Marvin Gaye is possibly the most well-known Motown artist of all time. Despite this,
he was haunted by many personal struggles. Did he move to Europe to avoid taxes? Why
did he alter his last name? Here's the untold truth of Marvin Gaye.
Marvin Gay Sr. was a violent man, and his family lived in fear of his punishments
and the inevitable religious reasoning behind his domestic abuse. Gaye talked about how everyone had
to navigate his constantly shifting moods and would have to do anything and everything to win
his favor. Gaye, however, from an early age defied his father and hated his attitude, even though all
he really wanted was his love. He describes his father further in David Ritz's "Divided Soul":
"Living with Father was something like living with a king [...] a very peculiar,
changeable, cruel, and all-powerful king."
He sang in order to please his father, but the better he got, the more demands were placed on
him. Ritz's biography only gets darker as Gaye talks about how the emotional abuse from his
father caused him to contemplate suicide. The only thing that stood in the way of him and death was,
according to Gaye himself, his mother, Alberta. His sister Jeanne elaborated:
"Marvin loved his mother so much because she was there to defend him and to encourage him
in just about everything. She told me he would be a great star one day."
If it hadn't been for his mother, Marvin said:
"I think I would have been one of those child suicide cases you read about in the newspapers."
In order to escape a nasty home life, Marvin Gaye enlisted with the Air Force with visions
of being a pilot, even though he was terrified of flying. Really,
it came down to another act of defiance towards his father. He said:
"I was sick to death of my Father's household. I had to get out. Besides,
I didn't have the concentration to make it through high school.
I was afraid of failing. I knew I couldn't live up to Father's standards."
Yet he would find that while he was in the military, his romantic idealization of it would
come crumbling down. He wasn't able to adjust to the extreme regimentation of military life,
and he was openly oppositional to authority. Gaye said of his time in the military:
"I felt betrayed. I went in to learn how to fly and wound up
peeling potatoes on some God-forsaken bases in Kansas, Texas, and Wyoming."
When he'd finally had enough of his time in the Air Force, he began to act crazy
in order to convince them that he had some form of mental illness — ultimately earning
an honorable discharge. He described the general sentiment of his discharge papers:
"Something about being unable to adjust to regimentation and authority, and
'good riddance' or something. I don't know."
There are a couple of stories about how Marvin Gay Jr. became Marvin Gaye with that extra "e"
at the end. One such story has it that on the release of his first Motown single,
"Let Your Conscience Be Your Guide," the record company added the "e" to his last name. However,
in most accounts of this minor change of names, the person making the decision was Gaye himself,
once again stemming from his complicated relationship with his father.
Gaye talks about his name in "Divided Soul" and how he was deeply troubled by having the same name
as his father, who is often described as a, quote, "sexually ambiguous man." All it took for Gaye to
be reminded of this connection was for people to add "is" to the front of his name, asking:
"Is Marvin Gaye?"
He just couldn't escape the teasing and the confusion of his own sexual identity.
Beans Bowles, a music producer who knew Gaye, stated:
"He fought it. The cats would kid him about being gay, knowing he wasn't,
but knowing how he hated hearing about it. We called him Gayesky. That bugged him too."
Throughout his Motown career, Marvin Gaye had several duet partners. His first partner in
1964 was Mary Wells — known at the time as the "queen of Motown." However, their duet record,
"Together," tamed her sound while it gave Gaye a platform to shine. After she left Motown,
Gaye was then placed with Kim Weston. Their album, "Take Two," became a massive hit, but
after that record, she, too, left Motown. His most successful partnership was with Tammi Terrell,
which started in 1966 and led to numerous hits — but Terrell died from a brain tumor in 1970.
It wasn't until 1973 when Barry Gordy tried to convince Gaye to do a duet record with Diana Ross
that Gaye revealed his feelings about having another duet partner.
The Los Angeles Public Library reports:
"Gaye was reluctant; he had come to think that his partners were cursed. Wells and
Weston had both left Motown after their duet albums with Gaye, and neither had much of
a career after leaving; and Terrell's death still weighed heavily on Gaye."
Marvin Gaye had found himself in a deep depression by 1970. It would be at this time that he would
befriend two seemingly unlikely men in Lem Barney and Mel Farr, both players for the Detroit Lions.
ESPN contextualizes this moment in Gaye's life by pointing out that Tammi Terrell's death happened
just a couple of years after the assassinations of Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert
Kennedy. The Watts Riots, the continuation of the Vietnam War, and the Kent State shootings
had also just shaken both the American public and Gaye himself. He's quoted in his biography:
"In my heart, I could no longer pretend to sing love songs for people.
I couldn't perform. When Tammi became ill, I refused to sing in public."
Gaye got the idea that he wanted to try out as a wide receiver for the Detroit Lions.
According to his brother Frank's book, "Marvin Gaye, My Brother", Gaye said:
"I'd rather catch a pass and score a touchdown in Tiger Stadium, than rack up another gold record."
He trained with Barney and Farr, bulked up 30 pounds, and stayed off cocaine in order
to be taken seriously. Joe Schmidt, Detroit's coach, gave Marvin an invite to a practice and
had him run some routes and found him to be good, but not great. According to ESPN:
"Gaye didn't receive a training camp invite. His tryout was the end of the fantasy.
