It’s hard to believe, but Mar­vin Gaye’s clas­sic 1967 record­ing of “I Heard It Through the Grapevine” was orig­i­nal­ly reject­ed by his record label.

The song, about a man’s grief over hear­ing rumors of his lover’s infi­deli­ty, was writ­ten by the leg­endary Motown Records pro­duc­er Nor­man Whit­field and singer Bar­rett Strong. Smokey Robin­son and the Mir­a­cles first record­ed the track in 1966, but that ver­sion got nixed by Motown founder Berry Gordy dur­ing a week­ly qual­i­ty con­trol meet­ing. Then, Whit­field record­ed the song with Gaye in ear­ly 1967, but for some rea­son Gordy did­n’t like that ver­sion either. So Whit­field changed the lyrics a bit and record­ed it with Gladys Knight and the Pips. The fast-tem­po arrange­ment, influ­enced by Aretha Franklin’s “Respect,” was released as a sin­gle in Sep­tem­ber of 1967 and rose to num­ber one on the Bill­board R&B chart.

Gaye’s ver­sion might have been for­got­ten had it not been includ­ed in his 1968 album, In the Groove, where it soon became noticed. “The DJs played it so much off the album,” Gordy said lat­er, “that we had to release it as a sin­gle.”

Gaye’s record­ing of the song became a crossover hit. It rose not only to the top of the R&B charts, but also spent sev­en weeks at the top of the Bill­board Pop Sin­gles chart. It was Motown’s biggest-sell­ing sin­gle up to that time, and the In the Groove album name was soon changed to I Heard It Through the Grapevine.

Gaye was known for his sweet-sound­ing tenor voice, which he could mod­u­late from a bari­tone to a silky high falset­to. Dur­ing the “Grapevine” ses­sions, the singer report­ed­ly quar­reled with Whit­field over the pro­duc­er’s insis­tence that he sing the song in a high rasp. Whit­field pre­vailed, and Gaye’s per­for­mance is one of the great­est of the Motown era. You can hear his clas­sic vocals “a cap­pel­la” in the video above. And for a reminder of Whit­field­’s clas­sic arrange­ment, with its puls­ing elec­tric piano intro­duc­tion and shim­mer­ing strings, see the video below. The Funk Broth­ers, the leg­endary Motown back­ing group, played on the track, as did the back­ing vocal group The Andantes and the Detroit Sym­pho­ny Orches­tra.

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in 2013.

Relat­ed Con­tent 

Revis­it­ing Mar­vin Gaye’s “What’s Goin’ On,” and the Album That Opened R&B to Resis­tance: Revis­it­ed 50 Years Lat­er

Zoo Hires Mar­vin Gaye Imper­son­ator to Help Endan­gered Mon­keys “Get It On”

Hear Grace Slick’s Hair-Rais­ing Vocals in the Iso­lat­ed Track for “White Rab­bit” (1967)

Fred­die Mer­cury & David Bowie’s Iso­lat­ed Vocals for Queen’s “Under Pres­sure” (1981)

“The Sound of Silence” Is the Most Met­al Song of the Past Decade”: imag­ine that head­line, and the con­trar­i­an cul­ture piece prac­ti­cal­ly writes itself. Not so long ago, Slate was noto­ri­ous for pub­lish­ing that kind of thing, but it seems they’ve now put that sen­si­bil­i­ty behind them — or at least most­ly behind them. “If you’re in the mood for an under­dog sto­ry,” writes that site’s Luke Winkie, “I rec­om­mend perus­ing Bill­board­’s Hard Rock Dig­i­tal Song Sales chart. It is home to, gen­uine­ly, one of the most sub­stan­tial feats of endurance in the his­to­ry of pop­u­lar music, and it shows no sign of slow­ing down any­time soon. I speak, of course, of Dis­turbed’s cov­er of the Simon & Gar­funkel clas­sic ‘The Sound of Silence,’ which has been at, or near, the apex of that chart since 2015.”

While you almost cer­tain­ly know Simon & Gar­funkel, you may not know Dis­turbed, who’ve been steadi­ly pop­u­lar in the met­al world since the release of their debut album The Sick­ness in 2000. Lis­ten to that album’s big sin­gle “Down with the Sick­ness,” and you’re instant­ly trans­port­ed back to the turn of the mil­len­ni­um, when the exag­ger­at­ed­ly rhyth­mic and aggres­sive sub­genre of “nu met­al” reigned supreme.

