Standing In The Shadows Of Motown

Think of the Supremes, Gladys Knight, Smokey Robinson, Marvin Gaye, Martha Reeves, Stevie Wonder and the Temptations. You hold decades of pop musical history in your mind: The Motown Sound. Now ask who the instrumentalists were on their records. Or don't even bother, because the question is asked and answered in the affectionate new documentary "Standing in the Shadows of Motown." In the movie, fans are asked, who played on the recordings with those artists? Who for example was behind Gladys Knight? "The Pips?" asks one Motown fan.

No, it wasn't the Pips, the Miracles or the Vandellas. The musicians who played behind all of the Motown stars on their studio recordings were the Funk Brothers. The Funk Brothers? Paul Justman's documentary, based on a book by Allan Slutsky, gives belated praise to Motown's house musicians, the men who played under all the Motown hits recorded in Detroit.

The hero of the Funk Brothers themselves seems to have been the late James Jamerson, the bass player who used only one finger but seemed able to keep two times at once. Their stories about him are legion. The other original Funks were drummer Benny Benjamin, pianist Joe Hunter and guitarists Eddie Willis and Joe Messina. The movie always talks with or about perhaps a dozen other musicians who played on many or most of the Motown records, but it's difficult to keep them straight--because, of course, they were not famous.

And yet the Motown Sound was, quite simply, their sound. No disrespect to the singers, but, as drummer Steve Gordon observes, "You could have had Deputy Dawg singin' on some of this stuff." The documentary argues that they played on hits that sold more records than the Beatles, Elvis, the Beach Boys and the Rolling Stones combined--but were almost anonymous.

The first Motown sides were cut in "Studio A," which was simply the garage of Berry Gordy, the label's founder. It was down four steps from his kitchen and originally had a dirt floor. Along with Sun Studios in Memphis, it was one of the birthplaces of the last half-century of American hit music. The movie returns to that location ("Hitsville, USA") for sessions in which the surviving Funk Brothers remember the good times and bad, and the very sound of the studio itself.

Sessions would last all day and into the night. A producer would come in with a song and a few chords and they'd play with it, adapting it to the house style, adding a touch here, a riff there, until it emerged as the big, bold and sometimes almost unreasonably happy Motown Sound. In one of the movie's best sequences, we see them cobbling a song together almost from scratch. Sometimes, they remember, they were so overworked they'd hide out in a nearby funeral parlor, where Gordy wouldn't think to look for them.