An Oral History, A Bloody War

THE LATEST SPIKE LEE JOINT STIRS EMOTIONS

Last summer, I was having afternoon tea with a celebrated film director – as one does 😉 – at London’s W Hotel. We talked about Marvin Gaye, the man and his music. There was the suggestion of a documentary to be made; I gave him a copy of Ben Edmonds’ essential study of What’s Going On. The meeting was one of those improbable but happy consequences of writing a book about Motown. The conversation was intriguing, one for the diary.

      This summer, I discovered why Spike Lee was interested in What’s Going On. If you’ve seen his latest movie, you’ll know why, too.

      “In many ways,” wrote British film critic Mark Kermode, “Gaye’s musical masterpiece is the thread that links the disparate time-frames of Da 5 Bloods, bringing past and present together.” American screen authority Roger Ebert singled out “a chilling a capella rendering of the [album’s] title song and a use of ‘God Is Love’ that will stay with you long after the film is over.”

Hey, what’s happening, Spike? (photo: Andre D. Wagner/New York Times)

      Da 5 Bloods, which premiered on Netflix last month, has been widely praised for its imaginative storyline – Vietnam vets return to honour their late commander and locate a stash of buried gold – and for the powerful performances of its cast, particularly Delroy Lindo. To be sure, the soundtrack’s use of music from What’s Going On is brilliant, but there’s another Motown-related backstory to Spike Lee’s latest joint – and it’s not the fact that five of his lead characters happen to be named David, Eddie, Paul, Melvin and Otis.

      In the process of making the film, Lee read Bloods: An Oral History of the Vietnam War by Black Veterans, a Pulitzer Prize-nominated book by the late Wallace Terry, based on his first-hand interviews with soldiers who served in the conflict. The director also made it assigned reading for his actors.

      Terry began talking to, and recording, black servicemen when he was the Saigon-based correspondent for Time from 1967-69. His work then included the magazine’s May 26, 1967 cover story, “The Negro In Vietnam,” while his interviews subsequently formed the basis of Guess Who’s Coming Home: Black Fighting Men Recorded Live in Vietnam, issued in February 1972 on Motown’s subsidiary label, Black Forum. It was the first time that such a project had been created, and the LP’s liner notes even referenced Terry’s forthcoming book – although that took another 12 years, with a different publisher, to appear.

ANGER AND FRIGHT, TEARS AND LAUGHTER

      As “recorded, edited and narrated” by the journalist, the album opened with the sound of machine-gun fire and exploding bombs, followed by his voice declaring, “They’re fed up with dying in a war they believe is a white man’s war. They’re coming home determined to get their share – even if it means turning to violence.” Thereafter came the soldiers, bluntly and angrily talking about their experiences of fighting – but mostly of the prejudice and bigotry encountered from whites they served alongside. “This man has been a Beast all his life,” said one, using the racial epithet common in ’nam at the time. “I’ll join the Black Panthers as soon as I get home,” declared another. Still others spoke about how the Confederate flag would be flown on bases, particularly after Rev. Martin Luther King was assassinated.

The fourth Black Forum release

      “These raps are so good and their message so heavy that this record may shatter your sensibilities,” wrote civil rights activist Julian Bond in the album’s liner notes. “It may make you angry. It may frighten you. It may make you cry. It will make you laugh. And you will discover the war within the war.”

      The Black Forum imprint was introduced by Motown as “a permanent record of the sound of the struggle,” and its first three albums were touted to the trade at the company’s 1970 sales convention in San Francisco. One was a recording of a speech by black revolutionary Stokely Carmichael about indicted Black Panthers leader Huey Newton; another was an anti-Vietnam War sermon by Rev. King. “The thing with Stokely would have been a way of giving money to the Black Panthers,” Motown’s former president, Barney Ales, once told me. “They were putting the muscle on anybody, especially if you were a black guy with money.”

      None of those or later Black Forum releases sold significantly, but Rev. King’s Why I Oppose The War In Vietnam earned Motown its second Grammy award, in the spoken-word category in 1970. (An illuminating account of the imprint’s history can be found in Pat Thomas’ 2012 tome, Listen, Whitey! The Sights and Sounds of Black Power 1965-1975. Also worth reading is this article by Thomas for audio blog Möistworks, which includes links to most Black Forum releases.) Wallace Terry did “promote” Guess Who’s Coming Home with a November 1972 guest appearance on Soul Train, in an edition which also featured less controversial guests Joe Simon, the Sylvers and Billy Paul. Host Don Cornelius was pictured holding a copy of the Black Forum album’s gatefold cover.

BROTHER TO BROTHER

      The “war within the war” cited in Julian Bond’s liner notes is embedded in Da 5 Bloods, while the film is largely driven by the characters’ search for their fallen comrade’s remains, hidden treasure and closure. Even so, Lee makes explicit the racial context of the times, adding evocative newsreel footage of Rev. King, Muhammad Ali, Malcolm X and others.

Love, peace, soul…and war. Don Cornelius (right) with Wallace Terry and that album

      For his part, Marvin Gaye learned about the war’s racial turbulence from his younger brother Frankie, who spent two years in military service there. “There was one guy in particular,” wrote Frankie in his book (with Fred Basten) Marvin Gaye, My Brother, recalling what he told his sibling during night after night of emotional conversations. “He was from the Deep South and he didn’t want to be in the same tent with a black man.” Worse, this conscript “draped a big rebel flag over his footlocker, right in everyone’s face. Not a smart move, because we each had a rifle with a bayonet.” As it turned out, the two soldiers later became friends, after Frankie Gaye recounted the career-long struggles of black sportsmen and entertainers, and highlighted their inner strength. “He told me nobody had ever told him any of that stuff.”

      The music which Frankie Gaye’s experiences helped to inspire is the backbone of Da 5 Bloods. “I remember when Spike told me he was going to use it,” said film composer Terence Blanchard about What’s Going On in a recent interview on the Grammys website, “it automatically sent me down a direction, musically, where I wanted the score to have a grand feel to it. I wanted it to have more of a universal theme. I knew that Gaye’s music was going to cover a certain aspect of the emotion of dealing with social injustice in this country.”

      What’s Going On is far from the first piece of Motown history to be drafted into a Vietnam movie – Platoon and Good Morning, Vietnam come immediately to mind – and it will not be the last. But the album’s capacity to stir emotions and summon the mood of those troubled times – not to mention today’s troubled times – is beyond measure. Which I suspect Spike Lee knew only too well when we chatted over tea at The W last June.

Music notes: Spike Lee’s Da 5 Bloods is served with at least two playlists, both linked here. There’s this one featuring Terence Blanchard’s original score for the film, while this one includes period recordings heard on the soundtrack. In the second are selections from What’s Going On, as well as tracks by Freda Payne, the Spinners, the Chamber Brothers (their “Time Has Come Today” underpins the movie trailer) and Curtis Mayfield, as well as Marvin Gaye’s “Got To Give It Up,” which is heard during a scene set in a modern Saigon nightclub.