The albums recorded at the Roostertail, 1966 to 1970

The room that doubled as a studio

For a stretch in the late 1960s this building worked as a recording studio and a broadcast stage as much as a place to have dinner. Between August 1966 and December 1969, five commercially released albums were cut here by two different record labels, plus a sixth night that sat unreleased for forty-six years.

The engine was a booking called Motown Mondays. Seven consecutive Monday nights, August 22 to October 3, 1966, on the Upper Deck, the room Tom and Jerry Schoenith had added in the spring of 1965 for about 400 guests indoors and 135 more on the terrace. Two shows a night, at 8:30 and 11:00. Earl Van Dyke led the house band. The order ran Four Tops, Jr. Walker & the All Stars, Marvin Gaye, Martha & the Vandellas, the Miracles, the Supremes, and the Temptations.

Every set was taped. Detroit disc jockey Scott Regen emceed, and WKNR put each Monday back on the air the following Saturday night, the station's first live music broadcast. The room was wired before anybody pressed a record.

This is not the place for anyone determined not to like Motown-style music.

Chuck Thurston, Detroit Free Press, reviewing the 1966 series

Four Tops Live! put the venue's own sign on the cover

The Four Tops recorded on two of those nights: August 22, the opening night of the series, and September 11. Motown released the album in November 1966 on Tamla.

Opening night was a room full of Motown. Diana Ross, Mary Wilson and Florence Ballard watched from the audience and came up at the end to sing with the group. Berry Gordy was there. So were Marvin Gaye and the Everly Brothers.

The record then did what a hometown live album is not supposed to do. It topped the domestic R&B charts in 1966 and finished third on Billboard's Top R&B LPs of 1967. In Britain it reached number four and held the top ten for three months, with seventy-two weeks on the chart in total.

And then there is the cover. At least one printed edition photographs the four of them standing outside the building at night, directly beneath the lit Roostertail sign. Scott Regen wrote the liner notes. On this record the address is not a footnote. It is the picture.

Temptations Live! closed the series, and a Supremes tape waited until 2012

October 3, 1966 was the last of the seven Mondays, and the Temptations played it. Gordy released the recording on March 6, 1967, catalog GS 921. It stayed on the Billboard pop albums chart for fifty-one weeks and peaked at number ten.

It is also the only live album the Temptations ever made with original lead David Ruffin, alongside Paul Williams, Eddie Kendricks, Melvin Franklin and Otis Williams. The full seventeen-song set is documented, including "My Girl," "Get Ready," "Ain't Too Proud to Beg," and covers of "Yesterday" and "Ol' Man River."

A week earlier, on September 26, the Supremes played their two shows in the same run, with Florence Ballard singing lead on "People." Those tapes never became a record. They stayed unreleased for forty-six years, until the 2012 expanded edition of I Hear a Symphony finally issued them under titles reading "Live At The Roostertail, Detroit, MI/1966": "My World Is Empty Without You," "Michelle," "Come See About Me," "Back In My Arms Again," "Yesterday."

You knew all your friends were out there. I was scared to death.

Florence Ballard of the Supremes, on playing this room in January 1966

George Carlin recorded his first album here over three nights

Three weeks after the Motown series closed, a different label sent a very different act into the same room. RCA Victor recorded George Carlin on November 25, 26 and 27, 1966. The result, Take-Offs and Put-Ons, was his first solo album, produced by Tom Berman, catalog LSP-3772, released in 1967 and nominated for a Grammy.

This is early Carlin, suit and tie, years before the persona most people picture. The bits are radio parody and character work: "Wonderful WINO," "The Indian Sergeant."

What makes the record unusual is the sleeve. The artwork itself prints the line RECORDED LIVE AT Roostertail, DETROIT, MICHIGAN. Not a credit buried on the back. On the front. The album went back into print in 1972 on RCA Camden, again in 1975 on RCA Pure Gold, and on CD in 1997.

Recorded live at Roostertail, Detroit, Michigan.

Printed on the cover of Take-Offs and Put-Ons, RCA Victor, 1967

Smokey Robinson in 1968, then Stevie Wonder at nineteen

Motown came back twice more. Smokey Robinson & The Miracles recorded here in 1968, and Tamla released the album on January 6, 1969 as catalog TS 289. It reached number seventy-one on the Billboard pop album chart and number seven R&B, and it is the only Miracles live album without Claudette Robinson. Robinson produced it, and the set was pitched at an adult supper-club crowd rather than the group's usual teenaged market: "I Second That Emotion," "The Tracks of My Tears" and "Going to a Go-Go," mixed with pop standards.

Then, on December 19, 1969, Stevie Wonder recorded here. He was nineteen. Tamla released Stevie Wonder Live on March 6, 1970, with "For Once in My Life," "My Cherie Amour," "Sunny," and a reading of Dylan's "Blowin' in the Wind." Scott Regen, the same voice that had introduced the Mondays three years earlier, is credited on the record as MC.

That December date is described as among the last major Motown nights the room hosted. The format was going out of fashion nationally, and the bookings that had made this a recording address were ending.

On the air, and on screen

Radio did not only replay this room. It worked it live. On January 17, 1966, opening night of a two-week Supremes engagement, WXYZ disc jockeys Lee Alan and Danny Taylor broadcast their regular show from the floor, interviewing the group and the audience on air. WKNR ran a five-hour special the same night. A Canadian television crew filmed the following night's show for CBC-TV and CKLW.

Television came for the terrace. The venue's own photographs show network cameras set up over the water, one lettered WXYZ-TV, another carrying the ABC circle, and a mobile unit parked on the drive lettered American Broadcasting Company, Hollywood, Calif.

The most repeated story from this stretch belongs to Frankie Valli, who, per Hour Detroit, sang "Can't Take My Eyes Off You" here for the first time in 1967, shortly before CKLW put the song on the air as a hit. That night is dramatized in Jersey Boys, on stage and in Clint Eastwood's 2014 film.

One point needs stating plainly, because it gets blurred constantly. The film was not shot here. Jersey Boys was shot in Los Angeles, California, and the Roostertail scene is a set built there. The Roostertail is portrayed in Jersey Boys. Jersey Boys was not filmed at the Roostertail. Those are two different sentences and only one of them is true.

Portrayed in Jersey Boys. Not filmed at the Roostertail.

What the chalked slate says

Here is where the venue's own archive beats the written record.

In one scan from the Schoenith family collection, a crew is gathered on the lawn at the river's edge with an ABC camera behind them. A woman is holding up a production slate, and the chalk on it is legible.

It reads, line by line: TITLE: WHERE THE ACTION IS. 6-30 ROOSTER-TAIL MOTOWN. SCENE 2. SONG: MARVIN GAYE, AIN'T THAT PECULIAR?

Where the Action Is was Dick Clark's daily music programme. The written record has long held that it taped an all-Motown episode at the venue, but it holds that at the level of likely, sourced to page 252 of Mark Ribowsky's Supremes biography. The photograph is not likely. It names the show, the location, the scene number and the song, in the venue's own file.

There is one thing it does not settle. The slate is chalked 6-30, which reads as June 30. Ribowsky places the taping shortly after July 4, 1966. The slate is the harder evidence of the two, but the two do not agree, and nobody should quote a date off this photograph until they do.

TITLE: WHERE THE ACTION IS. 6-30 ROOSTER-TAIL MOTOWN. SCENE 2.

Chalked on the production slate, Schoenith family collection