Enter­tain­ing though the sheer incon­gruity of a nu-met­al ver­sion of “The Sound of Silence” would be, that move­ment had long since flamed out by 2015, when Dis­turbed record­ed their cov­er of Simon & Gar­funkel’s sig­na­ture song. Instead, they take the haunt­ing aus­ter­i­ty of the orig­i­nal in a grand­ly mourn­ful direc­tion, dri­ven by piano, strings, and the kind of cav­ernous sen­si­tiv­i­ty in which met­al acts occa­sion­al­ly indulge.

“Simon & Garfunkel’s ver­sion is best suit­ed for The Grad­u­ate,” writes Winkie, “while Dis­turbed’s take seems tuned for the end-cred­its scroll of a Trans­form­ers flick.” Inclu­sion in a Hol­ly­wood block­buster might have explained the song’s decade-long dom­i­nance of the afore­men­tioned Hard Rock Dig­i­tal Song Sales chart: a minor are­na in itself, but one in which this per­pet­u­al vic­to­ry reflects a wider cul­tur­al phe­nom­e­non. Though young peo­ple may nev­er have heard Dis­turbed’s “The Sound of Silence” — or indeed Simon & Gar­funkel’s — it’s drawn intense and abid­ing enthu­si­asm from lis­ten­ers in their six­ties, sev­en­ties, and eight­ies, for whose approval met­al bands haven’t con­ven­tion­al­ly angled. Nev­er­the­less, it had to mark a high point in Dis­turbed’s career when, after per­form­ing the song on Conan, they received high praise from one par­tic­u­lar­ly dis­tin­guished mem­ber of that demo­graph­ic: a cer­tain Paul Simon.

via Slate

Relat­ed con­tent:

Watch Simon & Gar­funkel Sing “The Sound of Silence” 45 Years After Its Release, and Just Get Haunt­ing­ly Bet­ter with Time

Paul Simon Tells the Sto­ry of How He Wrote “Bridge Over Trou­bled Water” (1970)

Paul Simon Decon­structs “Mrs. Robin­son” (1970)

Fred Armisen & Bill Hader’s Comedic Take on the His­to­ry of Simon and Gar­funkel

Who Invent­ed Heavy Met­al Music?: A Search for Ori­gins

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

Welsh croon­er Tom Jones made an unlike­ly come­back in the late 80s, cov­er­ing Prince’s “Kiss” with Art of Noise. Then in the mid-90s, he showed up on The Fresh Prince of Bel Air to sing the mid-60s hit “It’s Not Unusu­al” for super­fan Carl­ton Banks. This was a time of 60s come­backs all around, but Jones’ resur­gence was a lit­tle odd (though per­fect­ly in char­ac­ter for Carl­ton Banks). Tom Jones had been a big star in the mid to late 60s, with his own TV show and a string of inter­na­tion­al hits. But Tom Jones was nev­er exact­ly cool in the way that, say, Neil Young was cool in 1969, the year he and Jimi Hen­drix stole a truck to get to Wood­stock.

“Tom Jones and his show might’ve been seen as some­what ‘square’ by the rock­star stan­dards of CSNY,” writes Dan­ger­ous Minds,” but when the four­some agreed to appear in Sep­tem­ber of that year, just weeks after the mas­sive fes­ti­val in upstate New York, it turned into a mem­o­rable tele­vi­sion event, with Jones tak­ing lead vocals on “Long Time Gone” and blow­ing the audi­ence and the band away.

“The man’s mighty lungs inspire the rest of them to keep up, it must be said,” even Young, whose “face goes from one of disdain/’What am I doing here?’ to ‘This fuck­ing rocks’ about halfway through.”

