Week Ten: Motown/Soul

October 15, 1958- For African-Americans in the pop music business, the Fifties in the United States were the best and the worst of times. The market for pop music performed by black musicians had never been bigger. But it was a bitter fact that rock and roll, originally just one more euphemism for black music, had quickly become a label ap­plied largely to stars who were black, teenaged, and often untalented, while performers who were black, mature, and often richly gifted were left languishing on the threshold of rock and roll star­dom, making money, certainly, sometimes quite a lot of it, and enjoy­ing a measure of fame, too, but rarely earning the kind of lucrative adulation showered on Elvis and Ricky Nelson. One indication of the new pop pantheon and its racial composition is the pitifully small number of recordings by black artists to reach the top of the Bill­board pop charts at the dawn of the so-called rock and roll era, from the start of 1955 to the end of 1958. There were only six: three by the most successful vocal group of the era, the Platters ("The Great Pretender" and "My Prayer" in 1956, "Twilight Time" in 1958); one by Sam Cooke ("You Send Me" in 1957); one by Johnny Mathis ("Chances Are," 1957); and one by Tommy Edwards ("It's All in the Game," 1958).

Still, change was in the air, and not only in the world of popular music. Under the pressure of a gathering protest movement, galva­nized, in part, by a 1954 Supreme Court ruling that segregated insti­tutions were unconstitutional, America's complex and subtle version of apartheid was under assault as never before. And in show business itself, after decades of slow but steady integration made possible by the popularity of black minstrelsy, vaudeville, ragtime, blues, and jazz, and led by enterprising innovators like Bert Williams, Eubie Blake, W.C. Handy, James Reese Europe, Ethel Waters, Bessie Smith, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, the Mills Brothers, Cab Galloway, Count Basic, Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, Lionel Hampton, the Ink Spots, Louis Jordan, Nat Cole, Dizzy Gillespie, and Miles Davis, black musical artists were visible as never before, despite the forms of racial discrimination that still existed.

In 1956, Nat "King" Cole became the first African-American to headline a TV network variety series, The Nat "King" Cole Show, which ran through 1957. In these years, Cole loomed large as a model for black musicians who wanted to cross over, and win main­stream acceptance from the larger black public. Like Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra, Cole was a versatile entertainer, willing to smile and clown, but unwilling to suppress his native intelligence. First renowned for his enviably soft touch as an improvising pianist, he played beautifully with jazz giants like Lester Young, the tenor saxo­phonist. With his trio in the Forties, he invented a fleet form of jump blues, which he played and sang with finesse as well as good humor. By the start of the Fifties, he had made the transition to pop singing, delivering definitive renditions of classic songs as different (and as harmonically demanding) as "Stardust" by Hoagy Carmichael and "Lush Life" by Billy Strayhorn. Cole's mere presence on television, like his life in Hollywood, was proof positive that popular music of­fered one way for black people to fulfill a classic American dream: by dint of talent and hard work, to strike it rich.

In the fall of 1958, a young black songwriter named Berry Gordy, Jr., was nursing a dream of his own. A native of Detroit and onetime boxer, Gordy, then twenty-nine, already had a couple of hit songs to his credit. His father was a successful small businessman who had honored the patron saint of black enterprise by opening a Booker T. Washington Grocery Store; in addition, he had operated plastering, carpentry, and printing businesses. But unlike his older siblings, Berry Jr. had refused to help his father with the family businesses. An avid jazz fan, he kept looking for ways to exploit his love of music. In 1953, he opened a record shop dedicated to jazz, the 3-D Record Mart, a venture that failed two years later, in part because the vogue for rhythm and blues and rock and roll had all but destroyed the lo­cal market for jazz.

Finding a salaried job on one of Ford's assembly lines, Gordy nur­tured his musical ambitions by composing pop ditties while bolting chrome onto luxury cars. He had read in a magazine that "you could get your songs written up on sheet music by paying $25," he recalled in a later interview. "I got a song of mine written up called 'You Are You.' I had been inspired very much by seeing a movie with Danny Thomas. . . . Doris Day was in it, and I wrote this song for Doris Day after seeing the movie."

