In March, Aretha Franklin wins the Grammy for the bestselling live gospel album of all time, while Diana Ross almost wins the Oscar. Marvin Gaye finds his muse. Stevie Wonder gives Jeff Beck the riff of the century, then takes it back. The Temptations record the last Motown album made in Detroit.
In black churches, the word is always musical. God is in the grooves.
—BILLY PRESTON1
If you had to pick one song to demonstrate the ecstatic transcendence of twentieth-century gospel, Aretha Franklin’s “How I Got Over” might be it, from her double album Amazing Grace. The song was written by one of her mentors, Clara Ward. In 1951, Ward and her family gospel group were driving through Georgia when five white men surrounded their Cadillac and rained down racist abuse for driving a “white man’s car.”2 The men yanked at the door handle until mother Ward decided to act possessed and shriek curses at them. “Lucifer, oh Lucifer, before they die, make these vipers writhe and crawl on their bellies like the snakes they are!”3 The men scattered, fearing she was putting a hex on them. Ward wrote the song to thank Jesus for protecting them.
Ward had a long-term romantic relationship with Franklin’s father, Reverend C. L. Franklin, and sat in the front pew with him when Aretha recorded the set live at Los Angeles’s New Temple Missionary Baptist Church. The performance was preserved in the feature film documentary of the same name as the album, posthumously released in 2018. James Cleveland led the Southern California Community Choir. He once served as the minister of music in Franklin’s church in Detroit and was one of the men most responsible for the sound of the modern gospel choir. Producer Jerry Wexler brought in a rhythm section of top session musicians, including a conga player, to accompany Cleveland on piano. They sped up “How I Got Over” from its usual tempo and set the congregation dancing in the aisles.
Ward passed away from a stroke two days later. Another of the gospel titans, Mahalia Jackson, died two weeks after Ward. Franklin’s double album became a preservation of the psalms that held the community together through the epic civil rights era. “Precious Lord, Take My Hand” had been Martin Luther King Jr.’s favorite song. Her father had been close to MLK, and she had traveled the country for his voting rights campaign. She sang the song at his funeral.
Her wailing on “Old Landmark” and “Never Grow Old” could blast Robert Plant or Paul McCartney off the stage. “It makes you feel a bit small sometimes when you hear these people’s voices, so big and powerful,” conceded Mick Jagger, who was at the performance.4 He was in town working on the overdubs of Exile on Main Street with Billy Preston, who started out playing organ for James Cleveland at age ten. The experience inspired Jagger to add gospel flavor to a number of Exile’s tracks.
“I don’t think I’m alone in saying that Amazing Grace is Aretha’s singular masterpiece,” said fellow Detroit native Marvin Gaye, whose “Wholy Holy” she included in the set. “The musicians I respect the most say the same thing.”5
The power of her gift came from its double edge. She’d been groomed by her father’s community to take her place among the greats and raised in affluence. At the same time, she grew up too fast on the paradoxically hard-partying gospel circuit and had many reasons to know the blues.
Her father had a 4,500-member congregation, a radio show, and seventy albums as a preacher under his belt. Jackson and Cleveland often stayed at the house. Franklin watched them jam into the night and blossomed into a prodigy who could play a song on the piano after hearing it once.
But although she and her father loved each other, he had his dark side. At age twenty-five, before Aretha was born, he sired a child with a twelve-year-old congregation member while married to Aretha’s mother. Distraught over Franklin’s womanizing and occasional violence, Aretha’s mother left the reverend and moved out of state when Aretha was six. She died of a heart attack when Aretha was ten, the year the future Queen of Soul sang her first solo in church.
