Al Abrams - Sad News RIP

Reported in the forums by @chalky the sad news that Al Abrams has passed on. 

The Detroit Free Press has an extensive obituary and a preview and a link follows 

Martha Reeves says Al Abrams' work "got us through doors that were always shut to us."
Al Abrams was Motown before Motown even had its name.
Abrams, the first employee of Berry Gordy Jr. and the man who pushed artists like the Supremes and Stevie Wonder into news headlines around the world, died Saturday morning at home in Findlay, Ohio. He was 74.
The Detroit-born Abrams was the first press officer for Gordy's Motown Records, grabbing media coverage and airplay for the fledgling label and its stable of young stars — and helping blast through entrenched racial walls in the process.

http://www.freep.com/story/entertainment/music/brian-mccollum/2015/10/03/al-abrams-early-motown-publicist-dies-obituary/73283738/

Below is from a Soul Source news article featuring his 2010 Book

I  still believe I was the luckiest kid in all of Detroit that May of 1959.

That's how it felt to me walking into a virtual wonderland of music at Berry Gordy's flat at 1719 Gladstone in Detroit's inner city.

When Berry hired me I was an 18-year-old white Jewish kid in an all-black company where people my age were making music and history. He put me in charge of record promotion for the songs published by his Jobete Music Company and I thought I was in heaven.

My primary job was to get the records played on the radio, especially by white disk jockeys on mainstream radio stations. I certainly wasn't going to ignore the black DJs, some of whom - like Larry Dean and Bill Williams - quickly became my closest friends.

Berry had given me the job because I was able to get Larry Dixon, a DJ on Detroit's WCHB, to play a god-awful record by Mike Powers called Teenage Sweetheart that Berry's Rayber Music Writing Company had produced and recorded for a $100 fee. I still think it is the absolute worst record Berry has ever produced.

When I applied for a promotion job with Berry, he had given me the virtually impossible task of getting that record played on the radio before he would consider hiring me. Eager to get rid of me, he was convinced he would never see me again once I left his flat with the Powers disk in hand. But it was my good luck that after four hours of begging and pleading in the hot sun, Dixon gave it a spin on the Memorial Day holiday at the very time that Berry was listening to the station in his car. That was also the only time that record was ever played on the radio.

That accomplishment was enough to get me hired the very next day for $15 a week and all the chili I could eat - cooked and served by Miss Lillie Hart. Berry has always had a reputation for being a tough negotiator, but I got the best of him that day. I worked for Jobete, Rayber, the fledgling five-month-old Tamla Record Company, and the then-personal management entity of Berry Gordy Jr. Enterprises. Motown was still more than a year in the future.

A full length interview from 2005 can be read here...

http://sitemaker.umich.edu/livingmusic/browse_interviews&mode=single&recordID=595398&nextMode=list

Al Abrams was born in Detroit and graduated from Central High School at the age of 15. In 1959, he became the first employee of what was to become Berry Gordy, Jr.'s Motown Record Corporation. Working originally as National Promotion Director, he ultimately became the company's Director of Public Relations. Establishing his own firm, Al Abrams Associates in 1967, he worked with Stax-Volt Records, James Brown, Aretha Franklin and many other major artists. Abrams left the music business for book publishing and became editor of the journalism department at Gale Research Company. He wrote the first three of his eleven published books at Gale. Moving to Canada, he was an award-winning investigative reporter for the Windsor Star and later a gossip columnist and book editor at a major Ohio daily newspaper. Abrams has been a free-lance reporter and publicist since 1994. His work has appeared in Forbes, the Jerusalem Post, Detroit Free Press, and the Chicago Tribune, among other publications. His best-known book is "Special Treatment: The Untold Story of Hitler's Third Race," the pioneering study of the survival of the Mischlinge during the Holocaust. 

For a complete treatment of Motown publicity and marketing, please visit my website on Motown, Selling the Motor City Its Sound at http://www.umich.edu/~aamuhist/dmorrisz/motown/index.html