Motown's (Most?) Momentous Year
ANOTHER 60TH ANNIVERSARY TO CELEBRATE
For Motown Records, the single most important album recorded in 1963 might just have been by the Beatles.
It was not the company’s release, of course, but The Beatles’ Second Album (as it was known in the U.S.) became a chart-busting behemoth – with more than a year among the best-sellers – and earned tens of thousands of dollars in royalties for Jobete Music, thanks to the three Motown covers it contained: “Money (That’s What I Want),” “Please Mr. Postman” and “You’ve Really Got A Hold On Me.”
The revenue enabled the expansion of Berry Gordy’s young business, including significant investment in artist development, at the dawn of “the Sound of Young America.” The Beatles’ endorsement of the songs also served to promote Motown’s magic to the world.
“Big beat performances” finance Motown expansion
And so to the contention that 1963 should be recognised as one of the most significant years in Hitsville history, even if it doesn’t glow with a nice round number (after all, who celebrates a fourth anniversary?).
Motown loves anniversaries, of course, even if the numbers don’t always square with its 1959 debut. The company touted its first decade with a blue-chip boxed set in 1971. Then there was the all-conquering Motown 25 TV spectacular in 1983, followed by other network specials in 1998 (Motown 40) and 2004 (Motown 45). The 50th anniversary was an especially big deal, organised by post-Gordy owner Universal Music in 2009, which also threw bunting into the air for the 60th in 2019.
But for now, let’s hail 1963 and consider exactly why it deserves attention, beginning with the Fab Four. They cut their Motown covers in July that year for the LP which became With The Beatles, out in the U.K. on November 22. It held the Number One slot there from December to April, when it was issued in the U.S. (as The Beatles’ Second Album, with some track changes) amid rampant Beatlemania. In its second chart week, the album soared to the Billboard summit.
In his autobiography, To Be Loved, Berry Gordy recalls being contacted by someone in the office of the Beatles’ manager, Brian Epstein, seeking a publishing royalty discount on the three Jobete songs, before their U.S. release by Capitol Records. His initial response was to say “no,” but he agreed to a deal after discussing the issue with colleagues. “A part of something is always better than all of nothing,” Gordy later wrote.
THE H/D/H BREAKTHROUGH
Before the American release of The Beatles’ Second Album, the group had started publicly name-checking the alchemists of West Grand. In an interview with British music weekly Disc at the end of 1963, Ringo Starr singled out Little Stevie Wonder’s “Fingertips – Pt. 2” for praise, while George Harrison did the same for Marvin Gaye’s “Stubborn Kind Of Fellow.” Beatles historian Mark Lewisohn points out that in the same interview, Harrison said they all loved the Marvelettes, the Miracles and Mary Wells. (For a late-December edition of Saturday Club, the BBC’s Light Programme pop radio show, the Beatles themselves requested a spin for the Miracles’ “I’ve Been Good To You.”)
Every Motown year has its share of unimpeachable music, but 1963 excels for introducing Holland/Dozier/Holland – the most successful writing team in the company’s history. Their first two hits were recorded that January and broke in the spring, namely, the Marvelettes’ “Locking Up My Heart” and Martha & the Vandellas’ “Come And Get These Memories.” The latter went Top 10 R&B and Top 30 pop.
By the summer, H/D/H had scaled even greater heights with Martha & the Vandellas’ “Heat Wave” and the Miracles’ “Mickey’s Monkey.” The former topped the R&B rankings; both were Top 10 on the pop charts. As 1963 led into 1964, Martha & the Vandellas’ “Quicksand” became the fifth H/D/H Top 10 triumph on the Billboard Hot 100.
H/D/H: doing what they wanted to do
“Berry Gordy being a songwriter and producer himself, and a good one at that,” Eddie Holland once told me, “he had all the confidence in the world from doing that. And when he started hearing the emergence of Brian, Lamont and myself – and other artists and producers there – he let us do what we wanted to do.”
Those H/D/H records seemed just so revelatory, like sermons from the mount. There were a couple, in particular, that autumn – “You Lost The Sweetest Boy,” “Can I Get A Witness” – which were neo-gospel performances of a type almost impossible to fit into any kind of popular music context 60 years ago. (Hell, Johnny Griffith’s “Witness” piano intro alone could convert unbelievers.) No wonder the love for classic Motown seemed religious; those records were.
And then there was Little Stevie. Berry Gordy’s decision to record him in concert in March 1963 was pure genius, as if instructed from above. Like the finest H/D/H work, “Fingertips – Pt. 2” lifted the singer out of any type of ordinariness, commanding listeners to spend time in a place they could only imagine. The audience excitement was palpable, the band ablaze, Wonder’s voice (and harmonica) another means of travelling far from everyday life. Especially if you heard it thousands of miles away, on another side of the world.