Even stranger than this com­bi­na­tion is the fact that Young agreed to do it at all. He had become noto­ri­ous­ly averse to doing tele­vi­sion, even turn­ing down The Tonight Show with John­ny Car­son and cit­ing his hatred of TV as a rea­son for leav­ing Buf­fa­lo Spring­field two years ear­li­er. Though he may have been caught up in the moment, he lat­er regret­ted it, as his long­time man­ag­er Eliot Roberts told biog­ra­ph­er Jim­my McDo­nough: “Neil went, ‘The Tom Jones show! What pos­sessed you? It’s that shit.’ He always used to say ‘that shit.’ Cros­by had this weed of doom… Neil nev­er for­gave me for that. He ripped me about it for a very, very long time. Years.”

“It was high­ly rat­ed,” says Roberts, “sold a lot­ta records, but in ret­ro­spect it was embar­rass­ing.” Young prob­a­bly shouldn’t have wor­ried. Weed of doom or no, it didn’t seem to hurt his cred­i­bil­i­ty as much as his bewil­der­ing (though crit­i­cal­ly re-appraised) 1982 New Wave record, Trans. Jones has done just fine, rein­vent­ing him­self in the 80s and 90s in good-humored self-par­o­dies, then becom­ing a bona fide pop star once more. He has yet to appear again with Neil Young.

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in 2020.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Janis Joplin & Tom Jones Bring the House Down in an Unlike­ly Duet of “Raise Your Hand” (1969)

Tom Jones Cov­ers Talk­ing Heads “Burn­ing Down the House”–and Burns Down the House (1999)

David Gilmour, David Cros­by & Gra­ham Nash Per­form the Pink Floyd Clas­sic, “Shine on You Crazy Dia­mond” (2006)

Tom Jones & Chuck Berry Per­form Togeth­er, Singing “Roll Over Beethoven” & “Mem­phis” (1974)

The Time Neil Young Met Charles Man­son, Liked His Music, and Tried to Score Him a Record Deal

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

Miles Davis did­n’t put out any stu­dio albums from 1973 until the mid­dle of 1981. In explain­ing the rea­sons for this lacu­na in his record­ing career, Milesol­o­gists can point to a vari­ety of fac­tors in the man’s pro­fes­sion­al and per­son­al life. But one in par­tic­u­lar looms large: the fail­ure of his 1972 album On the Cor­ner. Davis was­n’t known for occu­py­ing any one style of jazz for very long, to put it mild­ly, but the On the Cor­ner ses­sions find him very near­ly break­ing with jazz itself. In a bid to recap­ture the atten­tion of young black lis­ten­ers, he took the plunge into a mix of what he lat­er described as “Stock­hausen plus funk plus Ornette Cole­man.”

“Miles want­ed the kids who were into rock,” writes Jaz­zTimes’ Col­in Flem­ing. “That was the tar­get demo, an audi­ence he’d been court­ing since 1970’s Bitch­es Brew. He played for that audi­ence on the psy­che­del­ic ball­room cir­cuit, doing so with rock groups — the Steve Miller Band, for instance — that he had no respect for as musi­cians. Davis thought he was slum­ming it while shar­ing such bills, but he also believed in the lis­ten­ing skills of youth, which is usu­al­ly a wise thing to do.” “The result­ing, seem­ing­ly incon­gru­ous mix of musi­cal expe­ri­ences and desires led him and a host of col­lab­o­ra­tors — includ­ing Her­bie Han­cock, John McLaugh­lin, Chick Corea, and James Mtume — to make ‘one holy hell of a groov­ing, min­i­mal­ist rack­et.’”

Upon its release, On the Cor­ner “was derid­ed as an affront to taste, an insult to lis­ten­ers, a sham per­pet­u­at­ed by a man who want­ed to rub your face in some­thing most unpleas­ant, just because he thought he could.” And yet, hear­ing it in this era — as I did not long ago while lis­ten­ing through Davis’ entire discog­ra­phy — you’d strug­gle to under­stand the source of the offense. Indeed, a twen­ty-first-cen­tu­ry lis­ten­er may well be more trou­bled by Corky McCoy’s infa­mous cov­er art, with its stereo­typ­i­cal street scene whose char­ac­ters range from pros­ti­tute to pimp, hus­tler to homo­sex­u­al. The image has been described as “ghet­todel­ic,” a word that could also label the inchoate musi­cal sub­genre Davis was attempt­ing to forge.

