Barney Ales, who helped turn Motown Records into a music-industry powerhouse, has died.
a natural-born salesman whose charisma and aggressive instincts helped turn Motown Records into a music-industry powerhouse, died Friday of natural causes in Malibu, California, his family said. He was 85.
Assembling a diverse staff of Detroit music-biz veterans, Ales gave Motown an entree to the industry establishment — the white-dominated record distributors and radio promoters behind the scenes who could quietly make or break a mainstream hit. Ales remained a close confidante of Gordy through the decades, although he was among the Detroit-based personnel who initially resisted the company’s move to Los Angeles in the early 1970s. He did eventually settle in Southern California and went on to serve as Motown Records president from 1975 through 1978 — a tenure marked by Stevie Wonder's commercial and critical blockbuster"Songs in the Key of Life.
Ales’ memories from behind the scenes are now the heart of “Motown: The Sound of Young America,” a visually rich, 400-page volume set to hit stores on Tuesday, several months after its U.K. release. Ales, raised in northwest Detroit by a Sicilian-born father and Cheboygan-born mother, was a guy made for the old-school record business: tough and street-smart, sociable and charismatic. It was a combo that helped him quickly rise from stock boy at Capitol Records to head of its Detroit branch before launching his own record-distribution company, where he crossed paths with the young, aspiring Gordy.
Hitsville’s record covers may have been emblazoned with names such as the Supremes and Marvin Gaye, but the staffers assembled by Ales — figures such as Irv Biegel, Gordon Prince, Phil Jones — were Motown stars in their own right. “The woman at the desk said, ‘We don’t serve colored people.’ And Barney shot back, ‘Good, because I don’t eat them,’” White says. “It sounds like a music-hall line or something. But it’s very real, and it tells you something about the time. I found that those kinds of anecdotes, those little snippets, were almost as illuminating as anything else.”
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