Art and religion aside, the payoff was substantial. Both “Fingertips – Pt. 2” and The 12 Year Old Genius Recorded Live topped the Billboard singles and album charts in August 1963. Not only was this Motown’s first LP to do so, but it also saw the company truly beginning to attract and impress, arousing curiosity in cities where the music industry rules were usually written and regulated. “Being in Detroit has been a big help to us,” Gordy commented in a rare (for him) media interview syndicated that summer. “The only drawback is the lack of arrangers and copyists. But we get the pick of Detroit artists, who would rather record for a hometown company, and we get a break with the local DJs, which helps us get records off to a fast start.”
‘I HAVE A DREAM’ IN COBO HALL
Motown’s location was significant on another occasion in 1963, when an estimated 100,000 citizens took to the streets for a Freedom Rally on the 20th anniversary of Detroit’s wartime race riots. It was June 23, and inside the city’s Cobo Hall, an audience of 20,000 heard Rev. Martin Luther King deliver his historic “I have a dream” speech for the first time.
Gordy then arranged with King to release a recording of the oratory, paying an advance and royalties to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. The Great March To Freedom album, complete with gatefold sleeve and a stunning aerial photo of the crowds on Detroit’s Woodward Avenue, came out on August 27 – one day before the civil rights leader delivered his more famous version of the speech in Washington, D.C., to an estimated 200,000 people. This, too, was recorded and released by Motown as The Great March On Washington, in October.
Recorded live at Chicago’s Regal Theater
If Gordy’s support for the civil rights movement played primarily to a domestic audience that year, he had already shown an awareness of the world beyond America’s borders. In March, he and sister Esther Edwards, together with Motown’s sales chief, Barney Ales, travelled to Europe “to visit our affiliates and conclude arrangements with leading firms to represent us,” as a company advertisement in Billboard declared at the time.
It was Gordy’s first overseas trip on business, and the team met label executives and music publishers in Britain, France, Holland and Germany. In London, there were appointments at Decca, Oriole (with which Motown had an existing, short-term contract) and EMI. On the Continent, there were similar sessions. The most significant outcome was a U.K. deal with EMI, which ultimately led to Motown’s strongest international partnership, spanning two decades. It began that September, with the British firm’s first release from Hitsville: “Heat Wave.”
Back home, 1963 proved momentous for Smokey Robinson beyond the chart fortunes of Mary Wells and the Miracles: he was appointed a Motown vice president. “It was a wonderful position to be in,” he told me in 2013, “because I was in on all the company business, and then I was in on all the artist business. The artists would come to me and tell me stuff that they wouldn’t go to Berry or Barney [about] because I was one of them. So if their gripes or grievances were legitimate, then I would go and tell Barney or Berry. It was a very unique position to be in, and I really relished it.”
Other unique positions became apparent in Motown’s most significant year, including Harvey Fuqua’s switch from promotion to artist development and Earl Van Dyke’s assignment as studio bandleader to succeed Joe Hunter. From that point on, both men helped to shape Motown’s evolution, such as Fuqua’s recruitment of ace choreographer Cholly Atkins, and Van Dyke’s firm-handed management of the most talented (and not undemanding) studio musicians of their generation.
But above all, there was the music – and as if to signal the rocket ride to come, the final Billboard Hot 100 of 1963 contained no fewer than six Motown singles, every one heading upwards. Two were written and produced by Smokey Robinson (“As Long As I Know He’s Mine,” “What’s Easy For Two Is So Hard For One”) and four by Holland/Dozier/Holland (“I Gotta Dance To Keep Fom Crying,” “Quicksand,” “Can I Get A Witness,” “When The Lovelight Starts Shining Through His Eyes”). “The rock ’n’ roll age is now about ten years old,” Berry Gordy concluded in his summertime interview. “And its lasting power is amazing.”
The output of 2648 West Grand would continue to fortify that power – as would the four young men from Liverpool, and their rather good taste in music.
Music notes: by my count, a total of 22 Tamla/Motown/Gordy singles released in 1963 (including several flipsides) made it to the Billboard R&B and pop charts that year, and they are all featured in the latest WGB playlist, linked here to Spotify. Eddie Holland’s “Leaving Here” was a December release, but it charted on the Hot 100 in 1964. A couple of the hits were second pressings, most notably Stevie Wonder’s “Fingertips – Pt.2,” and those details are to be found in the liner notes of the ’63 edition of The Complete Motown Singles, annotated by Bill Dahl and Keith Hughes. For Motown pilgrims, let’s call that series the equivalent of the Old Testament.