The murky side of Motown

In January 1959, when Berry Gordy Jr borrowed $800 from his relatives to launch the Tamla label and release "Come To Me" by Marv Johnson, he had a dream, a vision, inspired by the two years he had spent on the assembly line at Detroit's Lincoln-Mercury automobile plant. "Every day I watched how a bare metal frame, rolling down the line, would come off the other end, a spanking brand new car. What a great idea! Maybe, I could do the same thing with my music. Create a place where a kid off the street could walk in one door, an unknown, go through a process, and come out a star," said Gordy, who succeeded beyond all expectations and went on to run a business that grossed $367m in its first 16 years.

However, the mogul's statement is also indicative of the cavalier attitude he had towards many artists and associates. For all the talk of "the Motown family", and the loyalty he showed to a favoured few like Smokey Robinson or Diana Ross, Gordy considered most singers, producers and musicians to be part of the machinery and expendable. The Temptations changed lead vocalists on a regular basis. The songwriting and producing triumvirate of Lamont Dozier and brothers Brian and Eddie Holland, who had created so many hits for Martha Reeves and the Vandellas, The Four Tops and The Supremes, began asking questions about royalty statements and eventually went on strike in 1967, sparking a series of lawsuits that took 10 years to settle. The Funk Brothers, the session musicians who toiled away in the small studio at 2648 West Grand Boulevard – the famed Hitsville USA address, now a museum – didn't get any recognition until the Standing in the Shadows of Motown documentary in 2002. As Motown staff writer Valerie Simpson has stressed: "Everything was Motown. The individual was very far down the totem pole, like they wanted to keep everyone a secret. Who the musicians were was even a secret. If you chose it, your entire career could be a secret at Motown."

In TV specials and Hollywood movies like the cliché-ridden Dreamgirls, the history of the label has constantly been rewritten to fit the founder's view about his place in the great scheme of things, and to gloss over the blots on his copybook and reputation – like the ruthless treatment of Florence Ballard of The Supremes, the group's founder, who was edged out in 1967, received a one-off payment of around $140,000 after having been part of Motown's biggest selling act to date, and died penniless in 1976. The very competitive nature of the label also meant several of the acts didn't get the care and attention they deserved. The Detroit Spinners, Gladys Knight and The Pips and Edwin Starr certainly found greater success after leaving Motown. "There was a class system at Motown," Starr told me in 2000. "The Supremes were royalty. And we were at the back of the bus, carrying the buckets."

Gordy always claimed he was colour-blind, and in 1966 signed the mixed-race group The Mynah Birds featuring a young Rick James – who successfully returned to Motown in the late seventies – and Neil Young – yes, that Neil Young – but their album was shelved. Several attempts were made to launch white artists and Motown had success with the Canadian vocalist R Dean Taylor and the group Rare Earth, but failed to realise the potential of British vocalist Kiki Dee, and of the barnstorming Meatloaf, then part of the duo Stoney and Meatloaf. Gordy also managed to turn the no-brainer signing of superstar vocal group Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons into a catastrophe. In 1975, "The Night" became a Top Ten hit in Britain, three years after Motown withdrew its release in the US, and the company passed on "My Eyes Adored You", allowing Valli to buy the master back and take the song to the top of the US charts on a new label, Private Stock

Later, Gordy rationalised his decision-making, bizarrely stating: "I was so lucky with all my decisions. I'm not sure that I would change anything. Even the ones that were wrong turned out to be better in the long run because I learnt something and altered my actions."

Fifty years ago, Gordy was already 29. The seventh of eight children, he had dropped out of high school, been a boxer of middling ability, briefly owned a record shop and was already married with three kids and on the way to his first divorce when he quit his factory job in 1957. As a budding songwriter, he worked with Erma Franklin, Aretha's older sister, and a teenage Freda Payne, before teaming up with Roquel Davis and co-writing "Reet Petite" and "Lonely Teardrops" for Jackie Wilson, then one of the biggest stars on the R&B circuit. Gordy was disappointed by the amount of royalties he received and set up his own company. After Marv Johnson, he hooked up with Robinson, changed his group's name from The Matadors to The Miracles, and produced "Got a Job", their first single, which came out in 1958 on the End label and made some waves locally.

The same year, Robert Gordy, his youngest brother, had a minor hit with the novelty song "Everyone Was There" under the name Bob Kayli. In 1959, Gordy's sister Gwen and her boyfriend Davis launched their own record label, Anna, named after another Gordy sibling, with national distribution by Chess.

