STANDING IN THE SHADOWS OF MOTOWN
THE APOLLO NOVEMBER 7TH 2002
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Fredag 8 november 2002, 7.23
Fredag 8 november 2002, 7.23
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Motown Greats Honor
Funk Brothers
By The Associated Press AP-NY-11-08-02 1901 EST
IN
TERVIEW WITH Allan (Dr. Licks) Slutsky
Jewish News Online by Audrey Becker 11/19/02
Out Of The Shadows Meet producer/music supervisor Allan Slutsky,whose revelatory book inspired the film.
Jack Ashford Film Producer and Motown's Funk Brothers
"Standing in the Shadows of Motown"
Allan (Dr. Licks) Slutsky, Eddie Willis and Jack Ashford
Film Producer and Motown's Funk Brothers
Friday, Oct. 4, 2002; 3:30 p.m. ET
<http://discuss.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/zforum/02/sp_entertainment_slutsky100402.htm>
Back in the day, the Motown Record Corporation was called "Hitsville USA." Founder Berry Gordy and his team of homegrown talent from Detroit created a "hit machine" that cranked out pop hits by performers such as the Supremes, the Temptations, the Four Tops, Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder, Martha and the Vandellas and Smokey Robinson and the Miracles among many others.
But behind the hits were the musicians who created "The Motown Sound." The men in the shadows, the unsung heroes. They worked in Studio "A" which was nicknamed the "Snakepit," at 2648 West Grand Boulevard in Detroit. This is where it all came together.
Allan (Dr. Licks) Slutsky has produced the film, "Standing in the Shadows of Motown," adapted from his book of the same name. The movie tells the story of the Funk Brothers by combining interviews, archival footage, reenactments, reminiscences and new performances by the reunited Funk Brothers.
Slutsky and Funk Brothers Eddie Willis("I Was Made to Love Her," "The Way You Do the Things You Do," "Friendship Train") and Jack Ashford ("What's Going On," "Ooo Baby Baby," "Where Did Our Love Go") will be online Friday, Oct. 4 at 3:30 p.m. EDT, to talk about the Motown days and the new documentary film.
A transcript follows.
Editor's Note: Washingtonpost.com moderators retain editorial control over Live Online discussions and
choose the most relevant questions for guests and hosts; guests and hosts can decline to answer
questions.
Arlington, Va.: To Allan Slutsky: Tell us about the movie, "Standing in the Shadows of Motown" and
what does the title mean?
Allan Slutsky, Eddie Willis and Jack Ashford: Standing in the Shadows of Motown is the story of the Funk Brothers who were the legendary studio band of Motown from 1958 to 1972 and they were the musicians on every record that came out of Motown during that period. Although they've been unknown for 40 years, they're basically best friends of everyone in America. We know them intimately from their music but we just never knew their names and never knew what they looked like.
The title comes from a Four Tops song called "Standing in the Shadows of Love" and I changed that one world "love" to Motown because it seemed to tell their story because the Funk Brothers were standing in the shadows of this huge record company while others got all of the attention.
Springfield, Va.: I grew up during the late 50s and 60s -- tThe music from Motown was magic. This music will endure long after this generation and the next. What was the formula for such creativity and were the same musicians used for the Motown sound?
Allan Slutsky, Eddie Willis and Jack Ashford: JA: The room was very small that we recorded in and when we playing we could basically see each other. It just brought about a closeness that transcended into generating spontanaeity. That way we could almost feel one another.
AS: The other part to the sound was the fact that Motown was a very thickly orchestrated sound as opposed to Stax-Volt. Stax-Volt had one drummer, one bass, one keyboard, and one guitar whereas Motown had multiple people on each chair. Most times you'd have three guitarists on each record and you'd always have two keyboards. You'd also have two, maybe more percussionists. "Grapevine," for instance, was three drummers. Very thickly orchestrated sound and the band was populated by virtuoses.
EW: In the guitars, you had myself, you had Robert White, Joe Messina. Keyboards, you had Johnny Griffith, Earl Van Dyke. Drums you had Benny (Papa Zita) Benjamin and Uriel Jones and you had Pistol Allen. You had bongo percussionist Eddie Bongo.
AS: The significance of these particular musicians was that they were a collection of virtuosos, very highly skilled, not just rock and R&B musicians, but these were highly skilled jazz musicians in addition. So they brought a lot more to the table. That's the reason Motown music sounds so effortless. It was almost technically beneath them because it was so easy to play.
Alexandria, Va.: Will this be a major movie release? And when can we see it? Are there other Motown stars in it?
Allan Slutsky, Eddie Willis and Jack Ashford: AS: The film will be out nationwide Nov. 15. It will be a major theatrical release. There are Motown stars in it who help explain the story: Otis Williams from the Temptations, Martha Reeves from Martha and the Vanellas and the Holland Brothers of Holland-Dozier-Holland.
