The Red Thread This Week:
“Everyone would get critiqued, no one was immune.” — Smokey Robinson
Last Friday, during family weekend at the University of Oregon, we sat in a lecture hall listening to a music professor walk through a detailed history of Motown. I’ve loved those records as long as I can remember.
I knew a fair amount of the story already. What I hadn’t really heard was how early the structure showed up.
Berry Gordy came from a family of business owners. He’d worked the line at a Lincoln-Mercury plant. Even when he was just writing songs for Jackie Wilson, he worked like he was running a factory.
Once Motown opened its doors, the label held a quality control meeting every Friday morning. Producers brought in their newest records. The room listened and voted on what would be released.
Plenty of records lost. Some got reworked and brought back another week. Some never came back.
Gordy treated taste like a job. And the job had a schedule.
We usually talk about genius like it’s a gift. Lightning from somewhere. You have it or you don’t.
Motown had a building full of gifted people, and they still didn’t leave taste to chance. They put it on the calendar and made people defend their work out loud.
I’ve sat in much smaller versions of that room. At Slacker Radio, our programming team met every week to argue about what we’d feature across the service.
At the end of 2022, we were picking our Song of the Year. Kate Bush’s “Running Up That Hill” was back on the charts 37 years after its release, thanks to a critical episode of Stranger Things.
I argued against it. I thought it was a TV moment, and that our listeners came to us for something else.
I lost that vote and the feature ended up being one of our best performers of the year.
My instinct was wrong. I only found out because the meeting happened every week, and I had to show up and make my case.
A lot of us have systems for doing the work. Very few of us have one for stress testing it. We leave that part to our gut, where we’re the only voice in the room.
The Motown sound we call genius today is an artifact of a meeting held every Friday morning, where anyone could argue and nobody paid for it.
~ Jaime
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B-Sides
Motown’s first No. 1 hit: “Please Mr. Postman” by the Marvelettes. Fun fact, the drummer on that session was a 22-year-old Marvin Gaye, picking up studio work after his first album flopped.
Must watch: Standing in the Shadows of Motown, the documentary about the Funk Brothers. They played on more No. 1 hits than the Beatles, Elvis, the Stones and the Beach Boys combined, and almost nobody knew their names.