Devil's Night (13 page)

Weston beamed and led me into the vocal music workshop. As soon as she entered, the room came to a respectful silence.

“We have a visitor with us today,” she said, pointing to me. “I want you to let him know, are you as good as the singers from Motown?”

“Yes!” the class erupted.

“Are you better than we were?”

“Yes!” they chorused.

“Okay,” she said, pleased. “Let me hear you prove it.”

A small, dark young man left his seat and stood at the head of the class. A pianist hit the opening chord and he began to sing “Amazing Grace” in a pure, clear baritone. When he hit the high notes with a flourish, the room erupted into cheers of “Sing, George, sing.” He closed his eyes and improvised, daring his own range, and the kids clapped wildly. Weston stood in the corner, listening intently, arms folded across her chest.

When the song ended, George walked across the room. Weston unfolded her arms and hugged him. There were tears running down her cheeks. Happy and embarrassed, George turned to the class. “Hey, give me two,” he said, and they responded with two sharp claps of applause. “Give me one,” he commanded, and they clapped once more. “Now, give me a half,” he yelled, and they moved their hands together, stopping just short of contact. The silence was a surprise, and Weston doubled over, laughing.

The kids sang on and on. A frail, pretty girl with reddish hair performed “Somewhere over the Rainbow.” The entire group sang “Now We Sing Joyfully unto God,” sounding like the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. Then choir instructor Rudy Hawkins sat down at the piano and played one of their favorites, a rousing gospel number called “Spirit of the Living God.” Weston sang along, quietly, careful not to upstage her young protégés.

The gospel spirit is part of Kim Weston, and of Festival. When you ask her how she is, she answers, “I'm blessed.” On especially good days she says, “I'm better than blessed”; on bad ones, “I'm blessed anyway.” And in private moments, when she is asked what she wants to accomplish with Festival, she says, “I want to be a blessing in the lives of these young people.” Coming from any other show business personality, such sentiments would sound corny, but for
Weston they are natural expressions of a personality molded by a life of deep, fervent faith in God.

Kim Weston was raised, literally, in church. Her mother was an officer in the Apostolic Overcoming Holiness Church, a sanctified denomination with a stern moral code that forbade secular music, dancing, and even riding the bus for fun. She and Kim lived in a small apartment over the sanctuary. In the early morning, before she went to school, Kim would accompany her mother downstairs, where, together, they dusted the pews, swept the floor and lighted the stove in winter.

Kim's mother spent her days cleaning white people's houses, her nights looking after church business and her weekends singing in the choir and cooking barbecue to raise money for the congregation. At the age of three, Kim sang her first solo at a Sunday evening service, and by the time she was a teenager, she was a featured performer in the Wright Specials, a local gospel group.

One of the reasons for Weston's amazing rapport with her “young people” is her authenticity. Although she rarely discusses her background, they can sense that she has been where they are now—black, poor, the child of a single mother with nothing more to fall back on than belief in God and her own talent. And there is something more; Weston was there, at Hitsville, a part of the Motown legend that motivates and haunts the city's talented teenagers.

Kim Weston came to Motown in the early sixties, after songwriter Eddie Holland heard about her singing and invited her to record some songs. At first she refused because she felt uncomfortable singing secular music. But Holland was persistent, she needed the money, and eventually she made the trip across town to Hitsville, USA.

In those days, Hitsville was more than a company headquarters. It was a fraternity house, an exclusive club where black teenagers came together to make music and money under the tutelage of homeboy Berry Gordy. They sang together, partied together, toured together and often married one another. Like the cast of
Saturday
Night Live
a decade later, the Motown stars were the envy of young America, permanent guests at the hottest party in the country.

Like a lot of parties, this one ended with a hangover. In the early seventies, Berry Gordy moved his operation to the West Coast, taking a few of his most popular acts with him and leaving the rest to fend for themselves. Gordy's defection meant little to the white establishment. A scan of the Motown file at the
Free Press
reveals the extent of this apathy; the paper published only two articles—one a denial, one a confirmation—about Motown's departure. There was virtually no editorial discussion or op-end comment. Thus did Berry Gordy move Motown, a multimillion-dollar industry with inestimable public relations value—out of the city.

