E-mail a friendBerry Gordy
airdate January 8, 2009
Motown founder Berry Gordy helped groom Michael Jackson for stardom. After being convinced to see the young group from Gary, IN, The Jackson 5, Gordy knew they were right for his label. They signed at the end of '68 and, in fall '69, exploded with "I Want You Back," the first of four consecutive No. 1 pop hits. Jackson's first solo single, "Got to Be There," was released in '71, and put him on the path to superstardom. MJ ultimately left the label, but his Emmy-nominated performance of "Billie Jean" on Motown's 25th anniversary special—where he premiered his trademark moonwalk—was one that would send his career into the stratosphere.
Full interview. (22:30)
Motown Records founder explains the real reason he chose a music career over a career in boxing. (2:54)
Berry Gordy
Tavis: I'm beyond pleased tonight - I'm honored and humbled and whatever else I could be to welcome Berry Gordy to this program. Fifty years ago this month, he started a small record label in Detroit that would become one of the most prolific and successful companies in all of music history, and this year we commemorate Motown's historic 50th anniversary.
You can pick up a copy of this beautiful and brilliant 10-disc set, which I'm going to take out of the box for you in just a second - "Motown, the Complete No. 1's." Here is just a small sample of the genius of Motown.
[Montage of Motown hits]
Tavis: Mr. Chairman, an honor to have you on the program.
Berry Gordy: It's my pleasure.
Tavis: You doing all right?
Gordy: I'm doing great. (Laughter)
Tavis: You're looking clean and sharp, as always.
Gordy: Thank you. Well, so are you.
Tavis: And prosperous. I got to take this out of the box, man, because this thing - I was just saying the other week on this program how much I am a sucker for packaging, if I can get this thing open here. Where's the top of this thing? There it is. So I love this - so Jonathan, you see this? This boxed set is in the design of the Hitsville house.
Now mine, of course - can you read that print on there? Mine says, "Tavis, enjoy. Berry Gordy." So you can't get mine, but you can get your own. (Laughter) But I love the packaging. It's a cool idea, huh?
Gordy: Yes, well, it's the museum now, but it was the Hitsville - it is the Hitsville house, and it's where we started. It's where everything happened.
Tavis: Tell me, as I take my - there's a picture on the screen right there - tell me about the house. How did you - since we're starting with this, how did you find the house, how'd you end up in that house? For those who've not been to Detroit and never been there, it is a museum. Where is the house? Tell me about the house.
Gordy: Well, the house was a house that was found by my wife at the time, Rae, and it was just a photo studio, and I loved the house because it had a garage that I felt could be the studio. But it was a photo place and had a great big window in the front, and it was just a beautiful layout for me.
And that's it - we went in and we made the garage the recording studio and upstairs we had a bedroom and I lived there. And we just - everything became rooms for people to - pianos in rooms, and we just created it as we went along. And it was all evolutionary rather than something we had planned. It was just a place, and I named it Hitsville because at that time, "ville" was like a hip word, and I wanted a Hitsville - a place where hits were magically going to be made.
Tavis: Did you name it Hitsville the minute you went in, or did it become Hitsville later on? And I'm asking that for a very specific reason.
Gordy: No, I started out just with the garage, with the big picture window, which I thought was great. And I decided - I tried to figure out what to name it.
Tavis: When did you put Hitsville on it? When did you call it that name? How long had you been there before you called it Hitsville?
Gordy: I don't know exactly. It was shortly after and we had the - we were in there recording and doing all kind of stuff. And I had bought a little studio, a little - I bought a two-track machine from a disc jockey in Detroit, (unintelligible) O'Brian, and that two-track machine was what we started with and started recording.
Tavis: I only ask that Hitsville question because I've always known you to be a visionary, and I'm thinking for a Black man to open up a studio and he comes out the gate calling it Hitsville, (laughing) that's a lot of chutzpah, that's what that is. And of course it turned out to be Hitsville, but it's a great name and I've been there so many times, and I love going there every time I'm in Detroit.
I want to ask you a few questions about stuff that people may not know about you, and then we'll come back to the Motown thing, if I can. When you walked on the set, I said to you before we came on the camera how much I personally enjoyed the "Vanity Fair" piece. For those who didn't see the "Vanity Fair" piece, they really missed a wonderful piece.
There was a wonderful spread, many, many pages; Annie Liebowitz did the photos of some of the great Motown icons and artists. I thought it was a wonderful piece in part because it was the story of Motown told from the people who made Motown. You and all the people around you.
