City Kid (21 page)

My conversation with Jamerson and the publication of the
Musician
article (titled “Standing in the Shadows of Motown”) gave me entrée to the community of players and employees in Detroit, and encouraged me to keep pursuing this dream. It also let some of the label's highly protective representatives know I was digging around in uncharted territory. As a result, I was supported by those no longer associated with Motown, and faced harassment from folks who currently worked there.

Several people, including a girlfriend, asked me why I would even attempt such an undertaking. I'd asked this young lady, who was attending law school, to look over some of the Motown contracts and let me know whether they looked as abusive as some artists contended. Instead, she gave me a lecture on leaving black institutions alone, that I shouldn't be negative. So I asked her to leave my apartment and never spoke to her again. I was on a mission now. I couldn't have that “negative” energy around me.

Moreover, the musicians wanted me to do it. All the great players left in Detroit, and the others I spoke to on either coast, wanted their story told. They were part of history too, yet they'd been left out. Most of these men were old enough to be my father, a couple could have been my grandfather, and that connection drew me to them as well. One of the pleasures of being in journalism is the time you get to spend with people you'd otherwise never meet. These Motown musicians had had full lives, lives that enriched the music and made them great storytellers.

I learned a lot about perseverance and patience from them, and about the beauty of collaboration. Learning to mesh your talents with the skills of other gifted people is a glorious thing. It's not easy to learn and very difficult to sustain. At this time I was very much a lone wolf when it came to work. I listened to my editors. I took advice here and there. But I usually kept my own counsel. I debated myself in my notebooks, but didn't let too many people, be they friend or lover, into my creative process. I didn't know it then, but these genius musicians would, by lesson and example, teach me how to work well with other artists, something that would filter into my filmmaking years later.

Visiting 2648 West Grand Boulevard, the original home of Motown Records, was a revelation. For all its mystique and history, this legendary building is just a nice two-story home on a quiet midwestern street. Its staircases are narrow, and you wonder how the long-limbed Temptations and Four Tops made it up and down them. The famous studio, site of the Motown sound, was an expanded basement, big by East Coast standards, perhaps, but in no way exceptional. The smallness of the place made what was achieved there all the more impressive.

That building on Detroit's West Grand Boulevard is an object lesson that world-changing events are so often created by small groups of like-minded individuals. Almost all major artistic movements (and most political as well) come out of small communities of folks linked by geography and shared values. Often they are based in seemingly unlikely places—Seattle or the South Bronx or Detroit—that only afterward seem like the perfect place for something new to burst out of.

Being at 2648 West Grand didn't make it nostalgic as much as it opened me up to the richness of the possibilities around me. What this community of black folks accomplished out of a house in Detroit was amazing, but it wasn't out of reach for other generations—my generation—to achieve in their own way, on their own terms.

It's not well remembered now, in our gangsta-celebrating era, that Motown suffered from an unsavory reputation dating back to the 1960s. Rumors floated around showbiz circles for years that Motown was actually owned not by Berry Gordy but by underworld figures. In my research (and in others') those rumors have never been substantiated. However, there's no doubt in my mind that Berry had some Detroit bad boys in his employ over the years.

As word of my book filtered out, I was subjected to different pressures from Motown loyalists. The most graphic example of harassment was at a Motown-produced TV special taped at the Apollo Theater in the early eighties. I was told I'd be denied access to the theater, the press viewing area, and the gala after-party behind the Apollo in a tent on 126th Street. Just to be contrary, I hung outside the press area, set up in a nearby school, and sneaked in carrying a TV camera to obscure my face. Then I was spotted by a member of Motown's publicity staff, who had security escort me out. Later, I slipped into the after-party, where I had a brief, funny conversation with Bobby Brown.

That veiled gangster mystique played a huge role in eliminating my chief competitor in chronicling Motown's history. A hot young white music critic had landed a book deal about the same time as I, and, in fact, had made contact with many of the same interview subjects, plus a few I hadn't gotten to yet.

