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Thursday, May 1st, 2025
| Time | Event |
| 8:00a | Marvin Gaye’s Classic Vocals on ‘I Heard It Through the Grapevine’: The A Cappella Version
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 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) |
| 9:00a | Stream Online Monty Python and the Holy Grail Free on Its 50th Anniversary This year, YouTube celebrated its twentieth anniversary, prompting younger users to wonder what life could have been like before it. The fiftieth anniversary of Monty Python and the Holy Grail, which premiered in April of 1975, has inspired similar reflection among comedy enthusiasts. It can be difficult, at this point, to imagine oneself back in a culture not yet disrupted by Monty Python’s rigorously absurd logic, scattershot satire, and deliberate breaking of narrative and social convention — a culture, indeed, where that sort of thing could be feared too dangerous for television and film. It was their BBC sketch series Monty Python’s Flying Circus that introduced this comedic sensibility first to Britain, and then to the world. Between that show’s third and fourth seasons, the Pythons — Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Eric Idle, Terry Jones, Michael Palin, and Terry Gilliam — took on the side project of creating their own cinematic re-interpretation of Arthurian legend. With a modest budget furnished by Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, Jethro Tull’s Ian Anderson, and other investors connected to the music world, they plunged themselves into a grimy, unglamorous vision of the Middle Ages, punctuated by inexplicable anachronism and saturated with an iconoclastic disregard for received wisdom and trumped-up glory. There the Pythons told a story that, while perhaps lacking in narrative structure — to say nothing of historical realism — more than compensates in sheer comic momentum. By all accounts, it holds up half a century on, even for those viewers who’ve already seen it so many times as to have involuntarily committed every joke to memory. In celebration of its anniversary, the film has become available to stream free (albeit not in all regions of the world) on the official YouTube Movies & TV channel, where the latest generations of Monty Python fans first discovered their work. Even if lines like “I fart in your general direction” no longer raise any transgressive frisson, there’s still little on that platform’s universe of content to match Monty Python and the Holy Grail’s multilayered silliness, whose place in the annals of comedy legend has long since been assured. Related content: Terry Gilliam’s Lost Animations from Monty Python and the Holy Grail Are Now Online Monty Python’s Eric Idle Breaks Down His Most Iconic Characters Monty Python and the Holy Grail Re-Imagined as an Epic, Mainstream Hollywood Film Monty Python’s Best Philosophy Sketches 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. |
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