Swingin’ Robin Seymour, Motown Booster
‘WHY? BECAUSE I DUG IT’
What a remarkable life Robin Seymour led.
Picture him spinning records at high school sock hops around Detroit more than a half-century ago, introducing new talent to the kids. Such as the time he arranged for Little Stevie Wonder to perform for 1,400 youngsters at the Garden City High School gym (there were another 1,400 who wanted to get in). Or when he was hanging out at New York’s Copacabana in the summer of ’65 as a guest of Berry Gordy, when the Supremes made their first appearance there.
Then there was the day, 75 years ago this month, that Seymour and fellow soldiers in General Patton’s Third Army were in Steyr, Austria, as World War II ended in Europe, finding themselves by the gates of a Nazi concentration camp amid “a group of 20 or 30 walking, starving skeletons.” And then seeing the ovens.
Robin Seymour, 1964
For a brief moment, Seymour’s voice wavered when he told me about being MC for an afternoon concert at the Fox Theatre in downtown Detroit on July 23, 1967 as news spread of the riots occurring around 12th Street. “We all walked out on the sidewalk,” he said, “and you could see the smoke, pillars of smoke in the air. It reminded me of when I was in Germany during the war. It made me sick to my stomach.”
Robin Seymour died on April 17 at age 94, in San Antonio, Texas. He was one of America’s premier radio disc jockeys during the ’50s and ’60s, bringing rock & roll to the teenagers of Detroit and the surrounding areas, lighting up their lives with the music, burning its grooves into their souls. And for Motown, especially, Seymour was an important champion, spinning its early 45s on WKMH Dearborn and later showcasing its stars on CKLW-TV’s Teen Town and Swingin’ Time. He even managed a Rare Earth rock band, and had an unforgettable moment with their record producer, Andrew Loog Oldham.
The broadcaster was born Seymour Altman in Detroit on March 9, 1926. The details of his extraordinary life can be found in obituaries, such as this in the Detroit News, and in a 2019 autobiography, The DJ Who Launched 1,000 Hits. To gain a sense of his “Bobbin’ With Robin” style as a pioneering disc jockey at WKMH, there’s the 1956 edition of the Cruisin’ series of albums, and this aircheck from his time at WKNR (“Keener 13”), both sourced from the always-evocative Motor City Radio Flashbacks website. Another fine online source for such memories is Keener 13.
SENDING STARS ACROSS THE RIVER
Then there was Teen Town. Introduced on April 11, 1964 by CKLW-TV – the Windsor-based Canadian broadcaster, just across the Detroit River – the one-hour show aired on Saturdays and featured hitmakers (and would-be hitmakers) lip-syncing their latest releases, much in the manner of Dick Clark’s American Bandstand. It rapidly became popular and, being local, was a perfect promotional vehicle for Motown, which happily sent its stars across the border to perform.
“On Teen Town every week,” said Seymour, “we’d salute another high school.” One such school, Ecorse High, provided the audience for a memorable episode on January 2, 1965. “We salute the Motown Record Corporation, the record company that has put Detroit on the map all over the world!” Thus, the hour was devoted entirely to Hitsville, with in-person performances by the Supremes, the Miracles, the Marvelettes, the Temptations and Stevie Wonder, as well as interviews with Berry Gordy and vice president Barney Ales.
Seymour also screened footage of his then-recent visit to 2648 West Grand, with Gordy identifying members of the backroom team as well as his stars. And since the Supremes had just come off their third consecutive No. 1 on the national charts with “Come See About Me,” the trio’s achievements were an obvious topic of conversation. In addition, Gordy plugged the Temptations’ “My Girl,” which was two weeks away from its debut on the Billboard Hot 100.
It was during his long-running tenure at WKMH that Seymour became a familiar figure in Michigan music circles. He also promoted jazz and blues shows at Detroit’s Broadway-Capitol Theater, and socialised wherever music was alive. “The Flame Show Bar was the big hangout for all of the black stars, right in the area called Paradise Valley,” he recalled for me, “and there was another one across the street, the Frolic Show Bar. I started going there on a regular basis because I dug the music. I got to know Al Green and Morris Wasserman and all those guys. That was my home on Saturday nights, ninety-nine percent black and one percent white. It was as exciting as heck.”
Wasserman was the Flame’s co-owner; Green ran the club, and managed Jackie Wilson, among others. In this environment, Seymour met Gordy for the first time. Soon afterwards, the DJ was approached by one of his music publishing acquaintances, Peer-Southern’s Murray Deutch, to introduce him to Gordy because of his success as a songwriter. “Murray asked me if I could arrange a meeting with Berry at the Statler Hotel on Washington Boulevard. I said, ‘Sure,’ and called him.