As many times as we've talked over the years, I've always gotten the sense, and it came through in that magazine, that there's a story out there about Motown, whatever that story is, that rubs you raw. There's something about the telling of the story of Motown that you are unhappy with, and you are always intent on telling the story the way you think it ought to be told.
Let me just ask you honestly what is that thing about the telling of this story that you don't like, which makes it so important for you to tell your own story.
Gordy: Well, Motown has always been like a fairytale. We did things differently at Motown. It started out - it's a whole big story. What happens is (laughs) you're going to need a lot more time, because every story that I tell, it's like a branch. It goes out in a branch and it spreads out, and there's another story.
And there's a story of Diana and there's a story of The Temptations. There's a story of Holland-Dozier-Holland, there's a story of the Funk Brothers. And so when you simplify it, it was just a magical thing that happened, and I feel that it had a lot to do with just philosophies - stuff that I had learned as a kid. And it's so many different stories, but the truth was never told. And so after 50 years, I decided, well, we would just kind of let people tell their own truth.
When the magazine came to me - in fact, you spoke of the "Vanity Fair" magazine and the article. That was the greatest article that's ever been done on Motown. The reason it was great is because one, it was the truth. And the truth has never been told - there's been plays, movies, books about Motown, but it's always from people on the outside, people that were not there.
And when they came to me to do the article and they said, "Well, we want to do this great article, we want to honor you," Lisa Robinson was the person that I met with from "Vanity Fair," and naturally I thought it might be the same kind of thing. And I told her, "I don't want sound bites, I don't want to do anything -" and I had not done any articles, because I didn't want to do them because I don't want anything but the truth of what it was.
So knowing that they were very good with their research and stuff - good or bad - because she said, "What can we tell you, what can we talk about? What don't you want to talk about?" I said, "I will talk about anything you want to talk about, the toughest questions you can come up with, as long as you promise me that you will do in-depth study of this.
"You will research it. You're known for that, but it's easy to research something or it's easy to come out with things that are exploitative." All the things - they had stories of me with the Mafia, this and that, because they could not - no one could believe that a Black kid from Detroit could create Motown or something like Motown.
Tavis: See, but now you're getting to what I want to get to, and that's the answer I want to get to. What is it that kept angering Berry Gordy about the way the story was being told? So part of it is that they connected you to the Mafia, which was not true.
Gordy: Well, that was just one thing.
Tavis: Okay.
Gordy: It was everything was wrong. They never had Motown - the fact is that when we came out with our records, they were so strong, they were dealing, they went to the top of the charts. They were just so incredible. And it was done with all my money. I borrowed $800 from my family and -
Tavis: By the way, did you ever pay them back?
Gordy: Oh, yes.
Tavis: Okay.
Gordy: You should see the - (laughter) it's in my book. You should see what they - I signed my life away.
Tavis: I know that. "To Be Loved." It's a great book, "To Be Loved," yeah.
Gordy: Yeah, I went to them for (laughter) $1,000. We had a family club like where we all put in so much money for a month for the kids. My sister, Esther, was always trying to educate us and have us do things. The family was a very close family, and so we would put $10 a month in this, the whole family. And no one had ever borrowed any money from this. We called it Burberry, named after my mother, Bertha, and my father, Berry.
And that's why I love the contraction of those names. I eventually would take Motor Town and make it Motown. And I find that everything comes from upbringing, your childhood - things that you learn as a kid and the beauty that you have, and if you stick with that.
And I tell all the young people today when I do a commencement speech or something that it's all about principles, it's all about integrity, it's all about loyalty. And I'm out here today because of the 50th anniversary, and this is for those great, loyal people that supported me throughout.
This is not for me. This is for those Motown artists that were going through the South in the Motor Town Revue and being shot at by people in the South. And they were awesome. I tried to pull them off the road and they said, "No, this is important."
Smokey and the rest of them said, "No, we're going to go. We're going to sing, we're going to show people." And I said, "But I'm responsible. You kids are out there and you're getting shot at. Get off the road, come on back here." They said, "No. We love what we're doing."
Tavis: I'm glad you went there. Beyond the fact that they obviously loved what they were doing, they were born to be artists, as we now know, thanks to all these hits these many years later, talk to me about that loyalty issue. Why were you so loyal to them, and why do you think they were so loyal to you? Why?
