{"id":19413,"date":"2021-05-18T01:19:57","date_gmt":"2021-05-18T01:19:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/theoklahomaeagle.net\/?p=19413"},"modified":"2021-05-18T01:19:57","modified_gmt":"2021-05-18T01:19:57","slug":"whats-going-on-50-years-on-the-bitter-true-story-of-marvin-gayes-iconic-album","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.willoughbyavenue.com\/eagle\/2021\/05\/18\/whats-going-on-50-years-on-the-bitter-true-story-of-marvin-gayes-iconic-album\/","title":{"rendered":"What\u2019s Going On, 50 years On: The Bitter True Story Of Marvin Gaye\u2019s Iconic Album"},"content":{"rendered":"

www.idependent.uk<\/a>
\nBy Martin Chilton<\/a>
\n <\/p>\n

The soul legend\u2019s 1971 album is now considered one of the greatest musical recordings of all time, but it came perilously close to never seeing the light of day. As \u2018What\u2019s Going On\u2019 celebrates its 50th anniversary, <\/a>Martin Chilton<\/a><\/span> looks at the making of a politically charged masterpiece<\/span><\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

 
\nPut it out or I\u2019ll never record for you again\u201d was\u00a0Marvin Gaye<\/a>\u2019s stark warning to Berry Gordy, after the founder of\u00a0Motown Records<\/a>\u00a0refused to release the single \u201cWhat\u2019s Going On\u201d in the summer of 1970.
\nBerry \u2013 who was Gaye\u2019s brother-in-law at the time \u2013 told almost anyone who would listen that he detested Gaye\u2019s protest song, which he thought was too long, too formless and not commercial enough to be played on radio, a prerequisite for the scores of No 1 songs he\u2019d crafted at his Detroit studio known as Hitsville USA. Gordy was even quoted as describing \u201cWhat\u2019s Going On\u201d as \u201cthe worst record I ever heard in my life\u201d.
\nIn his memoir\u00a0Smokey: Inside My Life<\/em>, soul legend\u00a0Smokey Robinson<\/a>recalled telling Gordy he thought Gaye\u2019s track was \u201cbrilliant\u201d. The Motown boss was sure he would talk Gaye out of it. \u201cThat\u2019s like trying to talk a bear out of s***tin\u2019 in the woods,\u201d Robinson replied. \u201cMarvin ain\u2019t budging.\u201dwas going to be the biggest fiasco that ever was\u201d.
\nWhat\u2019s Going On<\/em>\u00a0is now widely recognised as one of the most important musical works of the 20th century, a song cycle that gave Black artists a licence to push the musical and political boundaries of their art. In November 2020, Robinson told\u00a0USA Today<\/em>\u00a0that this \u201cprofound\u201d masterpiece was perhaps the greatest album of all time, one that is \u201ceven more poignant\u201d in the era of Black Lives Matter than it was when released on 21 May 1971.
\nGordy might even have won the battle of wills had it not been for Harry Balk, Motown\u2019s no-nonsense head of A&R, who had once notoriously thrown a tax officer down the stairs of the label\u2019s Detroit headquarters during a row over an audit. Balk, who was 91 when he died in 2016, told\u00a0Detroit News<\/em>\u00a0that he received a demo 45rpm pressing of \u201cWhat\u2019s Going On\u201d by mistake. \u201cThis Marvin Gaye acetate was mixed in with a stack of other records and just fell on the floor. I loved it, and made a tape of it before sending the acetate on. I listened to it over and over, and fell more in love with it. I started playing it for people who came into my office. Of course, now everybody will tell you how wonderful they thought \u201cWhat\u2019s Going On\u201d was, but I played it for the hot producers and got nothing but negative opinions. The only one that was really knocked out with it \u2013 the only one \u2013 was Stevie Wonder.\u201d
\nBalk repeatedly tried to convince Gordy of the song\u2019s merits, but the Motown boss criticised its jazz influences. \u201cAh, that Dizzy Gillespie stuff in the middle, that scatting, it\u2019s old,\u201d Gordy told Balk. Undeterred, seizing an opportunity while Gordy was away travelling, Balk went to Barney Ales, vice president of sales, and told him that unless they released \u201cWhat\u2019s Going On\u201d, they would have nothing new to release from Gaye, a performer who\u2019d made the company millions of dollars with hits such as \u201cI Heard It Through the Grapevine\u201d and \u201cToo Busy Thinking About My Baby\u201d.