This proved handy when Berry Gordy Jr, with the help of Janie Bradford, the receptionist at the newly-acquired Hitsville premises, came up with "Money (That's What I Want)" for Barrett Strong and couldn't keep up with the demand. First issued under catalogue number Tamla 54027, to fool people into thinking this was a big operation, "Money" was licensed to Anna and became Gordy's first crossover hit, reaching No23 in the US charts in 1960. Gordy realised Chess, the distributor, was taking a big chunk of the profits, and decided to expand nationally. By then, he'd launched Motown, a contraction of Motor Town, with the original idea of putting all the vocal groups on Motown and the solo artists on Tamla (Tammy, the name he was after – then the title of a big hit for Debbie Reynolds – was already taken).

Gordy designed a self-aggrandising advert – "Mr Hitsville" – to promote The Miracles' single "Way Over There" but it was their follow-up, "Shop Around" that became the company's first million-seller. The following year, The Marvelettes topped the US charts with "Please Mr Postman". In 1963, the Beatles covered "Please Mr Postman" as well as "Money" and the Smokey Robinson composition "You've Really Got a Hold On Me" on their second album, and Gordy found himself haggling with Beatles manager Brian Epstein over royalties.

Observing and learning all the while, Gordy became a shrewder businessman. When he introduced weekly "product evaluation meetings" involving his staff, he fined latecomers the way James Brown fined his musicians for missing a cue. When he noticed distributors paid their bills late, he introduced the "CREATE, MAKE and COLLECT" motto to motivate his sales staff alongside the more prosaic "It's What's In The Grooves That Counts" for the creatives. When other Detroit labels made waves with acts like Edwin Starr and Freddie Gorman, Gordy simply bought them.

He kept it in the family, often literally, employing his brothers and sisters and, eventually, several of his and their offspring. Tri-Phi Records, another label owned by his sister Gwen and Harvey Fuqua, of the doo-wop group Harvey and the Moonglows fame, was absorbed by Motown, bringing the Detroit Spinners and Junior Walker & the All Stars into the operation. Anna Gordy married Marvin Gaye, who was 17 years her junior. Berry Gordy Jr himself fathered eight children by six partners (his three wives, and Jeanna Jackson and Margaret Norton, as well as Ross). "It is absolutely true

that at one time, I was obsessed with her," he later admitted about the soul diva.

Not quite everything went according to plan, though. Mary Wells, the First Lady of Motown, who had scored a worldwide hit with "My Guy" in 1964, was unhappy about the contract she had signed four years earlier aged 17, and eventually left the label in 1965. Many more artists defected. The Four Tops, Marvin Gaye, Michael Jackson, la Ross herself all signed to other companies, leaving Stevie Wonder as the only stalwart of Motown's golden age.

Yet, it was Gordy himself who committed the ultimate betrayal when he moved the company lock, stock and barrel from its natural home in Detroit to Los Angeles in 1972, with his sights set on Hollywood. "I didn't leave Motown, Motown left me," Martha Reeves commented. "I was in Detroit when they moved the whole works to Los Angeles. I was one of the people who had to face the people in Detroit who said: 'What happened? Why did they move?' Motown made a decision to get out of town right away, and some people were able to make the move and some weren't. I was one of the ones who was not informed. I heard about it, like the song says, through the grapevine."

Gordy was no great shakes as a movie mogul, unable to see past Ross, his eternal leading lady in Lady Sings The Blues, Mahogany and The Wiz in the Seventies. Wonder and Robinson kept the label afloat, yet, by the Eighties, even they had drifted into schmaltz alongside Charlene and Lionel Richie.

Fittingly, Gordy began To Be Loved, his autobiography published in 1994, by reflecting on his misgivings about selling Motown to MCA. "That night, 30 December 1986, I passed on the deal even though my company was losing millions," wrote the boss, who spent a further 17 months wavering before eventually reaching an agreement in May 1988 and selling Motown for $61m (Jobete, the lucrative publishing arm of the company, was finally wholly acquired by EMI Publishing in 2004). "For years, we had shown the world what we could do with talent and ingenuity at our base. And now these new corporate entities were showing me what they could do with money and power as theirs... I was just tired. I didn't want to do it anymore. It had long stopped being fun for me. When I started out, I was doing about 90 per cent creative and 10 per cent business. As the years went, the percentages more than switched. Now, I was doing 98 per cent business and 2 per cent creative. I was stuck and I hated it."

In 1990, Gordy was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Motown had a last hurrah with Boyz II Men in the Nineties but became just another urban label after PolyGram acquired the company in 1994. Now part of Universal Music, Motown has finally been making sense of its huge back-catalogue and wealth of unreleased material, in particular with the release of the Cellarful of Motown collections of outtakes and the Complete Box-Sets series.

The joyful, soulful, upbeat Motown sound did change the world, broke down racial barriers and epitomised the American dream. Yet the Hit Factory had too many casualties along the way.