基本信息·出版社：Random House Trade Paperbacks ·页码：384 页 ·出版日期：2005年10月 ·ISBN：0812974689 ·International Standard Book Number： ...
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Motown: Music, Money, Sex, and Power |
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Motown: Music, Money, Sex, and Power |
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基本信息·出版社：Random House Trade Paperbacks
·页码：384 页
·出版日期：2005年10月
·ISBN：0812974689
·International Standard Book Number：0812974689
·条形码：9780812974683
·EAN：9780812974683
·装帧：平装
·正文语种：英语
·外文书名：情迷地特律
内容简介 In 1959, twenty-nine-year-old Berry Gordy, who had already given up on his dream to be a champion boxer, borrowed eight hundred dollars from his family and started a record company. A run-down bungalow sandwiched between a funeral home and a beauty shop in a poor Detroit neighborhood served as his headquarters. The building’s entrance was adorned with a large sign that improbably boasted “Hitsville U.S.A.” The kitchen served as the control room, the garage became the two-track studio, the living room was reserved for bookkeeping, and sales were handled in the dining room. Soon word spread that any youngster with a streak of talent should visit the only record label that Detroit had seen in years. The company’s name was Motown.
Motown cuts through decades of unsubstantiated rumors and speculation to tell the true behind-the-scenes narrative of America’s most exciting musical dynasty. It follows the company and its amazing roster of stars from the tumultuous growth years in Detroit, to the drama and intrigue of Hollywood in the 1970s, to resurgence in 2002.
Set against the civil rights movement, the decay of America’s northern industrial cities, and the social upheaval of the 1960s, Motown is a tale of the incredible entrepreneurship of Berry Gordy. But it also features the moving stories of kids from Detroit’s inner-city projects who achieved remarkable success and then, in many cases, found themselves fighting the demons that so often come with stardom—drugs, jealousy, sexual indulgence, greed, and uncontrollable ambition.
Motown features an extraordinary cast of characters, including Diana Ross, Michael Jackson, Marvin Gaye, Smokey Robinson, and Stevie Wonder. They are presented as they lived and worked: a clan of friends, lovers, competitors, and sometimes vicious foes. Motown reveals how the hopes and dreams of each affected the lives of the others and illustrates why this singular story is a made-in-America Greek tragedy, the rise and fall of a supremely talented yet completely dysfunctional extended family.
Based on numerous original interviews and extensive documentation, Motown benefits particularly from the thousands of pages of files crammed into the basement of downtown Detroit’s Wayne County Courthouse. Those court records provide the unofficial—and hitherto largely untold—history of Motown and its stars, since almost every relationship between departing singers, songwriters, producers, and the label ended up in litigation.
From its peaks in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when Motown controlled the pop charts and its stars were sought after even by the Beatles, through the inexorable slide caused by their failure to handle their stardom, Motown is a riveting and troubling look inside a music label that provided the unofficial soundtrack to an entire generation.
From the Hardcover edition. 作者简介 Gerald Posner, a former Wall Street lawyer, is an award-winning author of seven books on subjects ranging from Nazi war criminals, to assassinations, to the lives and careers of politicians. A regular investigative contributor to NBC’s Today show and panelist on the History Channel’s HistoryCENTER, he lives in Manhattan and Miami with his wife, author Trisha Posner. More information is available at www.posner.com.
From the Hardcover edition. 编辑推荐 The book that answers the questions about the Motown nobody knows . . .
• Is there any truth to the rumor that the Mafia grabbed control of Motown after Berry Gordy ran afoul of violent loan sharks?
• Which Motown diva was almost run down by a station wagon after a blowout with a rival?
• How did Hollywood and the film industry sink Motown’s film business after the tremendous promise of Lady Sings the Blues?
• What famous star hid from Gordy that he was the father of her first child?
• What was the secret scheme one former executive says the company developed to steal millions of dollars in “suitcases of cash” from artists and songwriters?
• Which Motown star had a violent fight with Gordy on the day JFK was assassinated?
• Was the death of the Temptations’ Paul Williams by a single gunshot a suicide, as ruled by coroners, or a murder to silence him, as suspected by some colleagues?
From the Hardcover edition. 文摘 Chapter 1
Detroit Dreaming
Berry Gordy Jr. was the seventh of eight children, born in Detroit on Thanksgiving Day, November 28, 1929, just at the onset of the Great Depression. His father was the son of freed Georgia slaves who had become sharecroppers of a 168-acre patch of barren farmland that had yielded barely enough to keep the family going. Twenty-three children were born there, but fourteen died at or shortly after birth. Those who survived were tough. The mulatto Berry Gordy Sr.—his own father was the child of a slave and her white plantation owner—was a short, wiry man who did not get to high school until he was twenty-two because his family could not spare him from the backbreaking farming.
Berry Gordy Sr. was thirty—mature by local standards—when he married Bertha, a short, cute nineteen-year-old schoolteacher of African and Indian descent. In 1922, three years into their marriage, Gordy made a deal that changed their lives—he sold a load of the farm’s timber stumps for $2,600, a small fortune in rural Georgia. As word of the sale spread, the family worried that local whites might rob Gordy, so he traveled to Detroit, where his brother had recently moved, to cash the check. Once there, he never returned. Bertha and their three children joined him a month later.
The promise of assembly-line jobs in auto plants had lured many southerners to Detroit since the mid-1800s. The Motor City’s population boomed 1,200 percent during a fifty-year period that ended with the Great War. Ford was the first to break the racial barrier when it began hiring black workers in 1914. During the Roaring Twenties, Detroit had become America’s fifth-largest city and its second-fastest-growing. And although Jim Crow laws were still widely entrenched and the city largely segregated, to many southern blacks Detroit offered genuine possibilities for progress.
Berry Gordy Sr.’s start was not aus
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