\nWithout Gordy\u2019s knowledge, Ales commissioned a pressing of the 100,000 copies of \u201cWhat\u2019s Going On\u201d, and the single was sent out to radio stations on 17 January 1971. Within four days, after enthusiastic plays from DJs across America, every single copy had sold out. It would go on to sell two million copies, hailed by Jackson Browne as \u201cthe most articulate and deeply felt anti-war song of the time\u201d.
\nThe inspiration for \u201cWhat\u2019s Going On\u201d came from Four Tops singer Renaldo \u201cObie\u201d Benson, after seeing an incident of police brutality in San Francisco. In May 1969, during a tour of California, the band were stuck in a traffic jam when they saw young protestors at People\u2019s Park being savagely attacked by cops in riot gear. \u201cThe police was beatin\u2019 on them, but they weren\u2019t bothering anybody,\u201d Benson told Ben Edmonds for the book\u00a0What\u2019s Going On: Marvin Gaye and the Last Days of the Motown Sound<\/em>. \u201cI started wondering what the f*** was going on. What is happening here? One question leads to another. Why are they sending kids so far away from their families overseas? Why are they attacking their own children in the streets here?\u201d
\nBenson and fellow Motown writer Al Cleveland shaped a tune about the violence, but it was rejected by Benson\u2019s fellow Four Tops bandmates as being \u201ctoo political\u201d. Joan Baez also turned down the song before Benson offered it to Gaye. The Washington-born singer, who was 31 at the time, said he wanted to add his own input and Benson agreed. \u201cMarvin definitely put the finishing touches on it,\u201d Benson explained. \u201cHe added lyrics, and he added some spice to the melody. He added some things that were more ghetto, more natural, which made it seem more like a story than a song. He made it visual. He absorbed himself to the extent that when you heard the song you could see the people and feel the hurt and pain. We measured him for the suit, and he tailored it.\u201d
\nOne of the key changes that Gaye made to the song was to remove the question mark that Benson had originally fixed to the track. Gaye was adamant that the song was a statement rather than a question. Gaye was becoming more politicised and wanted to respond creatively to a tumultuous period in American history. \u201cFor the first time I really felt like I had something to say,\u201d he commented.
\nOne of his rows with Gordy over a change in musical direction came when the Motown boss was on holiday. \u201cI was in the Bahamas trying to relax,\u201d Gordy recalled in the 2016 documentary\u00a0Marvin, What\u2019s Going On?<\/em>\u00a0\u201cHe called and said, \u2018Look, I\u2019ve got these songs.\u2019 When he told me they were protest songs, I said, \u2018Marvin, why do you want to ruin your career?\u2019\u201d After the success of the single, however, Gordy realised that it was in Motown\u2019s interest to capitalise on the sales and release a whole album of Gaye\u2019s new songs. He realised he\u2019d antagonised Gaye and devised a way to entice him to record the album: he bet Gaye that he could not deliver an album in just 30 days. Neither men ever disclosed the amount they wagered.
\nThe core inspiration for the protest songs came from Gaye\u2019s personal life. His younger brother Frankie Gaye had been stationed in Vietnam, working as a radio operator. The pair had an uneasy relationship and Frankie felt let down by the lack of contact from his famous brother while he was facing carnage nearly 9,000 miles away. \u201cThe death and destruction I saw in Vietnam sickened me,\u201d Frankie told Gaye\u2019s biographer David Ritz. \u201cThe war seemed useless, wrong and unjust. I relayed all this to Marvin and forgave him for never writing to me while I was over there. That had hurt, because he was a big star and none of my buddies believed he was my brother. \u2018Wait,\u2019 I told them, \u2018He\u2019s going to write me back and prove it to you.\u2019 He never did.\u201d
\nGaye tried to put himself in Frankie\u2019s shoes by writing the song \u201cWhat\u2019s Happening Brother\u201d, about the disillusionment of war veterans returning to President Richard Nixon\u2019s America, a country in which unemployment was running at six per cent in 1971. Frankie said the song was \u201cso personal and heartfelt\u201d that he wept after hearing it for the first time.
