What's Going On
Marvin Gaye · Tamla · 1971
Issue №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.
The chain
The 1971 stereo master is the source of everything. Three modern mastering chains descend from it, plus an all-analog path and the 1971 Japanese local cut.
Session. June 1970 to May 1971 · Hitsville USA Studio A, Golden World (Motown’s Studio B), and United Sound Studios in Detroit; The Sound Factory in West Hollywood, California
Producer. Marvin Gaye
Postproduction. The title track’s double-lead vocal began as engineer Ken Sands’s accident, two lead takes played together by mistake; Marvin kept it and built the album’s stacked harmonies on the technique.
Release. May 21, 1971 · Tamla
Original master. Cut at Motown’s Detroit operation. The same album tape reels feed every reissue.
Notable. First soul concept album to prove the form commercially. Stevie Wonder’s classic 1970s run, Marvin’s own later catalog, and a generation of social-conscience soul artists followed the commercial path the record opened.
Also in the wild. The Detroit Mix, Marvin’s own earlier stereo mix, distinct from the released Los Angeles mix and reissued on its own. This verdict covers the LA mix.
There is a catch worth flagging up front. Universal Music Group released a separate European 50th Anniversary edition in 2022 at the same time as the US Kevin Gray Cohearent cut, using the same artwork and similar hype-sticker text claiming Kevin Gray Cohearent mastering. The audio is different. The European pressing was cut by Lawrence Dunster from a digital transfer and pressed at Dublin Vinyl. Two records, similar marketing, different chains. The verdict table below names the US edition specifically.
The musicianship
The Funk Brothers had been the Motown house rhythm section since 1959, and What’s Going On was the first album ever to print their name in the credits. They were no longer cutting three-minute singles to a Holland-Dozier-Holland template. They tracked the suite in arrangements that asked them to listen across the stereo field.
Personnel.
Marvin Gaye · vocals (multitracked harmonies, vocal stacking) · production
James Jamerson · bass
The Funk Brothers · rhythm section
David Van De Pitte · arranger and conductor of the orchestra · Grammy-nominated for the title-track arrangement
Eli Fontaine · alto saxophone (title track)
Wild Bill Moore · tenor saxophone (”Mercy Mercy Me”)
Notable Behind The Scenes.
Marvin tracked Jamerson down at a Detroit bar one night, the kind of late-call retrieval the Funk Brothers later described in Standing in the Shadows of Motown. Jamerson had been drinking heavily and could barely stand. Motown pianist Joe Hunter later told The Guardian: “That bassline you hear on What’s Goin’ On by Marvin [Gaye]. Jamerson played that lying flat on his back, right there on the studio floor.” That is the take on the record.
The chatter that opens, bridges, and fades the title track is Marvin’s friends in conversation: Mel Farr (running back, Detroit Lions, 1967 NFL Offensive Rookie of the Year), Lem Barney (cornerback, Detroit Lions, Pro Football Hall of Fame 1992), Elgie Stover, and Bobby Rogers of the Miracles. Spoken salutations caught while the tape was rolling.
The verdict
The 2019 MFSL UltraDisc One-Step 45 RPM 2-LP, cut by Krieg Wunderlich from MFSL’s DSD64 transfer of the original analog tape, is the reference cut.
If you cannot find the One-Step at a fair price, the 2022 Kevin Gray Cohearent cut, all-analog on the album, is the next-best option at standing catalog price.
For CD listeners, the 2008 MFSL hybrid SACD’s Red Book layer is the reference. When it is out of reach, the Universal Music Japan SHM-CD Deluxe Edition is the continuing in-print path.
For music-server listeners, the HDtracks 24/192 FLAC is the reference; the 24/96 carries the same master at a lower price.
Period-authentic: the 1971 Tamla Japan pressing, an all-analog local cut from the original window. Price verification pending.
Avoid the 2022 European 50th Anniversary pressing. It is a digital cut wearing the US edition’s marketing; the catches below show how to tell them apart.
Catches to watch for…
The 2019 MFSL One-Step is OOP at primary retail; VG+ non-negotiable at the secondary-market level. The One-Step’s DSD64 intermediate has a documented reason: the original reels carry per-track calibration tones, and takes split across reels made a direct tape-to-lacquer cut infeasible. Motown’s printed inner sleeve scopes the 2022 edition’s all-analog claim to the album disc: LP1 cuts from the original analog album masters, while the LP2 bonus material comes from a composite reel derived from analog and digital sources. The 2022 European 50th Anniversary edition uses the same artwork as the US cut and similar hype-sticker text claiming Kevin Gray Cohearent mastering, but the audio is a different chain: a digital cut by Lawrence Dunster, pressed at Dublin Vinyl. The runout is the only reliable discriminator. The US cut carries the etched signature “KPG@CA” (Kevin Gray at Cohearent Audio); the European runout reads “LAWRIE” and “CURVEPUSHER.” The European labels even print the same HS- heritage matrix numbers as the US edition, and later European copies dropped the hype sticker entirely, so neither labels nor stickers settle it. AnalogPlanet‘s Michael Fremer placed the One-Step ahead of MFSL’s earlier standard 33⅓ pressing (February 2019).
Endnote
Fifty-five years after Marvin Gaye finished the record his label had refused to release, the catalog still carries it across four mastering chains and four format paths. It took fifty-one years for a second all-analog cut to come off those reels, and it arrived alongside a European look-alike sold on the same claim. Sometimes the work that almost did not happen is the work that ends up holding the longest.
Next Up: Edition №5 - Someday My Prince Will Come / July 7, 2026
Reference Checks is an evidence-led publication on the recording versions worth a serious listener’s time. Subscribers to the paid tier receive the full chain-of-custody dossier (every catalog string, matrix runout, plant identifier, and verification specification) plus a more prose-forward editorial reading of each issue. The reviewer’s listening chain is calibration context, named in the About page and absent from every verdict.