JA: This is like a celebration. The culmination of all the years we worked. So many years we were looking at the back of the head and now we're looking the other way.
AS: The guests in the movie are Chaka Khan, Montell Jordan, Gerald Levert, Joan Osborne, Meshell Ndgeocello, Bootsy Collins, Ben Harper and Tom Scott.
Washington, D.C.: Is there any particular reason why these musicians did not get the publicity they deserved? Also, can you name some of the hits I would be familiar with? Thanks.
Allan Slutsky, Eddie Willis and Jack Ashford: EW: Some of the hits I played on were Ain't Too Proud to Beg, Standing in the Shadows of Love, Shotgun, Where Did Our Love Go, The Way You Do the Things You Do, Reach Out, and Mary Well's Two Lovers, Stevie Wonder's I Was Made to Love Her and For Once In my Life, Heatwave, Dancing in the Street, Pride and Joy.
JW: Motown was a special company. It dealt mainly in releasing singles and they didn't put all that information on the label. They wouldn't support it. Between Norman Whitfield and Marvin Gaye ... they were more into giving the musicians the credit. The musicians made Marvin. He depended on the musicians to give him his ideas to convey what he wanted. Norman a lot of time worked with each musician separately and came in and stacked them one at a time.
JW: I played on just about all of Marvin's stuff. Mercy Mercy Me, What's Going On, Got To Give It Up, Signed, Sealed, Delivered, Where Did Our Love Go, Dancing in the Street, War by Edwin Star.
Inwood, W.Va.: Mr. Ashford, any relation to Nick?
Allan Slutsky, Eddie Willis and Jack Ashford: JA: They say we are. He looks like my uncle. My family and his family are from South Carolina.
Rockville, Md.: Did these same musicians also perform as the backing band when the Motown acts would tour?
Allan Slutsky, Eddie Willis and Jack Ashford: AS: The didn't want the Funk Brothers to go out on tour because when they did the studio production ground to a halt. The only significant tours were the 1964 and 1965 Motor Town Revue that went to England. Even then, they only let a few of the musicians go. That tour they let Earl Van Dyke go, Bobby White and Jack Ashford. But James Jamerson, Benny Benjamin and the rest of the Funk Brothers stayed home in Detroit so they could cut records.
Allan Slutsky, Eddie Willis and Jack Ashford: The main live band guy on the road for Motown was Choker Campbell and he had his own musicians.
Vienna, Va.: Do you know of a group named the Andantes who were the in-house background singers? They, like you guys, were in the shadows too weren't they?
Allan Slutsky, Eddie Willis and Jack Ashford: EW: Louvain Demps, Jackie Hicks and Arlene were the Andantes and they never got any attention either. It's rumored that on quite a few of the Supremess hits that's them.
Washington, D.C.: When can we hope to see your film in the D.C. area?
Allan Slutsky, Eddie Willis and Jack Ashford: Nov. 15 it'll be in the D.C. area. Not sure of what theater yet. Probably one of the art house theaters.
Herndon, Va.: Gentlemen: Please help me remember the name of the bass player who laid down so many of the classic licks on Motown tunes, such as "My Girl." I believe he passed a couple of years back.
Allan Slutsky, Eddie Willis and Jack Ashford: AS: James Jamerson who died in 1983 and he was the first virtuoso of the Fender electric bass. It was a new instrument then and for the first almost decade or so they didn't know what to do with it. Most converted it to an upright bass. Jamerson was the first bass player to play it as a unique new instrument. He basically invented the vocabulary of the Fender bass.
Lyme, Conn.: In retrospect, what are your feelings toward Berry Gordy?
Allan Slutsky, Eddie Willis and Jack Ashford: JA: If it hadn't have been for Berry, you wouldn't be talking to us. He had a big job to do. He was breaking new ground and making hits at the same time. He had a good relationship with us.
AS: In this movie there are 30 Motown songs that were licensed for this movie. That's unheard of because Motown only allows a couple of songs to be licensed at a time. Berry interceded and basically said, here's the entire catalog. Take what you need. Without him there wouldn't have been a movie.
Allan Slutsky, Eddie Willis and Jack Ashford: EW: If it hadn't have been for Berry, none of us would be here doing what we're doing. I'm thankful for him.
STANDING IN THE SHADOWS OF MOTOWN
by Don R. Lewis
(09/04/2002)
2002, Rated PG, 116 Minutes, Rimshot LLC
<http://www.filmthreat.com/Reviews.asp?Id=3516>
Let me count the ways in which this film is just plain terrific. First off, I
consider myself a big music fan but I had never heard of "
The Funk Brothers
."
