OK I’ll admit I got behind on this thing for a day or two but I’m back with a vengeance. I was doing a spot of Christmas shopping this evening and the same old songs were being trotted out in all the shops. There was one exception which I’ll blog in the next entry. How refreshing then to wander into HMV to hear the opening bars of this. It is one of the most incredible openings ever, full of anticipation. It builds element by element and had me distracted from shopping for the duration.
A single snare hit
then the organ part,
the kick drum comes in,
followed by that tambourine,
and those precise guitar licks,
the horns enter with a clarion call
Then Marvin Gaye’s vocal is there -”oooooh”, over one of those perfect Funk Brothers drum rolls
We’re only 20 seconds in at this point and the first line “I bet you’re wonderin’ how I knew” has you hooked for the whole 3 minutes, 10 seconds
The vocal is just incredible, partly due to Norman Whitfield (who co-wrote it with Barret Strong) pushing Marvin Gaye to sing in a higher key to put that edge on his soulful voice.
A few weeks back I came across a link to the Plain or Pan blog that had the master tapes for I Heard It Through The Gravevine. Go take a look at the post, although due to bandwidth they might not be available. If you can get hold of them though you will not be disappointed, to load them up in Audacity and be able to listen to the individual tracks. You can pretend you are on one of those TV shows where gnarled producer sits in front of the mixing console and pulls up faders in turn to bring out the individual elements.