Her grandmother and housekeepers raised her until she joined her father’s revival show at age twelve. Her father made $4,000 per gig and flew from state to state. Aretha and the gospel caravan, however, drove eight to ten hours a day. Partying one night, she slipped away into Sam Cooke’s motel room. Both kept quiet when the reverend banged on the door. Singer Etta James said, “We were out of our homes for the first time, and we wanted to experience it all.”6
Franklin had her first child at age twelve and another by a different boy at fourteen.7 When she wanted to break into pop, she didn’t think her father knew that genre and found a new manager and husband in a pimp named Ted White. “That was standard operating procedure,” James said. “Part of the lure of pimps was that they got us paid. They protected us. They also beat us up. Lots of chicks felt that if her man didn’t beat her, he didn’t love her.… Naturally, women’s lib came along and changed all that.”8
Their tumultuous relationship informed Franklin’s incendiary anthems like “Respect” and “Think,” as the women’s movement rose out of the civil rights and antiwar movements. She finally left White at the end of the decade. Now she had a more stable home with road manager Ken Cunningham and intermittently saw Temptations singer Dennis Edwards.
Amazing Grace went double platinum and won Best Soul Gospel Performance at the 15th Annual Grammy Awards on March 3. She also won Best R&B Vocal Performance (Female) for “Young, Gifted, and Black,” the anthem by Nina Simone and Weldon Irvine. How was Franklin going to top that?
She turned back to pop with Hey Now Hey (The Other Side of the Sky), produced by Quincy Jones. “Master of Eyes (The Deepness of Your Eyes)” overflowed with horns, flutes, and funky bass, employing all the tricks Jones had learned from arranging soundtracks. Rolling Stone described it as “cramming more ideas into one song than most people can get into five.” Next year it won the Grammy for Best R&B Vocal Performance. The yearning ballad “Angel,” written by her younger sister, Carolyn, and Sonny Saunders, topped the R&B charts for two weeks and made the pop Top 20.
Easy listening was one song chart she had just begun making serious inroads on. She and Diana Ross both felt competitive with Barbra Streisand, and Franklin’s jazzy cover of West Side Story’s “Somewhere” pointed in that direction. Jones called the song “his all-time favorite.”9 But Hey Now Hey was Franklin’s first album for Atlantic Records that failed to make the Top 25, not helped by a strange cover drawn by Cunningham featuring her face superimposed on itself upside down. So Franklin returned to her frequent production team Wexler and Arif Mardin for Let Me in Your Life, recorded from April to September.
Franklin was always a producer as well, even if not credited as such. Biographer David Ritz said, “Aretha didn’t just walk up to the mic and sing. She came into the studio with her own charts, her own harmonies, her own grooves.… It’s like Marvin Gaye, Barry White, Isaac Hayes. She has the big vision, the Phil Spector overview. That’s a big gift even if you’re not a world-class vocalist. That puts her in rarified company.”10
Her return to traditional soul yielded one of her biggest hits, “Until You Come Back to Me,” a song Stevie Wonder recorded in 1967 but never released. When it made No. 3, she became one of the few artists to have a hit at each number of the pop Top 10. (Only Marvin Gaye, Madonna, Taylor Swift, and Drake have done the same.)
Billy Preston summarized, “She can go into her diva act and turn off the world. But on any given night, when that lady sits down at the piano and gets her body and soul all over some righteous song, she’ll scare the shit out of you. And you’ll know—you’ll swear—that she’s still the best fucking singer this fucked up country ever produced.”11
In June, Black Enterprise magazine compiled its first Top 100 Black Businesses list, ranking Motown Records as the largest black-owned corporation in America, generating $40 million a year. But although the city of Detroit was embedded in its name, founder Berry Gordy had opened a Los Angeles office as early as ’63 and moved his kids there in ’68.12 After the riots, the Detroit office received anonymous calls threatening to burn the place down and endured a shooting in 1969. Gordy’s house was vandalized. Rumors of tensions with the Detroit Mafia persisted. Mostly, now that Gordy had conquered pop, he hungered for the new challenge of Hollywood, like another Midwest mogul who moved to LA at the same time, Playboy’s Hugh Hefner.
