Standing in the Shadows of Motown   

Directed by Paul Justman

Written and narrated by Walter Dallas and Ntozake Shange

From the book “Standing in the Shadows of Motown” by Alan Slutsky

Rated PG for language and thematic elements.

116 minutes runtime

OK, oldies addicts, put on your seat belts for this one.  You are about to see musicians you have heard more than any others, and you don’t even know their names.  These are the guys who were the house musicians at Motown and backed up every Motown vocal performer from Diana Ross to Marvin Gaye.  They played on more records than the Beach Boys, the Rolling Stones, the Beatles and Elvis combined, yet their names were not mentioned on a single record until Marvin Gaye's “What's Going On” album in 1970.  They are the great Funk Brothers.

The movie starts in Detroit in 1959.  Whites everywhere are listening to black music, only it’s black music turned white by the likes of Elvis, Ricky Nelson, the Big Bopper and Jerry Lee Lewis.  Black music needed its own label to sell the music of the great black musicians of the time.  Enter Barry Gordy, the legendary man with the idea.  The son of a plastering contractor, Gordy was a boxer when he tried his hand at songwriting.  He wrote a song or two, but his real gift was in seeing the power behind the first black recording label.  He started Tammy records in his house in Detroit in 1960, posted a huge sign over the front door that read “Hitsville, USA,” and the label eventually became Motown.

In the course of opening his recording studio, Barry prowled the streets of Detroit in search of musicians he could use to back up the recording sessions featuring his future stars.  Detroit was booming with the auto industry at the time and blacks were streaming north to take good paying jobs on the assembly lines.  Musicians, especially black musicians, lived a tough life in those days.  They worked for little or nothing, were shunned by many of the white clubs and often fell victim to drugs, alcohol or lead poisoning (.44 caliber).

It didn’t take long to attract a dozen skilled blues and jazz musicians with the promise of steady work.  The pay was minimal and the glory was non-existent, but they got paid without having to show a gun, they could play other gigs as they liked and they could play their music the way they wanted to play it.  Between 1959 and 1971 this group forged the sweet soul of the Motown sound and became the nuclear rhythm section of the hottest pop music in America.  They called themselves the Funk Brothers.

At the same time Gordy was hiring his back-up group he was forming, nurturing and recording the Supremes, Temptations, Smokie Robinson, Stevie Wonder, the Four Tops, Martha and the Vandellas and others.  These were the glamorous, sexy headliners that everybody wanted to be.  They dressed right, they looked right and they moved right.

But the Motown sound was the Funk Brothers from start to finish.  They not only laid down the gut-bucket base, the rocking piano and the hopping percussion, they composed and arranged those rhythms on the spot, often playing smash hit arrangements for the first time during the recording session.  They had to get it right the first time and the pressure was intense.  At it’s peak in 1966, an earthshaking 75% of the songs recorded at Motown made it onto the national charts.  The Brothers were reportedly paid about $10 a song.

“Shadows of Motown” is packed with interviews of many of the Funk Brothers and archive footage of the group during recording sessions in Studio A (affectionately referred to as the “Snake Pit”) at Hitsville USA.  When Gordy first opened the sake pit the walls were cinder-block covered with carpet, the master recording board had only three channels and the floor was dirt except for a piece of plywood under the piano.  He had to move his car out to make room for the equipment.

As Motown and Gordy became wildly successful, the Brothers were virtually locked in the snake pit, often recording seven days a week.  Spies were hired (usually unsuccessfully) to ferret out Motown musicians who were recording for other labels on the sly.  In one hilarious sequence the exhausted men hide out in a funeral home to get some space as the undertaker fends off Motown operatives trying to get on with the show.

But things changed during the 1960s.  The Beatles and the Stones were topping the charts with their own versions of Motown hits.  Psychedelic was in and soul was out.  America was entering into a new era of rock and roll and traditional funk was receding in the wake of the “wa-wa” pedal.  As the Funk Brothers put it, they went to work one morning in 1971 and the sign on the door of Hitsville USA told the world that Motown had moved to La-La land, and that was all she wrote.

The group drifted apart in obscurity until they were reunited by writer Slutsky, director Justman and co-producer Sandy Passman who shot this film in Detroit over six weeks in the winter of 2000.  The film revolves around a series of concerts and practices performed by the remaining Funk Brothers backing up the vocals of Montell Jordan, Chaka Khan and Me'Shell NdegéOcello and includes a scorching rendition of “Heat Wave” by Joan Osborne.  It also includes great archive footage of Sly, the Beatles, the Stones and many black pop music legends.

“Shadows” is the best musical documentary to hit the big screen since the brilliant and touching Wim Wenders classic, “Buena Vista Social Club” (1999) about a group of Cuban musicians reunited by Ry Cooder to record a CD.  The CD went on to be a Grammy winner in 1997 and the movie followed.  If you like great stories about great musicians, see this video.  The DVD is available for rent at Hastings and the tape at Blockbuster, or you can buy the tape at Amazon.com.

The only other movie that comes close is “A Great Day in Harlem” (1994), a documentary that started with a group photograph of America’s great jazz musicians for an Esquire magazine article in 1958.  35 years later many of the surviving musicians, including Dizzy Gillespie, Sonny Rollins, Buck Clayton and Art Blakey were interviewed about that day.  Their interviews are accompanied by live footage of the event and narrated by none less than Quincy Jones.  The tape is available if you search, but if collecting this genre is your sort of thing, you better move fast on this one.

“Standing in the Shadows of Motown” is a sweet film about rock and roll’s blue collar workers who still make your car radio sing with delight on the way to work in the morning.  You’ll be sorry if you miss it.