So I was quite surprised when he asked me to meet him at an Upper West Side restaurant. I'll never forget that day, both because of the bizarre tale he told and because he gave me a clear lane to finish my book. The writer related that he'd received threats for “asking too many questions” by an ex-Motown executive. Yet what really freaked him out was a phone call he received after a trip to Detroit.

He claimed that a male voice told him, “We know where you live,” as a helicopter appeared outside his Riverside Drive apartment window and hovered menacingly outside. To the writer this strange occurrence (if it happened as he described) meant, stay out of Detroit and drop this book. The idea that someone might have threatened him didn't seem far-fetched. Detroit was, after all, murder capital USA.

Ultimately, whether this was a paranoid fantasy or some incredible bit of staged intimidation, I didn't really care. Not only was he going to stop working on a rival Motown book, but he would sell me all his research. A deal was struck, and boxes of interviews and other materials joined the stack in my bedroom. Looking through the writer's interviews and notes, I realized his mistake. Number one, he had been quite blunt in asking for information about any Motown/Mob connections, as if they'd just spill whatever they knew simply because he asked them.

Moreover, he was a New York City white man interviewing mostly working-class black Midwesterners, and hadn't worked hard enough to dampen their natural suspicion. There was no doubt that the thrust of his interviews had gotten back to certain individuals in Detroit, who decided to test him. But a helicopter hovering over Riverside Drive? Still don't know what to make of that.

When I returned to Detroit I tried to push this writer's fear out of my mind. But one night, alone in my Renaissance Center Hotel room, I had a freak-out, worried that some hit man would break into my room, smack me around, and steal my interview tapes. I placed a chair under the doorknob, crumpled up newspapers on the floor, and talked animatedly on the phone to friends in New York until near dawn.

The paranoia passed, due largely to the fellowship of two men—longtime Motown keyboardist and bandleader Earl Van Dyke and musician and talent manager “Beans” Boles. Van Dyke was a tough, no-bullshit, brown-skinned man, with no illusions about the humanity of showbiz executives and the warmth of his fellow man. I recall driving with him through Detroit on two occasions when he pulled out his revolver and placed it on the seat of his car, because someone had cruised behind him a little too close. Some of the best observations in my book
Where Did Our Love Go?
, about Marvin Gaye's inner demons, Diana Ross's temperament, and Stevie Wonder's artistic development, came from Earl.

Beans Boles was a jovial, lean, light-skinned man, with great empathy for others, who walked me through the byzantine ways of the Motown business. While he joined Motown as saxophonist, Beans quickly became part of Motown's permanent government, working in their management, helping to book and run tours, and wrangling talent. In that capacity Beans dealt with all levels of the Motown hierarchy, including Berry, and key administrators.

Moreover, he generously gave me access to touring schedules, internal memos, and the notorious Motown contracts. But Beans didn't just give me access to the mechanics of the company, he opened up its soul, too, with very acute portraits of Marvin Gaye, Diana Ross, and sad Florence Ballard. Though the film
Dreamgirls
was fun, and gave a lot of young black talent a showcase, the real story of Motown was much more complex and nuanced than the film suggests, and it was through these fine men that I came to understand it.

Both Earl and Beans treated me warmly, and almost single-handedly guided me to all of the wonderful Motown musicians. They gave me the confidence to believe I could finish the book, and, crucially, it was important to them that I did. Maybe because I wasn't close to my father, and I didn't know my grandfathers very well, I always enjoyed the fellowship of older black men. I never just tolerated them like some young people do. I genuinely enjoyed hearing their stories, not just for information, but for the closeness it engendered. My strongest memory of writing
Where Did Our Love Go?
is sitting in my Detroit hotel room, a bottle of Scotch and my tape recorder handy, listening to middle-aged black men tell the stories that no one else wanted to hear.