More than a hundred Michigan employees were let go. The label’s house band, the Funk Brothers, played their last session in the original Hitsville Building on August 30 for a band called Art and Honey.13 A few Funk Brothers, like bassist James Jamerson, made the trek to the West Coast, but now some of the Hollywood session musicians known as the Wrecking Crew played on Motown records. Some fans felt the state-of-the-art LA studios made Motown’s new records more antiseptic. The Four Tops, and Gladys Knight and the Pips, defected to other labels.
Nevertheless, Motown enjoyed one of its most successful years, racking up five pop No. 1s, almost tying the six it scored in 1965. The five included two from Stevie Wonder and one each from Diana Ross, Marvin Gaye, and Eddie Kendricks. Motown also collected seven R&B No. 1 singles and five R&B No. 1 albums.
The common refrain was that the move was the culmination of Gordy’s quest to sell out. But the first Motown film, Lady Sings the Blues, opened with Diana Ross as a screaming junkie in a straitjacket. She earned a standing ovation at the Cannes Film Festival for her portrayal of Billie Holiday weathering rape, prostitution, and police harassment. Despite Ross’s sequined image, she’d grown up in the projects. “I knew a lot of pimps. It’s a possibility if I had’ve got strung out over one of these guys it could’ve been me. If I had fallen in love…”14
What Ross and Gordy wanted more than anything was an Academy Award. Ross was nominated, but she was up against Cicely Tyson for Sounder, and Gordy worried that two black women would cancel each other out. He undertook an aggressive ad campaign, flooding Academy voters with gifts. This offended some of the industry, as it was almost two decades before Harvey Weinstein made such tactics commonplace. Liza Minnelli won for Cabaret.
Thus when Gordy insisted Ross return to the studio to cut a new ending for her upcoming single, “Touch Me in the Morning,” she was not in the mood. The vibe was so poor that lyricist Ron Miller feared the song was on the verge of being scrapped. So he threw a Hail Mary, asking, “Does anybody in this room remember who won the Best Actress Oscar last year?” Everyone froze, fearing Ross’s reaction—but Ross smiled, because she realized no one did remember, and finished the song.15
The producers had to splice together twelve different takes. It almost became a revue of her most famous inflections from “You Keep Me Hanging On,” “Someday We’ll Be Together,” and “Reach Out and Touch (Somebody’s Hand).” But there was something haunting about the Burt Bacharach horns, swelling strings, and pulsating bass. The idea of spending one last night together and then walking away in the morning was perfect for a generation facing the rising tide of divorce en masse. Miller recounted, “I analyzed Diane as a person and realized that she was a contemporary woman who was probably liberal about expressing her sexual values, like most Cosmo women in a ’70s society. Once, it was the man who might give a woman the brush off after a one-nighter telling her ‘nothing good’s gonna last forever’; now it could be the other way around.”16
Maybe the song paralleled her relationship with Gordy. When Ross became pregnant with their child at the end of ’70, she wanted to get married, but he didn’t. He wanted to see other women, and they already fought a lot.17 Ross felt her mother wouldn’t approve of her being an unwed mother, so she married a white publicist named Robert Ellis Silberstein (a.k.a. Bob Ellis) in a quick Vegas wedding.
Her professional partnership with Gordy continued unabated, though old feelings sometimes died hard. When she rehearsed with Billy Dee Williams for Lady Sings the Blues, producer Gordy conspicuously interrupted whenever it came time for a kiss, advising them to “save it for the camera.”
“Jesus Christ, Berry,” she said, “it’s only a kiss.”18
Marvin Gaye felt reluctant to move to LA. His future wife, Jan, wrote, “[His] songs carried the feel of hardcore, urban Detroit. He had great affection for the Motor City.”19 His follow-up to What’s Going On, “You’re the Man,” explicitly spelled out what he wanted politicians to focus on (“you know busin’, busin’ is the issue”) and was the grooviest reminder to vote on wax. But when it stiffed at No. 50, Gaye decided he was done with protest music.
