Then Michael again, shrieking: ‘DIANA ROSS! I’VE JUST SEEN DIANA ROSS!’
Tito and I jumped up and raced outside to make sure it wasn’t another of his pranks. But it was true. Mr Gordy had gathered the crème de la crème of his Motown family – and who knew how many other movers and shakers from the music industry? Ever since July, we had kept pinching ourselves that we were actually Motown artists – grouped with the Temptations, the Marvelettes, Martha & the Vandellas, Smokey, Gladys, Bobby Taylor, Diana Ross, Marvin Gaye and the Four Tops. For so long, they were who we wanted to be and where we wanted to be. And we were about to perform for half of them.
Jackie grew agitated. ‘Guys, we need to concentrate. Come on. Do y’all know what you’re supposed to do?’ The occasion was clearly getting to him, and Michael and Marlon’s regular news updates weren’t helping. Funnily enough, it was the one occasion when Joseph wasn’t backstage. He was busy rubbing shoulders with the big names and maybe that was why Jackie had the jitters. ‘C’mon, y’all … we must get this right. Let’s focus,’ he said. After Joseph, Jackie was the one who most used that word.
Michael and Marlon settled down and we gathered in a huddle and told one another that we should ‘go out there and tear this place up’. That was how we spoke before a show over the years: ‘Tear ’em up’; ‘Let’s knock ’em out’; ‘Let’s kill ’em’; or ‘Let’s go out there and hurt ’em’. Michael carried forward these phrases into his work as a solo artist. Anyone who worked with him will recognise that vernacular. Fighting talk, borrowed from Joseph.
As kids, we knew the calibre of talent waiting to watch us and yet we didn’t for a second feel out of our depth or inferior. As Motown’s first child group, we couldn’t wait to do our set: ‘My Girl’, ‘Tobacco Road’ and a James Brown number. The big question in our mind was: how would they react? What were these Motown folk like in a private setting? In an audience?
If there were two absent people we wanted out there, it was Mother and Rebbie. Mother had waited in the wings for so long on our behalf, taken a back seat, sacrificed her own dreams and missed her boys most weekends. And when Motown first exploded, Rebbie was the one going to the local record store, buying the newly-released 45s and dancing the ‘sock hops’ with Jackie. She was all about what Mr Gordy had invented – ‘the sound of young America’. Or, as another Motown motto would go, ‘It’s what’s in the groove that counts’.
Once we were poolside, with mics and instruments in hand, we looked out across the lit water and kept spotting the faces of the greats who were watching. It took one wink from Michael and then we started killing it. The energy of that performance was incredible and we could tell our VIP audience was into it. They weren’t just gracious, they loved it. By the second verse of ‘My Girl’, they were clapping and dancing and cheering, even whooping when Michael turned on his moves and set fire to the place. As we took our bows, we spotted Mr Gordy front-centre of the standing crowd, clapping the loudest, smiling the widest alongside Joseph, puffing out his chest. Always a good sign.
When Smokey Robinson and Marvin Gaye came over and expressed their enthusiasm, we started to feel that we must be good. Everyone talked about ‘the little fella’ – Michael – and Diana Ross made a beeline for him. She said a few words and grabbed his cheeks like an auntie meeting her favourite nephew. I was talking to someone else at the time, but I saw how starry-eyed he was. That was actually the first time we met Diana, which puts to bed the Motown folklore that insisted it was she who discovered us. That marketing myth was invented because, we were told, it was stardom by association, so we memorised it as ‘fact’ to tell journalists.
That night, we stayed at Bobby Taylor’s apartment in Detroit and rang Mother in Gary, each one of us taking turns on the phone to tell her how brilliantly the night had gone. ‘Did they really like it? Did they really? I’m so proud of you boys.’