\nGaye was in poor shape mentally during the making of\u00a0What\u2019s Going On<\/em>. His marriage to Anna Gordy was coming apart at the seams and he was still grieving for his singing partner Tammi Terrell \u2013 with whom he\u2019d recorded classics such as \u201cAin\u2019t No Mountain High Enough\u201d \u2013 who had died of brain cancer in March 1970, when she was just 24. \u201cMarvin was depressed just before\u00a0What\u2019s Going On<\/em>,\u201d the singer\u2019s American football star friend Mel Farr said. \u201cHe\u2019d been holed up in his house for a long time.\u201d Gaye was taking increasing amounts of hard drugs. He was traumatised by the daily news, especially the killing of four young students by the National Guard at Kent State University two months after Terrell\u2019s death. \u201cI couldn\u2019t sleep, couldn\u2019t stop crying,\u201d he told Ritz in\u00a0Divided Soul: The Life of Marvin Gaye<\/em>. In his one interview in the summer of 1971, with\u00a0Disc and Music Echo<\/em>\u00a0magazine\u2019s Phil Symes, Gaye admitted \u201cI was terribly disillusioned with life in general.\u201d
\nHe channelled all that despair and anxiety into\u00a0What\u2019s Going On<\/em>, which began recording on 17 March 1971. He brought in Farr and his Detroit Lions colleague Lem Barney to be part of the vocal chatter that launches the title track. The LP, which subverted every aspect of the Motown template of carefully crafted love songs and ballads, went on to become the label\u2019s biggest-selling album of all time. \u201cThe entire\u00a0What\u2019s Going On<\/em>album, from start to finish, is a masterpiece,\u201d Bruce Springsteen told BBC\u2019s\u00a0Desert Island Discs<\/em>. \u201cIt was sultry and sexual while at the same time dealing with street-level politics. That had a big influence on me. Along with the idea that it was a concept record without being cursed by that name. It was a record that had a thread you can follow from the first song to the last and it created a world that you could walk into and then come back out of.\u201d
\nAlthough Gaye, who said that all the inspiration for the album \u201ccame from God Himself\u201d, won his bet with Gordy \u2013 the album was completed in under 30 days \u2013 there has been plenty of mythologising about the recording sessions, during which Gaye supposedly worked constant 16-hour days to cut the nine tracks: \u201cWhat\u2019s Going On\u201d, \u201cWhat\u2019s Happening Brother\u201d, \u201cFlyin\u2019 High (In the Friendly Sky)\u201d, \u201cSave the Children\u201d, \u201cGod is Love\u201d, \u201cMercy Mercy Me (The Ecology)\u201d, \u201cRight On\u201d, \u201cWholy Holy\u201d, and \u201cInner City Blues (Make Me Wanna Holler)\u201d.
