Marvin Gaye- "What’s Going On"

Has there ever been a discussion as to why the volume on the 45 version starts to fade normally around 3:27, then suddenly gets louder again at 3:45, then completely fades out?

bwolfe wrote: Elvis' "Suspicious Minds" had a false fade out too. Pauses in songs have always intrigued me. "Monday Monday", "The Little Girl I Once Knew", "Do You Love Me" and "Judy In Disguise" all has pauses or stops. Must have been an artistic thing.

Supposedly "Suspicious Minds" was done this way to replicate the way he performed it live.

"Do You Love Me" was kind of an odd one since it almost sounds like a mistake when recording/mastering it...almost like the engineer thought the song was over & quickly faded it only to realize they were still singing. Definitely not your standard false ending.

I remember in the early 70s when some Top 40 stations were playing a few selected album cuts, a station I worked at was playing "Molina" by CCR which has a very long (~5 second) false end. The station carted the song with the false end shortened.

I'll add the Byrds' "Turn! Turn! Turn!" to the list.

The first AM station I worked at had an antenna current meter that would purposely engage only when one pushed an "audio cut" button while taking meter readings. While this resulted in an accurate reading, it also caused a blatantly obvious decrease in modulation while that button was held down. On many occasions, I took adavantage of the pauses in the "Monday, Monday"s and "Turn! Turn! Turn!"s of the music world to unobtrusively comply with FCC regs. :)

I had a radio instructor who once told me the false early fade on songs like "What's Going On", "Suspicious Minds", and "Do You Love Me" were put there as a guide for DJs so they'd know when to begin manually fading out the record to avoid exceeding the 3:00 run time threshold most stations abided by in those days. My instructor also claimed that if DJs didn't want the song to fade early, then they could simply "ride the gain" by gradually turning the volume up louder as the fade was in progress and then potting the volume back down when the music grew loud again. One thing making me question that explanation though is, why would the commercial 45 copies also contain the false early fades?   

Edited by Todd Ireland

my commercial 45 for the marvin gaye song 'what's going on'
issued as tamla 54201 starts with a 'whopp' sound before
the music begins.....it sounds also like an echo
effect......the 'anthology' cd version edits off this
sound.....do any of the cd's claiming to have the '45
version' on it actually contain the 'whopp' echo on the
intro?...btw, the 'anthology' cd version sounds almost mono
as noted in the db as 'very poor stereo separation'...