Al was the only child of Harry and Mildred Abrams. He was born in Detroit in February 1941. He was raised in a small Jewish community in a neighborhood in the area of Michigan Avenue and 29th Street. The Abrams family home was a two‐family flat that was shared with Mildred’s parents. The house was a straight shot from downtown and Briggs Stadium, the home of the Detroit Tigers, and the Cadillac auto plant.
During the 1940’s it was a bustling, mainly Polish, working‐class community with thriving businesses such as the Warsaw Bakery. There was a synagogue on the corner of 29th Street almost kitty‐corner from the Crystal Theatre, where young Abrams would attend movies on the weekends, and a number of Jewish‐owned businesses on Michigan Avenue including Fogelman Furs, owned by Al’s Uncle Harry Fogelman.
His father, Harry Abrams, owned two large semi‐trucks. He was a produce wholesaler of potatoes and onions and would travel throughout Michigan and Ohio buying crops from farmers which he would sell to grocery chains in Detroit. Harry Abrams was one of the first independent truckers to hire an African-American driver. Young Al remembered that when the local motels refused a room, the driver slept on the Abrams’ couch and ate his meals with them.
Abrams’ father died when he was 11, and his mother went to work in the kitchen of a popular restaurant. She and her son were forced to move into homes shared by four families because of their reduced circumstances.
As Abrams was growing up, he became attuned to what were then called “race records”. He used to listen to WLAC out of Nashville, Tennessee, on his tiny transistor radio in bed every night before he went to sleep. Two of the station’s disc jockeys, “Hoss” Allen and “John R” Richbourg, played the rhythm and blues records you couldn’t hear anywhere else on the radio.
When he saved enough money, Abrams would take a streetcar to and from black‐owned record shops including Joe Von Battle’s on Hastings Street in Detroit’s old Black Bottom neighborhood. There he would buy 78s like “You Tickle Me Baby” by the Royal Jokers and “Gee” by the Crows. If he spent all his money on records, he would walk all the way back home, eager to share his new sounds with his friends. They would often memorize the lyrics and stand on the corner at night and sing acappella until the people in the apartments started screaming at them from their windows.
When he was 14 and attending Central High School, Abrams went down to the local black newspaper, the now defunct Detroit Tribune, and told them he wanted to be a reporter. They gave him a press card and let him write a column that featured high school news and music gossip called the Central Chatterbox. He was the only white face at the Tribune.
Being a bright student who graduated from high school at the age of 15, Abrams was interested in pursuing a career in labor relations, but was too young to attend college. He lied about his age to get a job with the Handleman Company, a distributor of phonograph records to retail operations. Abrams stayed there two years, spending most of his paycheck on records he could get at a discount, before the company discovered his true age and let him go.
He claims that he was influenced by the 1957 film Sweet Smell of Success to go into the field of press relations.
Again lying about his age, Abrams got a job in the mailroom of an advertising agency in Detroit. But he had been bitten by the music bug, and he kept looking for opportunities in the field he loved.
Al Abrams and how he came to be hired at Motown. In 1959, Abrams looked into taking a job for $15 a week to drive artists to record hops. This was a form of payola whereby record promoters supplied artists to perform for the DJs in the hope they would get airplay. This led him to a job interview at a residence at 1719 Gladstone where Berry Gordy Jr. and Raynoma Liles were living. They had formed a business called the Rayber Music Writing Company whereby for $100 they would make a recording of an aspiring artist and press it onto a vinyl record.
Abrams interviewed with Berry Gordy for the job. Not really interested in hiring someone so young, Gordy gave Abrams a record called “Teenage Sweetheart” by a Yugoslavian immigrant who recorded it under the name Mike Powers with dreams of becoming a singing idol. Gordy told Abrams he could have the job if he could get the record on the air. The song was awful, and Gordy thought Abrams would never get it played.
The next day (Memorial Day) Abrams took the record to a remote broadcast being done by Larry Dixon of WCHB out of Inkster, Michigan. He badgered Dixon for nearly four hours out in the heat to play “Teenage Sweetheart”. Finally, the only way Dixon could get rid of him was to play the record.
Unbeknownst to Abrams, Gordy and Liles happened to be driving on Belle Isle, a park located on the Detroit River, listening to WCHB when the song came on the radio. Gordy reportedly almost lost control of the car and said, “Oh my God, the white kid got the record played. Now we’re going to have to give him a job.”
