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What’s Going On: The Song Motown Tried to Kill
What’s Going On: The Song Motown Tried to Kill The tear gas was still hanging in the air over Berkeley, California, on the afternoon of May 15, 1969, when the Four Tops’ tour bus rolled into town. Renaldo “Obie” Benson, the group’s bass singer, looked out the window and saw something that would not leave…
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Marvin Gaye: The Loving Father Behind the Troubled Prince
The world knew Marvin Gaye as the Prince of Motown — the velvet voice, the tortured genius, the man who asked what was going on and never quite found peace. The headlines remembered the rebellion, the exile, the tragedy. But there was another Marvin Gaye, one the headlines rarely captured: the father who nicknamed his…
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How Marvin Gaye Made “I Heard It Through the Grapevine”: The Hit Motown Tried to Bury Twice
It is one of the most famous recordings in the history of popular music — three minutes of paranoia, heartbreak, and pure Detroit electricity, a song so embedded in the culture that most people can’t remember a time before it existed. And it almost never came out. Berry Gordy rejected it. The man who ran…
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The Untold Story of Marvin Gaye: The Prince Who Defied Motown, Exiled Himself to Belgium, and Died at His Father’s Hand
Marvin Gaye had the smoothest voice in soul music and the stormiest life behind it. They called him the Prince of Motown, and for a while he wore the crown beautifully — velvet suits, duets with the loveliest voice in Detroit, a string of hits that seemed effortless. But beneath the polish was a man…