He would go back to a recording studio and watch Farr and Barney ply their trade on Sundays."
Everyone knows the classic "What's Going On," but not many realized that the project that would
follow that hit album would be the soundtrack for a blaxploitation film called "Trouble Man."
It would also end up being one of the projects Marvin Gaye would be most proud of in his career.
He had wanted to make a jazz record with fewer
vocals, and the soundtrack from "Trouble Man" became just that.
Gaye and the producers and musicians he worked with on the soundtrack
found themselves experimenting with new technology. While electronic
music had been creating experimental soundscapes before the soundtrack,
it was a rare technology to be found in the halls of Motown. They also found a
way to create a drum loop for the record. Trevor Lawrence, the saxophonist on the record, told NPR:
"Now back in '72 there were no samplers. What they did was they took a piece of tape
and they had the two track tape machine, and they made that pattern that made a
loop like a figure eight around the tip – rim, which I'd never seen before."
While Marvin Gaye would be mostly known for creating the music behind the film
"Trouble Man," he did try his hand at being in front of the camera as well.
In 1969 and 1971, Gaye would have small roles in two relatively forgotten films,
"The Ballad of Andy Crocker" and "Chrome and Hot Leather,"
respectively. Voices of East Anglia stated about Gaye's transition to acting in these films:
"He was good looking, had the voice of an angel and was a big draw.
An acting career beckoned, and ambitious Marvin had aspirations to make it on the big screen
following in the footsteps of Elvis Presley and Frank Sinatra."
Coming up on the final years of the Vietnam War,
both films featured Gaye playing Vietnam War vets. "The Ballad of Andy Crocker" explores the
effects of the war on veterans after returning home, while "Chrome and Hot Leather" tells the
story of a Green Beret who seeks revenge after a biker gang kills his fiancee.
"You should have let me knock a couple of their heads together."
"We don't need a beef at this point."
"Well, it sure would have made me feel better."
Motown caused the final rupture in their relationship with Marvin Gaye when they
released his 16th studio album, "In Our Lifetime," without his consent.
They had made changes to the production of the album which angered Gaye significantly,
as did their decision to remove a question mark from the title. He's quoted in "Divided Soul":
"They left out the question mark. That was the whole point. The question was,
'Is the world coming to an end in our lifetime?'"
The song "Far Cry" — which was released on the record — wasn't even finished according to Gaye.
Motown added instrumentation to it, and Gaye railed against them. He said:
"How dare they second guess my artistic decisions!"
According to "Divided Soul," Gaye thought that Motown had gotten their hands on the
unfinished masters from a couple of the musicians who had snuck them out
of London and brought them to Los Angeles. Nonetheless, it didn't matter because the
record was out and shipped all around the world whether Gaye wanted it to be or not.
When Marvin Gaye divorced Anna Gordy in 1977 and subsequently separated from second wife,
Janis Hunter in 1979, his financial issues began to encroach into his existence to the
point that he could no longer ignore it. He absconded to London first,
but he realized that London was a little too fast-paced for him, stating:
"Not having lived there before [...] I wasn't sure what to expect. But as far as drugs and women go,
London's as wild as any city needs to be. I had access to anything I wanted,
and that was part of the problem."
According to Michael Eric Dyson's book, "Mercy, Mercy Me: The Art, Loves and Demons of Marvin
Gaye," Gaye was then convinced to move to Belgium by businessman Freddy Cousaert,
who ultimately got him back on his feet. It was during his time there that Gaye produced the 1982
hit 'Midnight Love'" — his last album before his death and the most successful.
After Gaye's death, the sum total of what he owed to the IRS, creditors, and in alimony
was discovered. He owed the IRS over a million dollars, the state of California around $600,000,
and alimony to both Gordy and Hunter totaling more than $300,000. An unnamed woman was also
suing him over a claim that he had beaten her at the end of 1982 and the beginning of 1983.
It's widely known that Marvin Gaye was killed by his father in 1984, but what you may not know is
that the .38 caliber revolver that Marvin Gay Sr. used to shoot his son had been a gift from his son
four months earlier. Marvin Sr. had said that having several guns in the house made him feel
safe, according to Gaye's mother, Alberta. Gaye had intervened in an argument between his mother
and father that night and paid the ultimate price, one almost seemingly determined by
fate knowing how ever-present the threat of his father had been throughout his life.
In "Mercy, Mercy Me," Michael Eric Dyson pushed forward the argument
that Gaye sought out his father's anger in order to end his own life. Dyson proposed:
"[Gaye] was attempting a form of passive-aggressive revenge by
hanging his own death on his father's conscience."
On November 2nd, 1984, the judge sentenced Marvin Gay Sr. to five
years of probation without jail time because he had been persuaded by the
argument that Gaye had attacked his father twice. The shooting had been in self-defense.
In the immediacy of the moment, this might have made sense, but knowing the history of
Gaye's relationship with his father, this sentence certainly raises a few eyebrows.
If you or someone you know is dealing with domestic abuse,
you can call the National Domestic Violence Hotline at 1−800−799−7233.
You can also find more information, resources, and support at their website.