The opportunity to create a soundtrack gave him a respite from having to figure out his next major career move. When Isaac Hayes won the Oscar for Best Original Song for “Theme from Shaft,” and his score was nominated as well, he started the trend of R&B kings making jazzy scores for blaxploitation films that were typically better than the movies themselves. In February, Gaye’s theme song for the movie Trouble Man peaked at No. 7. On the album, he sang and played everything: keyboards, piano, synthesizer, and drums (he started out as a drummer at Motown), aided only by three saxophonists.
The title song became a concert favorite, but the LP was mainly instrumental, and Gaye knew he needed a new hit vocal album. Billy Paul and Teddy Pendergrass (of Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes) were rising stars on the R&B chart that winter. His biggest challenger was Al Green, who was originally from Michigan before relocating to Memphis. Two months after What’s Going On came out, Green had arrived on the pop charts with “Tired of Being Alone.” Since then, he’d hit No. 1 with “Let’s Stay Together” and accumulated five more Top 10 pop hits along with three chart-topping R&B singles and albums. And the critics all raved. Even The Village Voice’s king of snark, Robert Christgau, gave Green’s April release Call Me an A+.
Another stopgap was a duets album with Diana Ross. Originally Gaye declined, but Gordy appealed to his vanity by saying that she needed him. His passive-aggressive feelings toward the project were apparent when Ross arrived and found the sound booth full of pot smoke. She was pregnant and didn’t want to expose her child. “I’m sorry, baby, but I gotta have my dope or I can’t sing,” he said.20 She stalked out. When Gordy tried to reason with him, he just blew puffs into the air and grinned. “Sorry B. G., gotta have my stuff.”21 So they recorded separately. Engineer Art Stewart noted, “Adding insult to injury, he sang circles around her.”22
“I should have done everything in the world to make Diana comfortable,” Gaye later conceded. “But I went the other way. It’s hard for me to deal with prima donnas. We were like two spoiled kids going after the same cookie.”23 The bittersweet “My Mistake (Was to Love You Girl)” made the effort worth it.
Finally he bit the bullet and headed into Hitsville West to start working on his own album. He had some old tracks in the can: “Come Get to This,” “Distant Lover,” and “Just to Keep You Satisfied,” which he had co-written with his wife, Gordy’s sister Anna. He could finish those off with overdubs.
Like Ross, Gaye secured his rise in the Motown empire through a romantic relationship with a Gordy. He and Anna did love each other in the beginning. He called her “Mama,” as she was eighteen years older than he. But eventually their mutual infidelities contributed to a suicidal spell for the singer. Gordy’s dad, Pops, had to talk Gaye into handing over the gun.24 Gaye later said the marriage should’ve ended after a year. Instead, it lingered for fourteen. Growing up with an emotionally and physically abusive father gave him a high tolerance for misery. The ultimate reason they continued, though, was “fear and money,” he said.25
One day Barbara Hunter, a friend of his co-producer Ed Townsend, came by the studio with her daughter, Janis. Janis’s father was jazz singer Slim Gaillard, whose “Yep-Roc-Heresay” had been a favorite of the Beats. In her memoir she pinned the date as her seventeenth birthday, January 5. “His face expressed a gentleness that carried the same promise as [one of his songs]: that life, lifted into melody and framed by harmony, never has to be harsh.… His sound erased all pain.”26
She was eighteen years Gaye’s junior, the same age gap he shared with Anna. Hunter’s mother encouraged the mutual attraction between daughter and singer. He took her to an Italian restaurant in Hollywood and tipped the server twenty dollars to bring her apricot sours, because the drinking age was twenty-one.27 Then he took her to an apartment he kept on the side, a one-bedroom with a junkie assistant who lived on the living room couch.
