When the entrepreneur Berry Gordy launched Motown Records, he knew he had a hugely talented stable of black artists; he also knew it would be an uphill task to sell them to a white-dominated mainstream media. The civil rights struggle in America had not yet been won and racial segregation was still a daily reality. The man he hired to promote his label and artists such as Stevie Wonder, Marvin Gaye, Smokey Robinson and the Supremes was Al Abrams: a Jewish teenager of Polish extraction, who became Motown’s first full-time salaried employee.
Abrams, who had an enthusiasm for black music but no experience in promotion, turned out to be an inspired appointment. He came up with Motown’s famous slogan, “The Sound of Young America”, designed to transcend the race divide and to sell the label’s record to black and white teenagers alike. He wrote attention-grabbing press releases, ghosted columns for the label’s fledgeling stars such as Diana Ross, cajoled radio stations to play Motown records and sweet-talked journalists and editors into putting his artists on the covers of magazines that had never before carried a black face. “We saw every 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,” he said in 2011.
His skills helped to turn the Supremes into the most successful vocal group in chart history, and earned him the soubriquet “the fourth Supreme”. Their rise to the top was a testament to both his ingenuity and perseverance: the group’s first six singles failed to chart and it was not until the release of Where Did Our Love Go, released in 1964, that Abrams’s relentless promotion finally secured their first No 1.
He landed the job on a wager, after lobbying Gordy at his Detroit home in 1959. Struggling to get Motown up and running, Gordy at the time was putting out vanity records by anyone who would pay him $100 to do so. “I probably pressed a little harder than I should to get hired,” Abrams recalled. “He wasn’t interested and wanted to blow me off, so he gave me an awful record and told me, if I could get it played on the radio, he’d give me a job.” Gordy kept his word.
The racial discrimination Abrams encountered in his attempts to promote black artists was rife. On one occasion, the features editor of the Detroit News took him aside and asked, “What’s a nice Jewish boy like you doing working for a bunch of n*****s like them? Shouldn’t it be the other way round?” Abrams, who had been anticipating such a question, replied, “Let me tell you the truth. You know how these black people like to play dice? Well, I really started Motown Records, and one night I got into a craps game with Berry Gordy, and I lost the whole thing. But they let me stay on and do the publicity.” The editor fell for the story and pledged the paper would do anything it could to help.
Advertisement
Yet, if he sometimes used his white skin to get publicity for his black artists, he also stood shoulder to shoulder with them in solidarity. While on tour with Smokey Robinson and the Miracles in the early 1960s, Abrams found that he had been booked into a whites-only hotel while the musicians were lodged in a cheaper black boarding house. When he invited Robinson back to the hotel, he received a knock on his door from the manager, who demanded to know if he had a “coloured person” in his room. Abrams replied no, it was Smokey Robinson. Both men were thrown out and Abrams joined the musicians in the boarding house. “I never stayed in a white hotel again,” he said.
Abrams was known to indulge in the dark arts of the trade. “I would take 20 bucks and buy some quality booze, go out to a radio station, walk into the studio and give the disc jockey the bottle and put the record on his turntable,” he recalled. “He’d take the bottle and play the record. That’s the way it was.” Top radio presenters demanded a higher price. In late 1959, Abrams paid the DJ Alan Freed $100 to play Money by the Motown artist Barrett Strong. The practice of accepting cash to play records was made illegal the next year.
On another occasion, he started a rumour that Bob Dylan had described Smokey Robinson as “America’s greatest living poet”, a comment that has since been reported as fact in hundreds of books and articles about Dylan. “I made that up, but it’s been around so much that, if you asked Dylan, even he now thinks he said it,” Abrams admitted, 40 years after the event, in a 2005 interview.
Born in Detroit, Michigan, in 1941, Al Abrams left school at 15 and wrote a gossip column for the Detroit Tribune, a local black newspaper where he was “the only white face around the office”.
He left Motown in 1967 to start his own public relations firm, where his clients included Stax Records, James Brown and the hit-writing team Holland-Dozier-Holland. Abrams later became a freelance journalist and author, writing books about subjects as disparate as Motown and the Holocaust.
Advertisement
He is survived by a daughter, Alannah, and his wife Nancy, who said that, as an ever-diligent publicist, he spent his final days arranging the details of his obituary. “The minute he heard his cancer was inoperable, he was making lists for me,” she said. “You need to say this, do this, here are some contacts, here are some photos. And I want them to mention my cats,” he said, referring to Misty, Sir Lancelot and Chatul.
Al Abrams, publicist, was born on February 19, 1941. He died on October 3, 2015, aged 74