Spirit and Flesh
by Gigi Anders
MARCH 30, 2012 TAGS:
It isn’t easy upstaging Charlize Theron. In a commercial for Dior’s J’Adore perfume, the actress walks seductively toward the camera, shedding first jewelry and then clothing; her perfume is what matters. But what sets the mood, what captures that moment of released sensuality, is the music behind her, the sultry, supple voice of Marvin Gaye.
Twenty-eight years after the brilliant R&B soul singer’s untimely death — he was shot twice through the heart by his father on April 1, 1984, the eve of Gaye’s 45th birthday — his intoxicating music continues to be compelling, gorgeous and relevant. Gaye’s emotional nudity is so pure and his willingness to explore and confess is so truthful that he gets to us every time we listen.
“I write my music according to my lifestyle,” he once said. “I feel it from my soul and ask God to let it move men’s souls.”
Souls and desires. They don’t call Gaye’s music “baby-making” for nothing. But as openly erotic as he could be — “Let’s Get It On” and “I Want You” — he could transcend mere carnality. “Here, My Dear” and the double-Grammy-winning “Sexual Healing” transport us to ever more divine realms of longing, hurt, hope. “What’s Going On” and “Mercy, Mercy Me (The Ecology)” bring us back to Earth. What binds them all, of course, is the elegant singer’s persuasive and pervasive sensibility: lush, haunting and nourishing.
“Marvin expressed a profound and human kind of discussion,” says David Ritz, who wrote Divided Soul: The Life of Marvin Gaye. “He agonized over how to reconcile spirit and flesh. From R. Kelly to Prince, they are all children of Marvin because he was cathartic. He faced what is troubling, and turned chaos into art. What makes him permanent isn’t only that he defined the questions in a deep, deep way, but he articulated them with such lyrical beauty that you’re just in heaven, you want to listen over and over again.”
About Gaye’s slinky 1972 song, “Trouble Man,” Joni Mitchell wrote:
“It was so influential to my music and my singing. It excites me from the downbeat — the way the drums roll in — the suspense — the approaching storm of it.”
That was Marvin Gaye’s fractured, complicated life, an approaching storm. (The drama of it has attracted Hollywood; two bio-pics are in the works.) He was born on April 2, 1939, to a Pentecostal preacher and a domestic worker. Violence was endemic in the household. Gaye’s father, an alcoholic, regularly beat the children, especially his rebellious son. As Gaye sang in Joni Mitchell’s favorite song, “I come up hard, awful hard.”
He dropped out of high school, joined and then was let go by the Air Force, sang doo-wop on the streets of D.C. in 1957. When a colleague brought him to Detroit’s Motown Records, he began as a session drummer but soon had his first hit, singing 1962’s “Stubborn Kind of Fellow.” That year he married Anna Ruby Gordy, a sister of Motown’s president Berry Gordy Jr. More hits followed, a long string of them — “How Sweet It Is (To Be Loved By You)” in 1964, “I’ll Be Doggone” and “Ain’t That Peculiar,” both in 1965. Gaye hooked up with Tammi Terrell in 1967, and their winning pop duets included the classic “Ain’t Nothin’ Like The Real Thing.”
A solo Marvin released, “I Heard It Through The Grapevine” in 1968, became Motown’s biggest hit single of all time. The song’s romantic paranoia reflected the jealousy and suspicion in Gaye’s troubled marriage. It also signaled his artistic and personal restlessness. His earlier Motown love songs are definitely delicious, but the later work, while beautiful as ever, is more profound, the ideas more sophisticated. Had Gaye had a different father and not been so involved with drugs, there’s no telling where his musical evolution could have reached.
Tammi Terrell’s death at 24 from a malignant brain tumor in 1970 drove the diffident Gaye into despair, introspection and the critical and commercial smash of 1971, the ethereal “What’s Going On.” Its breakout success allowed Gaye to renegotiate his contract, giving him creative control over his work and $1 million, making him the highest-paid black artist in the country. (In 2008, 37 years later, Gaye made Forbes’ 13 top-earning dead celebrities list for the first time at number 13, the only person of color there.)
But Gaye and his money never stuck together; he spent it all on “cars and the fairer sex” — and drugs. Moving with his parents to Los Angeles in 1972 exacerbated his addictions, his marital problems and the ever more combative relationship with his father.
Yet the music Gaye produced during this period was never better: “Let’s Get It On” was the highest-selling record of his lifetime. The album and song “I Want You,” inspired by Gaye’s love affair with the teenaged singer-actress Janis Hunter, also fared well. Gaye’s marriage to Anna ended in 1977, the year he married Janis. They too divorced, in 1981.
The slow, then fast, descent commenced.
“Things didn’t look too good,” Gaye said. “I was divorced — twice. There was political upheaval with Motown. I was really broke … So I got the heck out of Dodge.”
Gaye left Motown, signed with Columbia Records, and exiled himself to Europe. One night in Brussels in 1983, David Ritz, his friend and biographer, suggested Gaye needed “sexual healing.” The phrase sparked the steamy, revelatory comeback album Midnight Love, whose track “Sexual Healing” sold two million singles and went platinum. It would be Gaye’s swan song.
Returning to America in 1984 for a concert tour, Gaye was depressed, lost and strung out. Holing up with his parents in the Los Angeles mansion he’d bought them was a fatal mistake. His father got five years of probation after pleading no contest to voluntary manslaughter.
Marvin Gaye came up and went down hard, awfully hard. But not his music. That eternally silken sound will always soften the blow.
