by Jan Gaye
“I love you,” said the child.
“I love you, too,” said Marvin. “I love everyone here. Let today mark a new life of love for everyone!”
The loving new life did not last long.
The divorce proceedings continued to separate Marvin from his money. It was clear to me that Anna’s lawyers were sharper than his. Beyond that, Marvin’s self-sabotage never stopped. The more he needed to conserve his earnings, the more recklessly he spent, and the more he needed to do what he disliked most: tour.
Performing in Dallas, Marvin and I accepted the gracious invitation to stay at the palatial home of soul singer Johnnie Taylor, whose “Disco Lady” was the hottest single in the country. Taylor was on the road but had left behind an ample supply of top-grade weed and cocaine for his guests. It was there where, after the show, Marvin and I met friends of Johnnie’s, a handsome couple eager to get high.
After all four of us consumed copious amounts of stimulants, Marvin took me aside and said, “I think they’re swingers.”
Floating on a cloud miles above the earth, I wasn’t sure.
“I am sure,” said Marvin. “I think they want to take this party to the next phase. I also think they’re quite attractive. Wouldn’t you agree?”
“I haven’t been looking at them in that way.”
“Well, they’ve certainly been looking at you. He definitely wants you. And I suspect she’d love to participate.”
“I don’t know, Marvin.”
“I do. A small intimate orgy is just what the doctor ordered. Just the four of us. Let’s just have a little more of the goodies that brother Johnnie has provided and go with the flow.”
A lot more smoke and coke, and it was apparent that Marvin was right. The couple was ready to rock.
Marvin was the ringleader. I remained hesitant. Marvin insisted. He told me that this would make him exceedingly happy. It would be a new thrill, a beautiful moment of physical freedom filled with boundless pleasures.
The problem was, Marvin didn’t participate. He watched. He egged me on. He closely observed the three of us engaging in a long sexual dance. Yet he himself stood to the side. I don’t know whether it was the coke or the jealousy, but Marvin claimed that he couldn’t perform.
Hours later when the couple left, he told me, “You loved it, didn’t you?”
“Not especially.”
“Oh, dear, please don’t deny it. You were an animal in heat. You couldn’t get enough. This was your dream come true.”
“Not my dream, Marvin. Yours.”
“After this,” he said, “I’ll never be able to satisfy you again. From now on you’ll require this sort of extravagant stimulation. One man will never be enough for you.”
“If the one man is you, yes, he will be enough.”
“That’s what you say now. But I saw you. And now I’ll never be able to trust you.”
The next night the couple returned looking for more. This time the woman was hoping that Marvin would participate. But Marvin refused to even see them.
“Send them away,” he said. “They bore me. You go off with them if you want to. I can’t stop you. I won’t try.”
“I have no interest in them.”
“You did last night.”
“Why are you using them to torture yourself? What’s the point of this whole fiasco?”
“To watch purity turn to perversity is a fascinating thing,” he said. “You were once my angel. But now you have fallen. And yes, I do admit, it is exciting to watch the fall.”
Other than certain artists like Sylvester, Marvin watched the rise of disco with growing alarm.
“It is too far from the roots of rhythm and blues,” he told me. “Too mechanical. Too calculated. Too much the product of a producer rather than an artist.”
“Isn’t it just dance music with a new name?” I asked.
“Maybe, but when I create music, my purpose is not to get people to dance.”
“What is the purpose?”
“To get people to see below the surface of reality. Disco is surface music.”
“You like Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes’ ‘Don’t Leave Me This Way,’ don’t you?” I asked.
“You like Harold’s singer Teddy Pendergrass. I saw you watching him on Soul Train. You think he’s hot, don’t you?”
“I like the song.”
“Motown had Thelma Houston cover it. They souped it up with even more disco than the original. They say it’s going to be number-one pop. Now they want a disco song outta me.”
“And of course you told them no.”
