Heavyweight Featherweight

Ten years ago, Berry Gordy Jr. was making $90 a week as a chrome trimmer on a Ford Motor Co. assembly line near Detroit. At 37, he is still applying finishing touches, but now he owns the whole assembly line. Instead of autos, he rolls out pop records -- and has become a millionaire several times over.

As president of Motown (for motor town) Records, Gordy has thrust his young company high among the nation's independent recording firms. With predicted 1967 sales of $30 million, Motown is notable on several counts. For one, Gordy is a Negro in a business where the management is almost all white. For another, he has firmly an chored his enterprise in Detroit, far from such recording meccas as New York and Los Angeles. Most important, he has developed interrelated subsidiaries whose systematic control of Motown performers, publicity and recordings is unique in the industry.

Finances or Forks. Sometimes plucking recruits straight from high school, Gordy's International Talent Management Inc. puts new Motown performers through a show-biz finishing course for up to six months, teaching them how to dress, carry themselves, perk up their acts with a little choreography, and handle finances or even forks. Motown performers have many of their numbers custom-tooled by Gordy's own staff of songwriters and producers, led by the gifted team of Brian and Eddie Holland and Lament Dozier (Stop in the Name of Love, Baby Love). Where many recording companies market disks put together by outside producers, Motown carefully directs every session, with Gordy listening to each song before it is released and sometimes demanding a dozen or more retakes.

The result is the "Motown sound" --basically the Negro rhythm-and-blues style that has captured a vast white audience in recent years, but now stamped into slick model lines and given the hard chrome gloss that Gordy used to fit into autos. "This is just something we feel and therefore produce," says Gordy. "We've never stopped to think about it."

Though he now spends 95% of his time on the business end, Gordy got where he is today mainly because he wanted to be a songwriter. Son of a Georgia-born plasterer, he grew up in Detroit slums, quit school in the eleventh grade because he was interested only in music and boxing. As a professional featherweight, he won ten of 14 bouts, seven on knockouts, but got discouraged because he "never fought anybody worthwhile." After Army service, he opened a record shop and went broke, but continued writing and recording songs at his own expense. In 1959, Way Over There sold 60,000 copies. Encouraged, Gordy borrowed $700 from his family and launched Motown in a seedy frame house on Detroit's Grand Boulevard, where his offices and studios now sprawl through eight buildings.

Lavish Bashing. Motown's first gold record (1,000,000 sales) was a 1960 release of Shop Around, written and sung by Gordy's first protege, 19-year-old William (Smokey) Robinson, who is now a Motown vice president and songwriter and whose group, Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, is still a top Motown attraction. Since then, Gordy has crashed upward with all sorts of blockbuster Motown talent--Marvin Gaye, Martha and the Vandellas, Little Stevie Wonder, the Temptations, and Diana Ross and the Supremes, currently the reigning female vocal group in pop music. By now, there have been so many gold records that Gordy has stopped counting.

Last week Gordy celebrated his success by winding up Motown's first national sales meeting, a lavish three-day affair for which 35 distributors and their wives had been flown in, whisked through town by red-blazered chauffeurs and treated to a "Las Vegas night" of genteel gambling, a champagne boat excursion on the Detroit River, and a rich-menued, black-tie finale at Detroit's Roostertail nightclub. Yet the bash was not an indication that Gordy is easing into a softer style. In fact, he is now eyeing such ambitious new ventures as buying radio stations, moving into educational records and packaging television shows. Clearly, at a trim 140 Ibs., ex-boxer Gordy is still in there swinging.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.