Motown Grapevine

Description

Amazon description (about 260 words)

It started with an $800 family loan and a two-family flat on West Grand Boulevard.

If you were young in the 1960s, Motown wasn’t a record company. It was the radio. Motown Grapevine tells the stories behind that sound: the people, the gambles, and the moments that turned a small Detroit label into Hitsville U.S.A.

Meet the five girls from Inkster who finished fourth in a talent contest and still came back with a No. 1 song. Ride the 1962 Motortown Revue bus into the segregated South, where performers remembered shots fired at the tour buses in Birmingham. Step into the Snakepit, the cramped studio where the Funk Brothers laid down the grooves, and into Maxine Powell’s finishing school, where Motown’s stars learned that ‘everybody walks, but I teach how to glide.’

You’ll find Smokey Robinson, Mary Wells, Martha and the Vandellas, Little Stevie Wonder, the Temptations, the Supremes, the Four Tops, Tammi Terrell, and Marvin Gaye, who defied his own label to make What’s Going On. And you’ll learn how ‘I Heard It Through the Grapevine’ sat on a shelf for more than a year before it became one of the biggest hits Motown ever had.

This isn’t a comprehensive history; good ones already exist. It’s a book of stories, told with a journalist’s care for the record and illustrated with the author’s own watercolor caricatures of the artists who made the music.

Inside:

• 16 illustrated chapters on the stars, songwriters, and backstage figures
• An introduction to how the Motown system worked
• ‘One big hit’: a guide to overlooked Motown songs worth finding
• Suggestions for further reading and listening

For anyone who still turns up the radio when the Temptations come on.