1. What’s Going On
2. What’s Happening Brother
3. Flyin’ High (In the Friendly Sky)
4. Save the Children
5. God Is Love
6. Mercy Mercy Me (The Ecology)
7. Right On
8. Wholy Holy
9. Inner City Blues (Make Me Wanna Holler)
I direct some things, act in some other things, write still other things, and now and then do stand-up for coins and/or accommodation.
I really don’t have a top three, but big moments for me in pop include:
The Smiths – The Queen Is Dead
Sugarcubes – Life’s Too Good
The Leisure Society – Into the Murky Water
When we announced this album on the blog the reception was unlike anything we’ve ever seen.
What typically happens is 50 per cent of people tell us the album is brilliant while the other 50 per cent tell us it’s rubbish and they hope the guest gives it a right good kicking. But this week was different. It was 100 per cent pro-album – the first time that’s ever happened.
And it wasn’t just an expression of lighthearted joy either – it was weightier than that. There I was on Monday afternoon, trying my best to relax with a bag of Wotsits, when I was suddenly confronted with a load of tweets laced with reverence and implicit threat.
Here are just some examples:
@StuartBunby, who has an avatar of a chimpanzee playing baseball, said,
I really hope he likes it. It would be really good if we could all continue to get along.
I’ll admit, the double use of the word ‘really’ scared me a bit and made me think that this Bunby character was a great deal more menacing than his surname suggests – i.e. not menacing at all because he’s called Mr Bunby.
@John_p_d, who describes himself as a ‘jazz lover’, said,
I can’t see how it would be humanly possible not to love this record.
Obviously I resisted the urge to reply with ‘I can’t see how it would be humanly possible to love jazz.’
And finally, @tillyv lived up to her Twitter bio (‘Ambiguity alludes me’) by saying,
Woah. He won’t be able to write with the religious experience he is about to have.
I found this one particularly odd because one of the reasons the world is in such a mess is precisely because of people writing about the religious experiences they’ve had. But never mind. I decided not to pull her up on this because a) she seems nice and b) I’m not Ricky Gervais.
On Tuesday, I dragged myself away from twitter for a routine check-up at the dentist. Brian, the dentist, is a jovial sort and long-term reader of our blog who occasionally chastises me for telling silly jokes about the bands he loves.
Again, Tuesday was different.
He had me upside down in his chair, shone the bright light right in my face and, while prising my mouth open with what seemed like half of B&Q, said,
‘You do know What’s Going On is one of my favourite albums, don’t you?’
It was a bit like that scene in Marathon Man, except Brian isn’t a Nazi trying to escape his past.
Well, he says he isn’t anyway.
So, with all these expectations, I struggled with what approach to take and was conscious that I had to do the album ‘justice’.
With that in mind, here are some potential angles that I considered:
Any piece about Marvin Gaye is usually dominated by accounts of a ruthless father who used to beat him mercilessly as a child. Some people go even further and seek to explain his entire career as an attempt to simultaneously escape his father while also making him proud.
That may be true but it sort of ruins the jaunty opening.
With that in mind, I decided to move on and ignore the ‘terrible dad spawns great artist’ angle.
Sorry, terrible dads.
I considered doing the entire piece on how Motown is easily the best record label ever and, with the possible exception of Chess, no one else even comes close.
In fact, it’s so good that it’s now an adjective in its own right and people quite naturally walk around saying ‘I’m into Motown’ in a way that no one has ever said ‘I’m into Sony’ or ‘I’m into Bella Union’.
No doubt there’s someone shouting ‘I PREFER STAX, ACTUALLY!’ at their computer right now, but surely that’s just one of those weird things that people say – like salt and vinegar crisps belong in green packets.
Everything about Motown, particularly in the early days, makes me happy – they produced entertainers rather than singers; they recorded within hours of writing the song to capture the spontaneity; and they often ripped up their own release schedules because they were so excited about whatever brilliant song they just recorded.
Do you know what the first Motown record was that sold a million copies?
‘Shop Around’ by Smokey Robinson and The Miracles.
Do you know what ‘Shop Around’ is about?
It’s about Smokey Robinson’s mum pulling him to one side and basically saying, ‘Before you get married, son, have as many girlfriends as you possibly can.’
What a woman. I wish my mum had said the same to me.
My love of Motown also explains my suspicion of northern soul. Why is everyone messing about with B-sides and rarities? Just put ‘Needle in a Haystack’ by The Velvelettes on and be done with it.
And why are we in Wigan? And why’s everyone covered in talcum powder?
