History of Rock 'n' Roll in Ten Songs (15 page)

In 1961, John Hammond asked him to write the liner notes for the reissue of his 1930s recordings. He began with these ineffably Keatsian lines: “Robert Johnson is little, very little more than a name on aging index cards and a few dusty master records in the file of a phonograph company that no longer exists.” He signed them “R. W. E.”—for Ralph Waldo Ellison.
Invisible Man
—what could be more right than to disappear back into music he’d made so long before, into records he never talked about? “Look in your
phone book,” he’d say on those rare occasions when someone asked if that was him. “There’s a lot of Robert Johnsons.” But for the reissue, he demanded copyrights, which in the thirties nobody bothered with for race artists. Hammond, channeling the voice of his days as a pseudonymous New Masses jazz critic—the John Hammond who, as it happened, wrote under the name Henry Johnson, the John Hammond who wrote that compared to Robert Johnson, Lead Belly sounded “like an accomplished poseur”—said he was sorry, but it was the system:
The same system that kept your people in bondage after Reconstruction, and keeps them in bondage today!
But the old record man was there too. Hammond didn’t mention that he would still collect producer’s royalties. By this time, Johnson had long since learned that when you wanted something you couldn’t have, you needed the right lawyer. He went to see Clive Davis, just hired as a twenty-eight-year-old assistant counsel for Columbia. Davis agreed to make it happen—for a 25 percent silent-partner share.

Without the legend of a young man selling his soul to the devil, Johnson’s old music didn’t become a cult, merely a musician’s talisman: Bob Dylan’s “The stabbing sounds from his guitar could almost break a window” was a common reaction. In 1969, as the blues historian Peter Gural-nick once imagined, Johnson watched the Rolling Stones play “Love in Vain” on the
Ed Sullivan Show
—though not,
as Guralnick also imagined, “on a TV he still owed payments on.” He knew how much he was going to make off the song, for the rest of his life.

In 1931, scorned by the Clarksdale adepts, he’d spent a year with the older guitarist Ike Zimmerman near his birthplace in Hazelhurst. After long nights learning from Zimmerman as the two men sat on tombstones (in a cemetery owned by white people, Zimmerman’s daughter Loretha K. Smith would say with glee more than eighty years later), Johnson made his return. Now it was Son House, Willie Brown, even Charley Patton who tried to watch his fingers, tried to understand how he did what he did; that was why Johnson turned his back, so no one could see. “They named my daddy the
devil,
because they felt like no human being could teach a person to play the guitar like that,” Smith said. “But my dad, he wasn’t the devil. He was a good man.” After the war, Zimmerman moved to Compton, California, and opened his own Pentecostal church. In the 1960s he and Johnson joined hands once again. Johnson wasn’t a believer, but he loved the fellowship. Among the friends he made were the Jacksons, the Youngs, and the Wrights— and, years later, long after Zimmerman’s death in 1967, when Johnson was in his seventies and comfortably retired, O’Shea Jackson, Andre Young, and Eric Wright, remembering the family friend, the record man, sought him out, took him to swap meets and played him tapes, which is why, in
1988, when the boys were calling themselves Ice Cube and Dr. Dre and Easy-E, it was Johnson’s name, one last producer’s credit, that appeared on the back of N.W.A’s
Straight Outta Compton.

In the first years of the twenty-first century, people began to connect Mr. Johnson, the very old, very well-dressed man they’d see strolling the streets of Greenwich Village, sometimes stopping in at Evergreen Video on Carmine Street for
Homicide
sets (
That Andre Braugher,
he’d muse, thinking of women he met when he visited his half-sister in Baltimore,
sometimes he looks just like me
), the man who lived in a duplex on Washington Place and Sixth Avenue, right over the Radio Shack, with the Robert Johnson of those old index cards. Scholars sought him out. Books were published. He was interviewed on
Fresh Air,
and listened as hundreds of people recorded his songs. Thank God for Clive Davis.