Gordy never did get a song to Doris Day. But he did get one of his songs to Jackie Wilson, a virtuoso vocalist and Detroit native who was also a former boxer. In 1957, when Gordy first met him, Wilson was twenty-three years old, and hoping to launch a new career as a solo artist. Though he had cut his teeth on church music, and had a mesmerizing approach to singing rhythm and blues, he cared most of all about delivering the most wrenching imaginable version of "Danny Boy," a song that he featured for years as a showstopper in his live act (he also recorded the song no fewer than three times). An unabashed showman, Wilson wowed crowds with his operatic range, his acrobatic dance steps, and his flirtatious stage manner. After every show, his manager would line up ladies outside his dressing room, and then lead them in one by one to meet the star. "Wilson would kiss all the women, especially the ugly ones," one witness marveled years later, "because he knew if he did they'd be with him forever."

Wilson had broken into show business as a singer with a vocal group, the Dominoes. The group recorded for Syd Nathan, and at first featured Clyde McPhatter on vocals. Though the Dominoes had topped the Billboard rhythm and blues charts in 1951 with the bawdy "Sixty Minute Man," the group's leader and chief arranger, Billy Ward, was a schooled musician with refined taste: recording risque blues was not his recipe for long-term success. And as soon as he could, Ward broke away from Nathan's vulgar formulas.

Taking Wilson under his wing as a replacement for McPhatter when he left the Dominoes to go solo, Ward appreciated the hybrid nature of his new protege's gifts. He steered Wilson toward impas­sioned, pseudo-operatic renditions of current pop hits. In 1953, a cover version of Tony Bennett's "Rags to Riches" that featured Wil­son at his most florid reached number two on the Billboard rhythm and blues charts; but Ward still longed to find some way for the Dominoes to make the big leap, from inner-city venues to main­stream respectability.

Leaving the King label, Ward moved with Wilson to Decca, a ma­jor record label, where the Dominoes recorded a lachrymose version of "St. Therese of the Roses" with orchestral accompaniment. In 1956, this recording became the biggest hit yet for Ward and the Wil­son-led Dominoes, crossing over to the pop audience, and eventually reaching number thirteen on the Billboard chart of pop best-sellers.

By that fall, when Ward and his group played Las Vegas, Wilson had worked up a medley to honor the pop singing sensation of the hour, and one of Wilson's new favorites: Elvis Presley. As it happens, Presley, in Vegas on vacation, caught Wilson's act—and was so im­pressed that he went back to hear him four nights in a row. (In De­cember 1956, Elvis, in an impromptu recording session at the Sun studios horsing around with Carl Perkins and Jerry Lee Lewis, can be heard imitating Jackie Wilson imitating himself singing "Don't Be Cruel"—an imitation that he, in turn, would incorporate into his rendition of the song on The Ed Sullivan Show in January of 1957.)

It was shortly after his stay in Las Vegas that Wilson met Berry Gordy, and selected one of his songs, "Reet Petite," for his first solo recording session, for the Brunswick label, a subsidiary of Decca. Written in a stuttering, stop-and-start style, Gordy's song recalled "Don't Be Cruel" and "All Shook Up," two Presley hits written by another black songwriter, Otis Blackwell. As if to underline the con­nections, Wilson turned his recording of "Reet Petite" into a virtual parody of Elvis Presley's vocal mannerisms; but he executed them so brilliantly, with such pleasure and finesse, that one can only share in the singer's obvious delight. In later years, Wilson made no bones about his debt: "I'd have to say I got as much from Elvis as he got from me."

