A Vexatious Admirer
CALIFORNIA’S RAY DOBARD STUDIED THE MOTOWN MODEL
The marginal characters in Hitsville history can be unexpectedly interesting.
Take Magnificent Montague and Ray Dobard, for instance. The first was a popular, poetic radio DJ with stints in New York, Chicago and Los Angeles, whose on-air support for Motown was appreciated (and sometimes paid for) by Berry Gordy. The second was an important record retailer and label owner in San Francisco. What’s more, the two men were connected to each other – by a provocative turn of phrase, on one historic occasion.
Actually, “provocative” was a description often applied to Dobard, as was “litigious” and “vexatious.” Yet his virtues outweighed his sins: this was the founder of Music City Records of Berkeley, California, responsible for a distinctive, remarkable 25-year output of black vocal group and R&B repertoire during the last century.
Jackie Wilson with Ray Dobard, 1964 (photo: Barry Wickham)
“Much of what appeared on the label…can be said to reflect the evolution of black popular music between the early ’50s and the mid-1970s,” wrote rock & roll historian Alec Palao in liner notes for 2011’s The Music City Story, a highly-regarded 3CD set which he researched and compiled for Britain’s Ace Records. It featured tracks by the 4 Deuces, the Midnights, the Gaylarks, Johnny Heartsman, the Crescendos, the 3 Honeydrops, Lou Rawls, Darondo and many more. (The 3 Honeydrops included Mel Larson and Jerry Marcellino, later to join Motown as writers and producers, working with the likes of Diana Ross, the Jackson 5 and Thelma Houston.)
More than chronicling Dobard’s history, Palao helped to negotiate the Music City catalogue rights for Ace, and spent two years listening to the rare, released and previously-unissued contents of that Berkeley vault. The result was not only finding music. “Man, I have never seen such a fantastic operation as that of Berry Gordy,” Dobard admiringly told a Detroit promotion man in a 1965 phone conversation unearthed by Palao. “He is the only cat in the United States that is producing records. When I say producing records, that is producing.
“This cat is consistent. Everything that I heard has been a hit. And the way he built his organisation. I try to study it, I try to make a study of what he’s doing and follow him. Whenever he produces a new record, I start studying the record, the rhythm and everything, trying to find what the hell he’s doing. Trying to come up with something like that.”
A DEAL RENEGED UPON
Palao also discovered a specific way in which Dobard modelled his label’s 1960s output. A pair of California musicians, drummer Denny Carrasco and bassist Dave Turner, visited Music City’s studio in ’64 and were considered as a potential rhythm section by its principal. “Dave and I drove to Berkeley many, many times, over the course of perhaps half a year,” Carrasco told Palao, “to play along with recordings of ‘Really Saying Something,’ ‘Can I Get A Witness’ and the like, for basic tracks. Dave and I dug it, as [Dobard] paid us $25 cash each per session, a bundle in those days.”
None of which stopped Dobard from filing a $5 million damage suit against Motown Records in 1966, charging that it had reneged on an agreement for the Supremes to make an in-store appearance that May at his brand-new retail site in East Oakland. (The trio was in California for shows at San Francisco’s Fairmont Hotel.) Dobard further asserted that the deal had marked a truce in a three-year dispute with Motown over “discrimination,” rooted in his claim that Gordy only hired whites for senior executive posts.
Alec Palao’s Music City set for Ace Records
The June ’66 legal action – and Motown’s countersuit that Music City’s advertising of the Supremes’ in-store date was false and fraudulent – began working its way through the courts, but any conclusions went unreported. “Dobard’s complaint would have been thrown out,” Alec Palao told me recently, “as it would have been based on a verbal understanding only. If indeed there had been a written commitment for the Supremes to appear at the opening of his new store, Dobard would no doubt have had a box full of legal papers, as his litigious nature was just starting to go into overdrive at that point.” Palao located no such paperwork.
One of Gordy’s (white) lieutenants at the time, Barney Ales, vividly remembered Dobard when we collaborated on Motown: The Sound of Young America. “We used to send records to his store, to play and sell – 100 or 200 copies. Instead of selling them to customers, he would send them back to a local distributor, who’d send them back to us [for credit]. And I knew I never sold any records to that particular distributor. He said, ‘I got them from Ray Dobard.’ I said, ‘That’s your problem, give them back to Ray.’ ” Thus, there was tension when Gordy and Ales visited Music City circa June 1962. Ales recalled, “Dobard said, ‘Can’t we bury the hatchet?’ I said, ‘I’d like to bury it right in your head.’ ”
HYPNOTIC EFFECT
If the Music City maven was manipulative, he may have been influenced in that regard by Nathaniel “Magnificent” Montague. The two men became acquainted when the disc jockey had a spell on-air at San Francisco’s KSAN during 1957-58. “When he came to town, Ray made things available for him, like a hotel room,” said Freddie Hughes, a member of one of Dobard’s signings, the Four Rivers, “and I’m sure [Montague] was able to manipulate Ray.” Hughes recalled as much when speaking to Alec Palao for The Music City Story, adding, “Montague was almost like a hypnotist. He was a short guy, but he could talk a woman into doing anything he wanted.”
Montague’s talent drew other listeners. Starting in Texas in 1954, he had spun records and on-air magic at a variety of R&B-formatted radio stations. “I began stealing my personalities from a lot of unknown black preachers and artists of the South,” he confessed in his autobiography, and this skill was to shape a successful broadcasting career. But exactly how he and Ray Dobard were united by an incendiary catchphrase is a story for next time. That, and how Montague’s hypnotic talent caused Berry Gordy to open his cheque book, more than once.
Music notes: the prodigious output of Ray Dobard’s business is thoroughly available from Ace Records on compact disc and MP3, as well as via digital streaming services, including The Music City Story. (Hey, look, there’s a T-shirt, too, if you so desire.) Dobard quit the record industry in the late ’70s, but still evidenced his litigious nature against a variety of civil institutions in his adopted city of Berkeley (he was born in New Orleans). Dobard died in Oakland in 2004.