The cul­ture has long since caught up with the par­tic­u­lar son­ic exper­i­ment run in On the Cor­ner, which “has been hailed in recent years as the album that helped birth hip-hop, funk, post-punk, elec­tron­i­ca, and just about any oth­er pop­u­lar music with a repet­i­tive beat, which was quite the feat for a record that not many peo­ple have ever lis­tened to.” But if you join those ranks, you can hard­ly avoid notic­ing the tex­tures its son­ic col­lage shares with pop­u­lar gen­res of the past few decades, thanks not least to the splic­ing, and loop­ing that was the spe­cial­ty of pro­duc­er Teo Macero (also Davis’ col­lab­o­ra­tor on Sketch­es of Spain, In a Silent Way, and Bitch­es Brew). Maybe, when all this proved to be a bit much for the ear­ly sev­en­ties, Davis had no choice but to take a break, hav­ing final­ly got­ten a few too many miles ahead.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear a 65-Hour, Chrono­log­i­cal Playlist of Miles Davis’ Rev­o­lu­tion­ary Jazz Albums

Miles Davis Icon­ic 1959 Album Kind of Blue Turns 60: Revis­it the Album That Changed Amer­i­can Music

Miles Davis’ Bitch­es Brew Turns 50: Cel­e­brate the Funk-Jazz-Psych-Rock Mas­ter­piece

The Night When Miles Davis Opened for the Grate­ful Dead (1970)

Miles Davis’ Entire Discog­ra­phy Pre­sent­ed in a Styl­ish Inter­ac­tive Visu­al­iza­tion

Miles Davis Opens for Neil Young and “That Sor­ry-Ass Cat” Steve Miller at The Fill­more East (1970)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

She’s worked with Stan­ley Kubrick *and* “Weird Al” Yankovic, and helped Robert Moog in the devel­op­ment of his epony­mous syn­the­siz­er. Wendy Car­los is also one of the first high pro­file trans­gen­der artists–credited as Wal­ter Car­los for Kubrick’s A Clock­work Orange but hav­ing tran­si­tioned to Wendy by the time of The Shin­ing, in which only a few of her pieces were used.

In this brief clip from a 1989 BBC episode of Hori­zon, Car­los, accom­pa­nied by her two cats, explains how she uses ana­log synths to cre­ate elec­tron­ic fac­sim­i­les of real instruments–in this case cre­at­ing an approx­i­ma­tion of a xylo­phone, sculpt­ing a sine wave until it sounds like a mal­let on wood.

The seg­ment also shows Car­los oper­at­ing one of the orig­i­nal Moog synths, about the size of a fridge and look­ing like an old tele­phone switch­board with a key­board attached. By plug­ging and unplug­ging a series of cables, she demon­strates, the sine wave is decon­struct­ed from its orig­i­nal “pure” but harsh sound. Lat­er ana­log synths were addi­tive, not sub­trac­tive, she explains. (It’s one of the few times I’ve seen old tech explained so well and so quick­ly.)

Along with work­ing with Bob Moog, Car­los stud­ied at Colum­bia-Prince­ton Elec­tron­ic Music Cen­ter along­side two pio­neers of ear­ly elec­tron­ic music: Vladimir Ussachevsky and Otto Luen­ing, both of whom would make very chal­leng­ing com­po­si­tions and musique con­crete.

But Wendy chose both the clas­si­cal and pop­u­lar path, cre­at­ing the Switched on Bach series that fea­tured 18th cen­tu­ry music played on the Moog synth and oth­ers. It would lead her to Kubrick and A Clock­work Orange’s idio­syn­crat­ic score and even more suc­cess. Apart from her score for Disney’s Tron, now very much beloved by fans, Car­los turned to more per­son­al, sound­scape work lat­er. And in 2005, if you can find a copy, she put out a mul­ti­ple-CD set of all her sound­track work that Kubrick nev­er used for The Shin­ing and oth­ers.

The descrip­tion of the entire Hori­zon episode has a tech­nofear theme: “In Paris, Xavier Rodet has taught a com­put­er to sing Mozart; in Green­wich Vil­lage, Wendy Car­los syn­the­sis­es a clas­si­cal con­cer­to from elec­tron­ic tones…In Aus­tralia, Man­fred Clynes reck­ons he has dis­cov­ered a uni­ver­sal human lan­guage of emo­tion. To prove it he cre­ates feel­ings on tape. What’s left for human per­form­ers to con­tribute?”

