Books about pop musicians' lives rarely talk about the music. Most—including, oddly, memoirs by the musicians themselves—focus on the sex and the drugs and never say much about the rock 'n' roll, writes David Kirby in the Wall Street Journal.
There is plenty about hanky-panky and substance abuse in "Mary Wells: The Tumultuous Life of Motown's First Superstar"; apparently Wells never ran into a man or a narcotic (or a highball or a cigarette) she didn't like. And though Peter Benjaminson eports on all that, he also tells us where the music came from and how it went away, doing justice to his fallen angel of a pop star.
There are dozens of books on Motown already, notably Nelson George's 1986 "Where Did Our Love Go?: The Rise and Fall of the Motown Sound," which describes how Berry Gordy Jr.'s enterprise changed the music we listen to forever in the 1960s and then, in the end, "became just another record company." But to get inside a story, there is nothing like looking at it through a key player's eyes. You want to know about the Civil War? Pick up a biography of Ulysses S. Grant. Radioactivity? Marie Curie. And to find out where Motown came from, what made it tick and then tumble, you could do a lot worse than to slip into a pair of Mary Wells's pumps and follow her into the "Hitsville USA" studio on West Grand Boulevard.
Benjaminson, a Free Press city hall reporter in the 1970s, is also the author of "The Lost Supreme: The Life of Dreamgirl Florence Ballard" and "The Story of Motown."
