Night Beat

by Mikal Gilmore

  When Dennis Wilson drowned on the evening of December 28, 1983—the victim of a diving accident—there was much talk about his ill-famed indulgences over the years. There was also much made of how the family and group—rarely inseparable but also rarely unified—had fallen into bitter bickering (the band, in fact, came close to disintegrating several times, and Dennis and Mike Love had such an abrasive relationship that they obtained restraining orders against one another). In the group’s last tour, Dennis Wilson didn’t even appear for several dates, purportedly for reasons of family friction and drinking problems.

  There wasn’t, however, much said about just how well this group had lived up to its artistry during their long period of public neglect (they were an inestimably better, more resourceful band than, say, the Doors), nor did many reports point out how the Beach Boys had managed to take all the disenchantment of their best late-1960s work and continuously parlayed it into creative resolve. Dennis Wilson was perhaps the most volatile member of the band, but he was also its most archetypal: He embodied the public’s ideal of the band’s myth, and he understood how the flipside of that myth was probably an inevitable turn of events. In the years since the late-1960s, Dennis—like the rest of the band—had come to live out his celebrityhood as a novelty star: as a reminder of a past long used and reclaimed merely to satisfy an audience’s whims. If he drank or sulked a bit more as a result of swallowing that knowledge, I wouldn’t want to begrudge him. Perhaps even more than his brother Brian, Dennis Wilson exemplified the band’s real ethos, and when he fell into that deep, irretrievable chill on that Wednesday night in 1983, so did a part of the band’s best history.

  marvin gaye: troubled soul

  More than any other artist of the pop generation, Marvin Gaye rose to the emotional promise, stylistic challenge, and cultural possibility of modern soul. In fact, he was often cited as the man who singlehandedly modernized Motown: a sensual-voiced man full of spiritual longings (and spiritual confusion) whose landmark 1971 album What’s Going On commented forcefully yet eloquently on matters like civil rights and Vietnam—subjects that many R & B artists, up until that time, had sidestepped.

  Though that eventful record was in some ways the apex of Gaye’s career (he would never again return to themes of social passion), Marvin remained a resourceful performer up through the time of the last work released in his lifetime, 1982’s Midnight Love (Columbia). Watching him command the stage at 1983’s Motown Anniversary TV special, or seeing him graciously accept his first Grammy Award a few weeks later, it felt as if we were witnessing the rejuvenation of a once-troubled man, who learned to transform his dread into artistic courage, even grace. Hearing the news of his violent and improbable end—shot to death on April 1, 1984, by his minister father—it seemed likely that rugged emotions and rampageous fears were never far from the singer’s closest thoughts, after all. According to David Ritz’s 1985 biography of Gaye, Divided Soul, Gaye remained deeply troubled and ungovernable toward his life’s end—indeed, a doomed and restless man marked by fear, debt, sexual violence, religious guilt, jealousy, and, ultimately, a self-loathing so active it almost purposely created the circumstances of his own murder. The facts presented in Divided Soul weren’t pretty: Gaye abused cocaine to a degree of madness; he often struck and ridiculed the women in his life; he claimed to envision a violent death; and he even took a crack at suicide during his last weeks. On the surface, Gaye’s art seemed passionate yet well proportioned; behind that surface, in the man’s life and heart, it was all turmoil and craziness.

  But then Gaye always understood the tense play between fear and rapture uncommonly well, and at times that knowledge overwhelmed his music. In part, the worldly-spiritual insight was a product of the singer’s upbringing. Back during the period when his father, Marvin Gaye, Sr., was an active apostolic minister in Washington, D.C., Gaye grew up singing in an evangelical gospel choir, though he also spent much of his youth privately listening to the more secular forms of bebop, doo-wop, big band jazz, and R & B. Both the spiritual and early influences left an indelible impression on the singer, and following a term in the air force, he returned to Washington and began singing in street-corner R & B groups, melding the passion of gospel with themes of ever-suffering worldly romance (which, in that period, was a refined metaphor for sex).

  In 1957, Gaye formed his own vocal group, the Marquees—a polished harmony troupe—and with the support of Bo Diddley, the group recorded for the Okeh label. In 1958, Harvey Fuqua enlisted the group as his backing ensemble in the Moonglows, who recorded for Chess. In the early 1960s, while playing a club in Detroit, Gaye’s breathy, silken tenor caught the interest of local entrepreneur Berry Gordy, Jr., who signed him to his then-struggling Tamla-Motown label. Shortly after, Gaye married Gordy’s sister, Anna, and began working for Motown, primarily as a quick-witted, propulsive drummer (his bop-derived rhythmic drive can be heard on the early singles of Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, among others).

