I Heard It Through the Grapevine

Motown’s weekly quality-control meetings were famous for their ruthlessness, and by 1967 they had turned down “I Heard It Through the Grapevine” more than once. Berry Gordy vetoed the Miracles’ version and told Norman Whitfield and Barrett Strong to bring him something stronger. Whitfield came back with Marvin Gaye’s — the hollow, echoing Funk Brothers arrangement, Gaye pushed to the top of his range and well past where he sang comfortably — and Gordy rejected that too. Gladys Knight & the Pips got the single instead, and had a hit with it in 1967.

Gaye’s take was filed onto an album. In the Groove came out in August 1968, and radio DJs, who did not sit in on quality-control meetings, started playing it anyway. Gordy relented that October. The single went to No. 1 for seven weeks and became the biggest-selling record Motown had released to that point.

The reason is audible in the first eight seconds. The electric piano figure and the tambourine arrive before anything else, and they establish that this is a song about waiting — the narrator already knows, has known for a while, and is describing what it feels like when confirmation finally shows up too late to be any use. Gaye’s strained upper register does the rest. He isn’t performing heartbreak so much as performing the effort of keeping a voice level while saying something that costs him. Whitfield put him in a key that hurt on purpose, and the hurt is the record.

Greatest of All Time. Proof that an institution can be extremely good at its job and still be wrong twice about the same song.