“The explosive power of our sexual union was incredible,” she wrote. “We made love at every opportunity, night and day. We knew every inch of each other’s bodies.”28
Co-producer Townsend had conceived the germ of a spiritual song while he was in rehab. Gaye initially commissioned songwriter Kenneth Stover to pen political lyrics for it, but Townsend said no, it was a love and sex song.29 Now roused by his paramour, Gaye made the track into something even more than that—“something like sanctified.” The title split the difference between “What’s Going On” and “Let’s Stay Together.” Gaye sang “Let’s Get It On” to Hunter when he recorded it on March 22. They moved in together into a house atop Topanga Canyon with a Great Dane named Piro, and soon she was expecting.30 “We never used birth control. It was clear that Marvin wanted me pregnant—and I did nothing to prevent that.”31
Stevie Wonder was looking for a new sound when he heard an album called Zero Time by TONTO’s Expanding Head Band. TONTO was actually a collection of synthesizers, and the band was Malcolm Cecil and Robert Margouleff. Cecil was a white British jazz bassist who’d been in the original Blues Incorporated with Rolling Stones mentors Cyril Davies and Alexis Korner. Margouleff was a white audiovisual repairman who did commercial jingles with Cecil on synthesizers. Margouleff was friends with Robert Moog, the designer of the first popular synth used by the Doors, Monkees, Byrds, and Beatles.
Cecil and Margouleff built TONTO (“the Original New Timbral Orchestra”) out of Moog synths mixed with ARP synths (ARP being Moog’s chief rival) and other keyboards and computers. It eventually filled an entire room, looking like the control panel of a science-fiction mastermind. Wonder invited them to collaborate with him. He played almost everything himself, a pioneer of self-sufficiency alongside Paul McCartney, Todd Rundgren, and Sly Stone. He replaced the Motown orchestra with TONTO, electric pianos, or the clavinet. The latter was an electrified version of the clavichord, the European keyboard from the Middle Ages. It became the quintessential funk instrument of the early ’70s thanks to the hits of Wonder and Billy Preston.
Wonder decorated TONTO with statues of Eastern religious figures. He would start work after midnight, then plow through till the next afternoon, sometimes working two days straight.32 Cecil and Margouleff recorded everything he did, then later listened to the tapes, discovered genius fragments Wonder hadn’t realized he’d created, and hounded him to turn them into complete songs. Wonder would write the lyrics; then Cecil would speak them into Wonder’s headphones, and Wonder would sing them into the mic.33 He recorded his next four albums, Music of My Mind, Talking Book, Innervisions, and Fulfillingness’ First Finale, all in about a year’s time.
He wanted to win over the rock audience, which was larger than the R&B one, as blacks made up only 11 percent of the country’s population at the time, despite their outsized contribution to popular music, sports, and politics. So he took a financial hit to open for the Stones on their Exile on Main Street tour, doing fifteen minutes, then an encore with Jagger on “Uptight” and “Satisfaction.”
Former Yardbird Jeff Beck made his own recordings with the TONTO guys, and they brought him in to add guitar to Wonder’s “Lookin’ for Another Pure Love.” In return, Wonder agreed to write him a song. Beck recalled, “One day I was sitting at the drum kit, which I love to play when nobody’s around, doing this beat. Wonder came kinda boogieing into the studio: ‘Don’t stop.’ ‘Ah, c’mon, Stevie, I can’t play the drums.’” But Beck kept playing, Wonder sat at the clavinet, and the immortal hook of “Superstition” came snaking out.
“I thought, ‘He’s given me the riff of the century,’” Beck recalled.34
Wonder wrote lyrics decrying how “a lot of people, especially black folks, let superstition rule their lives.”35 Beck did a version with his band Beck, Bogert, and Appice. But his record was delayed, which fatally allowed time for Gordy to hear the song. Gordy determined there was no way Motown was giving that song away. Beck’s label chief, Clive Davis, freaked, but nothing had been signed on paper. So Wonder’s version hit No. 1 on January 27, the third funk single to make the top spot, after Sly & the Family Stone’s “Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin)” and “Family Affair.” It won Grammys for Best R&B Song and Best R&B Vocal (Male). Rolling Stone ranked it the 73rd Greatest Song of All Time. Bootsy Collins, bassist for James Brown and P-Funk, proclaimed it “funk heaven.” The kids of Sesame Street agreed when Wonder performed it on the show in April. Wonder apologized to Beck and gave him two songs for his next album.