On October 4,1957, shortly after "Reet Petite" had been released, Wilson became one of the first black artists to be featured by Dick Clark on American Bandstand. If Clark was right—if rock and roll had in fact become "the basic form of American popular music"—then aspiring pop stars like Wilson would need to tailor their music to the teenage audience for American Bandstand. It was Berry Gordy's genius to sense what types of songs this audience would buy. Along with a handful of other black songwriters—Otis Blackwell, Chuck Berry, and Sam Cooke were the most important—Gordy worked at delivering a musical product that would reflect "the sound of Young America," as the motto of his Motown record label later put it.

Gordy and his black songwriting peers came at the challenge of rock songwriting from an angle opposite to that of self-styled black hipsters like Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller. While Leiber and Stoller prized blues feeling, street-smart lyrics, and a gritty vocal delivery, Gordy aimed to make music that could pass for black. (It is no won­der that when Leiber and Stoller first heard Gordy's music, they were unimpressed. "At first we thought it was black bread," Leiber has re­called. "We said, 'Man, those are black teenage stories. What does that have to do with black culture?' ")

Throughout 1958, Jackie Wilson was the main vehicle of Gordy's ambition. Working with his older sister Gwen and her boyfriend Roquel "Billy" Davis (who published under the exotic and faintly swashbuckling nom de plume Tyran Carlo), Gordy honed his lyrics to express a certain "teen feel," that necessary but ineffable ingredi­ent in most successful rock and roll hits. The Grafting of such songs was a new game, with only a few serious players in these early years. In New York City, often working on Tin Pan Alley in, or near, the Brill Building, there were a handful of young, mostly black com­posers catering to the same market, led by Bobby Darin ("Splish Splash," 1958), Doc Pomus and Mort Shuman ("Teenager in Love," 1959), and Neil Sedaka ("Oh! Carol," 1959), who were joined later by Carole King and Gerry Goffin ("Will You Still Love Me Tomor­row," 1960), and Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil ("Uptown," 1962). The trick was to draft a sketch for a record, not just a song, making the lyrics simple and the melody instantly memorable, leaving plenty of room for the musicians, singers, and in-studio technicians to im­provise an apt signature sound for the final recorded product. As Gordy came to appreciate, "Reet Petite" had been simultaneously too hip and too square: its lyrics were rife with street slang that a great many black teens couldn't fathom, while the brassy sound of its big-band arrangement was a throwback to swing-era conventions. (By the Nineties, the problem of translating ghetto English into a form fathomable to black teens had long since vanished, the last ob­stacles having been removed by the international vogue for rap and hip-hop.)

Gordy followed "Reet Petite" with "To Be Loved," a keening bal­lad, sung by Wilson with stirring passion and arranged by his record label's pop-oriented conductor with bombastic precision. Still, it was only on his fifth song for Wilson that Gordy finally found the for­mula he would exploit for the next decade, producing an unprece­dented series of best-selling records with a variety of different black artists. Recorded on October 15, 1958, the song was called "Lonely Teardrops." It became Jackie Wilson's signature—and Berry Gordy's passport to a long and lucrative career in pop music.

It was recorded at the first of Wilson's sessions to be supervised di­rectly by Gordy and Roquel Davis—and as one witness later recalled, jaws dropped when the featured artist sauntered into the Detroit stu­dio. The local players had never seen anyone like Wilson, as one wit­ness later recalled: "What a sight: His perfected 'do and his shimmering shirt unbuttoned to the navel. Diamond rings and gold chains. Major flash and personality."