PEOPLE HAVE ALWAYS ASKED, ‘WHAT EXACTLY is the Motown Sound?’ In 1983, Smokey – the label’s first artist – tried answering that question: ‘The Motown Sound is the bottom, you know. They got the foot working and you can hear the bass real good.’ In his 1994 autobiography, Mr Gordy defines it as ‘rats, roaches, struggle, talent, guts and love’. I’d go further: its uptown-downtown mix is part funky, part melodic, with a distinct pop sound thrown in. And then there’s the feel-good mood it evokes, tapping into universal human emotion, elevating happiness, remembering desire, soothing heartbreak, as inspired by Mr Gordy’s early days with Jackie Wilson. It’s a catharsis that touches you; a force that compels you to move. It’s that blend of beats, bass lines, drums, keyboards, tambourines, hand-claps and the interplay of harmonies that create an instantly knowable sound, and one on which we built our live performances and musical education. And even then I don’t feel I’ve done it justice.
Our first Motown tutor was Bobby Taylor and we spent a lot of time with him in the months before Mr Gordy’s party, working at weekends and when school was out for summer. He didn’t have much room in his apartment so we threw down mattresses and sleeping-bags on his carpet. It felt like the sleepover we were never allowed to have. Bobby, a tremendous singer himself, spent those summer weeks producing us and cutting tracks like ‘Can You Remember?’, ‘Who’s Lovin’ You’, ‘Chained’ and ‘La-La-La-La-La Means I Love You’ and ‘Standing In The Shadows Of Love’, songs that would feature on our first album. We must have cut more than a dozen covers from the likes of the Delfonics, Smokey Robinson, the Temptations and Marvin Gaye, and that work allowed us to ease into the recording process as a team prepared our original material.
Bobby knew how to inspire us, and he taught Michael and me how to use a mic properly in the studio. ‘Guys, you’re not on stage any more,’ he’d say. ‘The mic will give you the volume, so don’t worry about projecting your voices.’ That was when Michael’s imitation came into its own. Bobby first sang a song, then Michael repeated it, note for note. If Bobby liked what he saw on stage, his judgement was validated in the studio.
We first recorded at Motown’s headquarters, using a four-track board. The studio was in a cellar of the old house that Mr Gordy had converted into Hitsville USA in West Grand Boulevard, Detroit. It wasn’t fancy and looked nothing like an empire, but it was the epicentre of the Motown Sound so it felt instantly magical. The pre-taped arrangements were the work of the in-house rhythm section, known as the Funk Brothers – the unsung heroes behind the Motown Sound, the dynamic team of musicians who created everything we had ever heard from the label. We couldn’t believe they were our collaborators. It was as though we had jumped into the radio on the side cabinet.
After a summer and early fall of recording, life returned to normal and we turned into a new year. Between August 1968 and March 1969, progress seemed to stall so we kept rehearsing, performing and revisiting our usual haunts – the Apollo, Guys and Gals, and the High Chaparral – to maintain our regional exposure, if nothing else.
Ironically, it was Mother who first got restless. ‘Are you sure these Motown people are going to come through, Joe?’
He told her to be patient – to trust the agreement. Legal loose ends were still being tied up with Steeltown Records and Motown was in the process of setting up a division in Los Angeles. All major record labels had started to head west in the late sixties and Joseph could almost smell success. ‘We’re going to Hollywood, boys. I just know it,’ he said, winking.
But we’d be going without Rebbie. In November 1968, she married a fellow Witness named Nathaniel Brown and announced she was moving to Kentucky. Joseph was furious; Mother heart-broken. Neither found it easy to accept that she was leaving the family: their plan to keep everyone together was coming undone and there was nothing they could do. Rebbie couldn’t understand why they were not overjoyed for her happiness, but I suspect Joseph felt his control unravelling. Or maybe Rebbie’s departure was a painful reminder of losing his sister Verna-Mae? Either way, he refused to give her away on her wedding day. That duty fell, instead, to Papa Samuel.
What upset Rebbie most was that Joseph didn’t arrange for us to be there either. A performance at the Regal was deemed more important. I never did understand how that fitted with Joseph always saying