The Motown order that changed Marvin Gaye forever: “I’ll never record for you”
Music is an incredibly subjective art form, but if you pick out the greatest songs of the 20th century, and Marvin Gaye’s ‘What’s Going On’ doesn’t make an appearance, you are dead wrong.
Disenfranchised by the idea of pumping out pithy pop-soul songs year after year, Gaye sought to create a record which would reflect the politically tumultuous period of the late 1960s. With the civil rights movement marching on, and more and more of America’s young people being sent halfway across the world to die in the jungles of Vietnam for reasons which were always pretty hazy, Gaye couldn’t ignore the societal situation any longer.
Of course, the Motown master wasn’t the only songwriter to take a socially reflective approach to his music during the 1960s, but nobody captured the zeitgeist of that time quite as expertly as Gaye. Even today, over half a century later, the song still stands up as a masterpiece of social realism and politically-active songwriting – in fact, it is arguably more relevant than ever when you look at the abhorrent news emanating from the United States on a daily basis at present.
Nobody in their right mind could deny the sheer power of ‘What’s Going On’, except, as it turns out, Motown boss Berry Gordy. Notoriously hard to please, Gordy experienced more than a few clashes with Marvin Gaye during the golden age of Motown. Despite being one of the Detroit label’s flagship artists, the Motown boss rarely seemed to trust the talents of Gaye.
For instance, we all know Gaye’s seminal recording of ‘I Heard It Through The Grapevine’, which became one of the biggest-selling Motown songs in the label’s history back in 1968. However, Gordy prevented the release of that single for well over a year, despite numerous pleas from Gaye and the wider Motown team. You would think, then, that once Gordy had been proved wrong by the success of ‘Grapevine’, he would have a little more trust in Marvin Gaye as a performer, but you would be wrong.
Gordy was openly resistant to the idea of ‘What’s Going On’ from the very start. Motown generally stayed away from the world of politics, something which the label was roundly criticised for during the peak of the civil rights movement.
The defence of this was that the label boss wanted Motown to appear to everybody, and taking a political standpoint might alienate some of its audience. So, when Gaye presented the finished recording of ‘What’s Going On’ to Gordy, the boss reportedly called it “the worst thing I ever heard in my life.”
The single, like many of Gaye’s previous recordings, was shelved. Unlike previous recordings, though, the vocalist wasn’t going to take no for an answer. “Put it out or I’ll never record for you again,” he declared, going out on strike in support of ‘What’s Going On’. That might have been the end of Gaye’s career at Motown, were it not for the support he received from figures like Stevie Wonder, and A&R man Harry Balk.
“Of course, now everybody will tell you how wonderful they thought ‘What’s Going On’ was, but I played it for the hot producers and got nothing but negative opinions,” Balk once told Detroit News. “The only one that was really knocked out with it – the only one – was Stevie Wonder.”
Eventually, Gordy relented and ‘What’s Going On’ hit the airwaves in 1971, many months after those first recording sessions took place. Despite the boss’ reservations about the track, it was an instant hit, topping the R&B chart, reaching number two in the pop charts, and rightly being hailed as Marvin Gaye’s ultimate masterpiece. Not bad for a song which could easily have been confined to the Motown vaults at the order of Berry Gordy.
More importantly, though, the success of the song altered the course of Gaye’s output for the rest of his career. Gordy begrudgingly had to admit defeat and granted the vocalist free rein to produce his own work without having to seek approval from the boss, opening the door for masterpiece records like What’s Going On, along with the rest of Gaye’s politically charged, often experimental output throughout the 1970s.
