The Spinners: The legendary group that Motown almost destroyed
Discovering a plethora of stars back in the 1960s, Motown Records could have given NASA a run for their money at one time. Yet, for every Diana Ross, Marvin Gaye, or Stevie Wonder, the Detroit label also played host to swathes of unrecognised and underappreciated talent, like The Spinners.
Despite encapsulating all the vibrance and foot-stomping euphoria of Detroit soul, the offices of Hitsville USA were a pretty ruthless environment for artists to reside during Motown’s heyday. For label boss Berry Gordy, hit records were the be-all and end-all of Motown’s output, and he stopped at nothing to exert his command over the pop charts, going right back to the early days of the label back in the 1950s, when Barrett Strong earned Motown (then called Tamla) its very first hit, ‘Money (That’s What I Want)’.
To be fair to Gordy, that hit-centric approach did pay off for the label. By the mid-point of the 1960s, the Motown sound was a constant, unavoidable stalwart of the pop charts, with the likes of Holland-Dozier-Holland providing a wealth of commercial soul smashes to stars like The Supremes, Marvin Gaye, and The Four Tops, among various others. For the rest of Motown’s roster, however, the pressure was on: either earn some top-ten singles, or pack your bags.
Earning top tens, as it turns out, is easier said than done. A bizarre catch-22 situation soon prevailed within the Motown roster, in which artists struggled to achieve hit singles without the full weight of the label behind them, but Motown only allocated so much attention to the artists who failed to provide them with hits. As such, Motown history is positively littered with incredible artists who never quite got off the ground at the label: Chris Clark, Brenda Holloway, and Carolyn Crawford being a few of the more tragic examples.
One of the label’s biggest missed opportunities, however, came in the form of The Spinners. Hang on, you might be thinking, The Spinners were huge back in the 1970s, earning multiple gold records and even a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. And yes, all of that is true, now-legendary tracks like ‘I’ll Be Around’ and ‘Could It Be I’m Falling in Love’ shot The Spinners to the peak of America’s ever-expanding R&B scene during the early 1970s, but that success only came after years of floundering around at Motown, under a largely uninterested Berry Gordy.
The Spinners spent their early years at another Detroit label, Tri-Phi Records, but when Gordy absorbed that label into his Motown empire in 1963, in an effort to monopolise the Detroit soul scene, he inherited the vocal group, too. At that time, vocal groups were the bread and butter of Motown, but The Spinners could only sit back and watch as the likes of The Four Tops, The Vandellas, and The Supremes dominated the charts, while their handful of releases languished in modest positions on the R&B charts.
Minor successes came and went, but Gordy clearly wasn’t impressed by the output of The Spinners, siphoning them off to the VIP imprint. To add insult to injury, he also allocated the band members as office staff, drivers, managers, and chaperones for other, more successful groups, in a presumable effort to make the band pay for Motown in one way or another.
Inevitably, the group themselves weren’t overly impressed with being Motown’s lackeys, and were it not for the saving grace of Atlantic Records, who signed them up in 1972, they might have parted ways or simply faded away into the ether of obscurity. Either way, the group’s colossal success at Atlantic was incredibly vindicating for the band, but it does raise some questions about the other underutilised artists on Motown, and what they might have achieved given the chance.
