The Motown Museum

Dec 02, 2008 10:23


If you ever find yourself in Detroit - yes, maybe a scary prospect at the best of times - put aside a couple of hours and drive out to the Motown Museum, located in the very same tiny "Hitsville USA" house where Berry Gordy Jr single-handedly kickstarted American soul music.

We visited this past weekend - as part of our last "brit weekend" with our great pals Pete & Caroline, who are sadly being shipped back to England early by Pete's ungrateful company - and it was a fabulous little excursion.


The house - apart from its special picture window and historical marker in the yard - looks quite ordinary and unimposing from the outside. Inside however, it has been sleekly transformed into a museum worthy of its importance in musical history.

A tour guide takes you through a to-die-for collection of vintage photos and album sleeves, a few costumes and other memorabilia, all telling the story of how Motown grew from (what was) an $800 loan into an influential musical powerhouse with a multi-million dollar turnover.

You get to walk through a full restoration of Berry Gordy Jr's apartment, where records were sleeved and dispatched from the kitchen table and see the original reception desk down on the ground floor.

The REAL beauty is in the home's basement however, where the original Motown Studio A has been marvelously preserved, looking JUST the same as it did between 1959 to 1971 when some of the label's biggest hits wowed the world.

Whilst a DianaRossalike entertained the other people in our tour group with a little dance off, I just stood mesmerised in thought of the songs and albums that had been recorded in this very room. Marvin Gaye's "What's Going On" and "I Heard it through the Grapevine" masterworks, The Temptations' "My Girl" and "Just my Imagination", Stevie Wonder's "My Cherie Amour", The Miracles' "Tracks of my Tears" and "Tears of a Clown", The Supremes' supreme "Where Did Our Love Go?", The Four Tops' biblical "Reach Out, I'll Be There" and the Jackson Five's hits such as "I Want you Back". The list just went on and on.

It felt similar to the frisson I felt when MK & I visited Sun Studios in 1995. But whereas Sun was 'home' to essentially one act - Elvis - Motown's Studio A represented so very much more, particularly to my own musical upbringing. I was temporarily transported back to when I was first lent "Motown Chartbusters Vol 3" in 1973 and played tracks like Jr Walker's "Road Runner" and Stevie's "For Once in my Life" over, and over, and OVER again. For someone who was then pretty much only listening to prog rock, that was no small revelation.

The Motown Museum is far from the biggest or most comprehensive music museum in the world, but it's more than worth the ten bucks entrance fee to just stand for a few moments in that basement studio imagining what went on 40 or so years previous. HUGELY recommended.
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