He read some of what was written about him, but nothing really rang a bell until he picked up a copy of Bob Dylan’s
Chronicles
from a used-books table up the block from his apartment. “I thought about him a lot, wondered who his audience could have been,” Dylan wrote of the obsession that bloomed when he first heard
King of the Delta Blues Singers.
“It’s hard to imagine sharecroppers or plantation field hands at hop joints, relating to songs like these.” Johnson almost spit, thinking of the night in 1936 when a
roomful of people broke into tears as he played “Come on in My Kitchen,” but then he read the next line: “You have to wonder if Johnson was playing for an audience only he could see, one off in the future.” Yes, he said out loud, thinking of the Dylan song he’d heard in a Victoria’s Secret commercial. “Love Sick,” that was it: “I’m walking”—that first line from the old Fats Domino hit, Johnson remembered—“through streets that are dead.” That wasn’t in Fats Domino. An audience far off in the future, he repeated to himself as he closed the book, and you were it.

On 21 February 2012, in his 101st year, he attended “Red, White and Blues” at the White House, and heard the president of the United States sing the last chorus of “Sweet Home Chicago.” Six days later he saw the entire show— B. B. King, Buddy Guy, Susan Tedeschi, Warren Haynes, Jeff Beck, Booker T. Jones, and Mick Jagger (
he looks older than I do,
he thought)—broadcast on PBS. He called the White House to inquire about the royalty arrangements; finally he was put through to Jack Lew, President Obama’s chief of staff. Lew was stunned. “Mr. Johnson,” he said, “no one gets paid for playing for the president!” “Well, I don’t know about that, son,” Johnson said, “but there’s one thing I do know. As the great Colonel Parker once said about his boy Elvis Presley, nobody asks Robert Johnson to play for nothing.”

Money (That’s What I Want)

1959 • 1963

Money Changes Everything

1978•1983•2008•2005

All rock ’n’ roll songs about money, from the Drifters’ “Money Honey” to Rubella Ballet’s punk chant “Money Talks”—“In this / corrupt / society,” Zillah Minx sings, breaking each word and each idea into its own line, “the rich / pay / to be free”— and on from there flow into Barrett Strong’s “Money (That’s What I Want)” or out of it. It was Berry Gordy’s first hit on his own label; as Raynoma Gordy Singleton, his second wife and first partner in the enterprise that would become known as Motown Records, put it, with that song “we were really starting to be in the money.” That was the meaning of the song as business. As something in the air, it wrote a bigger story: “Its immediate impact,” Singleton said, “would be nothing compared to what it would do over the course of the decades to come.”

Berry Gordy was born in Detroit; by 1959, just short of thirty, after dead-end careers as a boxer and a record store owner, he was making it as a songwriter. In 1957, along with his sister Gwen Gordy and the Chess staff writer Billy Davis, he’d written Jackie Wilson’s signature “Reet Petite (The Finest Girl You Ever Want to Meet),” the first of dozens of Wilson numbers to make the national charts, and a year later co-wrote Wilson’s “Lonely Teardrops,” his first top
ten hit. With Davis and Gwen he wrote Etta James’s “All I Could Do Was Cry”—the three of them knowing, as James didn’t, that her boyfriend, Harvey Fuqua of the Moonglows, was already deep into an affair with Gwen. The two were married the year after the record came out; when James said the song had played her for a fool, that was what she meant.

In Detroit, Berry’s sister Anna already had her own label, Anna Records; Gordy and the then Raynoma May-berry started Tamla. They named it for Debbie Reynolds’s “Tammy”: “We all really liked Debbie and that song,” Raynoma Singleton wrote in 1990 in
Berry, Me, and Motown,
which some, aware of how quickly Berry Gordy’s second wife became his second ex-wife and of how completely she was written out of the Motown story, translated as “Bury Me in Motown.”

Late in 1959, Berry and Singleton watched as black, cutout cursive letters spelling “Hitsville, U.S.A.” went up over the entry to a squat two-story house on West Grand Boulevard in Detroit. “Money” was the first record made there— or discovered there. As Singleton describes it, it is a rock ’n’ roll origin story: another proof that rock ’n’ roll can be born anywhere, at any time, regardless of how many times it might have been born before.