White adults never saw Motown as more than a bunch of black kids in capes and ball gowns. But for blacks, losing the company was a demoralizing blow. The auto companies promised young Detroiters a job, but Motown offered more—a chance for greatness. Every kid who sang in church dreamed of following Smokey and Diana, Martha and Little Stevie—and Kim Weston—into Berry Gordy's star-making machine on West Grand Boulevard.

Today, now that it is too late, people understand what they lost. The state of Michigan uses Motown songs in its promotions and the governor was on hand to dedicate the Motown Museum, located in the old Hitsville studio, which is all that is left of the Detroit show business dream.

The museum attracts more than a thousand visitors a month, most of them from out of town. People come to pay homage to the Motown sound and to gaze at the tiny Studio Number One, a primitive facility where most of the early hits were recorded. A Lebanese Christian told a tour guide that he used to listen to “My Girl” while his village was being bombed by Druze artillery. A Japanese tourist fainted from excitement in the control room. A lady from England stood on the spot where the Supremes had recorded “Stop in the Name of Love” and cried.

“This is the first place I came when I arrived in Detroit,” said
Gerald Clark, the man who had brought Floyd to my cocktail party. Clark, who often speaks in fragments of old rock and roll lyrics, arrived in Detroit from Springfield, Massachusetts. “I wanted to be a songwriter, and this was Mecca. I drove from Springfield, and I listened to Motown songs the entire way.” He looked lovingly around the studio he never managed to penetrate, and remembered an old Smokey Robinson tune. “You really had a hold on me,” he said to the empty room.

Clark's friend Bob Kerse came a little closer. In the late sixties he worked at Motown briefly as an assistant technician, and he had dreams of becoming a producer. “I didn't take it seriously back then, though,” he said. “I was a young guy and I goofed off. I thought there would be plenty of time. Nobody ever dreamed that Motown would leave Detroit. Motown
was
Detroit.”

In the summer of 1988, Clark and Kerse were trying to revive the dream. They were promoting amateur shows, attempting to locate and sign new singers, just as their idol, Berry Gordy, had done a generation before. But, they admitted, things were going slowly. The talent was still there, an unending stream of church-schooled crooners and shouters, but the magic was missing, and so were the audiences. “Some nights we don't get more than fifty, sixty people,” said Kerse. “I don't know what the problem is, but it's pretty discouraging.”

The shows were staged at the Palms, a downtown movie house just a few blocks from the Fox Theater, where the Motown Revue once performed, and this proximity gave a haunting, melancholy flavor to the effort. Many of the contestants were kids from the Festival program. Kim Weston encouraged them and helped them prepare. She takes a proprietary interest in their careers, and her greatest frustration is that she has been unable to help most of them find outlets for their talent.

When they do perform, Weston is often in the audience to cheer them on. That is what brought her one evening to the Latin Quarter, a downtown showroom where Martha Reeves and the Vandellas
were staging a bon voyage show on the eve of a British tour. Weston, who dislikes nightclubs, was there because Martha is an old friend from Miller High and Motown, but mostly because some Festival graduates were performing that night in the New Breed Be-bop Society Orchestra.

When she arrived at the club, there was a sense of excitement and reunion in the air. The tables on the mezzanine had little white place cards reserving them for “Miracles,” “Contours,” “Spinners,” “Tops” and other members of the Motown royalty. The entirely black audience sat at long tables on the sprawling main floor and looked up at the empty places with anticipation. The parking attendants under the club's marquee inspected the new arrivals closely, searching for stars.

Backstage, Martha Reeves sat in a red-sequined gown and fussed with her long, straight wig. When she saw Kim Weston, she jumped up and gave her a warm kiss. The two women, about the same age, made an interesting contrast. Reeves looked like an aging teenager; Weston, who had just come from a reception honoring civil rights pioneer Rosa Parks, wore glasses and had her hair pulled back primly in a knot.

