upset with us. One thing that used to bother me was being in the studio singing into the microphone, and I look up into the control room and there is Marvin Gaye, Gladys Knight, Smokey Robinson- I was a little in- timidated. They were so nice, giving a thumbs up, laughing and having a good time. You know, I was raised on soul music in Detroit- Motown, Stax, Aretha, Smokey, Marvin, the Supremes. . . In the night clubs, I sang about thirty songs a night, and I’ll bet 25 of them were Temptations, Four Tops- I could never sing quite like some of those guys can sing, so I developed my own way of doing it, and they really liked that. We hit it off really well. There were never any problems.
Did you guys ever play the Apollo? Yeah! We played the Apollo. But don’t ask me about it. (Laughs) Back then when we played I was pretty nervous. I was trying to concen- trate on remembering words and beats. I don’t know if I am going to say this politically correct, but back in those days we were told so many times by people that they thought we were black. In fact, the first year of our suc-
cess, we played to almost all black audiences- Washington, New York, Atlanta. We were in Philadelphia one time, and I was onstage test- ing my drums. I just had the bass drum on and was kicking it- and people in the audi- ence started yelling “Yeah man!” and they were making all this noise. That was the black audience. The white audience was not like that. I mean, they enjoyed it and had a good time with it, all colors- in Japan. In Germany, they liked it. All colors got into it. Color was never an issue with us, and hopefully not with them either.
The Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section has similar stories of surprising the black acts that they backed on records. One of the main guitar players for Motown was Joe Messina, a white guy. He was on most of the sessions. Again, when your mak- ing music, you’re not looking at color, you are listening to what is played. If it grooves, okay let’s do it.
The first time I heard Rare Earth, I thought you were black. At least you,
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