Norman Whitfield and Barrett Strong
Are here to make everything right that’s wrong
Holland and Holland and Lamont Dozier too
Are here to make it all okay with you
Billy Bragg, Levi Stubbs’ Tears (1986)
Norman Whitfield supplied hits to Motown Records. He didn’t sing, he didn’t perform, he sat in the basement of Motowns Hitsville U.S.A office and supplied The Temptations, Gladys Night and Mavin Gaye with hits. He is generally acknowledged as being a key figure in the creation of the Motown Sound.
You see, Berry Gordy’s Motown Records took the “make” path to success.
Motown had an inhouse songwriting staff that included Norman Whitfield, Barret Strong, Lamont Dozier and brothers Brian and Eddie Holland. They resided in the basement of the Hitsville U.S.A studio with the so-called Funk Brothers (keyboardists Earl Van Dyke, Johnny Griffith, and Joe Hunter; guitarists Joe Messina, Robert White, and Eddie Willis; percussionists Eddie “Bongo” Brown and Jack Ashford; drummers Benny Benjamin, Uriel Jones, and Richard “Pistol” Allen; and bassists James Jamerson and Bob Babbitt).
This approach to supplying the sound of young America (such was the Motown motto) earned the label 110 top ten hits in the US alone from 1961 to 1971.
While this was going on in Detroit, out on the east coast, record producers were taking the “buy” approach to hit creation.
In 1962, 165 music businesses were crammed into the Brill Building on Broadway in New York City. It was a one-stop shop where you could match the songwriting power of Lieber and Stoller (Stand By Me/Jailhouse Rock), Goffin and King (The Loco-Motion), Greenwich and Barry (Be My Baby/(And) Then He Kissed Me), Mann and Weil (You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’) and Bacharach and Hal David (Walk On By) against one another by just walking down the halls of the office building asking for a hit record.
“Every day we squeezed into our respective cubby holes with just enough room for a piano, a bench, and maybe a chair for the lyricist if you were lucky. You’d sit there and write and you could hear someone in the next cubby hole composing a song exactly like yours. The pressure in the Brill Building was really terrific — because Donny (Kirshner) would play one songwriter against another. He’d say: ‘We need a new smash hit’ — and we’d all go back and write a song and the next day we’d each audition for Bobby Vee’s producer.”
Carol King quoted in The Sociology of Rock by Simon Frith (1978)
Competition is truly one of the great driving forces for innovation, and as purchasers, the job is to see to it that this comes to the benefit of the company. But as the example of Motown shows, this doesn’t mean that you automatically lose out by taking the “make” approach.
Sad to say, Norman Whitfield one of the creators of the Motown Sound died on September 16th 2008. I’m going to put “I Heard It Through The Grapevine” on repeat this afternoon to honor his memory.
