Motown Publicist Al Abrams' New Book With Rare Photos, Letters & Clippings

 

 

As publicity director for Motown Records in the 1960s, Al Abrams stockpiled a massive collection of photos, promotional fare and internal documents as the label rose from obscurity to international success with artists such as the Supremes, Stevie Wonder and Marvin Gaye. Abrams' new book, "Hype & Soul," assembles hundreds of those rarely seen items for a peek behind the scenes of Motown's buzz machine. Here's an exclusive sampling.

Al Abrams was the first employee of Motown Records and eventually became its publicity director. / MARK CLAGUE

'Hype & Soul: Behind the Scenes at Motown'

By Al Abrams
TempleStreet Publishing 288 pages
Online ordering info: soulvation.biz or amazon.co.uk
Also available at Dearborn Music and Street

This is a familiar spot for Al Abrams.

We're talking right here, where you're looking, in the pages of this newspaper.

It was 52 years ago that an 18-year-old Abrams became the first hire for Berry Gordy Jr. and rose to become publicity director for Motown Records, charged with landing headlines for the label and its artists.

For the next eight years, Abrams was in the front seat as Motown conquered first Detroit, then America and finally the globe, a journey chronicled in his delightful new book, "Hype & Soul: Behind the Scenes at Motown" (TempleStreet Publishing).
Abrams wasn't just a PR man -- snappy, sunny and inspired by Tony Curtis' press-agent character in "Sweet Smell of Success." He was a pack rat, and his book is brimming with rare photos, press releases, letters and other well-worn documents that help reveal how Motown was packaged, presented and spun for public consumption.
"You can still see the Scotch tape marks where I had stuck them in scrapbooks. If it had my name on it, I felt compelled to take it home," he says. "I'm not going to claim I knew this would all become as big as it turned out. But I did always feel that one day this stuff may really matter."

While the glossy, full-color book makes a fun browse for casual fans, its real thrills are geared to the Motown diehards, including the healthy legion overseas.

They'll find telegrams and postcards and Abrams' hand-scrawled pitches for promotions that never came off, like a proposal for Detroit Mayor Jerome Cavanaugh to rename the city "Motown" for a day in '64, and a record deal for 17-year-old first daughter Luci Johnson that year.

There are the letters buttering up reporters, and the loads of press clippings they produced -- including what Abrams says is Motown's first-ever media mention: a 1959 Windsor Star profile of the long-forgotten singer Mike Powers.

And then there are the reams of press releases ("MARVELETTES FLY TO LONDON," "MARVIN GAYE RETURNS TO 20 GRAND") -- often pecked out by Abrams with one finger on a typewriter and rushed to a mail drop where he'd wait to ensure they were picked up.

Alongside Abrams' own anecdotes and candid snapshots of artists such as the Supremes and Stevie Wonder, it makes for a brisk and bustling jaunt through a bygone era.

"You wind up with a day-by-day chronicle of what really happened at Motown," Abrams says. "What are today's publicists going to have down the road -- a book of Twitter posts?"

In the pre-Rolling Stone era, pop-music journalism was still taking shape, often the province of teen-beat cub writers and castoff coverage, with writers and press reps inventing the standards as they went.

But in Detroit, the Motown story was more than just a hit-parade tale. It was a business and cultural phenomenon, and Abrams' go-to outlet was the Free Press, where he hobnobbed regularly with now-iconic Freep figures such as Van Sauter and Bettelou Peterson. Former editor Mort Persky, who oversaw the 1960s equivalent of the Sunday section you're reading, provides a foreword in the book, recounting the coverage of Motown acts as "Abrams shoved them into our consciousness."

The world certainly isn't short of Motown books, though many were criticized for sloppy reporting and slippery agendas. But a book of raw materials is its own fact-checker, and Abrams says he and his team -- including the English journalist Neil Rushton -- aimed to "tell the story that a lot of people had forgotten or overlooked."
Many of the documents are drawn from the hefty collection of memorabilia Abrams donated to the University of Michigan in the late '80s, when his wife finally convinced him to liberate their closet. He'd declined opportunities to sell to collectors such as the Hard Rock Cafe.

"I kept picturing this stuff in a frame with spaghetti sauce splattered on it," he says. "I realized it had value for historians, and a university archive would make it available to scholars."

Abrams, a Detroit native who today lives in Findley, Ohio, chuckles at some of the "grandiose PR ideas" he concocted during his Motown tenure -- which ended when he took up with the competing Stax Records label in 1967. He lays claim, for instance, to the famous quote attributed to Bob Dylan describing Smokey Robinson as "America's greatest living poet" -- a plug Abrams says he concocted with Dylan pal Al Aronowitz.

But he's also proud of his time at Motown, where he warmly recalls "being this young Jewish kid welcomed in like one of the Gordy family."

His efforts produced more than column inches and record sales for Detroit's biggest entertainment company, Abrams says. They also supplied powerful social fuel.

"When the Supremes got the cover of (the nationally syndicated) TV Magazine in 1965, that really jump-started things," he says. "It really opened the doors everywhere else -- 'Hey, we can put black people on a cover that will sit in people's living rooms for a week, and they won't cancel their subscriptions.'
"So we saw every magazine cover, every front-page article, not just as a breakthrough for the Supremes or the Temptations or whoever, but as a breakthrough in the civil-rights struggle."