Web sites here and here detailed a story today about the demolition of the building which used to house Motown Records. This event has made me realize that I’ve lived in very close proximity to Detroit all of my life, and yet I have next to no knowledge of the Motown record label and the artists that belonged to it. Honestly, I couldn’t name one artist that I’m 100% positive was signed to the label.
So, please, teach me. Gimme the basics, at least. I think I can take it from there. Who are the essential artists that performed on the label? What are their greatest albums and songs? Maybe even toss in a little history about the label if you fancy.
Motown had a lot of history, far too much for me to try to go into here. The sites above, and other answers I’m sure will follow will, I’m sure, provide you with a lot of good data. Enjoy!
Just out of curiosity but how old are you? When Motown moved its operations to the supposedly greener pastures of LA in the 70’s, it pretty much ceased to have any real connection with Detroit (aside from nostalgic) so it would have been fairly easy for anyone born after 1980 not to know anything about the label.
BTW, does anybody think that Motown’s move to LA turned out, in retrospect, to be the beginning of the end for the label? In Detroit, Motown Records had a distinctive sound that was easily distinguishable from everything else out at the time. In LA, Motown was just another record company.
I think Motown’s sound so emblemic of an era of music it was a mistake to move at the end of that era, and abandoning the midwestern pool of musicians it cultivated there to expand untested television and movie projects. I’ve never been entirely clear why Berry Gordy moved, rather than to dominate and expand operations from Detroit.
Here’s a Wikipedia link to Motown Performers. ANY Motown list of performers should start with acts like Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, the Supremes, the Temptations, Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder and the Jackson Five or risk looking suspect.
In case you didn’t know, it was a rotating selection of mostly the same musicians who played on all of the Motown records. They were known as The Funk Brothers. Usually, it doesn’t matter whose record you’re listening to, some combination of TFB was on it. There’s a job, eh? Go to work every day and make hit records.
I’ve seen pictures of the facilities in Detroit, and it doesn’t look like the kind of place that all those magical sounds were made in. It was old and kinda rundown and cramped, and the equipment was barely adequate. It was the staff of engineers, technicians and producers who knew how to create that sound without a battery of state-of-the-art equipment that made Motown special. Just think about all the records that are permanently etched into the minds of millions, that were all made in that little room.
And just to clarify (and to let you know I’m not a complete music ignoramus), I’m quite familiar with a lot of the artists I’m seeing here (particularly Marvin Gaye). I just wanted to finally figure out who exactly was associated with Motown. I could have easily done the research myself, but I figure the crowd here rather enjoys talking music, and I think it could spark some interesting conversation.
For the last couple of days, I’ve been playing Stevie Wonder’s Talking Book all the damn time. It’s one of five or six consecutive albums he made that are all supposed to be classics. I’ll be borrowing the rest of them in time, as soon as I no longer need to hear Superstition quite this many times a day. (That song is in my personal Top Ten.) That he made four or five other albums THIS good (and Songs in the Key of Life, at least, is supposed to be better) is hard to imagine. Few artists manage to do anything this good.
I hope I didn’t give you the impression I was trying to put you down. I was instead making the point that when Motown moved to LA in the 70’s, it pretty much severed its connection with the Detroit music scene that made it famous. Since Motown Records was no longer in Motown, I could certainly see how someone growing up in the area over the last 25 years could end up not knowing a lot about it.