By 10:00 that evening, every light in the Motown offices on Sunset Boulevard was off, except one. Berry Gordy sat in his office on the top floor and did not turn the light off. He had received the news 3 hours earlier. The Jacksons had signed with Epic Records. Five years of negotiation, counter proposal, and silence had ended with a signature on a contract that Berry had not signed and could not undo.
Michael was gone. Berry stayed in that office until after midnight. His assistant arrived the next morning to find the ashtray on his desk full to the edge. Berry Gordy did not smoke. Berry Gordy had built Motown Records from $800 borrowed from his family’s savings in 1959. He had built it on a specific insight that the music being made by black artists in Detroit, the gospel inflicted rhythm and blues of the city’s churches and clubs and living rooms, was music that the entire world would want to hear if it was recorded and produced correctly. Not watered down for a white audience. Not roughed up for a black one. Produced with the specific craft of someone who understood that a great song, played and sung by the right people and recorded by someone who knew
what they were doing, belonged to everyone. He had built a sound. He had built a system. The in-house songwriting teams, the artist development program, the choreography and etiquette coaching, the quality control meetings where every track had to pass a listening panel before it could be released. He had built an infrastructure for black excellence at a scale that had not previously existed in the American music industry.
And he had done it in a city and an era that did not make any of it easy. The Jackson 5 had arrived at Motown in 1969. Berry had heard them and understood immediately. He had put them in the system he had built and the system had worked as it was designed to work. I Want You Back, ABC, The Love You Save.
Four number one singles in 12 months. A family group from Gary, Indiana becoming the defining Motown act of the early 1970s. And at the center of it, the youngest performing member, Michael. 11 years old. A voice and a presence that Berry had recognized immediately as something the industry did not yet have a category for.
What Michael represented to Berry Gordy was not simply a commercial asset, though the commercial dimension was real and Berry understood it clearly. Berry had built Motown on talent, on the specific recognition that what the industry called talent was more accurately called a particular combination of gift and work, of natural capacity and developed craft, of the ability to move people emotionally in ways they had not anticipated and could not explain afterward.
He had found this combination in many of his artists. He had built careers around it. He had built an industry around it. In Michael, he had found something that exceeded even that framework. Not just talent in the Motown sense, not just the ability to perform and record at the highest level. Something more specific.
The quality of an artist who would continue to develop past the point where other artists stopped developing. Who would use each success as a floor rather than a ceiling. Who understood at an age when most performers were still learning the basics of their craft that the work was never finished. Berry had not seen this very often in 40 years of watching performers.
The contract negotiations with the Jacksons had begun in earnest in 1973. The family, primarily Joseph Jackson, managing his sons’ careers with the specific determination of a man who understood the value of what he had and was equally determined that the industry would not have it on the industry’s terms.
had been seeking greater creative control, higher royalty rates, and the ability to produce their own material. These were not unreasonable requests. They were the requests that any artist with the Jacksons’ commercial track record would eventually make. Berry had offered. He had negotiated. He had reached a point in the summer of 1975 where he understood that the offers he was able to make and the terms the Jacksons were seeking had stopped moving toward each other.
He had understood what that meant. He had not been ready for the moment it became final. The formal announcement that the Jacksons had signed with Epic Records was made in June of 1975. It was not a surprise to Berry by that point. The negotiations had been ongoing for 2 years and had reached a place months earlier where their trajectory was clear.
But the formal confirmation, the public announcement, the press release from Epic, the statements from the family, carried a specific finality that the preceding months of unresolved negotiation had not carried. It was done. The signature was on the paper. The relationship that had begun in 1969, when Berry had heard a family of young men from Gary, Indiana, and understood immediately what he was listening to, was over.
Jermaine Jackson, who had married Berry’s daughter Hazel in 1973, did not make the move to Epic. He remained with Motown, honoring what he understood as both a personal and a professional obligation. The rest of the family, Jackie, Tito, Marlon, and Randy, who had replaced Jermaine in the group, signed with Epic.
Michael signed with Epic. The news reached Berry on a Tuesday evening in September of 1975 through his assistant, who had received a call from a business contact. Berry was in his office when his assistant knocked. His assistant stood in the doorway and said the confirmation had come through. Berry said, “Close the door on your way out.
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” His assistant closed the door. From the outside, the light in the office stayed on. No phone calls went out. No one was summoned. The building emptied around the single lit room, the staff going home, the corridors going dark, until by 10:00 there was nothing left on that floor except the light coming under Berry Gordy’s closed door.
What Berry Gordy did in that office between 7:00 in the evening and after midnight on a Tuesday in September of 1975 has never been fully accounted for. He did not call his attorneys. He did not begin drafting a response. He did not reach out to industry contacts or press. His phone records from that evening show no outgoing calls.
