Recommendations of the Editorial team
October 1962: Motortown Revue – Marvin Gaye, the Supremes and Stevie Wonder on the road
The buses were old and there was no money,” recalls Mary Wilson of the Supremes, “but they were still the best years. We were like one big family.” In 1962, Motown Records had developed from a small Chicago label with just $800 in starting capital into a successful company with hits from the Contours, the Marvelettes and the Miracles. To further spread the message, Motown founder Berry Gordy Jr. invented the “Motortown Revue,” a tour package that brought the company headlines and satisfied Motown’s strict moral code by having the musicians travel the country with chaperones.
The first concert took place at the Howard Theater in Washington DC at the end of October. This was followed by appearances in 19 cities, 15 of which were in the strictly racially segregated South, as well as ten evenings in the “Apollo Theater” in Harlem. In addition to the Miracles, the Marvelettes and Mary Wells, the program also included the Supremes, Martha Reeves and the Vandellas, the Contours, Marvin Gaye and, as he was called at the time, Little Stevie Wonder, “the twelve-year-old genius”…
The reviews were good, the pay was bad. The Supremes earned $290 a week. Like everyone else, they played a tightly choreographed ten to 20 minute set. The Miracles, who had just topped the R&B charts with their second number one hit, “You’ve Really Got A Hold On Me,” came last. The competition between the groups was enormous. “We were called the No-Hit Supremes,” Wilson says.
“The women screamed right in your face.”
“We had to stand in front of the audience, sing our two songs and hope neither of us fell over.” (The Supremes didn’t score their first real hit until 1964 with “Where Did Our Love Go?”) Tour manager Thomas “Beans” Bowles always had Stevie Wonder perform before Marvin Gaye. “Stevie was a bundle of energy and had the audience under control straight away. Marvin had to give it his all afterwards, otherwise he would have failed.” Luckily for him, Gaye almost always managed that. “People were almost sitting on your lap,” he later reported. “The women screamed right in your face. I was completely full of pants.”
In the South, where the Confederate flag flew outside many venues and blacks and whites sat separately, the troops endured constant humiliation. “It was pretty disheartening for us black people to see other black people standing up in the stands behind the railing,” says Katherine Anderson Schaffner of the Marvelettes. “You’re trying to put on a good show, but the whole time your heart is pounding because you don’t know if something’s going to happen.” Motown attracted both black and white listeners, and so their music was also a music of change.
“When we got to Orlando, it was hot and stuffy,” Wilson says. “So we ran straight to the motel pool. But when we jumped in, the white people left the pool together. Then someone started playing records and we sang along. When they realized who we were, the white people slowly moved closer again – and in the end everyone celebrated together.”
