The Lost Supreme: The Life of Dreamgirl Florence Ballard by Peter Benjaminson Page A

that was released to them), you have to multiply a number that was probably less than one million by the low amounts per record—always less than a cent—awarded the Supremes in their contracts, then subtract their tremendous expenses, and so forth. This doesn’t mean that the Supremes who lived long enough and continued to have access to royalties from the following forty-plus years of use of Supreme tunes by private corporations, commercials, Hollywood, Muzak, and so on, didn’t eventually become well-off, if not exactly rich.
    At the time, however, as far as Motown was concerned, once a Motown song was recorded and earned its first round of income, although it stayed in the company’s catalog and was available for sale, it was forgotten. (This attitude extended to photographs of Motown artists, as well. When Motown later left Detroit for Los Angeles, in 1972, it left behind thousands of these photographs.
    Motown executives believed that the janitors or the new tenants would eventually throw them out, but many of these pictures were liberated by “thieves,”
    “vandals,” “collectors,” “scholars,” “preservationists,” “businesspeople,” or “dedicated musicologists,” depending on your point of view.) The major problem with the contract the Supremes signed (and with many other record contracts) is that the artists were being charged for expenses over which they had little or no control. Gordy often insisted on very long 30
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    in-studio recording sessions to get the sound of a Supremes record just right.
    To be sure, he probably improved the quality of the record by doing so, and that likely improved sales of the record; but all the expenses, including the fee for the studio musicians, were charged to the artists, not to Gordy or Motown.
    In defending these contracts, Berry Gordy has put forward several argu-ments that hold some water: No other record companies developed its artists through an in-house training program to the extent that Motown did. Few record companies kept their artists under contract if they didn’t make hits year after year. And few if any other record companies would have kept producing records for a group, like the Supremes, that didn’t hit pay dirt until their umpteenth record. Gordy’s supporters have also argued that Motown’s contracts were no worse than those of many other record companies, at least in the beginning.
    While Gordy may have been right about all of the above, the real stingers in the contract were the provisions giving Motown sole control over its artists’
    money and careers. Motown was unique in not only producing its singers’
    records but in acting as their lawyer and their agent as well. Everyone worked for Motown, including the attorneys and agents who were supposed to represent the interests of the artists, as opposed to the interests of the record company. Other recording firms allowed artists to hire their own agents and lawyers. Motown did not, at least not in its first few years of operation.
    Motown was also, by all accounts, absolutely tenacious in its efforts to keep as much of its artists’ money as it possibly could, whether it was entitled to that money or not. Katherine Anderson Schaffner of the Marvelettes said that from the time her group left Motown in 1970, until eighteen years later, in 1988, Motown paid them no royalties whatsoever. When the group sued the company, “They paid us a minimal amount,” she said, “and then we had to sue them again” because Motown still was not giving the hit-making Marvelettes everything they were entitled to, even under Motown’s stingy contracts.
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    Whatever the advantages and disadvantages, Motown and the Supremes were now committed partners. And as if by prearrangement, the second record issued under the group’s new name began to get some airplay. But only the side on which Flo sang the lead, “Buttered Popcorn,” received substantial