“So we had the meeting in their suite. As it went, I just listened, and they said, ‘Berry, we’d like to work out a publishing arrangement with you for all your songs, and we’d like to take the next step to discuss this in depth and have you think about it.’ He said, ‘I sure will, and really appreciate this.’ He and I then went to the elevator, and he looked at me, put his hand out and said, ‘Robin, I want to thank you from the bottom of my heart, but you know something? I’m going to start my own label.”
‘INSUFFICIENT FUNDS’
Seymour also remembered a story he was told by Joe Siracuse of United Sound when Gordy had booked a couple of pre-Tamla sessions at the studio. “[Berry] gave him a cheque but got a call back from Joe a week later, saying, ‘You know, the cheque bounced.’ Berry said, ‘Oh, I’m sorry, I’ll come over there right now with the cash,’ and he did. Then what Joe did was enlarge the bounced cheque – it was a joke, he wasn’t angry or anything – and put it at the bottom of his desk, about six foot long and four foot wide, with ‘Berry Gordy, insufficient funds’ showing. He did that about six months later, when Tamla had really started happening, and it became a big joke around the city.”
As Gordy’s hit factory grew, Seymour at WKMH supported its output. “I think I was the first white jock to play their records on a pop music station. Why? Because I dug it.” He said he felt a particular affinity with his teenage listeners, having started out in radio at such a young age himself. “I had a midnight-to-six show on Sunday nights at WJBK while I was in my senior year at high school.”
That fateful Fox show of July 1967
Motown received more support when, in October 1963, WKMH mutated into the more dynamic, Top 40-formatted WKNR. The station’s ratings rocketed, its status soared, particularly as the Beatles and the “British Invasion” reshaped and galvanised the American music industry. And this was when Seymour and three partners developed the weekly Teen Town concept and pitched it to CKLW-TV, built around different schools in the Detroit area.
“That was our audience,” he said. “The kids just flocked to it. We were across the river in Windsor, the kids would come from Detroit. They’d take the buses and street cars, through the tunnel or over the bridge. It became part of Detroit! And we always had the Motown people. Whenever they had a new record, Barney Ales would be the first to give us a call, to get them on the show and introduce the records.
“Then after six months, with Teen Town so popular, CKLW-TV asked me if I’d be interested in doing a summer thing on the station.” And so, from June 1965, Swingin’ Summertime aired on Monday-Friday afternoons, hosted by Seymour. It evolved into the hugely popular Swingin’ Time, another invaluable platform for Motown’s artists; a singular edition of the show on January 22, 1966 was devoted almost entirely to the Supremes. Such was the series’ appeal that there was even a concert spin-off, The Swingin’ Time Revue, at the Fox Theatre – one of which was playing on the weekend that the ’67 Detroit riots broke out.
The following year, after CKLW-TV dropped Seymour from Swingin’ Time, he formed his own company to manage artists, promote concerts, and package TV shows. Among its clients were the Sunday Funnies, signed to Rare Earth Records and produced by Andrew Oldham for two albums. “I was with Andrew in the studio in the middle of the night once,” Seymour recalled, “and I had a miserable migraine. He said, ‘Just a minute, Robin, I’ve got something for you,’ and opened up his little suitcase and brought out a tiny pill. I took it.” The result, he said, was a high which lasted two days. “I floated everywhere.”
These and many other memories resonated around The Last Great Detroit Radio Reunion last September, an event held to reunite some of the city’s storied broadcasters with those who had listened to them, growing up. Logically, Seymour also went to the Motown Museum for a book-signing of The DJ Who Launched 1,000 Hits, and gladly recalled his history for the visitors who gathered in Studio A that afternoon, just as he had for me.
“I was born and raised in Detroit,” Seymour said when we spoke, “living in a neighbourhood which had black, Polish, Italian, everything. We were very poor, but it was no big deal. I never thought about the colour thing.” It was a potent reminder of how colour-blind Motown strived to be, and of Berry Gordy’s oft-spoken words on the subject: “I wanted to sell all music to all people – whites, blacks, Jews, gentiles, cops and robbers.”
You might call that a swingin’ time.
Book notes: Robin Seymour’s autobiography is available from Amazon in paperback and Kindle editions, most recently with some judicious (and necessary) editing by Detroit music veterans Susan Whitall and Jim McFarlin. An earlier, essential book about Detroit radio is David Carson’s Rockin’ Down the Dial, published by Momentum in 1999. Naturally, Robin figures in that, too.