“I told them what I always tell them—I’m not interested in marketing trends. I’m interested in music that gets down to the soul of the matter.”
“And dance music can never do that?”
“If dancing were my thing, perhaps. But whatever movements I’m able to pull off onstage, I do with a certain self-consciousness.”
We laughed over the fact that neither of us was exactly a world-class dancer.
A couple of days after Marvin’s antidisco rant, I was with him at the Sunset studio. Nona and Bubby were upstairs napping on the waterbed. Marvin was stretched out on a couch in the control room. He loved singing while reclining on an easy chair or sofa.
At one point he wasn’t singing at all. He was listening to a throwaway rhythm track that his engineer, Art Stewart, had decided not to throw away.
“There’s something here, Marv,” said Art. “Listen to it.”
The track had a quirky, funky feel to it, a snare offset by a cowbell, a low-tech quality that added to the seductive groove abetted by Bugsy Wilcox, Marvin’s drummer. The groove was sparse and loose. In its imperfection it sounded absolutely perfect for a spontaneous Marvin Gaye vocal.
I watched as Marvin started singing over the track. He did so in his falsetto. This was his gentlest voice, the one that expressed the most longing. As I had noted before, I saw that Marvin’s writing process did not entail a pencil and pad. Nothing was written down. Like a jazz musician, he wordlessly scatted over the track. He kept scatting until the scats took the shape of actual words. Eventually, he strung enough words together to make a story.
I heard this story as a reaction to our recent antidisco discussion. He sang about a man who has been afraid of dancing his entire life, a wallflower who lacks the courage to strut his stuff. But the force of this infectious groove is too much to resist. The wallflower has to get out there. He has to get down. He’s got to give it up.
“Got to Give It Up” became the name of the jam, an under-the-radar, denial-of-disco song perfectly suited for the overblown disco era.
“Is this your story?” I asked Marvin after he improvised the lyrics.
“Well, kind of, sort of,” he admitted.
The song was all about Marvin’s insecurity. I was moved by how freely he exposed his vulnerability. He wasn’t afraid to say, “I’m shy, I’m fragile, I’m afraid of making a fool of myself, I need to sing this song to get over my fear.”
“Can I sing on this? Pleeeease . . .” I begged.
His honesty gave me the courage to honestly express my own need.
“I was about to do the backgrounds myself,” said Marvin.
“Can’t I sing just one part?” I urged just as Marvin’s brother Frankie happened to show up.
“Can I get in on it too?” asked Frankie.
“Everyone wants to get in on the act,” Marvin said with a smile.
“You know that’s true!” Frankie and I shouted in unison.
“It’s just two lines,” I said, “‘Keep on dancing’ and ‘Got to give it up.’”
“Okay, dear,” Marvin finally relented.
I covered him with kisses.
Frankie and I sang the backgrounds.
“Not bad,” said Marvin. “Y’all can sing.”
“We’ve been telling you that,” I said, laughing.
“We’re gonna have to do this more often,” Marvin added.
For all the enthusiasm, for all the genuine camaraderie, for all the sweet harmony in that moment, the next time never happened.
Neither Frankie nor I ever sang on a Marvin Gaye song again.
Before the final mix, “Got to Give It Up” kept evolving. Whoever happened to walk into the studio heard the jam and spontaneously added to it. Frankie Beverly, for instance, put on a percussive feel with a bottle and a spoon. Don Cornelius strolled through and ended up on the track. My sister Cass spoke the line, “I heard that.” I asked Marvin if Johnny McGhee, guitarist for LTD, could add a guitar part—and Marvin agreed. It all worked. It all contributed to the song’s bubbling funk. Even before its release, we put it on an endless loop and played it everywhere we went.
The single took off like a rocket. Everyone loved dancing to a story about the painfully timid man who allows positive vibrations to overwhelm his fears and force him to the dance floor. In 1977, a dizzy disco year when Leo Sayer’s “You Make Me Feel Like Dancing” dominated the clubs, “Got to Give It Up” hit No. 1 and became an anthem of its own.
