Edition №3
“What’s Going On,” the title track of Marvin Gaye’s 1971 album, was written by Obie Benson of the Four Tops. His own group refused to record it.
Renaldo “Obie” Benson, the Four Tops’ bass vocalist, was on tour in May 1969. The Four Tops’ bus pulled into Berkeley on May 15. Benson watched Berkeley police shoot buckshot into the crowd at People’s Park. One person was killed. Another was permanently blinded. 128 were hospitalized. The day is still called Bloody Thursday. Benson started writing “What’s Going On” after the tour and finished it with Motown songwriter Al Cleveland. The Four Tops refused to record it. They said it was a protest song.
Benson took the song to Marvin Gaye. Marvin liked it but wanted The Originals to cut it. Benson kept after him and eventually offered to give him a cut of the royalties. Marvin recorded “What’s Going On” at Hitsville USA on June 1, 1970.
There was more in motion than just Benson’s song. Marvin’s brother Frankie had served three years in Vietnam as an Army radio DJ and returned to civilian life in 1970. The conversations between them after Frankie came home reached past the title track and shaped the album that followed. “What’s Happening Brother,” recorded the following spring, came directly from those brotherly talks. The Benson sketch became the title track. Frankie’s IRL experience became the spine.
The opening saxophone line that defines the title track was a creative accident. Eli Fontaine, a Detroit session player, was warming up over the backing track. Marvin stopped the tape and sent him home. They already had what they needed. Fontaine protested he was just goofing around. Marvin told him goofing around was the take. Talk about an efficient use of studio time!
Berry Gordy hated it. He called the title track “the worst thing I ever heard in my life.” When Marvin called him in the Bahamas to argue for it, Gordy asked: “Marvin, why do you want to ruin your career?” When Harry Balk later pressed him to release the single, Gordy named what bothered him: “that Dizzy Gillespie stuff in the middle, that scatting, it’s old.” Gordy refused.
Marvin told him: “Put it out or I’ll never record for you again.” The standoff held through the fall of 1970. In January 1971, Harry Balk and Motown’s sales vice president Barney Ales pressed and released 100,000 copies of “What’s Going On” to radio stations and record stores without Gordy’s approval. The single sold over 200,000 copies in its first week, went to number two on the Billboard Hot 100 and held number one on the soul singles chart for five weeks. Gordy reversed and gave Marvin thirty days to deliver the album. The recording sessions took ten business days in late March 1971.
What’s Going On is Marvin Gaye’s eleventh studio album. Tamla released it on May 21, 1971. It sold two million copies in its first year and changed how Motown operated. The reissues never stopped, and they are not equal. In 2022 two editions arrived wearing nearly the same sticker and naming the same engineer. Only one of them is what it claims to be.
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