Happy Birthday, Mr. Chairman

‘LOGIC WAS ALWAYS THE BOSS’

It was on a Thursday – November 28, 1929 – that Berry Gordy Jr. was born to parents Bertha and Berry Sr. in Detroit. That year, it was Thanksgiving Day. In recognition and in celebration, here are his words, as once spoken to me for a Billboard salute to the magician who built Motown, song by song, record by record, star by star – and created a legacy like no other. Happy birthday, Mr. Chairman.

• I was just a competent, cocky kid who felt I knew a lot more than I did. But I had struggled to get people to hear my stuff and to listen to me. When I saw those young people coming up, I knew they were just like me. Smokey was just like me. All they needed was a chance to express their ideas; I would listen.

• Jackie was a star before I even met him, and he just had a flair about him. He was a performer all the way and he knew it. He would wink on cue with the girls. He knew what he had. I always looked for that magic later. It was very rough for the artists who worked with me after Jackie, because I was looking for that perfection. I thought Jackie, as the first guy I ever worked with, was the norm. And, of course, it was nowhere near the norm.

A message from Smokey…

• I never thought about going to New York, but I loved the New York sound. I had been spoiled, working with Dick Jacobs. That big sound he got, it was just too much. I wanted a New York sound real bad. But I never thought about moving away, never thought about whether there was or wasn’t talent in Detroit. I just felt everybody was talented.

• Billy [Davis] and I were very different. He was a very passive person, but very good with writers – and he had good connections with the Chess brothers. Billy had not had any really big hits, but he was a nice, quiet guy. He had been around, and he had some groups that we worked with. I was the aggressive writer. I was the guy coming with ideas and stuff.

• The reason I got into the [record] business in the first place was because I couldn’t get paid as a songwriter. When I couldn’t get my money from the New York publishers, I thought, first of all, it’s unfair, and not only that, it’s bad business. If these people go out of business every two or three years because they don’t pay people, they can never achieve longevity.

• So I thought, if I pay all these people, they’ll be stampeding through my door. And so Smokey got paid, and [other] people got paid – and they did stampede through my door. I had an instant publishing company, Jobete, which lasted 30 years. Other companies have come and gone which you can’t even remember. Why? Because I paid the artists.

• People had the freedom to discuss and say whatever they wanted [in Motown’s weekly Quality Control meetings] and fight as long as they wanted to. And if they had a better argument than mine, they would win. Logic was always the boss. I made that plain to everybody. It was not me, not them, it was not some other power, but logic. But they had to prove it or show it.

• Every record, we felt, had to go Top 10. We’d always say, ‘No album cuts.’ People [in the meeting] would say, ‘That’s an album cut, let it go.’ I said, ‘No, no, every cut has to be something meaningful. A side and B side. So when a record didn’t make it on the A side, like Stevie Wonder’s ‘I Don’t Know Why,’ they turned it over and ‘My Cherie Amour’ became one of the standards of all time.

…and Stevie…

• When I was building the company, I had a vision to move forward, and I was smart enough not to let those little obstacles stop me. When a football player’s running down the field with the ball tucked under his arm and he stops to fight an obstacle, then someone else is going to get him. So he’s got to outrun his obstacles. That’s what I tried to do.

• I didn’t want to put tags on the music, because it was a mixture of a lot of stuff: gospel, jazz, blues, country and western, whatever. It was Motown music, so it was individual feelings, the band and the mix. We didn’t care what it was called. As long as it was a hit.

• Except that I was dealing with human beings, which made it a lot more interesting, because each one had different dreams, desires, attitudes. We let them be individuals. Each one was uniquely different, and that’s why you didn’t get Marvin Gaye sounding like Stevie Wonder, or Stevie sounding like Diana Ross. That only comes out of freedom of expression. But freedom within limitations – I had some limitations.

• I think that more resentment came as I fell more and more in love with Diana and was on the road with the Supremes. Or as I started spending more and more time with them because I saw the Supremes as the vehicle to lead Motown into a whole new world of music, and appreciation of our music…And I’m sure that was resented by some of the other artists. But at the same time, I knew that it was breaking ground for the whole Motown stable. And it did.

• Norman was probably the most underrated producer that we had. He would take the Temptations, five voices, and he would take each voice: write a song, work out a song, produce with everyone in the group doing stuff that was just phenomenal. But Norman was very…[pauses] dictatorial. He did everything that he thought I’d done to him. He said, ‘If you were successful, then I’ve got to let these guys know what they’re getting. I’m going to give them smashes, but they’ve got to work!’

• Jamerson and Benny would have this little competition as to who could do more and get away with it. The other musicians were more conservative, but they were just as great in their own way: Earl Van Dyke, Beans Bowles, Robert White, Joe Messina, Uriel Jones and all these guys. They were all talented and they all had their own thing. My favourites just happened to be Benny and Jamerson. Like any artists, you have favourite people who you know can deliver the things that you want them to deliver.

…and Diana

• Marvin liked to hang out with cats he liked. He could have done it by himself, perhaps, but all these people added something to Marvin. He would end up pulling it together because it was Marvin who was the genius of the group. Not only the genius – Marvin had a natural talent for hits. He could do the national anthem and it would be a hit.

• Stevie seemed to know what he wanted even before he became an adult. And he did indeed take charge of his career. At first, it was very rough [to accept]. Not because I didn’t think Stevie could do it. He had proven that he could do things himself and that he had genius qualities and all that. What bothered me, I think, the most was the fact that he, in my opinion, was defiant.

• Michael had a knowingness about him. He paid close attention to every single thing I said. Even when my back was turned, I knew he’d be watching me like a hawk. The other kids might have been playing or doing whatever they were doing, but Michael was dead serious and he stayed that way. We connected. One of the kids finally asked me, ‘Mr. Gordy, does this mean you’re going to sign us?’ They were worried; Michael wasn’t. He knew he had me.

• Vegas had a mesmerising effect on us, this little company in Detroit. I always was kind of reaching out for Vegas, reaching out for Broadway, for the movies, while staying in my thing. I wanted more. I wanted a bigger picture. So Vegas was the way to get it – and the Supremes were the group to lead us that way, because they could do standards better than anybody and they had the image.

• When you work with an artist, you know that they’re going to be independent. When the day comes that they decide they want to leave you – even though you expect it – that’s devastating. But you do it because a teacher has to teach. I was driven to teach, to bring out every bit of talent and potential that a person had. You can’t bring out 90% of it and say, ‘Well, let me hold this 10 percent back.’ If I had thought like that, Motown would never have been anything.

Music notes: when the Motown founder appeared on the BBC’s long-running Desert Island Discs programme in 2016, he chose eight recordings to accompany his imaginary solitude. Four reflected the music he heard growing up, namely, the Nat King Cole Trio’s “Sweet Lorraine,” Rachmaninov’s Prelude in C sharp minor (performed by Vladimir Ashkenazy), Louis Jordan’s “Ain’t Nobody Here But Us Chickens,” and Billie Holiday’s “God Bless The Child.” The remaining choices tracked his professional career: Jackie Wilson’s “To Be Loved,” the Miracles’ “I’ll Try Something New,” the Supremes’ “I Hear A Symphony,” and Brandon Victor Dixon’s “Can I Close The Door (On Love)” from Motown The Musical. To hear the music and the stories behind it, check here.