Or at least that’s how it seemed, and while you got the occasional track that offered some social commentary, it almost seemed like the label was acting out of a sense of obligation to be seen making a comment rather than a feeling of outrage at the way events were developing. Which also probably explains why we kept hearing Motown tracks on the radio in Australia while other labels and other acts moved deeper into the ghettos.
Motown was coming out of the industrialised north-east, and reading about the label there’s a sense of locality. Most of the acts seemed to be drawn from the same geographic area, even from the same neighbourhoods. The Supremes, for example, were three local teenage girls who spent ages hanging around Hitsville USA before they got the chance to step onto the escalator that took them to the top of the pops.
Like all Motown acts, they were groomed - fitted out to look the part, choreographed to the nth degree so that the whole thing looked sophisticated when stuck in front of gorgeous grooves from the Funk Brothers.
The artists recording for Stax, Volt, Atlantic and the other labels that fall under that umbrella came from a more diverse background. Otis Redding came out of Georgia, Wilson Pickett had memories of picking cotton in conditions that hadn’t changed much since the end of slavery. While Aretha Franklin was a preacher’s daughter from the industrial north-east, her sound, once she moved to Atlantic was coming from the revival tents of the deep South as much as from her dad’s church in downtown Cleveland - not that there would have been a great distance between the two in reality.
A bigger distance lay in the ethnic backgrounds of the people at the top of the two camps.
Motown, based in Detroit, drew most of its performers, players, writers and consultants from the same area, and was virtually an all-black affair. White America didn’t play any part in the operation until the records, manufactured for acceptance as The Sound of Young America made their way into the market place. The labels that came under the Atlantic umbrella were an entirely different kettle of fish.
The people at the top of the tree on the Atlantic side of the fence were, on the other hand, almost exclusively white - and in many cases were either immigrants or the children of immigrants. Atlantic founder Ahmet Ertegun was the son of the Turkish ambassador to the USA, who had fallen in love with black American music after seeing Cab Calloway in London in the thirties, and teamed up with Herb Abramson, the former artists-and-repertoire director for National Records, to form Atlantic Records in 1947.