Honest, Direct – and Unloved
THE LAWYER WHO DISAPPROVED OF CARD GAMES IN WORKING HOURS
One Sunday afternoon during the summer of 1975, Ralph Seltzer was passing the time of day on a golf course in Fiji when he learned, first-hand, that the music of Motown had reached even the South Pacific.
By that point, the lawyer had worked for Berry Gordy for 11 years, and his presence in Fiji was part of a trip to connect with the company’s Antipodean licensees. In a break from work, he was refreshing his golf skills, his caddy a 10-year-old local lad. “I asked him what music he liked,” Seltzer later recalled, “and his answer was ‘Ben.’ I responded, ‘Do you mean the ‘Ben’ by Michael Jackson?’ And he replied, ‘Yes, I mean the ‘Ben’ by Michael Jackson.’ ”
Seltzer had reason to be pleased: he was one of the Motown principals who had first seen Jackson – a little younger than the golf caddy – and his brothers perform their historic audition for the firm in Detroit, seven summers earlier.
Ralph Seltzer: can the rest of the tape be reused?
“Somehow we don’t fully realize the influence that Motown has on the lives of people of this world,” Seltzer reminisced, “from the sophisticates in the discotheques in New York, London, Paris, etc. to the ten-year-old Fijian lad who can barely speak English.”
For his part, the lawyer influenced the lives of hundreds of his Motown colleagues, as well as those artists, songwriters and producers in Detroit and Los Angeles with whom he cut deals on the firm’s behalf. He was not a popular suit-and-tie sight in the Hitsville halls – tough, money-minded administrators seldom are in the culture industries – but that wasn’t his concern. Running the business according to Berry Gordy’s wishes, whether under direct or inferred instruction, was.
When you must, for instance, be the author of internal memos to Mickey Stevenson and Holland/Dozier/Holland forbidding the playing of card games in the office before 6pm, such as one issued on December 30, 1965, it’s not going to win you praise or plaudits. “We could hear him coming up the stairs,” Eddie Holland once recalled for me, “knocking on the door. We’d hide the cards when he stuck his head in, and we’d start playing again [when he left].”
That said, Holland agreed that Seltzer had a job to do and did it well – or else he wouldn’t have lasted. “I got along with him OK, but he was very stoic, he didn’t smile a lot. He wasn’t a bad person, but he was a little stern. He was a lawyer, and he acted like a lawyer. The creative people didn’t really care for him, but they would overlook it. They weren’t really paying any attention.” Evidently, that inattention included cautions about card games.
ASSISTANT TO THE PRESIDENT
Details of Seltzer’s arrival at Motown are thin on the ground; he appears to have joined in 1964, serving as assistant to the president. “Ralph was brought in by the Novecks,” recalled Barney Ales, the company’s late sultan of sales, referring to brothers Harold, an attorney, and Sidney, an accountant – two of Berry Gordy’s most-valued confidants. Seltzer’s profession was perhaps inevitable: his Russian-born father was an attorney who had argued cases before the Michigan Supreme Court, and the younger Seltzer served as a clerk to one of that court’s justices.
“I liked his honesty and directness,” affirmed Gordy in To Be Loved. “He had begun with the company as coordinator of our out-of-town offices, keeping track of operations in New York and our newest outpost in Los Angeles.” To the outside world, Seltzer’s name first appeared in connection with Mary Wells’ unhappy exit from Motown; he was quoted in press reports that the firm would challenge her new contract with 20th Century Fox Records.
The Jackson 5: ready for their audition
Insiders were aware of other Seltzer duties, such as oversight of the West Grand studio operations – including its costs. “[He] noticed that each mixing session used a full reel of tape,” former staffer Bob Dennis told the Recording Institute of Detroit some years ago, “and usually only three minutes or so was cut off the reel and kept.” Why, asked the assistant to the president, can’t the rest of the tape be reused? The studio crew was pressed to satisfy “the penny-pinching executive,” as Dennis called him, but in the event, technical reasons prevented a solution.
One of Seltzer’s more benign, lesser-known activities was the authorship of album liner notes: 18 of them from 1964-66, under the pseudonym of Scott St. James.
The atmosphere at Motown was still seen as “family” up to that point, but it was soon to change. The sacking in 1967 of Florence Ballard from the Supremes and the departure of Holland/Dozier/Holland made sure of that, and when Eddie Holland quit as head of A&R, Gordy put Seltzer in charge of the creative department, as it was then renamed.
