Hitsville’s humble beginnings: How Motown began with an $800 loan
The advice that most songwriters will give you varies, but the principles contained within remain relatively universal. Whether you are reading the words of Paul McCartney or Bob Dylan, their advice will be along the lines of staying true to yourself and only writing from the heart. This seems to be common knowledge spread across the music industry.
“If you’re only working off what you know, then you can’t grow,” said Joni Mitchell, echoing this sentiment, “It’s only through error that discovery is made, and in order to discover, you have to set up some sort of situation with a random element, a strange attractor, using contemporary physics terms.”
“Never play to the gallery,” said David Bowie, “Always remember that the reason you initially started working was that there was something inside yourself that you felt that if you could manifest it in some way, you would understand more about yourself and how you coexist with the rest of society.”
This mindset has been rewritten and re-emphasised multiple times across the music industry. So, why does one of the most successful record labels of all time not adhere to it as much? The whole notion of not putting the consumer first, of writing outside of your comfort zone, didn’t appeal to Berry Gordy when he started Motown, yet it was successful all the same.
It all began with $800, which seems like a relatively insignificant amount of money, and gave rise to one of the largest musical empires on the planet. Gordy was a boxer and a businessman, and neither of those career paths had yet proved too fruitful. He saw the money that was in the music industry and decided he wanted a piece of it. The loan came from his family, and Gordy used it to put a downpayment on a two-level home in Detroit, which became Motown HQ, or as he called it, “Hitsville.”
Detroit is a significant factor when you consider the history of Motown. It was famous at the time for its assembly lines, as the majority of Ford Cars made and sold to the world came from the city. Being so close to this kind of efficiency, turning scrap into a feat of engineering influenced Gordy’s business mind going into Motown. “I wanted to have a kid off the street walk in one door unknown…” he said, “And come out another door a star, like an assembly line […] That was my dream.”
That’s exactly what Gordy did. He followed blueprints. Creativity was important when it came to making the hits that came out of Motown, of course, but the label and those involved ran like a well-oiled machine, as opposed to the other approach of letting ideas occur naturally and pushing boundaries. Motown wrote love songs you could dance to, “The sound of young America,” that brought people together and allowed them to sing and dance to sweet melody.
$800 was the starting block for what became one of the biggest labels in America and gifted the world stars such as Marvin Gaye, Michael Jackson and Smokey Robinson. Of course, the label eventually came to an end. The issue with writing with the consumer in mind is that the consumer often doesn’t know what they want until you put it in front of them. They liked the music the label played, but after years of that same sound, they began looking for something else.
Additionally, many of the artists who were signed to Motown decided they wanted to pursue more creative endeavours. Marvin Gaye left the label because he wanted to make political music about the Vietnam War, which was wholly against Motown’s feel-good ethos. Hitsville was responsible for exactly that—hits, and they created some exceptional stars. The world of music wouldn’t be the same without it, and it all started with $800.
