Hitsville: The Mak­ing of Motown

Hitsville, USA. With the excep­tion of Abbey Road, no place has had a more pro­found impact on pop­u­lar music over the last 50 years. In Ben­jamin and Gabe Turner’s enter­tain­ing new doc­u­men­tary, Berry Gordy, the man behind it all, takes us on a tour of his old stomp­ing ground, the hal­lowed Motown Records head­quar­ters in Detroit.

As a song­writer Gordy enjoyed mod­er­ate suc­cess before set­ting up his own sta­ble of soul and R&B artists in the late ​’50s and ear­ly ​’60s: Smokey Robin­son, Mar­vin Gaye, Diana Ross… the list goes on. The film starts out as a sort of misty-eyed self-trib­ute, as Gordy rifles through his own great­est hits cat­a­logue fond­ly recall­ing the music and moments that defined his com­pa­ny. But cru­cial­ly every sparkling anec­dote con­tains valu­able insight into how some of Motown’s most icon­ic records were made.

Ear­ly on, Robin­son recalls being wok­en up by Berry in the mid­dle of the night, fret­ting over the pair’s lat­est sin­gle. They rushed back into the stu­dio at 3am to lay down a new ver­sion of the track, despite it hav­ing already been put out sev­er­al weeks ear­li­er. ​‘Shop Around’ went on to become the label’s first sin­gle to sell over a mil­lion copies; such was Gordy’s per­fec­tion­ism and com­mit­ment to ensur­ing that every release had that unmis­tak­able ​“Motown sound”.

Then there’s the sto­ry of Martha Reeves, the acci­den­tal super­star whose trans­for­ma­tion from A&R sec­re­tary to chart-top­ping diva occurred vir­tu­al­ly overnight after she took the mic dur­ing an impromp­tu track record­ing. Else­where, flick­ery black-and-white footage of The Temp­ta­tions and a group of ses­sion musi­cians record­ing ​‘My Girl’ is noth­ing short of elec­tri­fy­ing – just one of many aston­ish­ing archive scenes that will stay with you.

More per­ti­nent­ly, the film even­tu­al­ly segues from being a cel­e­bra­tion of musi­cal tal­ent (not to men­tion busi­ness acu­men) into a requiem for a city that once stood proud­ly at the cen­tre of Amer­i­can indus­try and cul­ture, but which has sad­ly become a short­hand for ter­mi­nal eco­nom­ic and social rot. How sweet it is to be remind­ed of the good times.