Thanks Bob Olhsson

[Barry Johns]

I've been watching a Mowtown documentary "Standing in the Shadows of Mowtown on Showtime interviewing the Funk Brothers. They talk a lot about the studio in Barry's home where Bob recorded much of that music. I can't imagine being part of history like that!

Thanks Bob for being part of that very important history!

[Bill Denton]

That is one incredible documentary...

If you're interested it's available on DVD...

[Darryl Ramm]

And available to rent on Amazon.

No, wait I want to own, I hate rentals...

[Bob Olhsson]

The amazing thing about Motown is that every other part of that company was just as incredible as the musicians. I did an interview for NAMM where I get into it a bit. This is a five minute excerpt they posted. https://www.namm.org/library/oral-history/bob-olhsson

[bashville]

Great to put a face with the name, Bob. Thanks for sharing this wonderful perspective.

[Stig Eliassen]

That documentary is very inspiring. Just saw it on dvd. Great stories, awesome music.

Thanks.

[Bob Olhsson]

A few things were misrepresented in SITSoM.

Nobody got credits because each album could easily have had 50 different musicians playing on it with a dozen different recording engineers involved. In the '70s more overdubbing became common and a lot fewer people were working on each album.

The Funk Brothers were also among the highest paid musicians in the world. When Berry started out he knew them from his jazz record store and they were happy to work for next to nothing in order to help him get started. At the same time they were also doing union advertising and network broadcast work that paid extremely well. Motown's sessions were all union by the time they'd become wildly successful. Some of the players got paid a weekly salary in addition to scale for not playing for other labels. Motown was also among the first labels to ever pay producer royalties.

But people like drama...

[Barry Johns]

I personally feel its so important in our world to give the full appreciation and respect deserved to those that choose to share with us like Bob does. It's not every day that we get a chance to communicate with such important history! It's also so important for the newer people to actually realize who it is they get the opportunity to speak with directly!

[Eric Lambert]

I suspect that that wasn't meant to suggest that the Funk Brothers were given a brighter spotlight in SITSoM than they deserved, or that they had gold bathtubs in their 5th Ave. penthouses.

[Bob Olhsson]

They were really well paid and deserved it. I was just not happy about the implication that they got screwed over by Motown.

The other thing is that we'd all known the Detroit studio would probably be closing for at least a couple years and many of us had been looking for other jobs. In my case I took a job in San Francisco almost a year before it finally closed. It was a difficult situation because there were no other comparable jobs in Detroit so we had no choice but to move if we wanted to continue on our career.

All I can say about history is that I certainly didn't realize what I'd witnessed as a fly on the wall until years later.