Frankie got drafted and went to Vietnam in 1967. He became an Army radio op, a "commo." The grim joke was that the life expectancy of a commo in a firefight was five seconds. That was hyperbolic, but instructors used it to concentrate the minds of their students by chalking a big "5" up on the board and leaving it there throughout the training. It might take a week, but eventually someone would ask what it meant.
The point being radio guys were more vulnerable than regular grunts, who were vulnerable enough.
The PRC-77 radio Frankie carried on his back weighed 13.5 pounds without batteries. It didn't work without batteries, and batteries died, so he carried extra batteries, along with the KY-8 NESTOR voice encryption device, as large as the radio, that would malfunction when it got hot, so Frankie sometimes wrapped it in wet burlap. That made between 54 and 60 pounds on his back before picking up his rifle and ammunition.
Oh, and there was a 10-foot whip antenna sticking out of the PRC-77 that slapped at the overhead foliage and pinpointed his location at all times.
Because the Viet Cong might lob a mortar in the general direction of the waving antenna, Frankie usually stayed some distance from the rest of his platoon.
In Vietnam, Frankie saw "all the things [he] never wanted to see . . . was in places [he] never wanted to be."
"The jungles were so thick and dense that it was like permanent midnight for long stretches," Frankie wrote. "You couldn't stand up; you had to crawl through the mud over things that moved when you touched them. It rained so much that everything on the ground rotted and smelled like week-old garbage. . . .
"It was often so dark or so steamy that it did no good to look up to see if the enemy was behind the next tree trunk or maybe crouched in front of you. We were so covered with mud it was impossible to identify uniforms or faces. Once you see people dying, cut up, or being tortured, day after day of that, you get desensitized, then paranoid. You think something's always going to happen, even talk yourself into not trusting anyone or anything."
He sent letters to his famous brother, whose voice he'd sometimes hear coming out of transistor radios even though he was half a world away. Some of the guys in Frankie's platoon teased him. No way he was really related to Marvin Gaye. Frankie got upset because Marvin never answered his letters, never gave him any proof of their relationship.
Frankie was an unreliable narrator. Some think he went to Vietnam in 1965 and came out in 1967. Later he'd claim Marvin did write him back; maybe because Marvin was dead by then and it would have seemed churlish in light of all that happened. Because even if Marvin never wrote to Frankie, it's for sure Marvin read those letters, and they moved something inside of him.
Anyway, about the time Frankie got out of the Army in 1970, Marvin was going through some pretty bad times himself. He was at odds with Motown founder Berry Gordy, who was also his father-in-law.
Gordy was planning to move the label from Detroit to Los Angeles to be closer to Diana Ross, the label's biggest star and Gordy's lover. Gordy foresaw a movie career for her, and he could manage it better from L.A. than Detroit. A lot of Motown artists were unhappy--Marvin saw it as Gordy's turning his back on those who'd made him rich.
Marvin was determined not to follow Gordy to L.A., especially since the label owner had thwarted his plans to work on an album with Quincy Jones. Gordy thought Jones' sensibility was too jazzy and baroque for "The Sound of Young America," that there was nothing wrong with the lover-man niche Gaye had carved out for himself. Gordy wanted pop songs and love ballads, not chords extended beyond the seventh: not ninths, not 13ths.
It was no wonder his marriage was crumbling. Then his duet partner Tammi Terrell died, from a brain tumor that may have stemmed from an incident with an abusive man years before. Marvin was crushed; he stopped touring and went into seclusion. He told everyone he was writing songs for a new album. He was also reading newspapers and watching TV news. And rereading Frankie's letters from Vietnam.
You know "What's Goin' On," the album that was named No. 1 in Rolling Stone's most recent updating of its recurring "500 Greatest Albums of All Time," is a concept album, a song cycle about a damaged vet just returned from Vietnam, right?
It's Frankie's story, opening with the ambient noise of a homecoming party (during which someone, maybe the Detroit Lions Hall of Famer Lem Barney, who was there, drops a distinct f-bomb), before Eli Fontaine's alto saxophone pierces through with what became the album's signature riff.
"What's Goin' On," the song that kicks off the album, was conceived by Obie Benson of the Four Tops after he witnessed the Battle for People's Park in Berkeley in May 1969. Benson and Motown staff songwriter Al Cleveland collaborated on the initial draft of the song, which Benson's bandmates turned down as too political for their brand.
So Benson took it to Marvin, who reworked the lyrics and embellished the melody and intended to give it to the Originals, a Motown vocal quartet he was producing.
But Benson, maybe for fiduciary reasons, insisted Marvin cut it himself if he wanted to be in on the publishing royalties. (The Originals were famous for being obscure; though they sang background on a lot of hits, they never cracked the Top 10 on their own.)
So Marvin did.
Berry Gordy hated it, allegedly calling it the "worst thing he'd ever heard." Gordy later denied that, saying he personally liked the jazziness of the production but he feared releasing a protest song would ruin Marvin's career and refused to release it. Then Marvin refused to record any more songs for the label until Motown put it out.
Finally, Gordy gave in and released the single. It exploded. Marvin went back into the studio and recorded the rest of the album, an inter-connected suite that touched on heroin use, neglected inner cities, social justice, the breaking of civic trust and ecological devastation in 10 days.
It may not be the greatest album of all time; lists like Rolling Stone's are fun to argue over but ultimately silly.
But I don't mind people believing it's a great album, and we might all be better, happier and freer if we intentionally listened to albums like "What's Goin' On" more often.
Now might be a good time.
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Philip Martin is a columnist and critic for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at pmartin@adgnewsroom.com and read his blog at blooddirtandangels.com.