This pro­gram was at least a decade after the first sam­pling key­board, so the anx­i­ety is either late or over­hyped. But it also sounds famil­iar to our cur­rent con­cerns over AI (as seen in these very web pages!). Synths nev­er replaced human instru­ments, but it did cre­ate more synth play­ers. AI won’t replace human deci­sion mak­ing (prob­a­bly), but it will cer­tain­ly cre­ate more AI pro­gram­mers.

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in 2019.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear Glenn Gould Sing the Praise of the Moog Syn­the­siz­er and Wendy Car­los’ Switched-On Bach, the “Record of the Decade” (1968)

Wendy Car­los’ Switched on Bach Turns 50 This Month: Learn How the Clas­si­cal Synth Record Intro­duced the World to the Moog

The Scores That Elec­tron­ic Music Pio­neer Wendy Car­los Com­posed for Stan­ley Kubrick’s A Clock­work Orange and The Shin­ing

Elec­tron­ic Music Pio­neer Wendy Car­los Demon­strates the Moog Syn­the­siz­er on the BBC (1970)

What the Future Sound­ed Like: Doc­u­men­tary Tells the For­got­ten 1960s His­to­ry of Britain’s Avant-Garde Elec­tron­ic Musi­cians

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts.

Here’s a remark­able short film of the great jazz gui­tarist Djan­go Rein­hardt, vio­lin­ist Stéphane Grap­pel­li and their band the Quin­tette du Hot Club de France per­form­ing on a movie set in 1938. The film was hasti­ly orga­nized by the band’s British agent Lew Grade as a way to intro­duce the band’s unique style of gui­tar- and vio­lin-based jazz to the British pub­lic before their first UK tour. As Michael Dreg­ni writes in Gyp­sy Jazz: In Search of Djan­go Rein­hardt and the Soul of Gyp­sy Swing:

The Quin­tette was unknown to the British pub­lic, and there was no telling how their new music would res­onate. So, Grade sought to edu­cate his audi­ence. He hired a movie crew to film a six-minute-plus pro­mo­tion­al short enti­tled Jazz “Hot” to be shown in British the­aters pro­vid­ing a les­son in jazz appre­ci­a­tion to warm up the crowds.

That would explain the didac­tic tone of the first two and a half min­utes of the film, which plods along as a reme­di­al les­son on the nature of jazz. It opens with an orches­tra giv­ing a note-for-note per­for­mance of Han­del’s “Largo,” from the opera Xerx­es, which the nar­ra­tor then con­trasts to the free­dom of jazz impro­vi­sa­tion.

But the film real­ly comes alive when Djan­go arrives on the screen and launch­es into a jazz arrange­ment of the pop­u­lar French song “J’at­tendrai.” (The name means “I will wait,” and it’s a rework­ing of a 1933 Ital­ian song, “Tornerai” or “You Will Return,” by Dino Olivieri and Nino Rastel­li.) Although the sequences of Rein­hardt and the band per­form­ing were obvi­ous­ly syn­chro­nized to a pre­vi­ous­ly record­ed track, Jazz “Hot” is the best sur­viv­ing visu­al doc­u­ment of the leg­endary gui­tarist’s two-fin­gered fret­ting tech­nique, which he devel­oped after los­ing the use of most of his left hand in a fire. To learn more about Rein­hardt, vis­it the links in the Relat­eds below.

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in 2013.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch Djan­go Rein­hardt & Stéphane Grap­pel­li Play Mas­ter­ful­ly Togeth­er in Vivid Col­or (1938)

Hear Lost Record­ing of Pink Floyd Play­ing with Jazz Vio­lin­ist Stéphane Grap­pel­li on “Wish You Were Here”

How Djan­go Rein­hardt, After Los­ing Two Fin­gers, Devel­oped An Inno­v­a­tive Style & Inspired Black Sab­bath Gui­tarist Toni Iom­mi to Do the Same

Djan­go Rein­hardt Demon­strates His Gui­tar Genius in Rare Footage From the 1930s, 40s & 50s