Have
you? If not, maybe you've heard some of the Motown hits they wrote the music for. Little songs like
"I Heard it Through the Grapevine," "Heat wave," "What's Going On,"
"Ain't too Proud to Beg," "Shotgun," and "Ain't no Mountain High
Enough." I'm stopping there merely for concern of word count. The songs these men wrote were
countless and classic.
<snip>
Movie spotlights unsung Motown heroes
Motown greats the Funk Brothers jam for a movie about their careers.
By Christopher Currie
http://www.southend.wayne.edu/days/2002/oct/10252002/ae/motown/motown.html
A film crew goes into a record store and starts asking customers and clerks if they have ever heard of Stevie Wonder, Diana Ross, Smokey Robinson or the Temptations. For these questions, they all get affirmative responses. But when the crew starts asking people about The Funk Brothers, everyone seems to be at a loss. "Standing in the Shadows of Motown," due in theatres Nov. 15, hopes to change that.<snip>
Motown's music machine
http://www.freep.com/entertainment/Music/funk6_20021006.htm
Soundtrack honors Funk Brothers: Hitsville's hot house band
October 6, 2002
BY BRIAN McCOLLUM
FREE PRESS POP MUSIC CRITIC
It's official: The Funk Brothers can still cut a mean groove.
Episode 327 - Jimmie Walker
October
24, 2012
Jimmie Walker brings comedy history into the garage. Before there was J.J. on Good Times, Jimmie tells
Marc about his experiences in the early days of the comedy boom and his interaction with up-and-comers like
The (Chitlin Circuit late 60's) Apollo Theater late 60's Motown Review Show at the 20 Grand Club in Detroit
& Jimmie Walker & Funk Brothers starts @30:00, Barry Gordy first big riots when Detroit is on Fire @
36:00 Cheech and Chong, Richard Pryor, Steve Martin, Jay Leno, David Letterman and many more.
ORDER ONLINE FUNK BROTHERS BOOKS
STANDING IN THE SHADOWS OF MOTOWN AT THE APOLLO NOVEMBER 7, 2002 Program
We sold our soul.. for 10 dollars
Sunday July 20, 2003
The Observer - http://observer.guardian.co.uk/screen/story/0,6903,1001681,00.html
They made more hits than the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Beach Boys and Elvis but then they were
forgotten. Sean O'Hagan went to Detroit to meet the unsung heroes behind the Motown sound
Joe Messina
gave up music over 30 years ago, and opened a car wash in suburban Detroit.
Often, customers would pull up with the radio blaring out the familiar sound of Tamla Motown,
Detroit's
very own hit factory from the late Sixties, and the forecourt would fill with the still effervescent
rhythms
of a more innocent pop era when Stevie Wonder and Smokey Robinson and Marvin Gaye ruled supreme. The sound
would barely register with
Joe Messina
, a middle-aged jazz fan, who had little time for
the
fripperies of pop, past or present. Yet, Joe had played on every one of the songs pumping out of the
radio.
'They tell me I played on more Motown sessions than anyone else,' he says. 'I was there from the start to the finish, and I must have played on well over 100 songs, easy. I'd just go down there, do the session in a couple of hours. Same as the rest of the guys. Money jobs, we'd call 'em. They supplemented what I earned playing jazz in clubs like the Twenty Grand or The Chit-Chat.'
Those clubs are long gone now, and so to a certain extent is the jazz music that filled them, consigned, through the vagaries of time and fashion, to the margins. The soul songs that Joe Messina played on, though, live on, many of them elevated to the pantheon of the pop classic - songs such as 'Heatwave' by Martha Reeves and the Vandellas, 'Tears of a Clown' by Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, 'Signed, Sealed, Delivered (I'm Yours)' by Stevie Wonder, and 'I Heard It Through the Grapevine' by the late, great Marvin Gaye. All feature Messina on guitar, though if any of one of them were to erupt out of the jukebox in the hotel bar we are sitting in, he would not even recognise them. 'It's incredible, isn't it?' he says, as if the absurdity of the situation has, at 74, only just struck him, 'but that's just the way it turned out. We were working jazz musicians who weren't really interested in pop. It's only now, with hindsight, that I can see we were part of pop history.'
The musicians who helped create the Motown sound in a small studio dubbed the Snakepit were known collectively as the Funk Brothers , of whom the great soul producer, Norman Whitfield, once said: 'You could throw a chicken in there and let the Funk Brothers play background, and it would be a hit.' They notched up more chart singles than Elvis, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and the Beach Boys combined. To the public, though, they were invisible and anonymous. Until now, that is. Their belated recognition comes courtesy of a documentary film called Standing in the Shadows of Motown, released here this week. In it the reunited Funk Brothers - the surviving eight of the original 12 Motown session men - once again lay down those familiar beats, this time behind an array of guest singers that include Chaka Khan, Bootsy Collins and Ben Harper. The performances are interwoven with personal reminiscences and some marvellous archive footage from the time when Berry Gordy's small Detroit-based Tamla Motown label was the most successful hit factory in late Sixties/early Seventies pop.