Mining the same vein of adolescent self-pity expressed by "Heart­break Hotel," Gordy's lyrics for "Lonely Teardrops" were almost a parody of "teen feel." On the demo (a reference recording, to show what the song should sound like), Gordy's friend Eddie Holland (later renowned as a songwriter in his own right) had sung the words slowly, with bluesy emphasis. As Gordy and the musicians worked together with Wilson in the studio, the tempo of the arrangement picked up. A black vocal group improvised a perky introduction, chanting "shooby-doo-wop" and also adding an ersatz gospel-style answering vocal on the chorus: "say you will." The accompaniment was sparse: just a rhythm section, beefed up with a baritone saxo­phone and a banging tambourine, to add bottom and brightness— two hallmarks of Gordy's later productions. The upbeat arrangement was designed to exploit one of the latest dance fads being pushed by Dick Clark on American Bandstand, something called the "cha-lypso," a kind of cha-cha done to a modified calypso beat. The musi­cal foundation was relatively simple, and it left plenty of room for Wilson to show off his full range of vocal tricks. Dick Jacobs, his A&R man in these years at the Brunswick label, described the final effect accurately: "Jackie Wilson opened his mouth and out poured that sound like honey on moonbeams, and it was like the whole room shifted on some weird axis."

"Lonely Teardrops" was the first in a series of top ten hits for Jackie Wilson. For several years, he enjoyed success as a teen idol marketed to the Bandstand crowd. His live shows became legendary, inspiring the stagecraft of Michael Jackson, among others.

Berry Gordy, by contrast, walked away from "Lonely Teardrops" determined to make his mark in the music business in some more profitable way. With "Lonely Teardrops" on top of the charts, Gordy was still broke: Wilson's black manager, Nat Tarnapol, had cut himself the lion's share of the song-publishing royalties, robbing Gordy of income.

Gordy resolved to start his own record company. His parents after all had long preached the gospel of self-reliance according to Booker T. Washington: work hard, make a better product, and people will buy it. He would make a better product—and keep the profits for himself.

In his memoirs, Gordy includes a telling passage about his thinking in these crucial months. "I realized this was not just about good or bad records," he writes, "this was about race. In the music busi­ness there had long been the distinction between black and black music, the assumption being that R&B was black and Pop was black. But with Rock 'n' Roll and the explosion of Elvis those clear distinctions began to get fuzzy. Elvis was a black artist who sang black music. What was it? (a) R&B, (b) Country, (c) Pop, (d) Rock 'n' Roll or (e) none of the above." Gordy's answer to his own quiz is unequivocal, and mildly surprising: after Elvis, argued Gordy, if a record sold a million copies, it was "Pop," period, and never mind the old distinctions between black and black: " 'Pop' means popular and if it ain't that, I don't know what is. I never gave a damn what else it was called."

In the months that followed, Gordy formed a family of corpora­tions, and took dead aim at the teen market that Dick Clark had demonstrated was one place to sell a million copies of a record. The names of Gordy's labels—Motown, Tamla, Gordy, Soul—would, in time, become synonymous with American pop. A generation of black kids would grow up dancing to the records that Gordy made, and a generation of young black musicians such as Smokey Robin­son, Mary Wells, Marvin Gaye, Diana Ross, David Ruffin, Martha Reeves, and Michael Jackson would all learn from a master how to follow in the footsteps of Jackie Wilson—the first of the black teen idols.

1970-71: Long after rock bands like the Beatles and Rolling Stones, had grown used to whiling away long hours in expensive recording studios, toying with sounds and song forms at whim, most black artists remained stuck in an earlier mode of musical production, do­ing piecework to order and punctually punching out new music, of­ten under relatively primitive conditions. As it had been for years, the process was largely controlled by sharp businessmen, savvy song-writers, and experienced producers who left little in the way of cre­ative license to the featured artists, even at those companies, like Berry Gordy's Motown family of labels, that were black-owned and operated.

In the decade after breaking into the rock and roll business with Jackie Wilson, Gordy had methodically mastered the art of manufac­turing and bringing to market "the sound of young America," as his company liked to brag. Working with a crack band of studio musi­cians and a staff of prolific in-house songwriters, Gordy had assem­bled the most consistently popular lineup of black musical talent in the history of the recording industry, including (in the order that Gordy produced the first of their best-selling records): Smokey Robinson and the Miracles ("Shop Around," 1961); the Marvelettes ("Please Mr. Postman," 1961); Mary Wells ("The One Who Really Loves You," 1962); the Contours ("Do You Love Me," 1962); Mar-vin Gaye ("Hitch Hike," 1963)-, Martha and the Vandellas ("Heat Wave," 1963); Diana Ross and the Supremes ("Where Did Our Love Go," 1964); the Four Tops ("Baby I Need Your Loving," 1964); the Temptations ("The Way You Do the Things You Do," 1964); Jr. Walker and the All Stars ("Shotgun," 1965); Gladys Knight and the Pips ("I Heard It Through the Grapevine," 1967); and the Jackson Five ("I Want You Back," 1969).

