Motown in the 1970s, and we talked about Motown in part one of this course in week six. We talked about Motown and its association with Detroit, after all the Motown comes from Motor City, right, Motown, and the importance of Berry Gordy Jr. in building that label into one of the most important independent labels of the '60s, and indeed the history of Motown of the '60s is really just one of increasing success. But the interesting thing about Motown in the '70s is that most of what happens in Motown in the '70s happens in Los Angeles, not entirely but a lot of it does. Berry Gordy Jr. gets the idea at the end of the, in the '70s as he wants to expand his business. He really needs to expand into movies and perhaps television, and that really by this time is really that whole part of the business is really located in Los Angeles. Of course, movies had always been out in Hollywood going all the way back to the '30s and '40s and all those classic films. So he moves, first he opens a branch office out there and then by July, by June of 1972 Motown is almost completely moved out to LA. I happened to have grown up in the Detroit area and I can still remember watching on the news report one night the local anchorman, whose name happened to have been Bill Bonds, telling us residents of Detroit, "Well, it was an interesting day for the city today, Motown Records left Detroit." And so Motown, though we keep the name Motown, was mostly an LA-based group, and as I say went out there mostly to be involved with the movie industry. But before all that happened, let's focus in on the importance of The Temptations. The Temptations, as we know from the '60, had a whole series of hits. By 1967, 1968 they were being produced by Norman Whitfield and he was having a success with them, and their music became increasingly interested, they became actually interested in sort of doing what Sly Stone was doing. And then as their music at late '60s and early '70s began to develop, they began to address kind of themes in urban life, a lot of that was happening in black pop world where, you know, after the assassination of Martin Luther King in 1968 a lot of black artists really feel a responsibility to engage some of the social questions and not just sort of paper over all that and sort of really engage them. Engaged in a tasteful way not in a way that was provocative or aggressive, but still began to engage that. The first real sign we can see of The Temptations taking the influence of Sly and the Family Stone to heart is a tune by the name of Cloud Nine from 1968, it was a number six hit, number two on R&B charts. This tune was the first real big hit with Dennis Edwards, and lead vocals for The Temptations. David Ruffin had been the lead singer through most of those sort of golden years of the 1960s. Now with Dennis Edwards, a bit of a sort of rougher more aggressive sort of a lead vocal sound. They followed up with with a number of hits including Psychedelic Shack from 1970. The tune that I would really ask you to focus on is from 1972, it's called Papa Was a Rolling Stone. It has many of the features that we'll be talking about with regard to some of the other music. First of all, Papa Was a Rolling Stone is a song written about problems in urban life, right, problems in the black community at the time. So it's a bit of realism from that point of view. It's an ambitious track, it's over seven minutes in length, which, you know, when it was played on AM radio a lot of it was cut down so it was, you know, down to the three minute ideal. But still if you listen to the album version of the track it's quite extended, features some great string arrangements by Paul Riser. The production is ambitious, it's artistic, it takes him a while to even get to the lead vocals as the music sort of unfolds and creates a kind of an atmosphere around it, so it's a very ambitious piece. As I say, influenced at this point not only by Sly Stone but by some of what was happening. We'll talk about in a couple of videos forward here about the blaxploitation films and some of what was going on with Isaac Hayes and Curtis Mayfield and some of the others. But it's a fantastic representative, and maybe in some ways a kind of a high watermark for the 1970s for The Temptations and for Norman Whitfield, that one Papa Was a Rolling Stone from 1972. Other Motown artists, the Commodores who formed in 1968 in Tuskegee, Alabama, many of them members are students at the Tuskegee Institute, were signed to Motown in 1971. They sort of have obviously sort of have their roots in funk music, and if you want to hear them sort of doing their funk thing maybe the best example of that is a track from 1977 called Brick House. It's a, like so many of these Sly-influenced tunes, not only has a very sort of infectious groove but there's always some sort of a lyrical, catchy sort of hook that really sort of draws you in, in this case it's the title of the song, Brick House. It's the way they do it is fantastic and that's really a big part of the charm and the attraction of the tune. But they were also famous for their ballads featuring lead singer Lionel Richie, and two great examples of that from 1977, Easy, which is a fantastic tune, and Three Times a Lady from 1978, both of those really, really showing a Lionel Richie sort of more sort of ballad sort of slow tune kind of approach. So they really had the sort of two sides and they could do something like Brick House as well. A group that gets rolling at Motown at the end of the 1960s into the 1970s hails from Gary, Indiana, and that's The Jackson 5, featuring a young child star Michael Jackson. They were originally a teen group that was, you know, targeted at the AM bubblegum kind of audience, the same audience that would have been listening to people like Bobby Sherman and David Cassidy and the Osmond Brothers, we talked about that a little bit in part one of the course. So they had a whole string of bubblegum hits and they were sort of a kind of bubblegum teen version of The Temptations, except they played, a couple of them played their own instruments, there were dance moves there, there was also, and course you've got this little Michael Jackson in front who was just singing up a storm for such a little kid, it was, even from those very early tracks you could see this kid is just absolutely loaded with