The basement was the snake pit where the Funk Brothers lived, the house band that played on more number one records than the Beatles and the Rolling Stones combined and never got credited, they invented the parts in real time and Jamerson's bass lines alone contain more musical information per bar than most complete songs. The writing room upstairs was Holland Dozier Holland locked in together cranking out melody and hook on a production line where the chord progression came first and the words were fitted to the feeling after, which is backwards from how everyone else wrote and why the songs hit the body before they hit the mind. The control room was where Norman Whitfield and Smokey Robinson competed against each other's sessions for the same artists, which meant every record was already in a war before it left the building. The echo chamber in the bathroom gave everything that particular Motown reverb that made transistor radios sound like the music was coming from inside the speaker rather than through it, and that sound is why those records still feel immediate fifty years later, they were engineered for the worst possible playback device and survived into every better one that came after.