Abrams agreed to start work for $15 a week and all the chili he could eat. Abrams was named national promotion director of tiny Tamla Records and Jobete Music Company, which Gordy had just started.
Young Abrams pulled off his share of outrageous PR stunts in his new position.
Besides promoting recordings at local radio stations, his responsibilities soon included writing the first Jobete and Tamla advertisements for Billboard, Cashbox, and other music business publications. Abrams couldn’t type, so he wrote the releases on a legal pad. On a trip to New York he took one to the legendary Walter Winchell. Winchell grabbed the sheet of paper out of Abrams hand and he told him that he had to sit down and type it out. Abrams typed it in Winchell’s office with one finger.
Abrams wrote all of the artist bios for the label as well as liner notes for albums. If one looks at the back of the Marvelettes’ first album, “Please Mr. Postman”, there’s a personal letter to the fans that was supposed to be written by the group. Apparently, very few of the fans noticed “liner notes by Al Abrams” printed at the bottom.
He also came up with a variety of memorable phrases to promote Motown. He had no formal training, but along the way he produced a few legends. The most memorable of these was both “The Detroit Sound” and “The Sound of Young America.”
In the early days, Abrams used to travel with the Miracles, Barrett Strong, and even served as road manager for a brief period for Motown’s legendary doo wop group, the Satintones. The first big public relations break for the Tamla label involved the Miracles. The group used to travel in an old Volkswagen bus. There were so many fans in the street for their appearance in St. Louis that their vehicle couldn’t get through when they arrived at the venue. The police had to come to the scene and Abrams called Gordy in Detroit to tell him about the incident. Gordy asked if Abrams could get the story into JET (a weekly magazine targeted toward African Americans). Abrams not only got it into JET but also the Michigan Chronicle.
Abrams gradually moved away from record promotion on his terms to concentrate his efforts on publicity and press relations for Motown.
His first big breakthrough in the mainstream white media was the Detroit Free Press. Once Motown got rolling in the early 60’s, the label and its artists became hometown heroes. They were adopted by the Free Press, and Abrams was placing 5 to 7 stories a week in the paper.
Abrams worked for the most singlehandedly. He didn’t trust anyone else to do the job that he knew he could do. He came up with a variety of interesting ways to promote the label, including using CKLW-TV movie host Bill Kennedy.
Abrams would bring Motown stars like Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder, or the Supremes to appear live on the program.
When Abrams traveled to New York with a copy of Barrett Strong’s single, “Money”, to try to get famed DJ Alan Freed to play it on WABC, he had to use a different approach. The benches outside the studio were filled with promotion agents, so when Abrams got in, he gave Freed the record and $100. This was Freed’s “consulting fee” for giving his opinion of the record’s merits. The practice had its consequences, however.
Abrams and Gordy wrote a song for Marv Johnson called “I Love The Way You Love”. It would earn a gold record for Johnson in 1960. (“I Love The Way You Love”) It was the only hit song Al Abrams would ever have a part in writing.
Abrams played a huge role in the label’s success. His public relations work helped make Motown something that Detroit could be proud of, and Motown, in return, had a great deal of pride in the city. Ah! “The Sweet Smell of Success!”.
Once Motown started to become a household name with nationally famous stars the company made a decision to concentrate more on white America. The focus of Abrams’ job became feature stories. Abrams did a lot of ghostwriting for stories that appeared in teen magazines. The type of things he was writing could be described as basically public relations hype, but in that more innocent time the fans of the Supremes, the Four Tops, and fans of Smokey and the Miracles took it as the gospel truth.
Gradually the stories he produced took more of a Hollywood slant – publicizing shows at the Copacabana, promoting appearances of Motown stars in movies or on network television, meeting established stars like Judy Garland, or hyping European tours. Although this type of material was directed at the national white media, Abrams always kept the black publications in the loop.
By the end of 1966, Abrams began to suffer what he described as a bout of Jewish self‐doubt. He asked himself whether all the PR success Motown and its artists enjoyed was a direct result of his efforts, or if anyone could have done it given the extraordinary amount of talent and genius at the label.
There was also the issue that Abrams was earning less at Motown than others working in public relations in the entertainment industry. He almost left the label to take a job as a publicist for United Artists to work on the James Bond films; and although Berry Gordy gave him a raise for staying at Motown, Abrams’ days at the company were drawing to a close.
