Motown Mondays at the Roostertail: seven nights in 1966

The room the twins built for a younger crowd

The Roostertail opened in June 1958 at 100 Marquette Drive, on the Detroit River. For its first years it worked as a supper club. Dinner, a headliner, coat and tie. In 1965 the founder's twin sons, Tom and Jerry Schoenith, added a second room upstairs and called it the Upper Deck. They built it for people their own age.

The Upper Deck opened in the spring of 1965. It held about 400 guests indoors and another 135 on an open-air terrace. The bookings leaned toward rock acts and dancing rather than a seated dinner show. The dress code stayed where it was. Coat and tie for men. Skirts for women, and, as the house rule went, they could not be short or very tight.

The building was mostly glass. Architect Edward Newman had given it floor-to-ceiling windows across a 180-degree view of the river, described at the time as the largest windows ever put in the state of Michigan. Glass is a difficult room for a horn section. Johnny Trudell, who led the venue's own house band, said the echo had to be handled with what he called electronic drapes. There were no real dressing rooms either. Performers changed in bathrooms and broom closets.

This is the room the whole 1966 story happens in. Four hundred seats, a terrace, a wall of windows over the water, and no proper backstage.

Seven Mondays, on tape, on the radio

Motown Mondays was a three-way arrangement between Motown Records, the Roostertail and WKNR, the Detroit station that called itself Keener 13. It ran seven consecutive Monday nights, August 22 to October 3, 1966. Two shows every night, at 8:30 and 11:00.

WKNR disc jockey Scott Regen emceed. Every set was taped, and the tape went back out over Detroit radio the following Saturday night on Regen's show, sponsored by Pepsi-Cola. It was the station's first live music broadcast. You could be in the room on Monday and hear the same show on the air five days later.

The band was Motown's own. Earl Van Dyke led it, built around four saxophones, two trombones and three trumpets. Chuck Thurston reviewed the series for the Detroit Free Press and set out the terms of the thing without much ceremony.

Seven Mondays needed seven bills. The Four Tops opened on August 22. The Miracles played September 19, the Supremes September 26, the Temptations October 3. Jr. Walker & the All Stars, Marvin Gaye and Martha & the Vandellas took the three Mondays in between. The sources agree on the acts and disagree on which of those three nights belonged to whom, so this page leaves them open rather than pick one.

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

Chuck Thurston, Detroit Free Press, 1966

Opening night, August 22, 1966

The Four Tops opened the series. Berry Gordy was in the room. So were Marvin Gaye and the Everly Brothers, who had nothing to do with Motown at all.

Diana Ross, Mary Wilson and Florence Ballard came as guests and watched from the floor. At the end of the show they went up and sang with the Four Tops. The Supremes had their own Monday booked five weeks out. On opening night they were part of the audience until they were not.

The August 22 tape, with a second date on September 11, 1966, became Four Tops Live!. Motown released it that November. It topped the domestic R&B chart, placed third on Billboard's Top R&B LPs of 1967, reached number four in Britain and held the British top ten for three months. One printed edition of the sleeve photographs the group outside the building, standing under the venue's own lit sign.

The Supremes, twice in one year

The Supremes played the Roostertail twice in 1966 and the two engagements had nothing in common. The first was a two-week run, January 17 to 29, months before Motown Mondays existed. Opening night went out live on WXYZ radio with Lee Alan and Danny Taylor, and WKNR ran a five-hour special hosted by Scott Regen the same evening. A Canadian television crew filmed the January 18 show for CBC-TV and CKLW. It was a hometown room, and the group could see exactly who was sitting in it.

The second visit was September 26, 1966, the sixth Monday of the run. Two shows. Florence Ballard sang lead on 'People.' The tapes went into Motown's vault and stayed there for 46 years.

They came out in 2012, on the expanded reissue of I Hear a Symphony, listed on the track credits as recorded live at the Roostertail, Detroit, MI, 1966. The released performances include 'My World Is Empty Without You,' 'Michelle,' 'Come See About Me,' 'Back In My Arms Again' and 'Yesterday.'

One caveat belongs here. Motown's own retrospective site names the Marvelettes, not the Supremes, among the seven 1966 acts. Dated accounts and the surviving recording both put the Supremes on September 26. A newspaper cross-check posted to a Detroit music forum suggests the likely explanation, that the original advertisement did list the Marvelettes and the Supremes replaced them. We are noting the discrepancy rather than resolving it.

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

Florence Ballard, the Supremes, on the January 1966 run

The Temptations close the run, October 3

The Temptations played the last Monday. David Ruffin, Eddie Kendricks, Paul Williams, Melvin Franklin, Otis Williams. Motown recorded the night.

The result was Temptations Live!, released on the Gordy label on March 6, 1967. Seventeen songs, among them 'My Girl,' 'Get Ready,' 'Ain't Too Proud to Beg,' and covers of 'Yesterday' and 'Ol' Man River.' It spent 51 weeks on the Billboard pop albums chart and peaked at number 10.

It is the only Temptations live album that features David Ruffin. Whatever that lineup sounded like on a stage survives in one recording, and the recording exists because a Detroit radio station wanted something to put on the air on Saturday.

The album credits name the Upper Deck. So do the credits on Four Tops Live!. For two of Motown's biggest groups, the room itself is on the record.

What the family did, and what it cost

The Upper Deck was integrated on purpose, by race and by age, at a time when a Detroit nightclub was under no obligation to be either. Tom Schoenith has put the policy plainly. "We didn't care if there were African-Americans, we didn't care if there were kids under 21," he told the Motown historian Adam White. "We mixed everything up."

The room did mix. The Ford, Fisher and Chrysler families were among the guests. So were Motown's artists, and so were people too young to legally drink in the building. That was the booking policy, on a Monday, on tape, going out over the radio five days later.

It had a price, and the price arrived at the family's house. In 2016 Tom Schoenith told WDET that booking the Supremes brought threats against his family and put federal agents outside their home. The family kept booking. That is the whole of the claim, and it does not need decorating.

We had threats against our family, we had FBI watching our house ... because we booked the Supremes.

Tom Schoenith, WDET 101.9 FM, 2016

What the room sent onward

The Motown connection outlasted the seven Mondays. Smokey Robinson & the Miracles returned and recorded Smokey Robinson & the Miracles LIVE! at the Roostertail in 1968. Tamla released it on January 6, 1969 and it reached number 7 on the Billboard R&B album chart. The set was pitched at an adult supper-club audience rather than the group's usual teenage market.

On December 19, 1969, a 19-year-old Stevie Wonder recorded Stevie Wonder Live in the same room. Tamla put it out in March 1970. Scott Regen, the voice that had introduced the 1966 Mondays, is credited as MC. It was among the last major Motown dates the venue hosted.

The most consequential thing the room produced was not a record. David Van DePitte was playing trombone in the Roostertail's own house band in 1968 when trumpeter Johnny Trudell, who also worked at the club, told him Motown had an opening. Van DePitte took the job on a premise that did not hold up. "The original premise of me being hired was that they were going to try and go into the movie business," he said later. He stayed anyway, and he went on to orchestrate Marvin Gaye's What's Going On.