Recording
Gaye entered the recording studio, Hitsville USA, on June 10, 1970 to record "What's Going On". Instead of relying on other producers to help him with the song, Gaye, inspired by recent successes of his productions for the vocal act, The Originals, decided to produce the song himself, mixing up original Motown in-house studio musicians such as James Jamerson and Eddie Brown with musicians he recruited himself. The opening alto saxophone line, provided by musician Eli Fontaine, was not originally intended. Once Gaye heard Fontaine's riff, he told Fontaine to go home. When Fontaine protested that he was just "goofing around", Gaye replied "you goof off exquisitely, thank you." The laid-back atmosphere in the studio was brought on by constant marijuana smoking by Gaye and other musicians.
Jamerson was pulled into the session after Gaye located him playing with a band at a local bar. Respected Motown arranger and conductor David Van De Pitte said later to Ben Edmonds that Jamerson "always kept a bottle of Metaxa in his bass case. He could really put that stuff away, and then sit down and still be able to play. His tolerance was incredible. It took a hell a lot to get him smashed." The night Jamerson entered the studio to record the bass lines to the song, Jamerson couldn't sit properly in his seat and, according to one of the members of the Funk Brothers, laid on the floor playing his bass riffs. De Pitte recalled that it was a track that Jamerson greatly respected: "On 'What's Going On' though, he just read the part down like I wrote it. He loved it because I had written Jamerson licks for Jamerson." Annie Jamerson recalls that when he returned home that night, he declared that the song they had been working on was a 'masterpiece', one of the few occasion where he had discussed his work so passionately with her. Gaye also added his own instrumentation playing piano and keyboards while also playing a box drum to help accentuate Chet Forest's drumming.
To add more to the song's laid-back approach, Gaye invited the Detroit Lions players Mel Farr and Lem Barney to the studio and, along with Gaye and the Funk Brothers, added in vocal chatter, engaging in a mock conversation. Musician and songwriter Elgie Stover, who later served as a caterer for Bill Clinton and was then a Motown staffer and confidante of Gaye's, was the man who opened the song's track with the words, "hey, man, what's happening?" and "everything is everything". Later Gaye brought Lem Barney and Mel Farr with him to record the song's background vocal track with him. The rhythm tracks and the song's overdubs were done at Hitsville, while strings, horns, lead and background vocals were recorded at Golden World Studios.
During hearing of playback of the song, Gaye asked his engineer Kenneth Sands to give him his two vocal leads to compare what he wanted to use for the song's release. Sands ended up mixing the leads together, by accident. However, when he heard it, Gaye was so impressed with the double-lead feel that he kept it, influencing his later recordings where he mastered vocal multi-layering adding in three different vocal parts. Before presenting the song to Gordy, he produced a false fade to the song, bringing the song back for a few seconds after it was initially to have ended. The song was also notable for its use of major seventh and minor seventh chords, which was a fairly uncommon use at the time. Gaye recorded the song's b-side, "God Is Love", on the same day.
When Gordy heard the song after Gaye presented the song to him in California, he turned down the request to release it, telling Gaye he felt it was "the worst thing I ever heard in my life". due to the jazz-oriented sound of the song. When Harry Balk requested the song to be released, Gordy told him the song featured "that Dizzy Gillespie stuff in the middle, that scatting, it's old". Gaye responded to this rejection by refusing to record material unless the song would be released, going on strike until, he felt, Gordy saw sense in releasing it. When Gordy tried to convince Smokey Robinson, who was one of the few in the Quality Department to take favorably to the song, to get Gaye to change his mind, Robinson simply told him that to do so would be "like a bear shitting in the woods, Marvin ain't budging".
Read more about this topic: What's Going On (song)
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