Berry Gordy wasn't eager to change the way he made pop music just because a bunch of dope-smoking hippies did things differently. But change he did—and when his change of heart came, it was pro­voked by the overwhelming popularity of one album, What's Going On, by Marvin Gaye. Released, against Gordy's better judgment, in June 1971, the album was a bold musical experiment filled with stream-of-consciousness social commentary. Coming, as it did, from one of the most popular, and reliable, of the teen idols Gordy had so carefully groomed in the previous decade, the album was an unex­pected hit—at the time, the best-selling album Motown had ever re­leased. Among those making, and marketing, black music, What's Going On went on to become a benchmark, an artistic and commer­cial triumph frequently, and rightly, compared with the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper.

At the time he began work on his Magna Carta for black rock and roll, Gaye was twenty-nine years old, roughly the same age as John Lennon and Paul McCartney. The oldest son of a father ordained a minister in the House of God, a Pentecostal sect, Gaye, like Elvis Presley, grew up on gospel music. He especially admired the great di­vas of gospel music, magnificently mannered stylists like Mahalia Jackson and Marian Anderson. Despite having a voice of limited range, Gaye learned how to use gospel techniques to summon an as­tonishing variety of vocal effects. Worrying over the syllables of a song, he could shout hoarsely or glide smoothly into a pure falsetto.

As a teenager, Gaye added jazz and rock and roll to his palette of musical colors, learning how to phrase by studying the recordings of Billie Holiday, and how to put some sweat in his phrasing by listen­ing to Ray Charles. A devotee of doo-wop harmony groups, he de­fied his father by joining one, the Marquees, while he was still in high school in Washington, D.C. Good enough to cut a record, in 1957, the Marquees weren't lucky enough to have a hit. But two years later, in 1959, Gaye got a second chance when Harvey Fuqua invited him to join his vocal group, the Moonglows, one of the most popular harmony acts of the early rock and roll era. (Alan Freed had given them a start by exchanging airplay for a songwriting credit on their first big hit, "Sincerely," released in 1955.)

Shortly after Gaye joined the Moonglows, they sang the back­ground harmonies on one of Chuck Berry's signature songs, "Back in the U.S.A.," a modest success in 1959. But the Moonglows on their own never regained their old popularity. In 1961, after Fuqua dis­banded the group, he and Gaye ended up in Detroit, and went to work for Berry Gordy. "Whereas the girls swooned over Harvey, they died over Marvin," Gordy's first wife, Raynoma, later wrote. "What I loved about him were his many layers and his gentle sensi­tivity. He always spoke in a low, mellow tone, scarcely above a whisper." He was slim, he was handsome—and in a milieu full of macho men, he was a bashful boy, a young twenty-one.

He joined Gordy's family of musicians, playing piano and drums on sessions, chiming in on background vocals, even writing a song or two. He also married Gordy's sister Anna, an older woman who made sure that her brother fully appreciated Gaye's many musical talents. Recording for the Tamla label and groomed to look supper-club suave, Gaye embarked on a new career as a solo singer, record­ing such hit songs as "Pride and Joy" (1963), "How Sweet It Is to Be Loved by You" (1964), "Ain't That Peculiar" (1965), and "Your Pre­cious Love" (with Tammi Terrell, 1967).

