Iron­i­cally, the results of mis­takes often end up to be far more inter­est­ing than those of hard work. Mar­vin Gaye’s 1970 hit “What’s Going On” serves as one of those mirac­u­lous exam­ples of serendip­ity. Dur­ing the record­ing ses­sions a rather for­tu­nate acci­dent occurred. The singer had recorded two alter­nate takes of the lead-​vocals that were one octave apart. When Gaye asked the sound engi­neer on duty, Ken Sands, to play these two tracks for him, the tech­ni­cian unwit­tingly played them simul­ta­ne­ously in mono. The unin­tended result was a duet between the singer and himself.

“That dou­ble lead voice was a mis­take on my part […] Mar­vin had cut two lead vocals, and wanted me to pre­pare a tape with the rhythm track up the mid­dle and each of his vocals on sep­a­rate tracks so he could com­pare them. Once I played that two-​track mix on a mono machine and he heard both voices at the same time by acci­dent.” (Sands qtd. in Edmonds 2001: 121–122)

Gaye liked this side-​effect to such an extent that he not only decided to keep it, but pushed it to the extremes on his next album also titled What’s Going On. No longer con­tent with the mere dupli­ca­tion of the sin­gle ver­sion, the artist mul­ti­plied his voice sev­eral times on the final mix of title track and the other songs on the album. After the release of What’s Going On, these har­monic, mul­ti­lay­ered vocals quickly became Mar­vin Gaye’s hall­mark style.

Although the singer and the engi­neer never planned to record them as such, the strange duet did not fall from the sky either. I would argue that the occur­rence of the singer’s and engineer’s for­tu­nate acci­dent was due to an excess rather than a lack of tal­ent. Their mis­take builds on their respec­tive exper­tise and skill sets. To use philo­soph­i­cal jar­gon: Gaye’s and Sand’s for­tu­nate acci­dent was not ran­dom, it was con­tin­gent .

Mar­vin Gaye – who pro­duced the album him­self – and his team of musi­cians and engi­neers were engaged in many exper­i­ments with the sound record­ing tech­nol­ogy avail­able to them. They wanted to record an album that sound dif­fer­ent from any­thing else on the mar­ket at the time. One of the biggest chal­lenges that they faced was a way to make What’s Going On sound like one cohe­sive unit rather than a col­lec­tion of songs. Gaye wanted to elim­i­nate the cuts between the indi­vid­ual tracks so that the album flowed con­tin­u­ously. While con­duc­tor and arranger David van dePitte sug­gested the use of so-​called segues to con­nect the indi­vid­ual songs, the sound engi­neers came up with a dif­fer­ent solution:

“The stu­dio tech­nol­ogy was still pretty prim­i­tive […] To edit, you had to phys­i­cally cut the tape with a blade. So when the basic rhythm tracks were done, Ken Sands and Cal Har­ris took the multi-​tracks and edited the entire album together by hand. It was quite an accom­plish­ment.” (Smith qtd. in Edmonds 2001: 167–168)

After they cut and pasted the entire album together, Sands and Har­ris over­dubbed the strings and horns directly onto the mas­ter mix.

There is no causal rela­tion between the engi­neers’ exper­i­ments and the acci­dent that occurred dur­ing the “What’s Going On” ses­sions Nonethe­less, I believe such inno­va­tions tes­tify to an open­ness that is needed to rec­og­nize such for­tu­nate con­tin­gen­cies when they occur. In a more tra­di­tional record­ing ses­sion, the cre­ative poten­tial of the same event would prob­a­bly have been dis­missed or even gone unnoticed.

Mar­vin Gaye’s extra­or­di­nary vocal tal­ents were also essen­tial to the occur­rence of this par­tic­u­lar acci­dent. A lesser singer sim­ply would not have pulled it off. Gaye orig­i­nally intended to have The Orig­i­nals – a male vocal group that he occa­sion­ally wrote and pro­duced for – to record “What’s Going On”. Like many other Motown acts, such as The Temp­ta­tions and The Four Tops, the mem­bers of The Orig­i­nals all cov­ered a dif­fer­ent range in the spec­trum. Gaye’s own voice, how­ever, could cover the entire range. By mul­ti­lay­er­ing his voice, mul­ti­track record­ing ren­dered other singers obso­lete. Gaye did not need any­one else to record com­plex har­monies any longer. Through the dou­bling, tripling and some­times even qua­dru­pling of his voice, multi-​track record­ing made it pos­si­ble for the artist to sing the dif­fer­ent voices on What’s Going all by himself.

“His mul­ti­tracked voices were star­tling. He’d become a one-​man Moon­glows, a one-​man Orig­i­nals, singing duets and trios with him­self, jux­ta­pos­ing his silky falsetto and sand­pa­pery midrange, weav­ing the fab­ric of his voices into a tapes­try of con­trast­ing shapes and col­ors.” (Ritz 149)

Apart from the skills and tal­ents of every­one involved, “What’s Going On”’s duet between Gaye and him­self also pre­sup­poses the mul­ti­track tech­nol­ogy – an eight-​track recorder to be pre­cise – itself. It might sound obvi­ous, but it is cru­cial to acknowl­edge that Sands and Gaye would have never stum­bled upon it on a type­writer, or even a sin­gle tape deck. The mis­take now known as What’s Going On is part of a com­plex con­stel­la­tion that con­sists of the artist, musi­cians, engi­neers, and technology.