Fever by Tim Riley Page B

irony was that for a time in the sixties, Motown produced as many ideal men and women as any other label, and the better duets mentioned above and partnerships between Robinson and Wells, and ultimately Gladys Knight and her Pips, suggested how much good pop energy was flowing between the sexes.
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    Before it was a crossover phenomenon, Berry Gordy shrewdly modeled Motown after white labels like Red Bird and Philles. Girl groups captured the female perspective with sympathy, cunning, and grace, and ambitious secretaries inspired producers to mold them into stars. The Supremes were all dolled up with dinner gloves for men, but in songs like “Stop in the Name of Love” and “Love Child” women heard female power shared on a mass scale that couldn’t be reduced to pithy tag lines. First-person girl-group point of view galloped forward as the genre leapt into celebrity status; here was female royalty that whispered confession as come-on, with the thrill of secrets told in public, and feminist subtexts bobbed ever closer to the surface. The parity went the other way, too. The label’s handsome boys not only leapt into soaring falsetto to pledge their desire atop tireless R&B rhythms; they did so with immaculate style, the kind only ladies’ men could summon.
    If Motown began as a “family” business that poached greater Detroit’s high-school musical casts and downtown’s secretarial talent for its beginnings, its longer arc had a traditional curve. Gordy rode out his decade with the Supremes, who came to symbolize the crossover reach of the sound for several pop generations. He ultimately succumbed to corrosive ambition for sex and power in the tired old show-biz fashion. That the Supremes would take the girl-group concept and turn it into something glamorous enough for Hollywood, and cliché enough for Vegas, illustrates how ambitious Gordy was for black acceptability.
    Although the Supremes, the Miracles, and the Temptations had already been signed and were busy working on material, the company’s first number one was “Please Mr. Postman” by the Marvelettes, in April 1961 (on the Tamla subsidiary—with Marvin Gaye sitting in on drums). And the label’s first big star was Mary Wells, who wrote her own hit with “Bye Bye Baby” in 1961, emerged with “The One Who Really Loves You” (by Smokey Robinson) and “You Beat me to the Punch” (by Smokey Robinson and Ronald White) in 1962, while still a teenager. Wells followed these up with a hit at the end of the year that packed a wallop: “Two Lovers” (another Robinson number) flirted with the idea of simultaneous lovers, until you thought the lyric through to uncover a woman’s dilemma at one man’s duplicity.
    But that the idea of two-timing and enjoying it was put forward at all shows how far girl groups were pushing things. For men, this was among the more advanced views of female behavior. By the time Wells put out the smash “My Guy,” in 1964, it didn’t take Smokey Robinson long to figure out that he could answer his own song with one for a guy group—so he wrote “My Girl” for the Temptations. Here, the gender dialogue wasn’t happening between singers and writers, it was happening with the same writer composing for two separate acts, one female, one male. Smokey was becoming a Svengali to Motown’s gender politics, in thrall to the beauty and complexity popping up all around him. Wells paired with Marvin Gaye for “Once Upon a Time,” and “What’s the Matter with You Baby” in 1964, and toured with the Beatles in England as the first Motown act overseas. Brenda Holloway was groomed as Well’s successor, but Holloway’s voice had more grain, and she leaned more toward soul ballads, so she never broke the top ten. “Every Little Bit Hurts,” her 1964 debut, shaped a