Linda Hillshafer Share Tune in weekday mornings to hear our favorite versions of “What’s Going On?”. Rodney Franks presents Stories of Standards Monday through Friday at 7:50 and 8:50 am. Stories of Standards is sponsored by ListenUp. First recorded by Marvin Gaye in June of 1970, “What’s Going On” was based on an incident witnessed by Renaldo “Obie” Benson, a Four Tops singer who saw peaceful demonstrators being attacked by police in Berkeley, CA, leading him to ask “What’s going on here?”. He discussed this with a friend, songwriter Al Cleveland, who wrote a song addressing those concerns, which Benson then presented to his fellow Four Tops singers, whereupon it was rejected as “a protest song,” too political for them. Benson then presented the as-yet-unnamed song to Marvin Gaye, who added a new melody and lyrics, influenced by discussions with his brother Frankie, who had returned from three years’ service in Vietnam, and a namesake cousin who had died there and inspired by the 1965 Watts riots. Gaye produced the recording with some Motown musicians and others whom he had brought in. The opening soprano saxophone line was the result of Eli Fontain’s warming up; Gaye asked the sound engineer to provide two vocal leads for comparison, however, these were blended, which Gaye like so much he adopted it and added the practice of vocal multi-layering.