MAXIM LANGSTAFF

Written from Max’s Interview with Smokey Robinson

ON EARLY INFLUENCES

I grew up in a home where everything was being played. I had two older sisters, and they and my mom played every kind of music you can think of: gut bucket blues, John Lee Hooker, T-Bone Walker. They played classical music and jazz, Sarah Vaughan, Frank Sinatra, Billy Eckstine, Sammy Davis, Harry Belafonte, and Patti Page. These people were being played in my home all day long. My sisters loved the music they called bebop, and their friends would come over and they’d be dancing that jitterbug and listening to Charlie Parker and Miles Davis and Dizzy Gillespie and Count Basie.

I remember seeing films of Bessie Smith and people of that era, and what impressed me most was that there were no microphones back then. They were playing in these honky tonk joints and in these blues places and stuff like that, belting it out. And everybody in there could hear them. They had a piano player and maybe a guitarist or maybe a drummer or something, but they were just in there, belting it out. And they had these big voices that resonated throughout those places. Jackie Wilson was my number-one singing idol as a kid growing up. I always tried to write songs. I had been writing songs since I was five years old, really.

At the time, radio was very important, especially before everybody started getting televisions. Radio was like TV. We would sit around and listen to the radio like people sit and look at TV now. Especially in the black neighborhood where people just didn’t have money to buy TV sets, radio was huge.

ON R&B

The origin of all rhythm and blues music is the cotton field. Those people were out there, and they were working their butts off from dawn until dusk, picking cotton. The only entertainment that they had was to
entertain themselves. So they sang hymns. And the hymns became the blues. They sang the blues because of the strife that they were living, and how their lives were going.

The blues was born out of that strife and out of those hymns. Then, later on, the blues became rhythm and blues. And it became pop. And it even became country.

ON MOTOWN

What made Motown sound like more than just black music for a black audience was Berry Gordy. Motown was started by a guy whose first love was music. He was a songwriter and a record producer and that’s what he loved, that’s what he loved doing. And so we had an advantage with him at the
helm.

Berry Gordy had this dream, and it was dream that would make other dreams come true. He had worked on an assembly line for Chrysler, and he had started writing songs on that assembly line. So he knew
about building things, putting them together. On the very first day the company was formed, Berry Gordy said, “I’m starting this record company. We are not going to only make black music. We’re going to make music for everybody. We’re going to make music for the world. We’re going to make music with some great beats and some great stories. And we’re going to always do quality music. That’s our plan.” That’s what we set out to do, and we pulled it off.

We were like family, all of us; not just among the artists and musicians. The people behind the scenes and the corporate people were part of it, too. We even had family picnics.

Berry Gordy hired wonderful writers, musicians, producers, and artists. He told us that every song had to have a story, with a beginning, a middle, and an ending that tied everything together-just like a book or
a movie. Even the people in the manufacturing department and in the sales department and in the promotion department had special talents.

Motown was a machine. And it was a very democratic company. Berry Gordy was a brilliant man because he never got in the way of creativity. Once you created something, he would critique it, and then we all did. Even Berry’s ideas got shot down sometimes just like everyone else’s. There were no exclusive relationships. [The songwriting team| Holland-Dozier-Holland had ten number-one hits in a row with the
Supremes, but they were still open to other producers and writers. The goal was to get the best records out at any cost.

When Motown started to really become popular, people were bringing their acts from Kenya, from New York, from London, from Chicago and Los Angeles and Memphis and Nashville. They wanted that
Motown sound, and it was right there, in the air in Detroit. And that was because of Berry Gordy.

ON MODERN RECORDING

Today people still go and buy records, and that is a really great thing. I’m very excited that vinyl is coming back. And they’re selling record players again! The sound of vinyl can never be duplicated by a CD. There’s something very mechanical about the sound of a CD as opposed to vinyl. Vinyl has a warmth to it that no other way of playing music does. And the album covers were great. I would read them to see what was going on behind this music.

I often think about people like Thomas Edison and wonder what they would think if they came back and saw somebody walking around with an iPod, a little thing with about a thousand songs in it.

I don’t think that all the new technology cheapens our relationship to music, or its value. I think music is a necessity, and I don’t think it will ever not be a necessity. It is the international language.

I live a life that I absolutely love. I earn a living doing what I absolutely love. I still go to concerts and I still go into the studio to make records. And I write songs. It’s what makes me happy. It’s who I am. I have no idea what I’d be doing with my life if I wasn’t doing music.

Maxim Langstaff

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