Whereas the director really wanted to go after the big hits. So we mostly went on that thing, and most of the songs are pretty much blockbusters: "Grapevine", "Heat Wave", "Ain't No Mountain", and songs like that.
Ed: Joan Osborne's rendition of "What Becomes of the Brokenhearted" was a real knockout.
Allan: Well, that's the highpoint of the performances. And that comes to the second part of your question. The stars we got were the ones who were the takers. You can't name a major star that we didn't go after, but most of them wouldn't give us the time of day. And it floored me, because I figured that people would be crawling all over each other to play with these guys, but it wasn't that way--it was very difficult getting people to play with them. So the people who stepped forward for our film are heroes to me.
Ed: I think you had mentioned on the DVD that Osborne was one of the first stars who agreed to be in the film.
Allan: We had asked her seven years before, when we had a different deal on the table, and she said yes, and she was hot as hell then--she was right in the middle of her tour for "What If God Was One of Us". So she had a lot of heart to agree to do the movie back then.
Writing The Book
Allan: I started a series of guitar books in the early '80s called "Dr. Licks". I would transcribe note for note what Eddie Van Halen, or whoever the guitarist was, played.
My ads were all over the place in "Guitar Player" magazine. And then I got picked up by Hal Leonard, who's a big publisher, and they were issued by Hal Leonard for years.
And then I wrote a book called The Art of Playing Rhythm and Blues, and it was kind of a survey of different '60s R&B styles. So I got to the Motown chapter, and as I was transcribing it, I thought, "Jesus Christ, listen to these bass lines!"
As a kid, I just took that stuff for granted. Everybody was so enamored of the Temps and Stevie and everything, and like everybody else, I never thought of the musicians. I thought of the guitar licks, but I never knew it was the same guys playing on every record. To me it could have been the Temps' road band, or whoever.
Article comments
1 - Philip Walker
I read that Allan slutsky was writing a biography of Junior Walker - is this true.
Please let me know
Regards
2 - Mac Diva
Barry Gordy did work on a car assembly line in Detroit briefly. It was sometime between his prize fighting career and when he penned his first hit for good friend Jackie Wilson.
I think the Motown assembly line myth is somewhat cliched. There is too much variation in how Motown acts sound for it to be really true. Phil Spector's wall of sound is more formulaic. As was Philadelphia International Records' sound later. What Gordy did was organize. He made acts fit a fairly rigid schedule of recording and performing. Some of the best, such as Stevie Wonder and Marvin Gaye, rebelled. They were not suited to regimentation.
The last word I had on the Funk Brothers was that they have fallen out with their 'discoverers,' i.e., the men who brought them out of obscurity. Litigation was in progress.