| When I began at Motown in late 1963, the
company was more like family than like a business. To a business man, the company
was showing signs of being an unsuccessful business. Sales were soaring, but
expenses were rising at the same rate, making profits paper thin. It was inevitable that
changes were going to be made; changes that would pretty much kill the "family"
vibe of the company. This was very necessary if there was going to be a company that
would eventually become the largest independent record company in the world. |
| To myself and many of my co-workers, Motown
became more of a job than a career in the late 60's. Motown became a festering
pimple that burst in 1968 when the creative team of Holland Dozier Holland left Motown
along with a significant percentage of Motown's creative and technical personnel.
Infecting Motown were new administrators charged with making the company more
profitable. With them came the company politics, company rules and company
restrictions usually found at established companies. It was just too much of a
change for many of us who had sweated at Motown for sub-par compensation over five or more
years. The business regimen was like a modern-day computer virus, corrupting files
deep into to the hard disk that we called the "Motown Vibe." |
| Apparently I was a valuable employee at
Motown as head of an engineering section of the company that mastered and technically
quality-controlled the product just before release. I say this because every time I
complained about the new changes, I was given more personnel to "make my job
easier." When I left Motown I had 5 technicians and a secretary that worked for
me, when the job easily could have been done with 3 people. |
| The majority of my day consisted of reading
the newspaper and chatting with my secretary. Expressing the desire to learn more of
the engineering process (even on my own time) was met with an "against company
rules" negative response. Soon I began to read the "help-wanted"
section of my daily newspaper. |
| Believing that there no real opportunities in
the Detroit area, I began to take "sick days" on Mondays to go to job interviews
in nearby Chicago. As I was just about to accept a job at Chess Records, I was taken
into confidence by one of the technical engineers that was planning to leave for the
"greener" pastures of Holland Dozier Holland. I wound up taking an HDH
offer and staying in Detroit. |
| Motown and HDH were in a bitter battle with
large-denomination lawsuits flying in both directions. Although unconfirmed, there
were reports of private investigators on roofs of buildings filming the famous
songwriting/production team entering and leaving other Detroit-area recording
studios. Also reported were tapped phone lines and strange characters rummaging
through garbage for evidence needed in the court proceedings. |
| I gave my notice at 5:00 PM Friday evening,
left Motown's clutches by 6:15 PM, and seldom looked back. The 3-man engineering
team (with me being the #3 man) left on a plane to New York under fictitious names on
Monday. |
| Over the next 6 weeks we were charged with
getting a custom recording console designed and
getting construction begun. This was
in addition to the selection of
all of
the rest of the recording and engineering equipment necessary to install HDH's own
recording studio. Thus a second chapter begins in our Motown Recording
Heritage. |
| I said it in a 1999 BBC interview:
"Motown was, to me and many like me, not a building, not a record company but a vibe
of both creative and technical people working together to make this 'new' brand of music
originating from Detroit." The business virus could infect a studio on West Grand
Blvd. but the vibe lived on in the HDH "splinter" group. |
| Within another 5 years, the Invictus/Hot Wax
collapse would prove beyond any reasonable doubt that this "Motown Vibe" doesn't
mix well with business. But this "last hurrah" of the Motown Vibe provides
us with a second chapter of our heritage - every bit as valid as chapter
one. |
