young Smokey Robinson covering "Adios My Desert Love" - by Nolan Strong & the Diablos

[robb_k]

Robb thanks for that info you're an amazing font of knowledge on these subjects and I, for one, so welcome your contributions. I wish this thread had actually been in the Motown Forum as that's always my first port of call and it's actually quite rare I venture elsewhere [[even to the DRATS Forum) so having re-ignited this thread I lost sight of it!

As time goes on I'm finding myself drawn to find out more about Berry Gordy's work and influences prior to Motown. In fact, I think his work as song-writer and producer should get more exposure but at Motown there was so much talent and others became more prominent. But he still "kept his hand in", for example producing Jose Feliciano's first Motown album which was excellent. I think with an older ear I'm appreciating more the early 60s and late 50s stuff and wanting to find out more about it all. The very early Smokey clip I found very interesting.

Take a look in the SDF Archives, in the "Classic Threads Section". We had a thread many years ago, titled something like "Pre-Motown Gordy Productions, which included label scans of almost ALL of Berry's and Gwen's pre-Motown work [[I think we were only missing one). It included not only every side they produced, but every song they wrote that came out on vinyl. Back at that time, Detroit music industry veterans, like Ron Murphy, Ralph Terrana, Dennis Coffey, Bob Babbit, Stu Bass, Lynn Bruce, Bob Ohlsson, Mike McLean, Clay MacMurray, and big Motown collectors like myself and Carl Pelagrino, and Detroit Soul researcher, Graham Finch, all of whom talked about those days. I hope that thread wasn't lost when Lowell changed SDF's platform, and we lost 2/3 of our 2001-2012 threads.