His secretary, who arrived at 7:30 the following morning, found the office in the specific order of a room that had been occupied for a long time by a person who had not done any of the things offices are for. No documents moved. No notes written. Nothing drafted or discarded. The only evidence of the long evening in the room was the ashtray on the corner of his desk, filled to the edge.
Berry Gordy did not smoke. He had never smoked. He did not keep ashtrays in his office for his own use. The ashtray was there for guests. His secretary noted it because it was anomalous. She noted it and then moved on to the morning’s business and did not mention it until years later in a conversation with someone writing about Motown’s history.
She said, “I don’t know what was in that ashtray or how it got there, but something had been burning in that office all night.” Berry arrived at 8:15 that morning. He was dressed, composed, and specific about the day’s work from the moment he sat down. He did not reference the previous evening. He did not comment on what had been confirmed.
He had a full schedule of meetings and he attended all of them. The people who worked with him closely that day have said, in the way that people describe something they noticed but did not fully understand that he was present and competent and entirely correct in everything he did. But something had changed in the quality of his attention.
Something behind his eyes. They could not say exactly what it was. Only that it was different from the day before. In the years that followed, Berry Gordy built Motown forward. He signed new artists, developed new talent, navigated the industry’s shifting landscape with the adaptability that had built the label in the first place.
Motown continued. It did not collapse from the Jacksons’ departure. The catalog was there. The infrastructure was there. The knowledge of how to find and develop exceptional talent was there. Michael Jackson’s career in the years after Motown became something that had no precedent. Off the Wall, Thriller, the transformation of a gifted young performer into the most famous entertainer on Earth.
Berry watched all of it from a particular vantage point. The vantage point of a man who had found him at 11, had put the machinery of Motown behind him, had understood what was there before most of the world had any idea. He has spoken about Michael in many contexts across the decades. In most of those contexts, he has been careful.
The careful speech of a man who understands that what he says about Michael Jackson will be scrutinized and who has decided at some point that careful is better than candid. But in a small number of interviews, in moments when the question has been asked in a specific way, something more direct has come through.
In one interview, a journalist asked Berry whether he regretted not finding a way to keep Michael at Motown. Berry was quiet for a moment. Then he said, “I didn’t lose Michael Jackson. I helped make Michael Jackson. And everything he became, he became using things I taught him and things I built.” He paused.
Then he said, “But yes. Just that. Yes.” Jermaine Jackson remained at Motown after his brothers left. He had a career there that produced singles and albums across the late 1970s and early 1980s. He and Berry maintained a relationship that was personal as well as professional, structured around the marriage to Hazel and around the genuine connection that had formed between two people who had been in each other’s lives for years.
But the specific thing that Jermaine’s presence at Motown could not replace was what had left with Michael. Berry has talked about this obliquely in the way that people talk about absences by describing what was there when it was there, which is also a way of describing what was not there afterward.
He said once in a conversation with a journalist that working with Michael was the specific experience of watching someone become everything they were going to be in real time, watching it happen before it was complete, having the specific privilege of proximity to a process that you understood was going to produce something extraordinary.
He said, “You don’t get that twice.” He said, “With most people, you see the talent and you work with it and something is made. With Michael, with Michael, you weren’t working with the talent. You were watching it become itself.” He stopped there. The journalist asked, “Do you think he knew how good he was?” Berry thought for a moment.
He said, “He knew he had work to do. That’s not the same thing as knowing how good you are. In some ways, it’s better. Michael Jackson died on June 25th, 2009. Berry Gordy was among the people who spoke publicly in the hours and days that followed. His statement was brief and formal, the statement of a man who has lived long enough in public life to know what public statements are for and what they cannot do.
In private, according to the people around him, he was quiet for several days. Not visibly devastated in the way the public was devastated, not the open grief of someone surprised by a loss, the specific quiet of someone for whom the loss confirmed something they had known for a long time was coming and had been carrying the knowledge of and who now had nothing left to carry it toward.
At Michael’s public memorial at the Staples Center on July 7th, Berry sat in the audience with the composure he had maintained in public for 50 years of a life lived at the center of the American music industry. He watched the tributes. He watched the performances. He watched the people who had known Michael at different stages of his life come to the microphone and describe what he had meant to them.
Afterward, someone who was with him asked if he was okay. Berry said, “He was my best student, and I was the one who found him.” He said it the way you say something that is both a source of pride and a source of grief simultaneously. The way those two things are often with the people who matter most to us, impossible to separate from each other.
Subscribe if this story stayed with you. Leave a comment. Do you think Berry Gordy ever stopped thinking about that night in September of 1975? Share this with someone who understands what it costs to build something and then let it go.