The film is a labour of love that took 10 years to finance and make, and would never have happened were it not for the tenacity of one man - Allan Slutsky . In the late Eighties, Slutsky, a fellow musician who trades under the moniker Dr Licks , wrote a well-received book about the greatest Funk Brother of all, James Jamerson , the phenomenally gifted, but deeply troubled, musical genius whose propulsive bass lines underpinned the fabled Motown sound. Jamerson, a heavy drinker, died poor and broken in 1987, his prodigious talents unsung save for the legions of soul fanatics who worshipped him as much as Marvin or Smokey.
In the bar of the Hotel Ponchartrain in downtown Detroit, we are joined by the dapper 75-year-old Joe Hunter , resplendent in a leopard-print shirt and large Panama hat, an ageing dandy in contrast to Messina 's restrained Italian-American hipster. Hunter played piano with everyone from John Lee Hooker to Curtis Mayfield, arriving in Detroit via a stint at the equally legendary blues label, Chess Records, in Chicago. He, too, speaks of the long-lost bass player with something approaching awe. 'Jamerson could drink. Man, he could drink. He used to say he played better when he was loosened up. That's when he'd go right out there. One time Berry [Gordy] had to go and carry him back from a drinking club to a session. That bass line you hear on 'What's Goin' On' by Marvin [Gaye] - Jamerson played that lying flat on his back, right there on the studio floor.'
Both Hunter and Messina were surprised when Slutsky initially contacted them about the film idea. 'I thought it was just more pie in the sky,' laughs Hunter, 'So, right off, I asked him to show me the money. When I got that nice little retainer cheque, I went looking for a piano.' The vexed question of payments and royalties is one that has dogged Motown's reputation since day one. Berry Gordy, the label's founder, was an entrepreneur of the old school, who never paid his musicians more than union scale even when song after song was hitting the top of the charts.
'Berry had charisma and he talked soft and light like an angel,' laughs Joe Hunter , sipping on his second glass of merlot, despite being on doctor's orders not to drink. 'When he hired me, he said, "I ain't got no money but you'll grow as I grow." Well, I must have been the root that went the other way - deeper into the ground while he bloomed like a blossom. Ten dollars a song is what we earned for years. Scale they called it. Charity I call it.' He shakes his head, while Messina cracks up laughing beside him. 'But, you know, I liked the man. He made things happen. He was like that Midas feller; everything he touched done turned into gold.'
The singers and songwriters fared little better than the musicians, but at least they got a share of royalties, albeit often a relatively small share. Motown, whose studio-cum-office on Detroit's West Grand Boulevard bore the legend Hitsville USA above the door, was a business like any other, geared to the maximum profit from the minimum layout. The music for classic songs such as 'I Heard It Through the Grapevine' was often laid down in two takes on a makeshift three-track recording system bought cut-price from a local radio DJ. 'You'd turn up, get the chord sheet off the producer, and lock down the track in a couple of hours,' says Messina . 'You never knew what the melody was going to be, or how the words went, and usually you never got to hear the finished song.'
Motown , as history has attested, was manufactured pop at its most blatant, and its most magical. Underpinning most of the hits was the spring-loaded rhythm section of Jamerson and drummer, Benny Benjamin , who died from drug abuse in 1969. If the Motown sound has an identifying signature, it was created by this pair, and by Benjamin's successor, the aptly named Richard 'Pistol' Allen, of whom, John Lennon, a devoted soul fan, once said: 'He hit the snare with such force it sounded like he was hitting it with a bloody tree.' While the singers grew famous, though, and were lauded long after their heyday, the musicians languished in obscurity. Motown's move to Los Angeles in the early Seventies was the beginning of the end for them, and for the fabled Motown sound. 'When the dust cleared and it was all over,' Joe Hunter says, 'we realised we had been left out of the dream.'
These days, Berry Gordy lives in a Bel Air mansion. Finally, though, the surviving Funk Brothers are getting their dues. They have won two Grammys for the film soundtrack , both displayed prominently in Hitsville USA, now a museum to the golden years of Detroit soul. They are touring again, and have even played for 'that funny little guy in the White House', as Joe Hunter says, wryly. James Jamerson, the most gifted Funk Brother, did not fare so well. When NBC television recorded its glittering celebration of 25 years of Motown in 1983, he had to buy a ticket from a tout to watch the stars he once backed bask in the limelight. A few months later, he died. 'He had no money,' his daughter says in the film, 'and he was probably feeling less than a man.' His spirit infuses every frame of Standing in the Shadows of Motown just as its title could serve as his epitaph.
ORDER ONLINE FUNK BROTHERS BOOKS