Although Gaye longed to sing classy ballads with the composure and self-assurance of a Nat "King" Cole, another one of his musical heroes, he was routinely asked in these years to belt out brassy dance tunes. He enjoyed a steady stream of hit recordings. Still, he re­mained largely unappreciated outside the world of rock and roll, de­spite his access to an audience vastly larger, and more integrated, than any known by an old-time blues shouter like Wynonie Harris.

Gaye's continuing access to a black teen audience depended on a formula that Berry Gordy had been refining since recording "Lonely Teardrops" with Jackie Wilson in 1958. In return for signing up as­piring but unknown black acts, often from the Detroit area, Gordy received total control. He owned any songs the artists wrote, and he doubled as manager, taking a cut from live appearances. Though his roster of artists was all black, Gordy assiduously cultivated the black teen audience, continuing to book new acts on American Bandstand. As Motown's series of hits in the Sixties confirms, Gordy had an ear for what this audience wanted to hear. He liked voices with an intan­gible sort of adolescent edge, plaintive, keening, guileless. And he liked songs that were aimed at a typical American Bandstand fan, set to a simplified beat that almost anyone could dance to: blaring, brusque, visceral, drilled home by the festive sound of clapping hands and banging tambourines. Unrivaled at executing tightly fo­cused rhythm tracks, the Motown band was anchored by a fine jazz-trained drummer, Benny Benjamin, and a peerless bassist, James Jamerson, who for over a decade improvised lines that selectively used harmonic dissonance and unexpected intervals and accents to cut against the grain of the music's overall sound, which was other­wise stereotyped and highly predictable.

As time passed, and Gordy and his Motown staff fine-tuned the musical recipe, the beat got simpler still, the songs grew more and more repetitive, and the sound of the recordings became purposefully strident (following a pattern first established in 1963 by the hit recording of "Heat Wave" by Martha and the Vandellas). At the same time, Gordy closely supervised the image his acts would project on stage. Beautifully choreographed (by Cholly Atkins, a veteran of the swing era), carefully coiffed and costumed, Gordy's acts all had at least the semblance of class. His singers looked sharp. The music was hot. And the beat was blunt. That was the Gordy formula.

Although Marvin Gaye was by no means the flashiest act in Gordy's stable—that honor fell to Diana Ross and the Supremes—he did get consistently good songs. And in 1968, "I Heard It Through the Grapevine" became the first of Gaye's songs to reach out beyond the everyday audience for pop music. Recorded some months earlier, and issued only after Gladys Knight and the Pips had released a tightly coiled and highly successful version of the same song for Gordy's Soul label, Gaye delivered the lyrics as a slow and ominous incantation. The producer, Norman Whitfield, had pitched the song in a key so high that Gaye had to struggle to hit his high notes, giving the lyrics the added piquancy of a singer straining at the limits of his ability.

Gaye's version of "I Heard It Through the Grapevine" became the best-selling record in the history of Motown up to that point, in part because it functioned as a spooky musical capstone to 1968, a tumul­tuous year, not least for young Americans attuned to the music on the radio. But instead of reveling in his newfound popularity, Gaye was bridling at Gordy's paternalistic regime. He longed to sing the kind of music he really loved, which was old-fashioned ballads. In 1967, he had recorded an unreleased album of standards lushly or­chestrated by Bobby Scott (the composer of "A Taste of Honey," a song covered by, among others, the Beatles). In the years that fol­lowed, Gaye obsessively returned to Scott's arrangements, taking a master tape of the instrumental tracks and overdubbing ever more ornate and intricate vocal tracks, treating the album, which never ap­peared during his lifetime, as a private musical talisman, proving, if only to himself, how far he had come in his ability to sell songs of nakedly romantic yearning. Since this was his true ambition, "Grapevine," like the hits that preceded it, felt like a millstone: music that adhered to a style of emotive belting that Gaye had never fully accepted as his own. In the wake of "Grapevine," Gaye took time off from Motown's musical assembly line. "I dug the hippies," Gaye recalled years later of his mood in these months. "I completely identified. They had the guts to tell the establishment to shove it. They had the imagination to dress differently, think differently, reinvent the world for themselves. I loved that. I also loved their pot."