Gordy: It's all about love. It's all about love, it's all about truth, it's all about - we had something in Motown that I tried - and I fought - well, it's a whole long story about things I've done. But I fought for this legacy for 50 years. I was in a lawsuit for 25, 30 years because the truth, I wanted to get the truth out. Because the truth will only win if you can afford to fight for it and are willing to fight for it, and I was.
Because it's about the legacy of Motown. I tell the young people today, you can never build a company like Motown if you think it was done with the Mafia, or cheating people, or this or that, and all those things that people were creating to sell books, to sell movies, to sell all that.
And so I said, "You can talk about me because I don't care. My legacy is going to be whatever it's going to be. You're going to love me whether I'm here or not, just like I love you," or whatever. So my legacy's going to be what it is, but the legacy of Motown cannot be messed with. It is a legacy for all people. Especially Black people, but the legacy of Motown was a magical legacy, and I could not let anybody - anybody just rewrite history.
Because there's people around the world that love the Motown music. They grew up with it; they had kids with Motown music. And I didn't ever want them to think - this is all over the world - that Motown was run by bad people.
Tavis: There's a great line in that "Vanity Fair" article, and you said this to me, and you've said it to me in private a number of times. And I was so glad to see it in the magazine. This is a Berry Gordy original formulation, and he's right about this, that Motrack, for so many of us, is the soundtrack of our lives.
It is the soundtrack of our lives, and I assume that's why you take it so seriously, because people lives have been built around this music.
Gordy: Right; and I didn't want them to invalidate their own lives, say, "Hey, I loved this music all my life and the guy that did this -"
Tavis: Was a gangster.
Gordy: "- is a gangster." Or the people are not good people.
Tavis: So let me ask you, then - I'm only raising this again because it's addressed to the "Vanity Fair" story we talked about earlier, but more importantly I know how important it was to you. And it's public, so I'm not saying anything that has not been addressed publicly.
The main producer of the "Dreamgirls" film took out a full-page ad in a major publication to make it clear that the "Dreamgirls" movie was not based on Motown; it was not based on the life of one Berry Gordy. How important was that to you, and did you insist that that get done?
Gordy: I was happy it got done. I did meet with David Geffen, who was the man responsible. I mean he was the man there, and he is a good friend of mine. We've been friends for 40 years. All the people - the competitors, all the record companies out there, we were out there fighting each other for records, but we all loved each other.
David and I, we would talk about problems and that with Jerry Moss over at A&M. And all of the people out there - Stax Records, Al Bell - we all were trying to advance the R&B artists, Black people, give them something to do. We did it different ways. Stax and I, people thought we were the biggest enemies in the world, and Al and I, we'd just laugh about it because they said, "Well, they're wrong, Motown is too this or too that; too sweet."
Tavis: One was wrong, one was refined.
Gordy: Yeah, one was wrong and Motown was - so the problem was that I sat down with David and I told him, (laughs) I said, "David, this is like I'm a gangster, just the worst character that I've ever seen." And he says, "Well, it's a movie." I said, "It's a movie, but it's Motown."
Tavis: But it's my life, yeah. (Laughter)
Gordy: But he understood - he understood. And he said, "Well, you really feel that way?" I said, "Man, it's more important to me - you can talk about me; whatever I do, it's fine. But the legacy, people died for this. Marvin Gaye is dead. These people have died to fight. They followed me." So I said, "And this 50th that's coming up is for them. It's not for me, it's for these unsung heroes that I love so much."
Because Motown people that came through the time that we came through cannot not love each other. And there's nothing that anybody can do about it, because we will always - coming through that period, we were suffering. There was race riots, and even the White people - we had a White sales department. They came to work every day on 12th Street in Detroit, in the midst of the riots.
And I said, "You guys better stay home." (Laughter) "You guys better be cool, man. Get out of here." And they, "No, we come to work." Because we were there, and we - they were like brothers to us. And they had all different kind - Barney Avis, who ran the whole thing, was a genius operations man, but he was an Italian.
And there was Irv Beagle (sp), who was Jewish, and then there was (unintelligible) who was Mideastern, and then there was Phil Jones, and I think one other person. But they were all there, and they were like brothers to us, and they fought. It was something.
So my whole thing is this is the 50th. I want these people to know that nothing has changed; we're still here after all these years. I still love them the same and I know they love - wherever they are, I call them up, they call me.
Tavis: I was watching a moment ago and you used two words, and I was watching your motions. You said, the phrase was, "They fought." You were talking about your artists. You said, "They fought," and your hands were kind of like this. "They fought," and your hands were like this.
