Apart and Together

‘I ALLOW MY FAMILY TO WATCH YOU’

It’s now ten years since yours truly got down to the labour and love of researching and writing Motown: The Sound of Young America with Barney Ales. The early months of 2013 were filled with interviews – in-person and by ’phone, with a variety of individuals who were vital to the story – and with detective work to locate and approach others less well-known.

One of the first interviewees was Mary Wilson, whose grace, good humour and insights were unforgettable, such as the anecdote about a Supremes’ appearance at an upscale Miami hotel in the late ’60s. After their performance, a woman from the audience came up to her, admiringly, and said that she enjoyed the group so much that every time they appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show, “I allow my family to watch you.”

*The Supremes on* The Ed Sullivan Show, 1966

Wilson’s brother, a would-be Black Panther, saw red when she later mentioned the remark to him. “I said, ‘You know what she means.’ Before then, white people didn’t want to watch and adore black people.”

Motown’s role in the evolution of race relations at home and abroad has been documented and discussed intensely in recent times, not least by Wilson. She raised the topic during an appearance at London’s Victoria & Albert Museum in 2019, recalling her childhood. “Racism was so bad back in those days that our parents talked about the time when their parents were slaves. We grew up with that around us, knowing that we were sub-human beings, really, and that we could not do a lot of things because we were black. And so on television, you rarely saw black people – or every time you did, they were either a maid or a janitor or something like that.”

When the Supremes began regularly appearing on Sullivan’s weekly show, viewed across America by millions, “it was like the first time you could see three beautiful black women on television,” Wilson told me. “And [that show] brought the family together, parents with children – the family structure was still intact at that point. So all of a sudden, on this musical programme which everybody watched, whether you were black or white, you started seeing more black people on it.”

‘THE ROPES WERE DOWN’

Smokey Robinson, too, recalled his race-related experiences on the road during our 2013 interview. “When we first started to take out the Motortown Revue, we would go to the South, and get shot at if we wanted to go to the toilet. And the toilet [sign] said, ‘Men, Women,’ and ’round the back somewhere, it would say ‘Coloured.’ You were not a man or a woman, you were just coloured. Many times, they were outhouses. We got shot at – all kinds of shit.

“And when we first started going out, in the middle of a big arena, the white people are over there, black people are over here. Or white people are upstairs and black people are downstairs, or vice versa. With ropes keeping them apart, and barely even looking at each other. After about a year or so, we went [back], the ropes were down, the black kids and the white kids were not only there, they were dancing with each other. You saw black boys with white girlfriends and white girls with black boyfriends. But they had this one thing in common: they loved this music. There they were, and we were bringing them together.”

Motown Records itself was, of course, an integrated environment – exemplified by Barney Ales and his function as the company’s kingpin of sales and promotion through the ’60s. “Berry knew that to get the kind of records that we were putting out [on the radio],” Eddie Holland explained, “it took a white man to do it. You’ve got to understand, where we were coming from, we couldn’t even put a black [artist] cover on an album in the South.

“Berry knew that, he knew how difficult it was to get on pop stations. Number one, he knew that a black man couldn’t do it. That was a fact. He also knew that it took somebody with a skill and someone he could trust, someone who had the kind of personality that could break through those barriers. Barney Ales was basically a blessing to him, and he had the intelligence to read and see who and what Barney was all about.”

Getting Motown onto pop radio playlists was “a big job in those days,” echoed its onetime A&R chief. “With all that prejudiced garbage out there,” said Mickey Stevenson, “not only did the song have to be special, but the guy bringing it in had to be special. There’s no doubt that Barney had to walk into certain stations and hear, you know, about the black people and blah-blah-blah. He had to stand there with a smile on his face, knowing that dialogue was a bunch of bullshit. That took a lot. He didn’t walk around saying it did, but I got close to him. I knew.”

Sometimes, humour was the best response. If Ales and Berry Gordy were together in meetings with industryites in radio or other sectors, they weren’t surprised by the assumptions often made. On some such occasions, Ales would take the lead, circumventing the inference that Motown was another poorly-capitalised start-up to be exploited, and deflecting any racial prejudice towards the real boss.

LOST IN A CARD GAME?

“I was mistaken for the owner, always,” said Ales. “And [the names] Berry and Barney are so close. So many times I was called the ‘n’ word. Plus, we used to have a joke that I found Berry when he was shining my shoes, and I said, ‘Boy, you got rhythm.’ Then there’s the one he tells that I lost the record company to him while we were playing cards.” Confirmed Gordy himself, “We had all kinds of stories.”

Motown’s first black salesman, Miller London, remembered less-amusing moments. Most of his distribution accounts were below the Mason-Dixon line. In Georgia, he visited one firm to discuss handling Hitsville’s prerecorded tape releases. The distributor took a gun from a drawer, setting it on the desk between them. “You here for the good news,” he asked, “or the bad?” London looked at the pistol, then his would-be client. “I said, ‘Well, we’re moving the tape line over to you guys.’ ‘Oh, that’s good news, then,’ he replied, “and put the gun back in the drawer.” It may have been a joke, but London was not inclined to laugh.

Another time, to help a work-overloaded colleague, London called several accounts about forthcoming Motown albums. One of these distributors was ABC Record & Tape Sales in Atlanta. “I said, ‘I have this new Temptations release, we have an allocation for you: 30 8-tracks and 20 cassettes. And [the distributor] says, ‘Why you calling me? We don’t buy those nigger records down here.’ This is 1969. And I said, ‘Well, you are a Motown distributor, right?’ He replied, ‘Yeah.’ ‘You sell the Supremes, the Four Tops?’ ‘Yeah.’ ‘Well, them’s nigger records,’ and I hung up.”

The tenor of such recollections and anecdotes is no revelation to anyone exploring Motown’s history in depth, but the specifics still have the capacity to catch attention. That was certainly true of those shared with me by London, including this one in New Orleans, from an earlier WGB post.

Fortunately, it was the music which mattered the most – and the style. One of the Motor City’s highly-regarded disc jockeys, the late Robin Seymour, noted the importance of both. As well as his many years in rock & roll radio, he hosted CKLW-TV’s Teen Town show in the mid-1960s, a natural platform for Gordy’s music makers and barrier-breakers. “When the Motown acts came on Detroit television,” reminisced Seymour, “they were all choreographed, and dressed differently, and there was a different sound. This was the first time, I would say, that Caucasian people saw anything like this.”

There they were, as Smokey said, being brought together by Motown.

TV notes: Motown acts’ many appearances on The Ed Sullivan Show have been packaged and released over the years, including – on that now-passé physical format, DVD – 2004’s The Soul Of The Motor City (Eagle Vision) and 2011’s The Best of The Supremes on The Ed Sullivan Show and The Best of The Temptations on The Ed Sullivan Show (both Motown/Hip-O). These days, there’s an Ed Sullivan channel on YouTube, which has at least two dozen performances by the Supremes, among others. Also, the Ed Sullivan website recently published an informed article by Kevin Powell about the broadcaster’s importance to black music and musicians. As for Robin Seymour’s Teen Town, that, too, can be found online, including this special edition devoted to Motown, with Messrs. Gordy and Ales interviewed, no less.

West Grand Blog