The Number One Jock

TOM CLAY’S THREE-WAY TIES TO MOTOWN

Once upon a time, Tom Clay wrote to me.

Admittedly, it was after the disc jockey – among the better-known personalities of rock & roll radio – played his part in several significant moments of Motown history.

The first? It was when Clay recorded a song written and produced by Berry Gordy (with the Rayber Voices) before he set up Tamla Records in 1959.

The second? When Clay was the catalyst for Gordy in 1960 to meet up-and-coming Detroit salesman Barney Ales, who soon joined the Motown founder’s young business and took charge of its sales and promotion duties to powerful effect.

And the third was in 1971, when the disc jockey – as a recording artist, once again – delivered the only major hit released on Motown’s California-based MoWest label: “What The World Needs Now Is Love/Abraham, Martin And John.”

It was the first of these three moments which prompted Clay to put pen to paper. Yours truly was working for trade paper Radio & Records in New York and had authored a story about various old-time promotion men. Clay – who ran his own radio production firm at that point – had given me some relevant recollections. When the R&R article was published, I had added an image of “Marry Me,” the disc jockey’s rendering of that Gordy song, released as a 45 by Chant Records in 1958.

“Seeing that record ‘Marry Me’ blew me away,” Clay wrote. “For 20 years I’ve been trying to live it down.”

In truth, it was not the only thing he sought to suppress. The DJ was one of the principal jocks caught up in the late 1950s payola scandal, fired from a Top 40-formatted radio station for taking money to play records. Called “the least attractive product of Detroit since the exhaust pipe” by Time magazine, Clay told the newsweekly in December 1959, “I have never demanded money from a record company.”

He added, “But it is all right for a man to put down $200 and leave a record for a deejay. If the deejay honestly thinks it is good, then he is justified in taking the $200 because, after all, that money is an investment for the record company.” The wages of spin almost doubled his annual salary of $8,000 (equivalent to $88,000 today).

The result was Clay lost his job at highly-rated WJBK Detroit after two years as a top dog. And those were literal heights: in September 1958, he broadcast from the peak of a five-story chimney at the city’s Jax Kar Wash, refusing to come down until 1,000 cars had gone through. The station gave away a free LP to every driver who did so because of Clay’s urging. The local police had to handle a crowd of 7,000-plus, gathered to see what was going on. Such a stunt was typical of the disc jockey’s style.

‘THE YOUNG BLACK KID’

It was at ’JBK that he caught Berry Gordy’s attention. “When I had Marv Johnson’s record on UA, ‘You Got What It Takes,’ he was at the No. 1 Pop station in town,” wrote Gordy in To Be Loved (“Marry Me” doesn’t get a mention). “Tom liked me and my record. Not only did he play it, but he introduced me to Barney Ales, telling me he would be a great local distributor.” At the time, Ales was with a local outfit, Aurora Distributing.

When I interviewed Clay in 1986, he remembered meeting Gordy for the first time at Detroit-area station WQTE (“Cutie Radio”) and described him as “the young black kid that I let into the studio while I was doing my show because he looked down and out. He handed me a record and an envelope with $200 in cash. He explained to me that he was desperate and had to get this record played, and because I was the number one jock in the city at the time, it meant a lot if I would play it.

“I took the envelope with the money in it and tossed it back on his lap. I listened to the record and told him I’d play it because I thought it would be a hit. Thus started my friendship with Berry Gordy.” The record was “You Got What It Takes.”

“It sounds like a great story, but Berry wouldn’t do that,” Barney Ales told me years later. “Not to a white disc jockey. Also, Marv Johnson was with United Artists, and I can’t see [Gordy] promoting UA. By that time, Marv was already somewhat of a star. I know Clay did a couple of record hops with Marv, because I had Mary Wells on the same bill. Tom was a pretty good disc jockey. He did a lot of promotion, sitting on top of trees.”

Motown’s national promotion director in the mid ’60s, Gordon Prince, also knew Clay from years before, when Prince worked for Detroit distributor Jay-Kay. “Yes, he was arrogant – a lot of [disc jockeys] were. Tom was supposedly very heavy into payola, but I can honestly say I never gave him a penny all my life. When he left Detroit to go to California, I went out to where he lived and helped him pack up the truck to move, and to say goodbye. He was a good guy.”

By 1971, Clay was freelancing for various stations on the West Coast, including KGBS Los Angeles. There, he assembled a tape of music superimposed over radio broadcasts of the assassinations of John and Robert Kennedy, and Rev. Martin Luther King. Within days of its May 22 airing on the station, KGBS received more than 17,000 pieces of mail from listeners, wanting to know if it could be bought on disc. Clay shopped the master, and Motown’s local A&R chief, Dave Pell, sealed a deal for its acquisition.

According to a Billboard report at the time, Pell recut the entire production, adding orchestral backing and trimming the running time from more than eight minutes. When issued on MoWest in the third week of June, the single credited Clay as producer and Gene Page as arranger, with the Blackberries handling vocals. “I never intended what I made up that night at KGBS to be anything more than a tape for the show,” he told Associated Press’ Marcia Chambers. “What I wanted to say to people is they don’t take time for love.”

“What The World Needs Now Is Love/Abraham, Martin And John” peaked in the Top 10 of both Billboard and Cash Box in August 1971, selling more than one million copies. Motown released an album by Clay in July, which included his follow-up 45 (“Whatever Happened To Love”) and versions of hit songs by Jimmy Webb, Joni Mitchell and Paul Simon; also, “What’s Going On.”

The disc jockey continued to work in radio thereafter, and had been teaching voiceovers in Los Angeles until shortly before his death on November 22, 1995. He was fondly remembered around the country, including in Buffalo, New York, where decades earlier – as Guy King on WWOL-AM – he organised an early stunt of the kind he came to be known for: sitting on a billboard, 75 feet above a square in the city, telling his on-air teenage audience to come downtown “if you want to hear Bill Haley & the Comets’ ‘Rock Around The Clock.’ “ Thousands did, and Clay was arrested for disorderly conduct.

Perhaps now you know why I kept his letter.

West Grand Blog