Motor City Recording

August 13, 2007

One of the structures that Henry Ford moved to Greenfield Village as a model of American industry was the Menlo Park laboratory of Thomas Edison. Within the laboratory is an example of his original voice recording machine. A person could speak into the horn and the voice would be recorded by a needle upon a strip of metal wound around a drum. That brief voice message could then be replayed. This voice recording machine was a novelty item at fairs.. never before had people been able to listen to their own voices.

The technology on display in this primitive machine would revolutionize music. If we were to write a history of modern American popular music, this machine might well be page one. It is the beginning of the historic shift from music noted on a page and reproduced live—always inevitably live—to music that could be played at will. The experience of music would be possible in the privacy of a teenager's bedroom or the publicness of an automobile on a city street. My history of modern American popular music would emphasize such changing social contexts of music, and those contexts were made possible by this machine.

I could not visit the Detroit area and fail to see the Motown Museum. It turns out that until the early 70s Motown occupied not a boxy building, but a string of houses set along West Grand Avenue. The house pictured above contained the studio where countless Motown songs were recorded through the 60s.. and according to our tour guide the final album to be recorded in this studio was Marvin Gaye's What's Going On (1970). That cramped recording room seemed somehow too small for the expansiveness of What's Going On.. but that is often the case with creative works: their physical origins appear disproportionate to their imaginative depth.

One other interesting point about Motown is the way the automobile industry influenced their business philosophy. Berry Gordy had worked for a while at Ford's Rouge Plant in Dearborn, Michigan, and he picked up Ford's scheme to bring in raw material and put out a finished product in one seamless and controlled work environment. Gordy ran his music business in the same way, picking up talented young people, training and refining them, giving them songs to sing, and finally turning them out as superstars ready to tour the globe. It was an assembly line. That conceptualizing of musical production worked well.. and we all have bopping around in our heads the output of this musical corporation. It became problematic when artists wanted to develop an individual voice, as was the case with Marvin Gaye and Stevie Wonder. You can imagine how Henry Ford would have responded to someone using his factory for a week to produce a different kind of car.. well that was Berry Gordy's position as his artists clamored for more freedom.

I would love to get back to Detroit..