Word: motown
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...auto industry's disaster, Detroit has been struggling with the nation's highest urban unemployment rate: 11.8%. Although its streets are decorated for Christmas, and stores, bars and restaurants are busy, an almost palpable anxiety hovers over the city and its gilded suburbs. For the moment, Motown's local economy has been saved from real damage by a system of auto-industry supplemental unemployment funds that allows most laid-off workers to continue to receive 95% of their base take-home pay; but those funds could run out within six months. Out in suburban Bloomfield Hills...
Then the Dallas Cowboys outbid Detroit for Jones, and Merritt could not come to terms with the team's owners, an unwieldy ensemble of 32 citizens, including Motown Singing Star Marvin Gaye. Instead of Merritt, the Wheels hired Dan Boisture, coach at Eastern Michigan University. The Wheels also brought in a defensive coordinator, David Brazil, who, one Wheel player reported, had coached his high school team to a 0-7 record. Worse still, the team could not use Tiger Stadium because the Lions held exclusive football rights there; the Wheels had to play in Ypsilanti, 35 miles from downtown...
Married. Mary Wilson, 30, only original member still singing with the Supremes, extraordinary exemplars of the "Motown Sound"; and Pedro Antonio Ferrer, 30, the group's Dominican-born road manager; both for the first time; in Las Vegas...
When Stevie turned 21, he rebelled against Motown. Yearning for a chance to experiment and weary of the record company's predilection for formula Top-40 hits, Wonder came to his contract-renewal sessions in 1971 demanding his own publishing company, higher royalties and the right to compose his words and music and cut his albums as he saw fit. After months of haggling, he got the total artistic freedom he wanted...
...first result was Wonder's 1972 album Music of My Mind, in which he showed complex new textures with the Moog and Arp synthesizers and a fresh repose in his love ballads. He had just married Syreeta Wright, a Motown secretary, and they collaborated on the lead song, Love Having You Around ("And when the day is through/ Nothin' to do, just sit around groovin' with you"). Alas, the groovin' lasted only 1½ years. Stevie and Syreeta are now divorced...