Berry Gordy Quotes

There aren’t enough people who care about the future. They are too busy worrying about today and what they can grab now

I was in charge, but I made logic the boss.

Your lovin' gives me a thrill But your lovin' don't pay my bills I need money — That's what I want.

The family piano’s role in the music that flowed out of the residential streets of Detroit cannot be overstated. The piano, and its availability to children of the black working class and middle class, is essential to understanding what happened in that time and place, and why it happened, not just with Berry Gordy Jr. but with so many other young black musicians who came of age there from the late forties to the early sixties. What was special then about pianos and Detroit? First, because of the auto plants and related industries, most Detroiters had steady salaries and families enjoyed a measure of disposable income they could use to listen to music in clubs and at home. Second, the economic geography of the city meant that the vast majority of residents lived in single-family houses, not high-rise apartments, making it easier to deliver pianos and find room for them. And third, Detroit had the egalitarian advantage of a remarkable piano enterprise, the Grinnell Brothers Music House.

Once I got to talk to music legend Berry Gordy. We were at a party celebrating the anniversary of Motown, and soon after I met him, we got to talking about what it takes to succeed. “Man, I failed at everything in life until I was thirty-three,” he said. “I failed at every single thing, man. Hundreds of things—magazines, a bunch of other projects, too. It took me all those times of failing to make something actually work for me.