Rejecting his clean-cut stage image, Gaye discarded his suits and ties and grew a beard. Unwilling any longer to adhere to Gordy's rigid regimen, Gaye refused to go on tour. He refused to cut any more upbeat dance tunes. Instead, he made his first foray into record production, working with the Originals, a new Motown group that specialized in old-fashioned doo-wop harmonies. He composed three gorgeous ballads for the group to sing: "Baby, I'm for Real," "The Bells," and "We Can Make It Baby." Each song was lavishly orches­trated by the arranger David Van dePitte, who surrounded the group's delicate vocal harmonies with swirling violins, a sexy alto saxophone, and a glittering array of tinkling cymbals and bells, cre­ating a dreamlike aura that recalled Gaye's own formative love affair with the harmony singing perfected a decade before by groups like the Moonglows.

In the fall of 1970, Gaye was offered a new song, "What's Going On," composed by two Motown colleagues, Al Cleveland, a staff writer, and Renaldo Benson, a member of the Four Tops who had previously co-written "I Second That Emotion," a hit for another Motown vocal group, Smokey Robinson and the Miracles. A song about a world in chaos, "What's Going On" also evoked, implicitly, the blood still being shed in Vietnam. A prayer for peace, a sermon on social harmony, it had an introspective tone that was unexpected coming from two of Gordy's company songwriters.

At first, Gaye said the song didn't interest him. But Cleveland and Benson kept pestering him to change his mind. Years later, one of Gaye's confidants, Mel Farr, at the time a celebrated pro football player for the Detroit Lions, recalled how, on a visit to the singer's house, Gaye had played "What's Going On" for a group of friends, remarking that it might make a good song for the Originals: "He started fooling at the piano and when we dropped by to see him the next day he was still fooling with it. 'That's not for the Originals, Marvin,' we told him. 'That's for you.' "

Gaye now proceeded to do something all but unprecedented within the Motown system. Late in 1970, while most members of the Motown staff, including Gordy, Cleveland, and Benson, were in the midst of moving their families, and the company, from Detroit to Los Angeles, Gaye stayed home. Working on his own, without supervi­sion, Gaye began to fool around in the studio. Using the latest studio technology to multitrack his own voice, just as Patti Page had done a generation before, Gaye created an impressionistic pastiche of vocal textures, produced by pitching his voice in various registers and us­ing a variety of timbres, juxtaposing a smooth falsetto, a silky croon, and a raspy groan, gliding from a whisper to a scream, and deploy­ing all these voices in a constantly shifting pattern of changing har­monies. By using the studio to create a kind of musical kaleidoscope, Gaye was able to produce by himself the painful yet enchanting mood of bittersweet longing he had so beautifully conjured up in the love songs he had written and recorded with the Originals.

Functioning as his own producer and free to summon his muse at will, in whatever way he wished—one pictures him at a microphone, eyes closed, enveloped in a cloud of marijuana smoke—Gaye for the first time was able to work as he pleased, at odd hours, toying in the studio with his vocal harmonies, trying out new tracks, adding and subtracting vocal lines and orchestral sounds, mixing in a track of percussively snapping fingers, asking David Van dePitte to create an­other lavishly romantic string arrangement, and using Mel Farr and his other pals to exchange hip salutations, putting all these pieces to­gether to create the illusion that a singer was singing the song with himself, to himself, commenting on current affairs as if in a trance— and all while a party of old friends swirled around the ghostly trou­badour as a small jazz combo played with after-hours ease. (For "What's Going On," as for every song on the album of the same name that was released shortly afterward, the music was anchored by the bass lines improvised, brilliantly, by the peerless Jamerson, who cut loose with perhaps his finest set of recorded performances.)

