For nearly two years, Marvin Gaye was largely absent from the public life of the music industry. And then, out of that silence, came something that would change the course of American popular music.
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PART FIVE: WHAT’S GOING ON—THE ALBUM THAT CHANGED EVERYTHING
The origins of “What’s Going On” can be traced to a specific day in 1969—May 15—when a tour bus carrying the Four Tops drove through Berkeley, California.
Renaldo “Obie” Benson was one of the Four Tops. He was watching from the bus window as police clashed violently with anti-Vietnam War protesters in People’s Park. The incident would become known as “Bloody Thursday.” Benson watched young people being beaten and arrested, and he couldn’t stop thinking about it. He started asking questions—to himself, to anyone who would listen—about why young Americans were being sent overseas to fight an unpopular war and then attacked in their own streets when they protested.
He began writing a song. He worked on it with Al Cleveland. It was a song about confusion and grief and love—about looking around at the world and not understanding what you were seeing.
Benson shopped the song to several artists, including Joan Baez, who he thought might be interested in protest material. Nobody took it. He eventually brought it to Marvin Gaye in 1970, during Gaye’s period of withdrawal following Tammi Terrell’s death.
Gaye was immediately drawn to it. He connected it to his own experiences—to his brother Frankie’s service in Vietnam, to the Watts Riot of 1965 that had shaken Los Angeles, to his general sense that the world was in pain and that nobody was saying so clearly enough. He revised the melody and rewrote portions of the lyrics, adding his own perspective and his own voice—literally and figuratively.