I had to laugh when I heard a Motown executive tell Marvin, “You have a disco hit.”
“The hell I do,” said Marvin. “This is just a lonely little song about a lonely little guy trying to overcome his loneliness.”
“Call it whatever you want,” said the suit. “All I know is that it’s going number-one pop.”
Despite his protests about the crassness of the disco era, Marvin was happy to be back on top.
“Got to Give It Up” became the final track—the only studio cut—on the double album culled from his show in England. As a result, Live at the London Palladium sold two million copies.
I wasn’t surprised when Motown urged Marvin to do an all-disco album.
“Never,” he said.
“At least consider making music suitable for dancing,” said the suit.
“The music I’m considering making,” said Marvin, “could not be more unsuitable for dancing.”
“Then what’s its appeal?” the executive wanted to know.
“It appeals to my sense of irony, my sense of poetry, my sense of justice, and, perhaps most importantly, my sense of humor.”
“When will you start recording? When can we hear something?”
“It may be a month, it may be a year, it may be a decade. There’s no way of knowing when the spirit will move me.”
“You need to move quickly,” said Marvin’s accountant, “if you don’t want to lose everything you own. The IRS is coming down hard on you. And so is Anna. You’re on the brink of bankruptcy.”
“A true artist transforms discord into beauty,” Marvin responded. “In the hands of an artist, adversity is a gift. Adversity provides the conflicts that birth creativity.”
Finally Free
I watched Marvin make his new record. Since meeting me four years earlier, this was the first music he was making where I wasn’t his muse. This time—except for one song—it was all about Anna.
Marvin was lost in the memories of a marriage that had fallen apart, even as he reassured me that he was completely devoted to me, Nona, and Bubby.
I was now twenty-one; Marvin was thirty-eight. We adored our two young children. We adored each other. In spite of the psychological challenges we both faced—including a growing dependence on drugs to beat back depression—we were more deeply in love than ever.
Our dream was to live out our life free of drama and enjoy simple happiness in our Hidden Hills home.
“The dream can be realized,” Marvin told me, “once this divorce is behind me and we can get married.”
His divorce from Anna had been a ferocious battle, in and out of the courtroom, dragging on for months. Finally, though, there was hope for resolution.
A judge had issued a final decree, ordering Marvin to pay an exorbitant amount of money for child and spousal support. Marvin’s accountants had proven, though, that he was broke.
The judge was not convinced. He stated that as an enormously popular recording artist, Marvin was still capable of substantial earnings. With that in mind, it was decided that, to satisfy the terms of the settlement, Marvin would give Anna all the profits from his next record.
Marvin embraced the notion.
“When I refused to go to the studio to record,” Marvin told me, “Anna was the only one strong enough to get me in there. So it makes perfect sense that, even at the end of our marriage, she still has the power to make me work. The irony is that the music I intend to make will have no commercial value. I will not contribute to the Gordy wealth in any way. If I have to make an inferior album to satisfy the divorce decree, so be it.”
But as I watched Marvin begin to work in the Sunset studio, I saw proof of what I had long known to be true—Marvin Gaye was incapable of making inferior music. Once he started to write and sing, all prior agendas flew out the window. All he could do was follow the dictates of his heart.
“Not every song is a hit,” he said, “but every song does tell a story.”
He ignored Motown’s demands that he make a commercially viable follow-up record to “Got to Give It Up.” In fact, as he worked on this divorce settlement record, he banned the Motown suits from his studio. Aside from myself, his engineer Art Stewart, and a few select backup musicians, no one was allowed inside.
The record became an obsession. Within days of observing Marvin putting together the pieces of this new music, I saw that it was evolving into nothing less than a saga. Marvin was not writing three-minute songs; he was composing a grand suite in the style of What’s Going On in which one melodic motif seamlessly merged into another. The motifs were chapters in a novel. The subject was his long and tumultuous marriage to Anna.