And so I'm thinking about your boxing career. (Laughter) And a lot of folks don't know that Berry Gordy was a very good boxer - so much so that he is in the California Boxing Hall of Fame. What did you take - you loved it. You left that and you went into the music business, obviously, as the story goes. What did you take from that boxing career, from being such a good boxer, into the music business? Did that help you in any way?
Gordy: Yes. Boxing was very good for me because first of all, when I saw Joe Louis at eight years old and he made my - it was Nazi Germany versus America, the land of the free. And America had won when he knocked out Max Schmeling. I was eight years old, and I saw the joy in my mother's and father's faces, and it was just the world was - especially America, our neighborhood.
Running through the streets, it was all that. And I looked at that and as a kid of eight, I just went, "What could I ever do in my life that could make so many people happy?" All around, but also my parents mainly, because I wanted to be somebody. Maybe it gave me inspiration.
And so my inspiration from there was to make people happy like that, like Joe Louis did and like Obama just did. (Laughter)
Tavis: A whole lot of people, yeah.
Gordy: Yeah, and that was a whole thing, but it was that same kind of feeling there. But I was eight years old. So I started boxing and I wanted to be a champion, and I fought hard on that. And then Joe Louis was my idol - hero - but later on, Ray Robinson became my idol. He was smooth and he was sharp and he had more girls. (Laughter) And so that was good. Oh, man, I got a win-win situation here. (Laughter)
Tavis: So one of the ways to get girls is to know how to write a good song. So you got this boxing talent which is phenomenal - you're such a chameleon. You got this boxing talent which you're pretty good at, but then you also write songs pretty well. How did you get into the songwriting thing?
Gordy: Well, I started songs when I was very young. I took one year of music lessons with my uncle, who was a classical pianist, and I loved classical music so much at that time. And I started - he was very strict, and he was giving me scales and arpeggios and I was playing them and all that.
And then I would be playing them and I'd play a chord, and I'd hear a nice melody in my head and I just got really interested in writing out what I felt and what they would make me feel. Then I realized, even at that early age, that music controls you. It makes you feel what it wants you to feel (laughs).
And so I noticed that as a kid, and so I started playing boogie-woogie. There was Hazel Scott's boogie-woogie, and I liked her. I saw her, and I started writing songs. And my first song was called "Berry's Boogie-Woogie," and my little fake -
Tavis: "Berry's Boogie-Woogie." (Laughter) I love it.
Gordy: Anyway, so that's how it started. And then I started - naturally I started writing about girls and listening to music. The Mills Brothers - I'm going to buy a paper doll that I can call my own, a doll that other fellas cannot steal? I said, "Oh, how clever - that's really -" I was, like, eight or nine and 10, maybe. How clever. That applies to me, because I was losing girls before I even got them. (Laughter)
So I would listen to the songs and think of how they - oh, that's wonderful, and I feel this way so other people have to. And then the Ink Spots, I would hear their songs and stuff. And then later on I heard Nat King Cole. Well, he was, like, romantic, and he was up to date. And eventually, I realized that boxing and music was my - it was boxing and music.
And they really didn't - they were both things that could get me girls, but Nat King Cole had come along and he was romantic, and he didn't get beat up. (Laughter) He didn't. And so then eventually I realized that I'd have to move out of the boxing ring after I had had quite a few fights. So I was really fighting to be a champion.
Tavis: So you start writing music and we are - hold on. We are at the end of this show, and I'm going to ask Mr. Gordy to do a small favor for me. I've only done this once in the six years I've done this show, which is to say that we do - we ask our guests to come on for one show and the conversation is so rich I have to ask him to stay over for just a few more minutes so I can continue this tomorrow night.
Would you stay a few more minutes for me? Can you do that for me?
Gordy: Absolutely, yeah.
Tavis: All right. So Berry Gordy, the chairman, has agreed to do this again tomorrow night. I'm going to pick up tomorrow night with "Lonely Teardrops."
Gordy: Oh, tomorrow night, okay. Okay.
Tavis: You know the big Jackie Wilson hit, "Lonely Teardrops?" You know who wrote that? This guy. (Laughter) So we're going to talk about "Lonely Teardrops" and the rest of the Motown number ones tomorrow night. The chairman's going to come back. We may have the same clothes on tomorrow night, just to warn you of that, but he's so clean, that's okay.
So tomorrow night we'll continue our conversation with Berry Gordy as we celebrate early the 50th anniversary of Motown.
Back to January 8, 2009