Twenty-eight years after the brilliant R&B soul singer’s untimely death — he was shot twice through the heart by his father on April 1, 1984, the eve of Gaye’s 45th birthday — his intoxicating music continues to be compelling, gorgeous and relevant. Gaye’s emotional nudity is so pure and his willingness to explore and confess is so truthful that he gets to us every time we listen.
“I write my music according to my lifestyle,” he once said. “I feel it from my soul and ask God to let it move men’s souls.”
Souls and desires. They don’t call Gaye’s music “baby-making” for nothing. But as openly erotic as he could be — “Let’s Get It On” and “I Want You” — he could transcend mere carnality. “Here, My Dear” and the double-Grammy-winning “Sexual Healing” transport us to ever more divine realms of longing, hurt, hope. “What’s Going On” and “Mercy, Mercy Me (The Ecology)” bring us back to Earth. What binds them all, of course, is the elegant singer’s persuasive and pervasive sensibility: lush, haunting and nourishing.
“Marvin expressed a profound and human kind of discussion,” says David Ritz, who wrote Divided Soul: The Life of Marvin Gaye. “He agonized over how to reconcile spirit and flesh. From R. Kelly to Prince, they are all children of Marvin because he was cathartic. He faced what is troubling, and turned chaos into art. What makes him permanent isn’t only that he defined the questions in a deep, deep way, but he articulated them with such lyrical beauty that you’re just in heaven, you want to listen over and over again.”
About Gaye’s slinky 1972 song, “Trouble Man,” Joni Mitchell wrote:
“It was so influential to my music and my singing. It excites me from the downbeat — the way the drums roll in — the suspense — the approaching storm of it.”
That was Marvin Gaye’s fractured, complicated life, an approaching storm. (The drama of it has attracted Hollywood; two bio-pics are in the works.) He was born on April 2, 1939, to a Pentecostal preacher and a domestic worker. Violence was endemic in the household. Gaye’s father, an alcoholic, regularly beat the children, especially his rebellious son. As Gaye sang in Joni Mitchell’s favorite song, “I come up hard, awful hard.”
He dropped out of high school, joined and then was let go by the Air Force, sang doo-wop on the streets of D.C. in 1957. When a colleague brought him to Detroit’s Motown Records, he began as a session drummer but soon had his first hit, singing 1962’s “Stubborn Kind of Fellow.” That year he married Anna Ruby Gordy, a sister of Motown’s president Berry Gordy Jr. More hits followed, a long string of them — “How Sweet It Is (To Be Loved By You)” in 1964, “I’ll Be Doggone” and “Ain’t That Peculiar,” both in 1965. Gaye hooked up with Tammi Terrell in 1967, and their winning pop duets included the classic “Ain’t Nothin’ Like The Real Thing.”A solo Marvin released, “I Heard It Through The Grapevine” in 1968, became Motown’s biggest hit single of all time. The song’s romantic paranoia reflected the jealousy and suspicion in Gaye’s troubled marriage. It also signaled his artistic and personal restlessness. His earlier Motown love songs are definitely delicious, but the later work, while beautiful as ever, is more profound, the ideas more sophisticated. Had Gaye had a different father and not been so involved with drugs, there’s no telling where his musical evolution could have reached.
Tammi Terrell’s death at 24 from a malignant brain tumor in 1970 drove the diffident Gaye into despair, introspection and the critical and commercial smash of 1971, the ethereal “What’s Going On.” Its breakout success allowed Gaye to renegotiate his contract, giving him creative control over his work and $1 million, making him the highest-paid black artist in the country. (In 2008, 37 years later, Gaye made Forbes’ 13 top-earning dead celebrities list for the first time at number 13, the only person of color there.)
But Gaye and his money never stuck together; he spent it all on “cars and the fairer sex” — and drugs. Moving with his parents to Los Angeles in 1972 exacerbated his addictions, his marital problems and the ever more combative relationship with his father.
Yet the music Gaye produced during this period was never better: “Let’s Get It On” was the highest-selling record of his lifetime. The album and song “I Want You,” inspired by Gaye’s love affair with the teenaged singer-actress Janis Hunter, also fared well. Gaye’s marriage to Anna ended in 1977, the year he married Janis. They too divorced, in 1981.
The slow, then fast, descent commenced.
“Things didn’t look too good,” Gaye said. “I was divorced — twice. There was political upheaval with Motown. I was really broke … So I got the heck out of Dodge.”Gaye left Motown, signed with Columbia Records, and exiled himself to Europe. One night in Brussels in 1983, David Ritz, his friend and biographer, suggested Gaye needed “sexual healing.” The phrase sparked the steamy, revelatory comeback album Midnight Love, whose track “Sexual Healing” sold two million singles and went platinum. It would be Gaye’s swan song.
Returning to America in 1984 for a concert tour, Gaye was depressed, lost and strung out. Holing up with his parents in the Los Angeles mansion he’d bought them was a fatal mistake. His father got five years of probation after pleading no contest to voluntary manslaughter.
Marvin Gaye came up and went down hard, awfully hard. But not his music. That eternally silken sound will always soften the blow.
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COMMENTS (2)
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krishna andavolu wrote on April 2, 2009 6:41am
"A Funky Space Reincarnation," from the 1978 Double album Here, My Dear. [Report Comment]
Anonymous wrote on April 2, 2009 5:44am
What Gaye song plays under the Theron commercial? [Report Comment]
