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Martha Wash was also a soloist in the San Francisco Inspirational Choir, a wonderful Gospel group I recorded a number of times.

WOW, Thank you so much!!

That's a wonderful shot of Mike!

Mike told me that Mike & the Modifiers was the second artist Berry Gordy signed after the Miracles. In 1965 when I started working in the disk room, Mike was...

When I started at Motown in 1965, I was told we were creating dance music for teen-aged girls.

I believe she was an officer of a bank before joining her brother.

Up until around 1968, you WANT the mono version of most popular music. That includes the Beatles. This is because the production decisions were based on monitoring in mono.

Almost nothing about ANY artist that I've actually witnessed has been true!

Drug use was very rare and only very occasional pot. I also don't think it had to do with the riots.

I was told by Bob Dennis that the original plan was to have Brian Holland manage production...

I was one of a group of people who began collecting things for the RRHOF with the understanding that it was going to be built in San Francisco. When Wenner auctioned off all of our efforts to the...

Where did you get the idea it "destroyed most of the inner city?" I don't remember hearing of any major clubs being harmed.

My understanding is that they intend to feature singers and singing groups that were influenced by Gospel but will be aimed directly at the pop market.

Motown artists originally got a fixed weekly salary-like advance and were only charged for that plus session musicians because it was part of the A.F. of M's. national contract. They were not charged...

I don't remember anybody thinking Motown records would even be on the radio five years later.

My understanding is that Motown was never the main source of income for the musicians. In the late '60s, Detroit, Chicago, Nashville and New York lost a lot of musicians to LA simply because there...

No, it was all about advancing the artists' careers as they and their fans grew older. I'm not at all sure that Motown ever profited from just record production. The "majors" I worked with never put...

Motown is easier to understand if you think of it as the publicity department of an artist management company.

Detroit and Chicago were the centers of radio production in the late 1940s. NBC and CBS were in Chicago while ABC was in Detroit. Between performing on live radio and recording for advertising, our...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YJssXUbEPKQ

Martha sang in a Gospel group I recorded during the mid '70s. She knocked it out of the park before she had a lot of recording experience too!

At the time Motown went union, it was $60/ 3-hour session with a 4-song limit for masters and 6 for demos.

I visited London in the summer of 1969 and spent a day with John Reid and John Marshall who were Motown's European team. I explained to them how Motown's quality control system worked and how lots of...

Mike McLean told me our security people showed up the following morning with rifles from when they'd served in the army.

I was told Tom and Lawrence Horn left to work for HDH. Around ten years ago, Bob Dennis told me they had run out of money after a year, and everybody moved on.

People confuse fame with financial success.

Berry wanted Motown to be a Columbia Records and not a Chess or an Atlantic. By his personal measure, it was a failure. By my measure of experience...

Esther Edwards told me that we didn't have any money for promotion like the majors. We did have the leverage of offering stations an earlier copy of a known artist than their competition in exchange...