Sorry, it’s not for me.
Finally, I love the fact that all you needed for a career at Motown was to be in close proximity to the recording studio. That was it. Just hang around and your time will come, like it did for Diana Ross and Martha Reeves – office girls who were put on the production line just because they were within reach.
‘Excuse me Martha, can you stop typing for a second and come in here and sing “Heatwave” please.’
‘Sure, no problem.’
‘Great, and can you bring the Vandellas with you please.’
I’m fairly sure that if I’d been working there as a cleaner then I’d probably have had fifteen top ten hits by now and currently be on tour somewhere with the surviving members of The Four Tops.
That’s how good it was.
Yet when you look at Gaye’s career, it’s complex and goes against the grain of the other artists. He starts out as a drummer, then gets marketed as a Nat King Cole-style crooner, before he decides to rebel against the company ethos. This basically involves smoking a load of weed, snorting a load of coke, and being a terrible pupil at the John Roberts Powers School for Social Grace where he was sent to be groomed.
He’s also not helped by a stop-start discography that never quite takes off in the same way as The Supremes, The Four Tops or The Temptations. For every ‘Can I Get a Witness’ and ‘How Sweet It Is (To Be Loved by You)’ there’s a string of forgettable songs that aren’t hits. It’s only really when he teams up with Tammi Terrell in 1966 that he has consolidated success for the first time.
Tragically, though, Terrell collapses in his arms on stage one night in 1967 and is later diagnosed with a brain tumour. She dies three years later, at the age of just twenty-four.
So, despite everything that I associate with Motown, the opposite appears to be the case for Marvin Gaye. His success is, at best, sporadic, and his personal life is littered with tragedy and unease.
Come the end of the sixties, with the label starting to fall apart, Marvin Gaye is still hanging on and looking for another move.
And he’s just had his biggest hit so far – ‘I Heard It Through the Grapevine’.
One of the more interesting aspects of Gaye’s career is how he became overtly politicised towards the end of the sixties in a way that other Motown artists didn’t. Throughout his life he had personal battles with authority (his father, Motown), and as the decade wore on he embraced an emerging subculture that was defiantly anti-war and anti-government.
He tells of a time when he heard one of his own songs on the radio interrupted by a newsflash about the Watts Riots.
He tells of how his brother would come back from Vietnam with stories that would terrify and infuriate him.
Yet, all the while, Motown are still pushing him to ‘entertain’, to meet their expectations of who Marvin Gaye was.
He can’t do it any more.
Instead, he starts wearing hoodies, grows a beard, and refuses to pay his taxes in case the government uses them to bomb Vietnam.
It’s in this frame of mind that he starts work on What’s Going On – an album that turned its back on a career of love songs and focused on the Vietnam war, spirituality, environmentalism and saving babies instead.
So here we are. Having considered the three obvious angles, I still felt dissatisfied. None of them seemed to adequately sum up the album and I felt there was still something missing.
For example, there’s the James Jamerson story.
For those of you that don’t know, Jamerson was the legendary bass player at Motown who played on practically all their hits. Naturally, Gaye wanted him for What’s Going On so he tracked him down to a club and dragged him into the studio to record his part. There was only one problem – Jamerson was so drunk that he could barely stand up.
It didn’t matter though. Jamerson lay on the floor, pissed out of his head, and nailed his part in one take. To this day it’s one of the best bass lines ever and I’ll never know how he did it.
So, yeah, at one point I considered doing 2,000 words on a drunk bass player.
And that was nearly that. I’d given up trying to find something that captured the essence of What’s Going On and, instead, settled for what I had – some biography plotlines and a few daft jokes.
Par for the course, really.
Then I saw it.
In an interview just before he made What’s Going On, Marvin Gaye said the following:
‘I had to be an artist, and artists work in the privacy of their own imaginations.’
It was that final phrase that really struck me.
I couldn’t stop thinking about it and it went round my head for hours. He’d come up with the perfect description for the creative process, one that explained why debut albums are often the best, why you should never cater for your audience, and why you should always ignore other people’s expectations.
But more than that, he explained his own transformation.
He explained that What’s Going On is as much about personal politics as it is about a wider context – the legacy narrative that now gives the album its weight.
He let you in on the secret of what happened and, in the process, reminded me that these stories are always best kept personal. So if you’re asking me what I think of What’s Going On, to do it justice, I would say its magic is in that phrase.
After twelve years and ten albums, Marvin Gaye finally discovered what he’d been looking for the whole time – the privacy of his own imagination.