One of the Vandellas spotted Weston and came over to give her a hug. “You got back together a year ago, right?” Kim asked, and the Vandella nodded. “Well, y'all started a year before me last time, so maybe I'll start up again pretty soon myself,” Weston said. The two women giggled, remembering their first years at Motown, more than a quarter century before.

A tall, open-faced man with thick glasses came up behind Weston and the Vandella and embraced them both. Kim spun around and her eyes went wide with pleasure. “Bobby Rogers of the Miracles,” she exclaimed, giving him his full title. “I didn't know you were in Detroit.” Many of the Motown people who stayed at home have a feeling of being left behind. Some are bitter, some philosophical; either way, they take an obvious comfort in each others' presence in the city.

Rogers, who started out with Smokey Robinson when they were teenagers, surveyed the room.

“Just like old times, isn't it, Bobby?” the Vandella said.

“Yeah, things are coming back the way they used to be,” he replied. He didn't sound as if he meant it, but he didn't sound too unhappy, either. The Motown teenagers have all grown up since the sixties.

Rogers is a friendly man who used to make a point of signing autographs for ugly girls. Unlike many former Motown artists, he still receives substantial royalties, which supplement his income as an interior decorator.

“Smokey made sure we got our money because he was close to Berry,” he said. “I got to say that Smokey was very fair with us, very fair. He invited me to write with him, and you know Smokey Robinson doesn't need any help from me to write songs. The only hit I ever wrote was ‘First I Look at the Purse.' ”

Cocktail waitresses circulated with drinks and people began to take their seats. Many of the celebrity tables remained vacant. The Tops were on the road, somebody said. A lone Spinner represented his group. “Where's the Contours?” someone asked, and a loud laugh went up from the others. “Man, them Contours were something else,” Rogers said fondly.

The old Motown people gossiped about Smokey and Stevie, Marvin and Diane (never Diana)—legendary names to most people, old pals to them, nothing more. The gossip was good-natured, affectionate. “We were just a bunch of kids together,” said Kim Weston. “And we honestly liked each other.”

“And still do,” said Rogers, raising his brandy glass in a toast to old times.

The house lights dimmed and the show began with a number of amateur acts. Most of them were second-rate, but Bobby Rogers and his friends laughed hard at their jokes and clapped enthusiastically along with their music.

Weston asked Rogers if he was still singing. “Only in church,” he
said, and squeezed his wife's hand. He was once married to Wanda Rogers, lead singer of the Marvelettes. His second wife, Joan, has worked for United Airlines for twenty years. “Bobby had to learn all the songs,” she said.

“Never did spend too much time in church as a kid,” said Rogers, a bit sheepishly. But after all, who needs a church when you are a Miracle?

Unlike Rogers, most of the Motown stars started out singing gospel. In Detroit, where there is a Baptist or Sanctified church on nearly every block, there was an enormous pool of talent, but the same could be said for other cities. Chicago, New York, Philadelphia, and New Orleans all produced their share of black teenage r&b artists. Nowhere else, however, were these singers picked, packaged and provided with material like at Motown; and nowhere else did they work for a black man and a black company.

This was a part of the magic of Motown for black Detroiters. Berry Gordy created more than a sound and a fortune; he proved that a black man was smart enough and tough enough to control a black product. Yet, that night Gordy was in California, and other members of his family, the brothers and sisters who have stayed in Detroit, were conspicuously absent. Martha Reeves had wanted the chance that Gordy gave to Diana Ross, and she slammed the door after her when she quit Motown. The Gordys have a long memory.

The New Breed Be-bop Society Orchestra struck up “Jimmy Mack,” and Reeves came charging out. She looked lithe and youthful, although her voice, still strong, sometimes fumbled around for notes like a drunk searching through his pocket for a coin. The Motown fraternity didn't seem to mind, though; they watched her with smiles on their faces. “Good for Martha,” Kim Weston said, and the others nodded.

Throughout the show, people approached the Motown tables to pay their respects. Some asked for autographs, others hauled one or another of the artists to their feet for a photograph. They mentioned shows they had attended, called out the names of old hits.