\nThe sessions at both Hitsville and Golden World Record studios were, in truth, chaotic, often not starting until midnight. \u201cIt was a prolonged process because Marvin didn\u2019t turn up half the time. He would have an afternoon or evening appointment and he\u2019d not show,\u201d said Van DePitte, who admitted to\u00a0Billboard<\/em>\u00a0that he had been warned the singer would be \u201ca pain in the fanny\u201d. According to music journalist Dorian Lynskey, in his book\u00a033 Revolutions Per Minute: A History of Protest Songs<\/em>, \u201cGaye kept joints and scotch on hand for the coterie of friends that attended the sessions, and masturbated at length before vocal takes in order to drain himself of carnal distraction.\u201d
\nAt the end of a month of recording dates, Gaye took some of the master tapes with him when he flew from Detroit to Sylmar, California, to play the role of a biker called Jim in\u00a0Chrome and Hot Leather<\/em>, a movie about a young Green Beret. \u201cHe didn\u2019t talk about his music much,\u201d said cinematographer John Toll. \u201cWe just knew him as a lanky, friendly guy who asked a lot of questions about the process. We talked a lot about football too. He became one of us.\u201d
\nAlthough Gaye tinkered with the mixing of the songs up to the point of final production, he conceded that Van DePitte had helped fulfil his vision, orchestrating versions of Gaye\u2019s inventive words and melodies in a skilful blend of jazz and soul musicians, the Detroit Symphony Orchestra and Gaye\u2019s smooth, soulful voice. \u201cMarvin couldn\u2019t read or write music per se. He needed not only a musical secretary, but somebody who knew how to organise the stuff and get it down on tape,\u201d Van DePitte said. The arranger brought in the brilliant drummer Chet Forest and saxophonists Eli Fountain and Wild Bill Moore, as well as suggesting the musical bridges between the tracks as way of helping Gaye\u2019s \u201clittle stories\u201d flow into one another. Although Gaye was pleased with the results, he was miffed about the praise for Van DePitte\u2019s orchestration. \u201cI\u2019m gonna learn to write music,\u201d Gaye said in the liner notes for the album. \u201cWhy? Because I want all the credit.\u201d
\nOne of the stand-out tracks was \u201cMercy Mercy Me (The Ecology)\u201d, written solely by Gaye, which lamented the ecological nightmare of \u201coil wasted on the ocean and upon our seas, fish full of mercury and radiation underground and in the sky\u201d. The song was performed by musicians Ledisi, Grace Potter and PJ Morton at the 2021 Grammy awards ceremony, evidence that this prophetic anthem about environmental pollution resonates half a century later. Moore who\u2019d played with jazz maestro Slim Gaillard in the 1940s, improvised the sweet tenor saxophone solo on the track, while backing band The Funk Brothers, especially bassist James Jamerson, laid down a sizzling groove.
\n\u201cInner City Blues (Make Me Wanna Holler)\u201d joined \u201cWhat\u2019s Going On\u201d and \u201cMercy Mercy Me\u201d as the singles issued from the album. In his liner notes, Gaye included the credit: \u201cThanks too to James Nyx, a gentleman and a scholar (which I\u2019m apparently not)\u201d, in tribute to a songwriter who also worked as a janitor and elevator operator at Motown\u2019s offices. Gaye wrote the melody for \u201cInner City Blues\u201d and Nyx came up with the lyrics about the \u201chave-nots\u201d of America after seeing a newspaper headline about the \u201cinner city\u201d of Detroit. \u201cI said, \u2018Damn, that\u2019s it. Inner City Blues.\u201d In his eighties, Nyx earned handsome royalties from the numerous times his words were sampled on rap and R&B records.
\nArt director Curtis McNair explained the care that went into the album cover. \u201cI could see how emotional Marvin was in terms of the essence of the album, and I wanted to match that,\u201d he told Boston newspaper\u00a0The Bay State Banner<\/em>\u00a0in 2008. \u201cWe had 100 slides of photographs from Jim Hendin and I picked this one when the sleet made his hair turn white, and on top of that you have the moisture on his trench coat and that wonderful expression on his face. I thought all of that added to the drama.\u201d
\nHendin took the portrait at the singer\u2019s Detroit home on Outer Drive. \u201cMarvin couldn\u2019t have been more cooperative. Marvin went out into his backyard, and as I clicked away, it began to snow. The drizzle added everything to the shots. Luck, or something stronger, was with us that day,\u201d said the photographer. McNair\u2019s supervisor Tom Schlesinger initially rejected the cover shot \u2013 for the \u201cridiculous\u201d reason, in McNair\u2019s words, that you could see too far up Gaye\u2019s nostrils \u2013 until McNair demanded that Gaye had the final say. \u201cThat\u2019s it. This is definitely the cover right here,\u201d insisted the singer.