Flash forward: It's 2003, some twenty years after I seriously began researching my book, and I'm sitting in the Magno screening room in Midtown Manhattan about to watch a documentary about those great Motown musicians.
Standing in the Shadows of Motown
even carried the title of my long-ago
Musician
magazine profile. But watching the doc wasn't the pleasant experience of nostalgia I'd anticipated; instead, it brought me face-to-face with mortality.

About midway through that viewing I got choked up. But it wasn't until the penultimate sequence, when the remaining Funk Brothers came out carrying their instruments and photos of their fallen comrades, that I started crying like a baby.

I got up out of my seat and went into the men's room, where I tried to hide the tracks of my tears. The movie brought me back to 1983, '84, and '85, when I began to venture out to Detroit, Michigan, in search not simply of Motown Records' history, but of a piece of my childhood, and those moments when Jamerson's bass pumped against my chest through my mother's Motorola hi-fi. All my emotions mixed together: the joy of the music in my family's living room; the experience of being schooled on music and life by that feisty, funny group of musicians in Detroit; the challenge of writing my first book; and the reality that while the music lives on, eras pass and people die, often alone and overlooked. Deep inside me all the passion at that time in my life lives on, and I still feel it whenever one of those classic Motown singles comes on.

In spring 1985 I was awakened in my Jamaica, Queens, apartment by a phone call from a young filmmaker I'd recently befriended. His high-pitched voice filled my ear.

“Nelson, this is Spike! Loved your piece on Russell Simmons in the
Voice
!”

He was referring to my profile of Rush that had run in April of that year. I thanked him, and we chatted. I told him I was moving to Brooklyn, to an area called Fort Greene.

“That's where I live!” he told me excitedly. Turned out I was moving right around the corner from him. I didn't know it at the time, but the publication of the Simmons profile, and moving from Queens to Fort Greene, was the end and beginning of two eras for me.

Moving from my Queens apartment with Rocky took me out of daily contact with the business of hip-hop and, happily, ended my long-ass E and F train rides into the city. I was back in Brooklyn, but to a very different 'hood than the one I'd grown up in. Until I moved to Fort G I'd been in the area only once before.

After picking up a girl at a disco on my eighteenth birthday, I took the subway back to Brooklyn with visions of horizontal enrichment dancing in my head. However, during the ride I noticed that she had healed cuts on both wrists. She told me that she'd attempted suicide twice. In addition, she revealed that she had a male roommate, and was in a quasi-romantic relationship. I just walked her to her door, kissed her on the cheek, and got lost trying to get home. I now realize that this woman lived just two blocks from my current address in Brooklyn, but in '85 Fort Greene was a foreign land.

I had no connection to the area. I had never had any friends who lived there. After that weird experience, I never dated any girls who lived there. All I knew was that Fort Greene was just east of downtown Brooklyn, where I had spent my whole childhood going shopping with my mother. When I did my internship at the
Phoenix
I actually worked just blocks from Fort Greene. Yet streets such as DeKalb, St. Felix, and Carlton were as foreign to me as avenues in Staten Island. I knew that the Fort Greene projects had produced the basketball greats Bernard and Albert King. The area was also always regarded as a hotbed for gang activity—first in the seventies, with the Tomahawks, and in the eighties, with the Decepticons.

Fort Greene, and my new place at 19 Willoughby Avenue, were easy to love. In contrast to where I'd grown up in Brownsville and lived in Queens, Fort Greene was very close to Manhattan. On almost every major subway line, Fort Greene was no more than two or three stops into Brooklyn, so going out, especially anywhere below Fourteenth Street, was made very convenient. The streets were lined with tall, thick trees fronting magnificent brownstones. There was a picturesque park with rolling hills and tennis courts, and in the fall it filled with hard, brown, fallen acorns that I used to collect and on occasion toss at friends. Fort Greene was close enough to Manhattan that I could leave my apartment at 7:30 P.M. and catch an 8:15 P.M. show at the Bottom Line in Greenwich Village, which made my life infinitely easier.