It takes me a long time to get round to things – the films of Billy Wilder, tax returns, writing this – and Motown was just another one of those foolishly neglected items on my very long list. When I was little most of the music in our house was classical. That came from my dad, the son of an Austrian woman who brought the Viennese love of chamber music with the suitcase of possessions she packed when she fled the Nazis. My childhood was all schnitzel and sauerkraut and septets. There was the occasional burst of pop too but only really through the records my mum had bought, which she seemed to have stopped doing once her children came along. It would be ten years until I’d hear of the existence of David Bowie. My first exposure to any kind of R&B was in the form of Boney M’s 1978 Nightflight to Venus.
Charities have been started for less.
Leaving aside an early flirtation with the works of Queen, my own pop education began quite late under the tutelage of my school bus comrade Bob, who filled the vital role of Slightly Older Kid with Advanced Record Collection. He made me a copy of The Smiths’ Strangeways, Here We Come, and since TDK D90s had two sides, slung in The Pogues’ If I Should Fall from Grace with God too. These were a revelation. The energy of The Pogues, the sly gallows wit of Morrissey, the music from Marr the like of which I’d just never imagined existed, blew out a wall to my left and when the clouds of plaster thinned, there was this whole other world – whole other part of my brain, actually – a valley of possibilities, stretching away. I let slip Queen’s hand and off into that valley I gambolled, writhing around in indie like an extra in a drug scene from a 1960s movie: The House of Love, The Sugarcubes, They Might Be Giants and the fey, pre-Roses la-la pop that Manchester put out (God, I loved The Man from Delmonte like only a weedy nerd could). By the time Madchester came along, I was an old indie hand in the right place at the right time.
For years after that I was pretty tribal about pop, as the gauche often are; I was an indie kid, all fanzines and certainty. That probably lasted about a decade until I met my wife, who is on every level a better person than me. She loves all the things I took pride in disdaining: soul, musicals, celery. And in a war of attrition over the last almost twenty years, she’s got me round to the first two. (I will die before admitting celery is a foodstuff, mind.) Now among the thousands of LPs, CDs and downloads I own there’s stuff in every genre. Except metal, which continues to elude me. But what all those lost years meant was that in spite of listening to (and loving) a great deal more of it in recent times, whole swathes of soul, funk, R&B and related sub-genres that would be bunged in the same grey slots in HMV have passed me by, including all but the title track of Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On.
God, the pressure. People love this, don’t they? I mean, really fanatically love it as an album, an artefact, a milestone. God, the pressure.
I’ve been on a bit of an up and down journey with this one. See, that opening track is so strong, such a great piece of music, that I think I was waiting for an album of something similar – something that immediately grabs you, a constantly startling adventure in music, twists and turns and revelations at every corner. This is not that album. That first listen was a surprise. No, I’ll be more honest: it was a disappointment. But that’s the problem with the expectations we build up, isn’t it? That’s why so many critics level that utterly redundant opinion ‘I would have preferred it if it was a bit more like…’, the correct response to which is ‘Well, it isn’t, so suck it up and take it on its own terms, you solipsistic imbecile.’
So, having washed my expectations away, I went back to it and I must say I liked it a good deal better, which was exciting and pleasing and something of a relief because I’m a cultural coward and I’d hate to be seen as a dunce who can’t appreciate A Classic. The third time I put it on, I was truly looking forward to being in its company again, but as the record turned… nothing. It just didn’t take. To be absolutely straight with you, I got a bit bored.
I hope that we can still be friends.
Marvin starts out asking ‘What’s Going On’ and neither having received a satisfactory answer nor being the kind of fellow to let a thing go, he investigates further with a song called ‘What’s Happening, Brother’. Actually, there’s no question mark, so it’s difficult to tell whether he’s just reframed his original question or is now providing the answer to it. My guess is that it’s a supplementary enquiry related to the first one since it starts with exactly the same musical sequence the last song finished with. Because what seems to happen after the belting opener is that Marvin noodles around for fifteen minutes or so asking vague questions over music that doesn’t seem to change pace or go anywhere different to any great degree, making breaks at arbitrary moments when he’s thought of another question. I find the meandering makes it hard to get hold of anything.
