When Warren “Pete” Moore and his high-school friend Smokey Robinson trudged out of their first record company audition, rejection rang dispiritingly in their ears.
With their teenage vocal group the Matadors, they had travelled 600 miles to New York from their home town of Detroit hoping to secure a recording contract with Brunswick Records. After three numbers they were cut short by Nat Tarnopol, a hot-shot producer and manager of Jackie Wilson, the label’s biggest star. “You’re nice-looking, cute kids,” he told them. “But you’re not ready. Come back in a year or two.”
As they reached the corridor, another figure who had sat through the audition without saying a word came running after them and introduced himself as Berry Gordy.
“He told us he liked our voices and offered to become our manager right there,” Moore recalled. “Smokey and I looked at each other and said, ‘You bet.’ ”
It was a moment that was to alter the future of popular music. Within less than two years Gordy had launched Motown Records, with Moore and Robinson’s group as his first signing. By then they had changed their name to the Miracles and their songs helped to make Motown the most successful black music label in pop history.
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While Robinson sang lead vocal in a sweet falsetto, Moore anchored the sound with his deep bass voice and arranged the vocal harmonies. A string of memorable hits such as You’ve Really Got a Hold on Me, Going to a Go-Go, The Tracks of My Tears, I Second That Emotion and The Tears of a Clown, many of them co-written by Moore and Robinson.
Their hits put the label on the map and gave Gordy the money to sign other artists. Moore co-wrote hits for his stablemates, including Ain’t That Peculiar and I’ll Be Doggone for Marvin Gaye and It’s Growing and Since I Lost My Baby for the Temptations.
The Miracles were integral to the success of Motown in other ways too and introduced Diana Ross and the Supremes to the label. “We heard them and went back to Berry and said, ‘These girls are pretty good,’ ” Moore recalled. Ronald White, another member of the Miracles, was responsible for spotting the 11-year-old Stevie Wonder and bringing him into the Motown fold.
At the height of the 1960s civil rights movement, the Miracles were the biggest-selling black male vocal group in America, but Gordy forbade his artists from writing political material. “Our songs didn’t have a social content,” Moore admitted. “Our songs were about being human beings whether you were black or white.”
However, when the group were on tour in the Deep South, they could hardly turn a blind eye to segregation. “That was a challenge,” Moore said. “We had to deal with racism and the Jim Crow laws. In those days our records were even called ‘race music’.”
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One night Moore and his colleagues refused to take the stage. “The blacks were in the balcony and the whites were downstairs, and we went to the promoter and said we wouldn’t go on,” Moore remembered. “He told us, ‘That’s the way it is,’ so we stayed in the dressing room.” Fifteen minutes later the promoter knocked on the door and said he would desegregate the audience.
By 1965 Gordy had made Robinson a vice-president of the company and the group were being billed as Smokey Robinson and the Miracles. He left for a solo career in 1972 and the group reverted to being the Miracles. Moore led the group for another six years, co-writing their 1975 No 1 disco hit Love Machine. Tired of the rigours of endless touring, he retired in 1978 and moved with his wife, Tina, and their two daughters, Monique and Monette, to Las Vegas, where he set up his own entertainment and publishing companies.
He remained close friends with Robinson throughout his life, but was hurt when the lead singer was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 1987 without the rest of the group. “It was a slap in the face,” he said. “We are the premier group of Motown. We were there before there was a Motown. We set the pace for all the other artists to come after us.”
After a long campaign, backed by Robinson, the slight was corrected when Moore and the rest of the Miracles were honoured in 2012. “Pete Moore was my brother since I was 11 years old. I’m really going to miss him,” Robinson tweeted on the news of his death.
Warren Thomas Moore was born in November 1938 in Detroit, the son of a sculptor, Odell, and a teacher, Oreatha. He met Robinson at school and together with Ronald White they formed a doo-wop group called the Five Chimes in 1955. They teamed up with Gordy two years later and, after a brief spell as the Matadors, became the Miracles.
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Gordy initially licensed their recordings to other labels, but when they weren’t paid, Robinson and Moore suggested that he should start his own record company. With cash borrowed from his family, he bought a house on Detroit’s West Grand Boulevard, built a studio in the basement and turned them into Motown’s headquarters.
With a sign on the lawn saying Hitsville USA , it was in this unassuming setting that the Miracles and the rest of Motown’s star names recorded all of their hits until the label moved to Los Angeles in 1972.
“The great thing about Motown was that there was no rivalry,” Moore said. “It really was like a family, with all the artists helping each other out on the road to success. It was a love fest.”
Warren “Pete” Moore was born on November 19, 1938. He died from complications arising from diabetes on November 19, 2017, aged 79