Cycle of Success

I think I have a couple of more Detroit/Motown blogs in me. At least one for sure...this one. We will see. Oh, the anticipation! I think I will skip the diatribe on the clogged toilet if you have been following the thread. Although there were some good lessons in that sordid affair I shall keep them to myself.

I have visited a lot of cool places in the last 25 years or so. Detroit was different. More melancholic. The pathos of Detroit is hard to shake. When visiting Motown, I purchased the autobiography of Berry Gordy Jr., the founder of Motown. It is a bit dated yet still has staying power. By any standard, Gordy is a big success story. A Black entrepreneur with a slate of mostly local Detroit young singers and homegrown songs which had an enormous impact on popular music from the 1960's onward. Unlike those born into wealth whose major task is to not blow it, it is quite another story to start with little and wind up with a lot.

The autobiography seems to have been written primarily by Gordy to right some wrongs that he saw as being leveled at him by those who worked for Motown at one point or another, that he kept the profits to himself and cheated those who worked for him. That he felt unappreciated by those who he helped to fame and fortune is a theme in the book. It is the undercurrent.

When I read through the voluminous book recently, mostly when I was actually in Detroit on vacation, one anecdote stuck with me that Gordy writes about. He called it the "Cycle of Success" and how it presents enormous challenges for those who strike gold. Figures like Marvin Gaye and others crumbled under the pressure of adulation while others like Smokey Robinson seemed better able to ride the wave despite some wipe-outs on the waves of popularity.

The anecdote is this: "When you have the power, people have to laugh at your jokes. When they gain the power, you have to laugh at theirs."  It became a pattern at Motown that Gordy would take raw talent and run the individuals or groups through an assembly-line type of process (actually taken from his experience from working on a Chrysler automotive assembly line for a couple of years) where the person or people would be groomed for hits. Singing lessons, etiquette lessons, how to dress lessons, dance lessons, etc. At the beginning, a no name. At the end, a name. And then the Cycle of Success would kick in and the artists, songwriters, and other talent, outgrew the confines of Motown and struck out on their own to make more money and have more control over their careers. Lawsuits ensued. Bitterness prevailed.

That is where Gordy, in vainly striving to keep the most successful and profitable artists inside the Motown orbit would have to start to laugh at their jokes in an attempt to keep them on the various labels that Motown had. More often than not, they'd leave. And Gordy would feel kicked to the curb. It became the case that the artists were moving on, the songwriters felt cheated out of royalties, and it went from Hitsville USA to Splitsville. And Motown, from both internal dynamics and external music business realities, became more of a name than a music company. The label was sold and that was the end to the Detroit success story. It lives on as a shell of its former shell but oh, what a shell.

When I stood in the first floor recording studio in the main house of Motown, the guide asked if I wanted her to take a picture of me in the room where such music history went down. I was like, "Nah, it isn't at all about me. It is about those who made music history here." It seemed profane to put my face front in center of the proposed picture.

What I found so interesting about the Motown story and saga is that the various parties and pieces all needed each other to create something great. And when it went from "We" to "Me" things began to unravel. Or to use an apt metaphor, the turntable of the hits stop spinning. The needle just died on the record. The assembly line ground to a halt, the magic disappeared, and we are left with a wonderful and wispy catalog of music and memories. The story of Motown is part of a larger story of Detroit which is part of an even larger story of the loss of our national identity as Americans. We used to be an industrious country. Yet, prosperity has made us selfish and we all want a piece of the cooked Golden Goose on our own plate. We are still well-fed but the bones of the carcass are ahead. The auto industry is an exemplar is spades. 

In our desire to get ours, to be loved in the words of Gordy, we have been warped. I am not sure it was our desire to be loved ever. Maybe to be famous, rich, well-known, is more accurate. To be trending by some snarky comment made on Twitter (as I am today) in a fleeting grasp at momentary notoriety. For love does not seek its own only, but looks to the good of others, as also part of the cycle of success. We are in this together.