BEFORE: Back-to-back docs on Motown, and I'm heading in to the home stretch on the documentary chain - just four left after this one. And there are 78 movies left to watch this year, 92 days until the election, and 150 total days left in this miserable, no-good, very bad (but also perfect, if I can keep the chain going) year. I now think I know who's going to win the title this year, who'll have the most appearances. It will very likely be a Beatle - only not the one who took the title two years ago.
With that in mind, here are today's relevant rock (and also R&B) anniversaries: on August 3, 1963, the Beatles played at the Cavern Club for the very last time, out of 274 shows there. On August 3, 1971, Paul McCartney announced the formation of his new band, Wings, with wife Linda pretending to play keyboards. On the same day, Ringo Starr received a gold record for his song "It Don't Come Easy", which reached #4 in both the U.S. and the U.K.
And on August 3, 1993, Motown Records was sold to Dutch entertainment company Polygram for $325 million. Berry Gordy had previously sold it to an investment company in 1988 for $61 million.
OK, cool, some Motown news just as I'm getting ready to watch the 2nd documentary about that label. Marvin Gaye, and several others, carry over from "Standing in the Shadows of Motown".
THE PLOT: Documentary film that focuses on the period beginning with the birth of Motown in Detroit in 1958 until its relocation to Los Angeles in the early 1970's.
AFTER: One of the first stories Berry Gordy tells in this film is about selling newspapers when he was a boy, a black-themed newspaper called The Chronicle. After a few days, he realized that if he took the newspapers into the white neighborhoods, he sold more papers. I suppose we're supposed to draw some big conclusion from this, like this foreshadows how he would end up selling black music to white music-lovers someday, right? Or are we supposed to conclude that he's some kind of genius because he figured out that if you increase your audience or your territory, you get more sales, right? Thank God he cracked that code, because if he didn't, I don't know how long it would have been until somebody else worked all that out! I guess he deserves some kind of Nobel Prize in Economics or something.
But the next day he went back with his brother to sell more papers in the white neighborhood, with much less success. Gordy drew the conclusion that one black kid selling newspapers was cute, but two was a threat to the neighborhood. (Umm, that's HIM making it all about race, not the customers...). Isn't it more likely that perhaps he'd saturated the market with newspapers the previous day? Or could it be that white people bought the black newspaper once, then read it, found that the stories weren't their cup of tea, so they didn't buy The Chronicle again? Nah, that couldn't be it, that would make too much sense. Gordy drew exactly the wrong conclusion and learned the wrong lesson from his paperboy experience - instead he should have learned that you can fool people into what you're selling once, but not all the time.
Later, Gordy worked for the Lincoln-Mercury plant in Detroit, and came away from that experience with ideas about how to run a record company. Here I thought that working on the line building cars was somehow connected to the Motown rhythm, like maybe Gordy heard something in the sounds of building cars that later turned up in Motown music, but that wasn't the case. Instead he decided to run a record company like an assembly line, where recording artists would be dressed up over here, move to the next room where they'd learn dance moves, then down to the next room where they'd record a song, and so on - and a polished performer would come out on the conveyor belt of the factory like a car or a toaster would. Yes, that's what the recording artists of Motown were to Berry Gordy, just products that were built in a factory. I could dig this analogy if he was talking about vinyl records or master tapes, but he was equating people with appliances. It's not really a good look.
There's another look at the "Snake Pit" in the basement of the first Motown building, which is where those Funk Brothers would record the tracks along with the top Motown artists, but the Funk Brothers themselves are in this documentary for only a few seconds - and this really compounds the problems from before, where the top credited artists (and songwriters) get all of the attention, while the studio musicians are nearly ignored. The pendulum has sort of swung back in the other direction, with the focus back on The Supremes, Smokey Robinson, The Temptations, the Four Tops, and so on. But even there, cuts had to be made due to time limits, so even though Motown released albums by dozens and dozens of acts over the years, they could only focus on the top ten of them here. Fans of Henry Lumpkin, Micky McCullers or Singin' Sammy Ward are bound to be disappointed.
So I don't know if there's anything really revelatory about taking a look at why songs like "My Girl" or "Tracks of My Tears" were successes - plus, it's kind of a moot point, right? I mean, if THOSE songs weren't hits, some other songs would have been, right? The Billboard chart is based on sales, and those happen every week - so clearly in the 1960's there were people going to record stores every week and buying SOMETHING, it was just a matter of determining what was most popular - and it's all "pop" music popular, I mean, that's what it stands for. The trick lie somewhere in trying to predict which songs would be more popular than others, and considering how much Motown was putting out, that was basically a numbers game. Berry Gordy's "show of hands" technique for determining which singles to release turned out to be rather hit-or-miss, as he was surprised a number of times.
