What's Going On

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A lover of jazz and Nat King Cole, a rebel and a spirtualist, Marvin Gaye was a major recording talent in the early days of Motown. After bringing in both Bongo Brown and Jack Ashford, the band began working together to create some memorable hits in the ‘snake pit’ such as “What’s Going On”, “Grapevine” and “Baby I’m For Real", and finally began achieving some sort of recognition.

In 1969, lyricist Al Cleveland and Renaldo “Obie” Benson, sat down and penned “What’s Going On” as a way to address the issues of the Vietnam war and the race riots. After The Four Tops and Joan Benz declined to record it, Marvin Gay was the next lucky artist in line. Benson says of Gaye, “Marvin was the perfect artist for it . . . The first time he sang it, I was playing guitar and he was playing piano, and it was so beautiful.”¹ With the support of Marvin’s wife, Anne, and the financial and artistic backing support of Motown, the song would soon come to fruition.

The studio at Hitsville was a bustling beehive of creative mechanisms and ongoing innovative recording techniques. However, it was Marvin’s own inner awareness that channeled much of the songs atmospheric vibes. The death of his old singing partner, his brother’s battle with PTSD, and “his own professional frustration into an artistic statement addressing the social and spiritual anguish he saw sweeping the real world...”² were ways in which he channeled his empathy and sorrow for what was going on. Detroit’s violence, trips to the moon, and the death of Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King, were also motivations during the time of recording. He began changing himself both on the inside and out, when he began growing a beard and started wearing more ‘funk’ style clothes.

Marvin wanted to go for something completely against Motown’s old sound.  So artists were brought in and VanDepitte himself played the piano and lead the rhythm section. However, some things did stray away from the plan. For example, the well-known alto sax in the beginning was in fact Fontaine’s warm up, and Marvin found it suitable enough for the record. The doubled lead vocal was also another accident that made it onto the track. Ken Sands, the engineer for the track, played Gaye’s two lead vocals at the same time and everyone liked it enough that it became a trademark of Marvin’s in the years to follow.

After recording, Marvin felt triumphant that he had created something entirely unique. However, all was not well. Berry Gordy had refused to release it and in doing so, prompted Marvin to issue a sort of ‘strike’. He would not record anything else until the song was released and instead took up professional football as a pastime until the label came to their senses. Luckily for Marvin he had a friend in the label by the name of Harry Balk. Harry managed to issue “What’s Going On” without the permission of Gordy. It was an immediate hit, and sold 100,000 copies in one day. That January day in 1971 had brought about one of Motown’s best-selling songs of all time.

As a listener, Marvin Gaye is a timeless classic. He was instrumental in the music world in the 60s and 70s, and his songs are still very much as popular today as they were fifty years ago. He was the voice of America, and his songs spoke to something that not many were willing to put out there. Their use of multi-track recording made him and his recording team geniuses in their own right. It would not be wrong to say that Gaye himself inspired the slow jams and contemporary music that we have to this day.