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MOTOWN MONTH: Wayne Kramer Salutes Motown’s Musos
5:02 PM GMT 23/01/2009
The MC5er on why The Funk Brothers were America’s greatest band…
THE MUSIC STORE in my neighbourhood in North West Detroit was called Capital Music and it was where a lot of Motown session players bought their music and it was the local bodega, the place you went to hang out.
I was intimidated by the Motown guys because they played on a level so superior to anything I’d been exposed to. You see, there was a strong music education policy in the Detroit school system and that created a generation of schooled musicians who had a leg up on the rest of the world, in my less than humble opinion.
Plus, the auto industry worked 24-7 with three shifts that worked so there were a lot of night clubs that could support live music seven days a week and some of those clubs were jazz clubs and it was a thriving world of gigs, where money was flowing and people had work and money and wanted to spend it and there was a thriving record industry.
If you recorded a record and it was good enough you could get it played on local radio and if you got it played on local radio people would go to the local record stores and buy the reord. So you had a whole thriving music economy and that helped birth a high calibre of musician. That meant that there was a high level of competition and the natural culling effect meant that the better players rose to the top, and the best players worked at Motown.
The thing that set them apart was that they were jazz musicians who could compete with the best of them but they never played down to pop music. They applied their knowledge of harmony and syncopation to pop music and Berry Gordy was smart enough to realise that if he treated them with dignity and respect they would produce wonderful music for him.
As a result, what happened at Motown compares with the great American Song canon, the Broadway composers, your Cole Porters and Irving Berlins. I don’t think I can play well enough yet to have worked at Motown. My reading was not good and you had to know your chords. The first rock guitar player that did well at Motown was Paul Warren (right, onstage at LA’s Whisky A Go-Go), this good-looking white boy who played on Papa Was A Rolling Stone. He brought the wah-wah in.
Wayne Kramer
Posted by Danny_Eccleston at 5:02 PM GMT 23/01/2009
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Keyboardist Earl Van Dyke. The drummers w/ their unique intros. The overall kinetic sound.
James Jamerson played the bass w/ one finger. He knew when and when not to play. Literally down on his drunken back, he played What's Goin On? Even in his near-passed out condition, Marvin Gaye knew he was the man for the job.
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