“When I met him, he didn’t have money, but he had direction…And he had the balls to go after what he wanted… Berry Gordy was street.” – Smokey Robinson
Smokey Robinson knows what he’s talking about. He was put through considerable struggle and humiliation, after all, for having the gall to try to make Berry Gordy a rich man. In the end, of course, they made each other rich men, but in the beginning you’d think that Smokey was trying to sell to Berry something he didn’t need or want, this small-time record peddler, not knowing where his first hit was coming from, a man who had experimented, on the streets of Detroit, with record-retailing, auto-manufacturing, songwriting, talent-scouting, even (ludicrously) singing. He was a wife-beater and a gambler and, indeed, the consummate small-time hustler: for a time, he was a pimp who rode the bus to work.