The single helped Talking Book hit No. 3 on the pop chart and hold the R&B top spot through the second part of January. The follow-up single “You Are the Sunshine of My Life” made him the first Motown artist since the Supremes to score back-to-back pop No. 1s. It was also his first easy listening chart-topper and earned him another Grammy (Best Pop Male Vocal). To throw a curve ball he let his backing singers, Jim Gilstrap and Lani Groves, sing the first few lines of the song.
On “Blame It on the Sun” you can hear where Elton John got “Don’t Let the Sun Go Down on Me” and where producer Mark Ronson found some of the sound he’d bring to Amy Winehouse’s work. On “Big Brother,” TONTO transformed Wonder’s clavinet into a sparkling acoustic guitar for his take on 1984, which Cecil had read to him. In the old days Wonder had to fight Gordy to record “Blowin’ in the Wind.” Now there was no more beating around the bush. An oppressor kills the singer’s leaders, then surveills him in a matchbox house overrun with roaches. But Wonder sneered that he didn’t need to do nothin’ to Big Brother, because “you’ll cause your own country to fall.” The idea wouldn’t seem so farfetched come autumn, when OPEC realized that the president’s weakness from the Watergate scandal made it the perfect time to launch the oil embargo.
The Temptations’ “Papa Was a Rolling Stone” cleaned up at the Grammys in March: Best R&B Vocal Performance, Instrumental Performance, and Song. Producer Norman Whitfield, convinced of his own genius long before then, decided “Papa’s” follow-up should be called “Masterpiece.” He set about constructing a song to fit the bill, something worthy to serve as the title track of the last Motown album recorded in Detroit. One last hurrah for the Funk Brothers.
Whitfield stretched the song out to fourteen minutes, the apogee of “CinemaScope soul,” as critic Nelson George labeled it, or cinematic funk—epics where the producer fused R&B, pop, and gospel with a little Miles Davis, some Hendrix wah-wah, and a dash of Beatles (hence another popular label for the genre, “psychedelic soul”). Like Phil Spector, Whitfield kept expanding the sonic canvas with strings, synth, trombones, trumpets, tympani, vibes, bells, gourds, and harp.
Marvin Gaye often received the credit for forcing Motown into the topical age, but Whitfield’s Temptations chronicled the dark side of the ’hood two years before him with “Cloud Nine,” “Runaway Child Running Wild,” “Don’t Let the Joneses Get You Down,” “Ball of Confusion.” “Masterpiece” was another bleak mural of the inner city: strung-out kids from broken homes dodge cars for fun, then mug for dope; mothers return home from a grueling day to find their apartments cleaned out.
The Temptations were angry Whitfield only let them sing for three minutes out of fourteen. And he didn’t let one person take the lead; he’d break up verses and give different lines to different singers. People called them cogs in Whitfield’s grand design. They hadn’t even wanted to do “Papa Was a Rolling Stone.” Still, “Masterpiece” hit No. 7 on the pop charts, so it was hard to argue with success.
But it was their last single to make the pop Top 20. It might have been the very moment the pop audience hit the saturation point with inner-city protest songs. It had been exhilarating to finally hear the truth about the ghetto over the airwaves for the first time. But how many times could listeners be reminded that poverty was hell before they needed a break?
Nine hours southeast of Motown, Philadelphia International Records’ answer to the Funk Brothers zeroed in on a new beat. The MFSB house band (officially “Mother Father Sister Brother,” unofficially “Mother-fuckin’ son-of-a-bitch”) was evolving toward a genre without a name, though Rolling Stone writer Vince Aletti soon took a crack at giving it one with an article entitled “Discotheque Rock Paaaaarty!”