talent and is a fantastic performer and dancer. Representative of that era or group's sound is the track ABC or I'll Be There, both of those from 1970. They continue to have hits through the first half of the 1970s but got into a bit of a dispute with Barry Gordy Jr. Different people will tell different stories about how this unfolded, but I think probably in some ways The Jackson 5 were a little bit frustrated that they thought that Barry Gordy wanted to keep them in the kind of teen music category. And they wanted to be, I guess they grew up, they wanted to be thought of as more sort of mature artists. And so when their contract with Motown expired they did not renew and they went to CBS Records instead in 1976. Barry Gordy owned the name The Jackson 5, so they renamed themselves as The Jacksons. Brother Jermaine stayed at Motown, was replaced by his, another brother Randy Jackson, and the group The Jacksons had hits, especially going into the disco era a big one would be Shake Your Body (Down to the Ground) from 1978. That track was number six on the pop chartsm number three in the R&B charts. And then Michael Jackson starts his own solo career. He'd done a couple of solo records but this one he does Off The Wall in 1971, the first one he did together with Quincy Jones, just a fantastic disco record and maybe the first real Michael Jackson record that sort of post, you know, a child star era for him. We'll talk more about that when we talk about the '80s and Michael Jackson in a few weeks. But for now that Off the Wall album happens in 1979. I would say in many ways maybe the best disco record ever recorded, but that's a matter of taste. There will be no questions about that on the quiz. Still, it was a very successful disco record that's for sure, as I say number three album in 1979 with four hit singles, Don't Stop 'Til You Get Enough and Rock with You were both number one hits, and Off the Wall and She's Out of My Life were both number 10 hits. So it was a fantastic record for Michael. He was not satisfied with the success of the record, and said, "My next record is going to be even bigger." And of course that next record was Thriller, 19, early 1980s and so we'll talk about that when we get there. Another issue that comes up with regard to Motown during this period is the idea of take, of the artist taking more control. Remember when we talked about Motown before, what we said was Motown was kind of like an assembly line, you had your songwriters and producers and your studio band and your singers, and the whole idea was that this was all sort of very, these labors were, the labor on the music was all very sort of separated out. But of course the thing that started to happen over the course of the '60s was that the bands and musicians were more in charge of their own music, their own production, by the early '70s that was really starting to become the normative thing. And that was happening at Motown to a certain degree too, and the two important artists that represent that are Marvin Gaye and Stevie Wonder. Marvin Gaye, of course had had hits in the '60s with Motown, but he won control of his production at Motown and established a kind of a social voice or a voice of social commentary. The big album that we should think about with regard to Marvin Gaye is his album from 1971 called What's Going On. Really it's a concept album, so we're talking about a Motown concept album at this point. Again, another point of contact with our hippie aesthetic and some of the stuff we were talking about last week. That album, What's Going On, had hits on like the song What's Going On, Mercy Mercy Me and Inner City Blues, and really was a record that like a lot of the music that we're going to talk about from black pop in the early 1970s really sort of dealt with kind of urban problems and urban life and urban issues in a way that was authentic and real, and so that was his real, its real calling card. The other one who takes control of his career is Stevie Wonder. Stevie Wonder had been a child star of course in the '60s, and at the end of the '60s there was a little bit of, you know, figuring out what is it that Stevie really does as he got a little bit older and all that, and they tried a couple of different things, a couple of different albums and singles were released and stuff, and they finally figured out the best way to deal with Stevie Wonder's just let Stevie be Stevie, and if you just let him do everything, all the singing, all the playing, all the writing and all that, it actually turns out fantastic, and so. And a lot of the stuff that he did in the '70s he did all of his own playing and production and all of that, and he brought in some musicians for some of it but a lot of it he's playing everything, or at least directing everything. A lot of complex arrangements featuring a lot of use of synthesizer that's influenced by the progressive rock bands like Yes and Emerson Lake and Palmer. It's amazing that you see that interaction, but Stevie Wonder was one of the people who was really involved in developing the synthesizer. Representative albums from that, Talking Book from 1972 was an important one, Innervisions from 1973 is another important record from that time, and Songs in the Key of Life from 1976. On Innervisions, the track Living for the City is perhaps a great one to listen to along with Papa Was a Rolling Stone, it's in '73, Papa Was a Rolling Stone was from '72, but it's a similar kind of thing, it tells a whole story of a kid, a black kid from the country who comes to the city and gets into trouble and gets thrown into jail, and all, very sort of in the spirit of the blaxploitation movies, as I say we'll talk about in a couple of videos here. But the radio version of it cuts out a whole center sort of dramatic section. You want to listen to the album version of it which is much longer and has that, and I think if you listen to that you'll hear a lot of the kind of tendencies, not only the kind of funk and sort of Sly kind of thing going on, but of course Stevie Wonder, the sophisticated use of synthesizers and some classical music kinds of references in the style, and then this whole sort of sketch study in urban life. Well that wraps up our discussion of Motown in the 1970s. Now we'll take a trip a little bit further east and talk about the Philadelphia sound.
