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DETROIT
— This is a familiar spot for Al Abrams.
We’re
talking right here, where you’re looking, in the pages
of this newspaper.
It
was 52 years ago that an 18-year-old Abrams became the
first hire for Berry Gordy Jr. and rose to become
publicity director for Motown Records, charged with
landing headlines for the label and its artists.
For
the next eight years, Abrams was in the front seat as
Motown conquered first Detroit, then America and finally
the globe, a journey chronicled in his delightful new
book, “Hype&Soul: Behind the Scenes at Motown “
(TempleStreet Publishing).
Abrams
wasn’t just a PR man — snappy, sunny and inspired by
Tony Curtis’ press-agent character in “Sweet Smell
of Success.” He was a pack rat, and his book is
brimming with rare photos, press releases, letters and
other well-worn documents that help reveal how Motown
was packaged, presented and spun for public consumption.
“You
can still see the Scotch tape marks where I had stuck
them in scrapbooks. If it had my name on it, I felt
compelled to take it home,” he says. “I’m not
going to claim I knew this would all become as big as it
turned out. But I did always feel that one day this
stuff may really matter.”
While
the glossy, full-color book makes a fun browse for
casual fans, its real thrills are geared to the Motown
diehards, including the healthy legion overseas.
They’ll
find telegrams and postcards and Abrams’ hand-scrawled
pitches for promotions that never came off, like a
proposal for Detroit Mayor Jerome Cavanaugh to rename
the city “Motown” for a day in ‘64, and a record
deal for 17-year-old first daughter Luci Johnson that
year.
There
are the letters buttering up reporters, and the loads of
press clippings they produced — including what Abrams
says is Motown’s first-ever media mention: a 1959
Windsor Star profile of the long-forgotten singer Mike
Powers.
And
then there are the reams of press releases (“MARVELETTES
FLY TO LONDON,” “MARVIN GAYE RETURNS TO 20 GRAND”)
— often pecked out by Abrams with one finger on a
typewriter and rushed to a mail drop where he’d wait
to ensure they were picked up.
Alongside
Abrams’ own anecdotes and candid snapshots of artists
such as the Supremes and Stevie Wonder, it makes for a
brisk and bustling jaunt through a bygone era.
“You
wind up with a day-by-day chronicle of what really
happened at Motown,” Abrams says. “What are
today’s publicists going to have down the road — a
book of Twitter posts?”
In
the pre-Rolling Stone era, pop-music journalism was
still taking shape, often the province of teen-beat cub
writers and castoff coverage, with writers and press
reps inventing the standards as they went.
But
in Detroit, the Motown story was more than just a
hit-parade tale. It was a business and cultural
phenomenon, and Abrams’ go-to outlet was the Free
Press, where he hobnobbed regularly with now-iconic
Freep figures such as Van Sauter and Bettelou Peterson.
Former editor Mort Persky provides a foreword in the
book, recounting the coverage of Motown acts as
“Abrams shoved them into our consciousness.”
The
world certainly isn’t short of Motown books, though
many were criticized for sloppy reporting and slippery
agendas. But a book of raw materials is its own
fact-checker, and Abrams says he and his team —
including the English journalist Neil Rushton — aimed
to “tell the story that a lot of people had forgotten
or overlooked.”
Many
of the documents are drawn from the hefty collection of
memorabilia Abrams donated to the University of Michigan
in the late ‘80s, when his wife finally convinced him
to liberate their closet. He’d declined opportunities
to sell to collectors such as the Hard Rock Cafe.
“I
kept picturing this stuff in a frame with spaghetti
sauce splattered on it,” he says. “I realized it had
value for historians, and a university archive would
make it available to scholars.”
Abrams,
a Detroit native who today lives in Findley, Ohio,
chuckles at some of the “grandiose PR ideas” he
concocted during his Motown tenure — which ended when
he took up with the competing Stax Records label in
1967. He lays claim, for instance, to the famous quote
attributed to Bob Dylan describing Smokey Robinson as
“America’s greatest living poet” — a plug Abrams
says he concocted with Dylan pal Al Aronowitz.
But
he’s also proud of his time at Motown, where he warmly
recalls “being this young Jewish kid welcomed in like
one of the Gordy family.”
His
efforts produced more than column inches and record
sales for Detroit’s biggest entertainment company,
Abrams says. They also supplied powerful social fuel.
“When
the Supremes got the cover of (the nationally
syndicated) TV Magazine in 1965, that really
jump-started things,” he says. “It really opened the
doors everywhere else — ‘Hey, we can put black
people on a cover that will sit in people’s living
rooms for a week, and they won’t cancel their
subscriptions.’
“So
we saw every magazine cover, every front-page article,
not just as a breakthrough for the Supremes or the
Temptations or whoever, but as a breakthrough in the
civil-rights struggle.”
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