When he showed me some of his original song titles, like “You Never Really Cared,” “Fourteen Years of Nothing,” “A Messed Up Mind and a Pocketbook to Match,” and one referring to me—“Younger, Prettier and Twice the Woman”—I told him that he had gone too far. He had to tone down his attitude and become more subtle—which is just what he did.
In the final version, he started out the story with a musical creation of his marriage to Anna. Marvin restated his vows and sang of the beautiful optimism that surrounded the couple. But that optimism was short-lived. There was infidelity. There was jealousy. There were breakups and breakdowns. There was tremendous anger.
But as I watched Marvin sing of his anger at Anna, I saw the anger dissipate. I heard him sing how anger could only make him sick; how he must purge himself of rage by expressing his rage in song. And yet that expression was far from furious. It was poetry. Miraculously, Marvin transformed anger into beauty.
In telling the tale of not only his marriage but of the divorce proceedings themselves, he asked Anna, “Is that enough?” I sensed that the question referred not only to the amount of money she was extracting from him, but the emotional damage they had done to each other. He detailed those times when she called the cops, the nasty legal skirmishes, the vicious fights in court. She may have won the battle, but Marvin warned her that “Daddy will win the war.” He was convinced that she wanted to “break a man.” But he wouldn’t permit it. He wouldn’t let her win.
Remembering that Anna herself once used this phrase, he named one song “You Can Leave, but It’s Gonna Cost You.”
While much of the record was about money, it was more about the mystery surrounding the loss of love, the sentiment expressed in the motif of “When Did You Stop Loving Me, When Did I Stop Loving You?”
Yet I was convinced that the answer to that question was never. Marvin never stopped loving Anna. I was sure of that because of the song that sat at the center of the suite—“Anna’s Song.” This was the high point. The passion with which Marvin shouted her name—“Anna! Anna!”—revealed the passion of a man forever bound to this woman, no matter how bitter their separation.
“With this record,” Marvin
told me, “I’ll be done with her.”
I knew better, but didn’t argue. I saw that Marvin wanted to feel that he was free, but the record itself said otherwise. The enormous creative output proved that Marvin was—and would always be—tied to Anna. In fact, it was the only time in his career that he had written enough material on a single topic to fill two LPs. The record that delineated his relationship to Anna was twice as long as What’s Going On.
Even when she was at odds with Marvin, Anna still motivated him to work. According to Marvin, Anna browbeat him. In some sense, this new album was a response to that browbeating. I took another approach entirely. When Marvin was reluctant to go into the studio, I’d say, “How can you deny the world these brilliant songs? How can you keep these beautiful melodies to yourself? You need to share. You to need to express all these amazing ideas that live inside you.”
In the case of the divorce album, he did just that. He wrote with fearless honesty and complete sincerity. He didn’t sing a note that he didn’t mean. He didn’t write a lyric that didn’t expose his raw feelings.
For all the lamentations about how Anna had wronged him, he boldly confessed his own wrongs. In a funky song he called “Time to Get It Together,” he addressed his weaknesses, singing about how he had wasted time by blowing coke up his nose and chasing down midnight hoes. He declared the end of that chapter in his life and swore to do better.
It was only love, he realized, that would make him better. In the midst of his divorce dispute, he sang “Everybody Needs Love,” a quiet prayer for the love of Jesus, the love required by everyone from “a beggar or even a superstar.”
In the symbol of a sparrow, Marvin saw the source of his creative energy. “Sparrow” became a song in which he elongated his prayer, asking the bird to reveal life’s deepest secrets—“sing before you fly away . . . sing to me, Marvin Gaye.”
I watched as Marvin flew away on the poetic wings of the sparrow into outer space, where he created “A Funky Space Reincarnation,” a funked-up fantasy about escaping into a world of musical make-believe.