Loud Music

The Motown years were an exceptional time period in the musical history of the United States. The number of hits that poured out of Detroit was prodigious, and their quality was exceptional. It didn’t much matter what your social strata or color or religion were. Teenagers and young adults of this period, the mid-1960s through 1972, were, as youth of every era, wrapped up in their music, but they also lived their music in many ways. And the music was magical in many ways.

By the 1960s, the postwar boom that had been promised to Americans was coming to fruition, after long years of deprivation and shortages. And the music showed it as much as the American lifestyle during this time. The music was happier, more carefree, more relaxed. Today’s music seems angrier, more hostile, more extreme. And it, too, is a reflection of the times.

The Funk Brothers were lost to the pages of history for many years for several reasons, the most prominent being the existing mores of the recording industry at the time regarding naming of musicians other than the principals on a record. Simply put, if you weren’t the star, you weren’t worth mentioning. The Funk Brothers played on more hits than the Beatles, the Stones, the Beach Boys, and Elvis combined, and yet, outside of a small circle in Motown, were relatively unknown. And to add insult to injury, the Funk Brothers got almost no warning when Motown decided to pull up stakes and move to Los Angeles in 1972.

Motown’s stars called the steps leading to Hitsville’s basement the bridge to the land of dreams. The session musicians, however, called the cramped, smoke-stained, dimly lit room the Snakepit for the nearly fourteen years where they were on call seven days a week. Their pay? Ten bucks a song for as long as it took to get everything right. And yet these very guys were the master planners of the famed “Motown Sound,” the guys who worked out the notes and chords and tempos that made the stars sound good.

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