, Amy Winehouse and Meghan Trainor have all been clearly influenced by the R&B sound and the man that brought it to prominence was Mr Berry Gordy in the 1960s. Berry Gordy, for his efforts has been honoured by The Rock ‘n Roll Hall of Fame and The Songwriter’s Hall of Fame which goes to prove that if you are really passionate and committed about something, the world will follow.

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Sheldon Rocha Leal, PhD

Written by

Music Academic, musician, songwriter and Director of Culture at a private school in South Africa.

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