\nThe album made millions of dollars, but the financial rewards did little to help Gaye escape his demons. Gaye, along with his wife Anna and Elgie Stover, wrote about drugs in the magnificent song \u201cFlying High (In the Friendly Sky)\u201d, and his addiction problems only increased after 1971. Gaye\u2019s second wife Jan, the 17-year-old daughter of Slim Gaillard, met the singer, then 34, during the making of 1973\u2019s\u00a0Let\u2019s Get It On<\/em>. She experienced some of his most appalling behaviour. She said Gaye\u2019s moods grew ever more erratic and violent as he began regularly \u201cfreebasing cocaine\u201d. One day, high on psychedelic mushrooms and cocaine, he attacked her. \u201cHe took a kitchen knife and put it to my throat,\u201d she recalled in her 2017 memoir\u00a0After the Dance: My Life with Marvin Gaye<\/em>. \u201cI was petrified, paralysed. I thought it was all over.\u201d
\nGaye saw his own downfall as somehow fated. He remembered his mother Alberta\u2019s melancholy warning about fame \u2013 \u201cfirst ripe, first rotten\u201d \u2013 as his life slowly crumbled in the late 1970s and early 1980s, even with the global success of his hit single \u201cSexual Healing\u201d. Frequently high, he became increasingly paranoid and even suicidal. There were divorces, bankruptcy and continuing emotional turmoil with his parents. It all seemed so far from the moment he told\u00a0Disc and Music Echo\u00a0<\/em>that he had made\u00a0What\u2019s Going On<\/em>\u00a0\u201cnot only to help humanity but to help me as well, and I think it has. It\u2019s given me a certain amount of peace.
\nThe peace did not last, of course, least of all with his own father. Despite the fact that Marvin Sr, a minister of a Pentecostal church, had beaten Gaye on an almost daily basis throughout his childhood, the singer paid tribute to him in the liner notes for\u00a0What\u2019s Going On<\/em>, declaring: \u201cWhile I\u2019ve got you reading, I\u2019d like to first give thanks to my parents, The Rev & Mrs Marvin P Gay, Sr, for conceiving, having and loving me.\u201d There now seems a dreadful sense of foreshadowing when Gaye sang \u201cfather, father\/We don\u2019t need to escalate\u201d on the seminal title track. The violence between the pair spiralled out of control on 1 April 1984, a day before Gaye\u2019s 45th birthday, when the 70-year-old killed the singer with three gunshots to the chest, following a physical altercation about a missing insurance company letter.
\nMarvin Sr was handed a suspended sentence and lived out his final days in a nursing home, dying in 1998. His son\u2019s legacy lives on, especially that 1971 masterpiece.\u00a0What\u2019s Going On<\/em>\u00a0moved to the very top of the revised edition of\u00a0Rolling Stone<\/em>\u2019s \u201c500 Greatest Albums of All Time\u201d list in late 2020. Yet it remains a bitter, grim irony that Gaye, whose sublime\u00a0What\u2019s Going On<\/em>\u00a0stands as such a clarion call against the senselessness of violence, met such a brutal end.
\n 
\n 
\n 
\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

www.idependent.uk By Martin Chilton   The soul legend\u2019s 1971 album is now considered one of the greatest musical recordings of all time, but it came perilously close to never seeing the light of day. As \u2018What\u2019s Going On\u2019 celebrates its 50th anniversary, Martin Chilton looks at the making of a politically charged masterpiece   Put…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":19415,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[115,103,105],"tags":[],"thb-sponsors":[],"class_list":["post-19413","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-entertainment","category-featured","category-national"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.willoughbyavenue.com\/eagle\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19413","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.willoughbyavenue.com\/eagle\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.willoughbyavenue.com\/eagle\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.willoughbyavenue.com\/eagle\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.willoughbyavenue.com\/eagle\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19413"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.willoughbyavenue.com\/eagle\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19413\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.willoughbyavenue.com\/eagle\/wp-json\/"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.willoughbyavenue.com\/eagle\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19413"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.willoughbyavenue.com\/eagle\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19413"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.willoughbyavenue.com\/eagle\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19413"},{"taxonomy":"thb-sponsors","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.willoughbyavenue.com\/eagle\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/thb-sponsors?post=19413"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}