‘Flyin’ High (In the Friendly Sky)’ and ‘Save the Children’ together sound like an extended improv looking for a hook, which is occasionally glimpsed before we lose all sight of it again. It’s like variations on a theme without an actual, you know, theme. I liked ‘God Is Love’ and ‘Mercy, Mercy Me (The Ecology)’ better. They seemed to have more of a shape, the latter even surviving the addition of a saxophone, an instrument which when blown with any vigour rarely doesn’t sound like a pig trapped in a barrel. And ‘Inner City Blues’ is simply great. It has more purpose than anything since the title track, marching forward on the hookiest of hooks. It’s simpler at its core than a lot of the other tracks and perhaps that’s why I like it. Maybe here’s the focus I’ve been subconsciously looking for; the song seems to develop, rather than wander.
I hope that we can still be friends.
I hesitate to say this, but there just don’t seem to be as many ideas here as there are songs. STOP! NO! LISTEN! I’m aware that I’m hearing it forty-five years after the event and that in fact any of the extraordinary, ground-breaking musical things Marvin Gaye may well have done here will have been so appropriated and re-used over the time since that it’s impossible for me to see them clearly from my vantage point. I know someone who hates Monty Python because before he saw any of their work he’d seen a million thudding sixth-form acolytes attempt to synthesise their genius, their turns of phrase. So by the time he got to Python itself, it was ruined for him.
That could well be happening with me and this album because, oh look, here are the strings I find so cheesy and awful in disco and here’s the jazz flute that I’ve hated since 1970s Italian kids’ cartoon Mr Rossi and the sound of ‘Right On’ has been parodied so often in blaxploitation/cop spoofs that it’s hard to take it seriously, but maybe I’m just looking the wrong way up the tube. Even so, it’s the only way I can look.
I hope that we can still be friends.
I also know that this album is supposed to be an explosive political statement and so I’m chary of not liking it for reasons of cultural sensitivity and – more importantly – the aforementioned cowardice. Yet the songs are so frustratingly vague. He starts with the general thesis that there’s something going on and then goes on to specify only that some of the things that are going on are going on with drugs and other things that are going on are going on with children.
Following that is a quick sidebar in which he’s keen to point out that none of it is God’s fault before he’s right back to it, noting that something’s also going on with ‘The Ecology’. He’s really no more specific about the problems than this. I have started to suspect that if I were to buy the deluxe reissue of this album, I’d find tracks that didn’t make the original cut called ‘Seriously Mate, Right?’ and ‘Cuh. Life, Eh?’ His obvious sincerity is not in any doubt and I’m certain that at the time it was released this was something quite extraordinary, but I want my explosive political statements to be all fire and revolution and lyrical petrol in a musical bottle, Marvin, get out of second gear! But yet again, I’m falling into the idiot’s trap of measuring this thing by my own expectations, so let’s take the lyrics on their own terms. Here’s a segment of ‘Save the Children’:
Oh what a shame, such a bad way to live
All who is to blame, we can’t stop livin’
Live, live for life
But let live everybody
Live life for the children
Oh, for the children
You see, let’s save the children
Let’s save all the children
Save the babies, save the babies.
I mean, I can’t say I disagree with him. In fact, I loudly applaud the whole notion, but it just doesn’t come as any great revelation, you know, the idea that we should really try to save the babies. To be brutally plain, you could absolutely take those lines and alternate them between two old men nursing Guinness at a bar, drunkenly agreeing with each other over and over.
ARTHUR: Live life for the children.
PETEY: Oh, for the children.
ARTHUR: You see, let’s save the children.
PETEY: Let’s save all the children.
ARTHUR: Save the babies.
PETEY: Save the babies. Have you any scampi fries back there, love?
I confess I’m being slightly harsh to hammer the point, but as great statements go it does all feel a bit undercooked.
I hope that we can still be friends.
But look, I don’t like not liking this album since it’s so important to so many people I know (plus cowardice etc. etc.). I’m comforted that a friend of mine who is an enormously knowledgeable classical music buff took until he was in his fifties to get his head round Mozart; maybe I just haven’t found the key that unlocks What’s Going On yet. So let’s focus on the positive: I did really enjoy it the second time I heard it and if you incorporate the fact that I adore the title track and ‘Inner City Blues’ is fabulous, then I enjoyed it at least 60 per cent of the time I was listening to it. Which also means that I very well might enjoy it again. The best things grow on you, don’t they? Apart from athlete’s foot – that one’s the exception. So that’s what I’m taking from this: an acquaintance that if worked at might one day become a firm friendship.
I really do hope that we can still be friends.
I definitely will. Late at night with whisky next, I think. But I won’t listen to it as A Classic, just as some music. See what happens if I come at it from that angle. See if it can breathe a bit more out from under the weight of everyone telling me how good it is.
I enjoyed 60 per cent of my listening, so 6. For now.