Since this was Gaye's first new recording in a while, Gordy rushed "What's Going On" into release. But by temperament and convic­tion, he was unmoved by the stunning originality of Gaye's new mu­sic. Still, Gordy was moved by the sales that the new music began to rack up. After being released in February 1971, "What's Going On" rose rapidly to number two on the Billboard chart of the "Hot 100" singles in America.

Gaye had made his point. And so Gordy allowed him to take the next step. He authorized him to produce, under his own artistic control, a new album, meant to capitalize on the popularity of "What's Going On."

Gaye worked quickly, calling on the talents of Van dePitte again, commissioning new songs from Benson and Cleveland, composing a new song himself, and asking Motown's crack band of studio musi­cians to go for the sound and feel of "What's Going On" writ large. "I do something and I listen to it and say, 'Wow, this will sound good on this,' " Gaye said of the album's sustained atmosphere of offhand genius: "And I listen to that and say, 'Wait, here I can put behind that, this,' and then I do that, I say, 'Wow, a couple of bells, ding dong, here,' and that's the way you do it. You build. Like an artist paints a picture." By the beginning of May, the album was finished, at least in Gaye's mind.

When Berry Gordy first heard it, he balked. It was one thing to re­lease a single song with stream-of-consciousness lyrics about the state of the nation. But it seemed to Gordy far riskier to release an entire album of such stuff. "He had done nothing for the past year and all of a sudden he wants to do a protest album," Gordy recalled in the memoir he published in 1994. " 'Marvin,' I said, 'don't be ridiculous. That's taking things too far.' "

Gordy eventually relented, though not without pressure from some of his most trusted advisers. Smokey Robinson, the most pro­lific of Motown's songwriters, warned Gordy that he and the entire Motown staff loved Gaye's album: "We think it's brilliant."

And so it was. Loosely linked by a series of lyrics expressing an al­most catatonic mood of doom about the spiritual condition of inner-city America, Gaye's production tied the songs together with music of hypnotic beauty, full of gently pulsating rhythms, sighing strings, sweet saxophone riffs, and lots of tinkling bells. In some of the songs, the singer protested that he and his friends were living in a nightmare world; but Gaye throughout sounded curiously detached, even serene, like a man happily trapped in a charnel house that was not, finally, without compensatory pleasures.

Popular musicians aren't normally capable of expressing feelings of such ambivalence. When What's Going On was finally released, in June 1971, Marvin Gaye proved that he could—and so joined a handful of performers, including Dylan and Lennon and McCartney, in expanding the frontiers of rock and roll as a potentially expres­sive, deeply personal art form.

At the same time, Gaye also laid out, more directly than Dylan, and more lyrically than Lennon or McCartney, the seductions of the cultural moment, and some of its real dangers. He did this most memorably on "Flyin' High (in the Friendly Sky)" perhaps the eeriest of the album's many highlights.

Sung with minimal melodic movement, in a variety of different multitracked voices, "Flyin' High" is, superficially, what Gordy would have called a "protest song." At first glance, it's a cautionary tale, a compassionate vignette of drug addiction, a play on an air­line's ad slogan of the day ("Flying high in the friendly sky"). But Gaye isn't outside the landscape of spiritual devastation he surveys: he's singing about himself. This is his version of "Mr. Tambourine Man," his version of "Heroin," his version of "Tomorrow Never Knows," and it's as harrowing and memorable as any of these more frequently celebrated precursors.

Singing in an unnaturally sweet falsetto, Gaye sounds like a drug-addled choirboy. Jamerson's bass prowls around the melody, which floats. The song's protagonist worries about his lusts, but he's help­less to control them; earnestly seeking salvation, he's settling, one more time, for a counterfeit of transcendence.

"And I go to the place where the good feelin' awaits me," Gaye croons sweetly, with angelic yearning. "Self-destruction is in my hand."

It was a lovely piece of music. And as he perhaps intended, it dou­bled as an epitaph for the halcyon days of intoxicated creativity that would soon enough be drawing to an unhappy close—for Gaye, and also for the larger (counter) culture of rock and roll.

-end