No one production team has been allowed to dominate the creative process the way Holland and Dozier did in the middle Sixties. In 1967 they left the company and Motown moved into its modern phase.
#Motown records was started in 1960 by full#
In 1964 Eddie Holland and Lamont Dozier began producing the Supremes and with the unprecendented success of that group, the Motown sound came into full flower.įor the next three years Holland and Dozier defined, expanded and elaborated on that sound, their achievements towering over and affecting the work of their colleagues in both the largest and smallest of ways. Through the early Sixties and out of the combined efforts of artists such as the Miracles, Martha and the Vandellas, Marvin Gaye, Mary Wells, the Marvelettes, the Contours, and producers like Smokey Robinson, Mickey Stevenson, and Berry Gordy himself, Motown records began to achieve a certain stylistic identity. Originally, it was just another R&B label, noteworthy primarily for the consistent high quality of its singles. Motown began the decade groping for a style. Most of them freely admit their ignorance of the new artists’ musical techniques. As long as these artists can turn out profitable records, the executives of their companies are happy to let them do as they wish. Today, no one on the Atlantic staff has anything to do with the actual recording of Led Zeppelin or Emerson, Lake and Palmer, no one at Warners pretends to understand the musical virtues of Black Sabbath, and when the Band goes into the studio for Capitol these days, one assumes they do as they please. Unfamiliar with the market and the music, the new men (as well as the older record men still active) do not run an in-house operation with all of its fixed expenses, but instead prefer a system of independent production in which the company invests in specific projects, finances and distributes them, and occupies itself as little as possible with the actual details of artistic production, about which it knows very little.
#Motown records was started in 1960 by how to#
(The major exception: Atlantic.) And it is then that they sell their company to the anonymous men of the conglomerates, men who lack any musical vision at all, men who only know how to read a bottom line, men who don’t care what puts it there. For when the blues market (or country, or gospel, or whatever the case may be) can no longer support the company financially, these are not the men who know how to diversify: they have no heart for it. Ultimately – in a business sense – it is their weakness too. The inner determination of a Leonard Chess, the personal commitment to a specific musical outlook, has always been the strength of the independent. And consequently, for the twenty years he ran the company, the Chess label signified something musically. I would venture to guess that for most of his years at Chess it never occurred to him that he might be recording anything else.
The late Leonard Chess discovered his artists in his bar, recorded them himself, and then sold their releases from out of the trunk of his car. Independent record companies are started by men personally involved with the art they intend to distribute. It is a flawed vision but a consistent one and the fruits of his labor have been on view since he started running the company they will continue to multiply until the day he stops.
As one after another of the independents have sold themselves to the conglomerates, and as each, to one degree or another, has lost touch with its original source of strength, only Motown continues to reflect the musical as well as business vision of its founder: namely, Berry Gordy, Jr. As surely as Atlantic was the greatest independent record company of the Fifties, Motown was the greatest of the Sixties.
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