Like with "I Heard it Through the Grapevine", which Gordy and Smokey Robinson make a $100 bet over which version came first - Marvin Gaye's or the California Raisins'. Just kidding. Smokey swears it was Gladys Knight's version, but Berry says it must have been Marvin's. In a way, they're BOTH right, because Marvin Gaye recorded it first, but Gladys Knight & The Pips released it first (September 1967), and the song went all the way up to #2. That's when the songwriter asked Berry Gordy if he could shop it around to other artists, and if you listen to the Gladys Knight version, you may understand why. It's too fast, it's got a weird rhythm and it sounds like even Gladys doesn't know when each line is supposed to start. Then the song got re-recorded with Marvin Gaye, only they slowed it down and made it more soulful and funky, and not fast and frenetic, and it was released again on Marvin Gaye's 1968 album "In the Groove", then became a #1 single at last. But the story doesn't end there, because Creedence Clearwater Revival then ruined the song in 1970, but this documentary conveniently leaves out any cover versions made by white people.
Gordy makes a point of trotting out the white A&R and sales guys who worked for Motown for decades, so it almost feels like he's trying to get out ahead of some discrimination charges or something. Or he's ticking off the boxes here - "Let's see, I mentioned the Funk Brothers, I proved that some white people worked for Motown, what's next?" I was willing to believe that he wasn't going to mention his 5-year relationship with Diana Ross, but it seems maybe his lawyers told him he had to get out ahead of that story, too. How is that not a conflict of interest, if he's sleeping with one of the top named artists on his roster? How does he not favor her over other artists, if that's the case? This is probably the reason why nobody knew about the relationship, right? Yet he brings it up in order to show how Motown was just "one big family". Fine, but it seems like there's a lot of hanky-panky that went on in that family...
And then we come to the company's move to Los Angeles, which was decried in yesterday's film by the Detroit session musicians who didn't want to move to the West Coast. According to them, they got no notice, just a sign on the studio door one day that there'd be no recording, and we'll see you in L.A. if you can afford the plane fare. But in THIS film, all we see are the positives, which involved strategic relocation and re-structuring of the business to properly create corporate synergy with the other entertainment holdings and properties in the cinematic media universe. Which is business language that roughly translates to: "I'm moving to sunny Hollywood, enjoy your Detroit winters, guys!"
I would say there's two sides to every story, naturally, but this documentary really only wants to show you one of them. Motown was everything that was good and right in the universe, and Berry Gordy had the Midas touch, and apparently never made any mistakes, except the things he got wrong turned out to be hit records anyway, so there you go. After all, he turned Michael Jackson into a hit machine, and the only cost was his childhood, so what possible bad ramifications could have come from that?
And while I thought it was very crass of "The U.S. vs. John Lennon" to end their documentary with gunshots and fading to black to symbolize Lennon's shooting, to not mention at all the tragic endings that some Motown stars came to seems almost worse. The way they discussed Marvin Gaye it seemed like maybe he's still alive somewhere, still out on tour or enjoying his retirement. Umm, that's not the case, and see also: Florence Ballard, David Ruffin. Just saying.
Also starring Berry Gordy, Martha Reeves, Smokey Robinson, Stevie Wonder, Brian Holland, Eddie Holland, Otis Williams, Mary Wilson (all carrying over from "Standing in the Shadows of Motown"), Barney Ales, Shelly Berger, Brenda Boyce, Lee Daniels, Lamont Dozier, Dr. Dre (last seen in "Straight Outta Compton"), Jamie Foxx (last seen in "Just Mercy"), Jackie Jackson, Jermaine Jackson (last seen in "Leaving Neverland"), Marlon Jackson, Tito Jackson, Kevin "Coach K" Lee, John Legend (last seen in "Between Two Ferns: The Movie"), Miller London, Little Richard (last seen in "Quincy"), Claudette Robinson, Valerie Simpson, Sam Smith, Mickey Stevenson, Adam White, Neil Young (last seen in "Sound City")
with archive footage of Muhammad Ali (last seen in "Richard Jewell"), Nick Ashford, Florence Ballard, Mike Douglas (last seen in "The U.S. vs. John Lennon"), Martin Luther King Jr. (ditto), Nelson Mandela (last seen in "Quincy"), Aretha Franklin (ditto), Whitney Houston (last seen in "Clive Davis: The Soundtrack of Our Lives"), George Harrison (also carrying over from "Standing in the Shadows of Motown"), John Lennon (ditto), Paul McCartney (ditto), Ringo Starr (ditto), Diana Ross (ditto), Michael Jackson (last seen in "Always at the Carlyle"), Eddie Kendricks, Gladys Knight, Michael Lovesmith, Barack Obama (last seen in "David Crosby: Remember My Name"), Maxine Powell, Richard Pryor (last seen in "Richard Pryor: Omit the Logic"), Lionel Richie (last seen in "Leaving Neverland"), David Ruffin, Ed Sullivan (last seen in "Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work"), Tammi Terrell, Mary Wells, Norman Whitfield, Oprah Winfrey (last seen in "Selma").
RATING: 5 out of 10 family members working for the company
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