That Motown’s founder placed a lawyer at the heart of music-making may seem inexplicable in retrospect, but it was a sign of how much the company had grown in terms of revenue, headcount and industry stature. This required strong administration and discipline, Gordy must have determined, to minimise the impact of the H/D/H exit. Seltzer set about his new task with “a stronger album department, realigned engineering assignments and the giving of responsibility and recognition to some of our ‘staff’ who have, through their efforts, played their own important role in this project,” he wrote in trade weekly Record World in August 1968. Among those staff were A&R administrators Bette Ocha and Hank Cosby, creative coordinators Suzanne de Passe and Frank Wilson, and Quality Control head Billie Jean Brown, supported by “creative evaluators” Iris Bristol and Robert Bullock.
To Motown’s old-school, the appointment of administrators, coordinators and evaluators confirmed how Hitsville had changed, and not for the better. “Those of us who had known the freedom of the old Motown realized that that freedom had been traded out from under us,” fulminated Raynoma Gordy in Berry, Me and Motown. Post-divorce, she was back at the firm, in its new downtown Detroit HQ. “The old feeling was of having our own piece of ground and working it with known pride; now it was turning into a plantation.” In so many words, Miss Ray suggested there were too many whites running things.
BEAN COUNTERS GET A FOOTHOLD
Others were unhappy with this situation, too. When songwriter/producer Ivy Hunter was making his first album as an artist, he hoped for a signing bonus equivalent to his annual average earnings. “Ralph Seltzer didn’t think that it was worth that,” Hunter complained in liner notes for The Complete Motown Singles: 1970. “But if they didn’t think that much of me, it was only going to get worse.” He added, “The bean counters had a real strong foothold in there.”
Bean counting came with physical peril, though. One of the Ruffin brothers “took a swing” at Seltzer, according to Peter Benjaminson’s The Story of Motown, when he wouldn’t release the singer from his contract. Another artist, Abdullah, threatened to cut the lawyer’s throat with a letter-opener.
In Tokyo: Ralph Seltzer (left) and John Marshall
More harmonious was the Jackson 5 audition, as Seltzer arranged for the youngsters to come to Detroit on July 23, 1968 when he and Suzanne de Passe would be present. Days later, after viewing the 16mm film of the performance, Berry Gordy instructed Seltzer to offer Joe Jackson a deal. There was some back and forth over terms, and, as was Motown practice, Jackson and his sons were expected to sign on the spot, not take the contract away for further study. (When the Jacksons quit for CBS Records in 1975, the terms were scrutinised in their litigation against Motown, and Seltzer was individually named in the suit.)
The creative department was Seltzer’s domain for most of 1968-69. To whatever degree he was responsible, the company continued to crank out an impressive number of hits in that period, not least because of Norman Whitfield’s ascendancy as a writer/producer. Following Barney Ales’ appointment in August 1969 as executive VP and general manager of Motown Records, Seltzer was re-assigned as his executive assistant, while former independent label owner Harry Balk took over the creative services department, including A&R. Soon, Ales began delegating international duties to Seltzer for both the record company and its music publishing wing.
This brought him into considerable contact with John Marshall, Motown’s London-based lieutenant. “Ralph and I spent a lot of time together on international business,” Marshall told me. “When it came to the company, he was always very frank about his various roles, many of which wouldn’t have put Motown in the most favourable light. However, he always seemed to have the best interests of the company and Berry at heart.
“That said, he was no ‘yes’ man, and was always open to talking through problems, strategies, new ideas and so on. His frankness, however, must have made him not that popular with a lot of people in the company.” It did earn Seltzer respect at Motown’s longtime overseas licensee, EMI Records, and he considered the British firm’s chief executive, L.G. Wood, to be a close friend.
Seltzer’s international role ended when Barney Ales returned to Motown in late 1975 and assigned those duties to former Decca Records executive Ken East, headquartered in London. The lawyer toiled for Gordy’s business for a little while longer, before joining the senior management of Barry White’s Unlimited Gold Records. Later, he and his wife Irene moved to Selma, Oregon to run their own venture, the Great Oak Vineyard.
For Seltzer, it must have been a change of style as well as environment. In the grape-growing business, at least, the product doesn’t talk back, play card games during working hours, or wield life-threatening blades.