In November of 1966, Abrams was contacted by New Worlds Inc., the public relations firm that was promoting a Dick Clark show at the Michigan State Fair Grounds starring Gary Lewis and The Playboys, The Yardbirds, and Sam The Sham and The Pharaohs. The PR guys were looking for a gimmick and hired Abrams because of his many original and unique promotions at Motown that were highly successful in giving Motown its world vibe.
Abrams came up with a concept called the Carnaby Street Fun Fair which would highlight the world’s first Mod Wedding. The bridal couple (Randi Rossi and Gary Norris) was found through the Detroit Free Press Action Line. The pair earned the chance to exchange their vows in the highly publicized ceremony after the original couple, who had won the wedding competition on the popular Detroit radio station WKNR, had to withdraw.
To insure maximum press coverage for the event, Abrams contacted Andy Warhol to stage a “happening” at the Fun Fair for $1,500. That brought Warhol’s traveling music, film, and light show extravaganza called the Exploding Plastic Inevitable to Detroit, including the rock and roll music of the Velvet Underground with Lou Reed and Nico.
Two weeks later on December 7, 1966, Abrams was fired from Motown by Michael Roshkind, one of the new white non-Detroit executives brought in by Berry Gordy as the company expanded.
Abrams stayed on through the Christmas holidays and then joined New Worlds, Inc. Early in 1967, he resigned from that company and founded his own public relations firm, Al Abrams Associates. His first clients were Ollie McLaughlin’s Ann Arbor‐based Karen and Carla Records, Florence Ballard, and the popular Stax/Volt label out of Memphis.
In 1969, Abrams began working with Holland‐Dozier‐Holland’s Invictus/Hot Wax labels, first through their attorney in their lawsuit against Motown, and then as PR Director. He continued working as a music publicist for a variety of clients, including James Brown, until he switched the focus of his agency to representing non‐music clients such as the Perry Drug Store chain, new home builders, and political candidates.
Abrams kept his hand in the music business, however, and in 1972 he wrote the first‐ever press biography for Bob Seger after he recorded his “Smokin’ OP’s” album for Punch Andrew’s Palladium label.
In 1974, Abrams joined Gale Research, then North America’s third‐largest publisher of reference books, as their PR Director. He was promoted to editor of their Journalism Department in 1976, and the company went on to publish the first three of the dozen books that Abrams wrote during his career.
Abrams went on to open Gale’s Great White Bureau in Canada in 1981, and he lived in Toronto and Windsor while holding “landed immigrant” status. He also started writing for newspapers and magazines including the Windsor Star, Detroit Free Press, and the Toronto Globe and Mail, before joining the Windsor Star as a reporter in 1985.
Abrams returned to the US in 1990. He worked as a gossip columnist and book page editor through 1994 before going back to free‐lance writing. He also was employed as a publicist for major global and industrial clients and for a start‐up high-tech computer storage application in Israel.
Memories of Motown, a musical that he co‐wrote and appeared in with his old Motown colleague William “Mickey” Stevenson, debuted in Berlin in 2009 to coincide with Motown’s 50th anniversary. A downsized version was performed with the Reno (Nevada) Philharmonic May 2012.
Al’s work as the national promotion director for Tamla Records and Jobete Music, and later as the Press Officer of advertising and public relations for Motown was instrumental in helping Motown become one of the most successful record labels in the history of popular music.
Al Abrams dies on October 3, 2015 from Cancer.
Detroit Music Awards, Induction April 2016
2016 Ohio Senior Citizen Hall of Fame, May 2016
National Rhythm & Blues Induction, August 2016
Fifth Third Bank, MCPA Wall of Fame
Michigan Rock and Roll Hall of Fame
New Book: High On Soul: Tell Me It’s Just A Rumor Berry
Abrams opens up about Motown and about the kids who grew up together.
It is a personal, introspective and revealing view of his life at Motown and the back stories that have always shrouded the internal Motown mystique.
When Motown abruptly left Detroit, its heart was ripped out and its soul lost. As Al recalls, without us (Detroit kids), Motown LA would be non-existent.
The Motown Music Bookshelf:
Hype & Soul: Behind The Scenes At Motown is currently unavailable as the first edition sold out within its first year. There are occasional used copies available at exorbitant prices. Abrams wanted his book to be a collectible that would never be discovered in a ten cent throw-away book bin.