Gordy had Barrett Strong in the studio. Born in Mississippi in 1941, he was a songwriter more than a singer; with the Motown writer Norman Whitfield he would write a cornucopia
of hits, including Edwin Starr’s “War,” the Temptations’ “Just My Imagination (Running Away with Me)” and their epochal “Papa Was a Rollin’ Stone,” and “I Heard It Through the Grapevine,” a song so rich that in 1968, a year after reaching number 2 in a version by Gladys Knight and the Pips that seemed to say everything the song had to say, it was an overwhelming seven-week number 1 for Marvin Gaye. Strong would make the national charts only once under his own name, but that one time has kept him on the radio all his life.

As Singleton tells the story, Gordy was at the piano, working on a riff from Ray Charles’s “What’d I Say” as the song-writer Janie Bradford hung over his shoulder (“Her mouth was so murderous,” Singleton writes, “that it could have had her arrested”). Strong sat down and he and Berry looked for a song together. Berry got up and let Strong go. “As soon as Barrett hit the groove,” Singleton writes, “the sound vibrated up through the ceiling, right up into the room in which I was working and right into my bones. I bounded out of my seat to head downstairs.”

“What should we call it, what should we call it?” Berry was asking them.

“Money!” Janie yelled out.

“Yeah, you would say something like that,” Berry laughed.

“That’s what I want,” said caustic old Janie.

Soon they were improvising on a theme with Berry going, “Your love gives me such a thrill—”

And Janie answering, “But your love don’t pay my bills.” They kept bouncing these sassy phrases back and forth to each other.

I had now breezed into the studio, my heart doing pirouettes. Barrett had started singing too.

“Give me money,” Berry blared. “That’s what I want.”

“That’s . . . what I want,” I echoed, carving out the soon-to-be immortal background vocal. Berry turned and smiled as he heard my voice. “That’s the ticket.”

They found a second verse. Singleton went back to her office to write out chord charts and call musicians. Over the next three days, with two guitarists, the bassist James Jamerson, the drummer Benny Benjamin, and three male backing singers plus Singleton, with one of them, Brian Holland, splitting the sound with a tambourine and Singleton conducting “like a traffic cop,” with Gordy working on a three-track tape machine and Singleton losing count after forty takes, they made the record.

You can’t hear it all at once. Strong leaps out into the music. Stopping each line like a car he’s crashed into a wall—

The best things in life are free

—with a vehemence making each line simultaneously the beginning and the end of the story—

But you can give them to the birds and bees

—his voice is as harsh as the words he’s singing, as violently emptied of compassion, empathy, trust, or warmth, as defiantly, proudly nihilistic. It is steely, honed, focused like a weapon on a single object, in Kara Walker’s words “My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love”: “Give me money.” The rumble of the drums and bass could be coming from under the floor, and with such force it makes a swoosh as the instruments roll the melody over like a body.

The backing singers pull closer to each other with each line. Singleton’s scratchy voice is dominating, piercing the sound of the men around her, the four pushing, as thrillingly autonomous as they are thrillingly anonymous, as if they are listeners shouting back at the radio rather than professionals inside a studio. Their satisfied, final, “That’s what I want” sliding cynically off of the rushed, then bluntly dramatic “That’s . . . what I want” now signifies what
these
singers want, the
I
redounding directly back on the woman’s voice that for a moment has made you forget there’s anyone else on the record.

You can see the people in the room, more people crowding in, until the riot inside bursts back out the door, people linking arms, running down the middle of the street, knocking over everyone in their path. The rhythm shifts unexpectedly, the sound rising and falling, and so starkly you can feel
it all but disappearing into itself, then coming back, harder, because holding the world for ransom feels too good—until the end, when Strong breaks free of the role the song has given him, its demands really not who he is, or even what he really wants. He is someone else, more laconic, complacent, the battle already over: “All that lean green,” he smiles, as if he’s won the lottery, and the sting is gone. Go back and listen to him sing the first line and you can’t believe it’s the same person. It isn’t: the song insisted he become someone else, and for just short of two minutes out of the two minutes thirty-five seconds of the record, he did.

In so many ways—for Motown, for the affirmation of noise, for speech that most of all wanted to please and speech that most of all wanted not to lie, for moving from “The Sound of Young America,” as Gordy’s future slogan would have it, to the sound of America plain and simple—the record drew a line: before “Money,” and after.