The Rise and Fall of Tamla Motown

Forty-odd years ago, I used to talk about books on an arts programme on university radio. It is to be hoped, and highly likely, that no tapes of those shows remain. The student newspaper decribed it as 'catholic' which mystified me at the time because there was no religious content. But, January's reading having been Sarte, Shostakovich and Tamla Motown, I like to think I still am. All you've got to be is of interest, and any good.

Where Did Our Love Go, the Rise and Fall of the Motown Sound by Nelson George is a brilliantly achieved account of its subject, as immaculate in its 200 pages of story as any of the perfect pop singles from the height of Motown's best days. Nelson George packs in as much detail as necessary with descriptions of the main characters, assessments of the records and the trajectory of the rise and fall.

He is clear-sighted in summing up the personalities so that when he quotes, from an acquaintance of hers,  that,

when she was poor, living in the projects, she was just as snotty as she is now, so her fame didn't make her snotty,

one reluctantly accepts the rumours about Miss Ross.

Success is usually visited upon those who want it the most with less reference to talent. There were better singers but the rise and fall of Motown maps very accurately onto the rise and fall of the Supremes while the likes of Martha Reeves, Gladys Knight and, most tragically, Florence Ballard aren't given such attention.

For all the glory of the music, there is the counter-balancing litany of victims whose ruined lives were collateral damage. Only one fault with the book is why I'm Still Waiting gets no mention but it's possible by then that George regards it as schmaltz at a time when the Temptations had moved into psychedelia and the 9-minute version of Papa was a Rolling Stone. Marvin Gaye and David Ruffin are troubled men. Not all achieve as much as they thought. Mary Wilson did well to sit tight and do what was expected of her in the Supremes.

Shakespeare, Handel and Leopold Mozart were entrepreneurs, in it for the money, and so the purist has to accept that Berry Gordy's motivation was similarly financial but that the surest way to success is through great art. He knew what he was doing.

Motown, and Northern Soul, admirers aren't always as obsessive as, say, jazz fans, in knowing who played bass in Duke Ellington's band but this book provides a guide to the names in the highly professional organisation of the hit factory. One benefit of the detail was looking up 'early Motown' on You Tube and finding a compilation including Brenda Holloway, The Marvelettes Beechwood 4-5789 and Mary Wells. Where Motown can be traced back to is Berry's time spent in jazz clubs, realizing that be-bop wasn't a commercial certainty whereas John Lee Hooker was more viable, and thus formulating something that owed a debt to Sarah Vaughan and the doo-wop that his friend Smokey Robinson had been doing.

In time-honoured tradition, the record company had their lawyers make sure the business was the first beneficiary of the talent it employed and the likes of Holland-Dozier-Holland and Stevie Wonder would sign contracts elsewhere. Every success story has its demise written somewhere in its DNA and Motown got so big that Berry became more remote from the process, returning only to involve himself with the Jackson 5. The accountants were white, the company left Detroit for L.A. where it became only one among several big labels and musicians, writers and executives found it easier to accept offers from rivals. It was never quite the same again.

Nothing lasts forever. Anything outgrows its initial confident surge to eminence. The universe, it is thought, will one day stop expanding, all the stars will run out of gas and it will become moribund but, it had looked like it was worth the effort at the time and the many highlights distilled from those few, fast years make for an epic, roller-coaster story that is superbly recounted in this book.