  In 1962, Gaye scored his first Motown hit, “Stubborn Kind of Fellow,” and throughout the decade recorded the most extraordinary body of Motown singles—all rife with a definitionally sexy-cool brand of vocalizing and a sharp, blues-tempered backbeat. Working with every substantial Motown producer of the period (including Smokey Robinson, Norman Whitfield, and the Holland-Dozier-Holland team), Gaye yielded a vital body of dance hits and sex-minded ballads that still remain as popular and indelible as the finest work of his prime songwriting competitors of the period, the Beatles. Gaye’s best-known hits from the epoch included “Hitch Hike,” “Baby Don’t You Do It,” “Can I Get a Witness,” “I’ll be Doggone,” “How Sweet It Is to Be Loved by You,” “Ain’t That Peculiar,” and his most successful 1960s recording, “I Heard It Through the Grapevine.” In addition, he advanced a romantic duet style with label-mates Mary Wells (“Once Upon a Time” and “What’s the Matter with You”), and in the 1970s, with Diana Ross.

  But Gaye’s finest duet work—perhaps the most passionate singing of his career—was with Tammi Terrell, with whom he recorded such late-1960s standards as “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough,” “Your Precious Love,” “Ain’t Nothing Like the Real Thing,” and “You’re All I Need to Get By.” In 1967, Terrell—who had developed a brain tumor—collapsed into Gaye’s arms during a concert performance. Three years later she died, and Gaye, reportedly shattered, began rethinking the importance of a pop career. As a result of Terrell’s death, he remained an infrequent and reluctant live performer until his 1983 tour (the final tour of his life).

  When Gaye reemerged, it was in 1971 with the self-written, self-produced, politically thematic What’s Going On. The record not only forced soul music to deal with the unpopular realities of a hardened sociopolitical scene (though Sly Stone had also started to do the same in his music), but was also among the first albums to establish a soul-pop star as a major artist of his own design. The effect was seismic: Within months Stevie Wonder was fighting (successfully) for the same brand of creative autonomy that Gaye had achieved with Motown’s factory-minded structure, while such other venerable R & B artists as the Temptations and Curtis Mayfield began recording social-minded soul-rock that had been inspired and in no small part made possible by Gaye’s breakthrough achievement.

  But Gaye refused to remain adherent to that one aesthetic-political epiphany, and in many ways that made for a varied but also wildly unsettled late career. In 1973, he turned his attention to purely erotic matters with Let’s Get It On, which introduced a manner of sexual explicitness to mainstream pop that, for such inheritors as Prince, certainly had tremendous impact. In the meantime, Gaye’s stormy marriage to Anna Gordy was coming to a rough end, and the divorce settlement (which caused Gaye to file for bankruptcy and eventually leave the United States for asylum in Belgium) was the subject of his most personal work, the two-record Here, My Dear, which the singer released to satisfy his overdue alimony payments (though his ex-wife later considered suing him over the record’s cont
ents). In 1981, Gaye released his final Motown work, In Our Lifetime, a haphazard but oddly compelling meditation on love—and a tortured, hell-fire vision of death.

  By all accounts, Gaye was a despairing man during this period (by his own admission, he once attempted suicide by overdose of cocaine), and when he left Motown for Columbia in 1982, even his staunchest admirers surmised that his prime work was behind him. But Midnight Love (1982) was not merely an elegant, stylistic rebound, it was also the most hopeful and celebratory work of his career. Gaye wrote, arranged, produced, and performed all the music himself, and though on the surface Midnight Love seemed merely a reprisal of the sex themes and rhythms of Let’s Get It On, the singer clearly pursued physical and spiritual notions of fulfillment on the album as if they were mutually inseparable ends. Gaye seemed to regard sex as a way of renewing will and spirit after debilitating emotional setbacks, and as an interesting if somewhat puzzling way of asserting his religious desires. “Apparently beyond sex is God . . . ” he told Mitchell Fink in a 1983 Los Angeles Herald Examiner interview. “So one has to have one’s fill before one finds God.”

  It is not likely that Gaye found his fill before his sudden, grievous death, nor is it likely that he was even close to peace of mind or to his God’s grace. Just the same, his fans were not ready to witness the end of such an ingenious and alluring sensibility. Gaye’s 1983 tour of America seemed to promise something more than a wildly enjoyable comeback: It seemed an act of brave reclamation—Gaye’s way of reasserting his musical preeminence, and making sense of all those counterpoised notions of joy and anger, pain and ecstasy, that made up the character of his singing and writing for over two decades.

  He was a major artist of our passage from pop innocence to social unrest, and he was just beginning to illuminate a new, even more complex, sensual temperament. Perhaps, as biographer David Ritz suggests, Gaye wanted nothing more than a way out of the madness and pain of his life—but perhaps he may have found that way in kinder terms, had his life not been blasted from him by his father. To our everlasting loss, we must live with what now seems—along with Sam Cooke’s terribly foreshortened brilliance—the most hurtful of soul music’s unfinished promises. But if anything can blunt such pain, it is the wonderful and transcendent legacy of Marvin Gaye’s music itself. Though it was his friend Smokey Robinson, and not Gaye, who sang “I gotta dance to keep from crying,” it is in such times as Gaye’s murder that those words assert their deepest meanings.

  no simple highway: the story of jerry garcia & the grateful dead

  There is a road, no simple highway

  Between the dawn and the dark of night

  And if you go, no one may follow

  That path is for your steps alone

  FROM “RIPPLE,”

  ROBERT HUNTER AND JERRY GARCIA

  He was the unlikeliest of pop stars, and the most reticent of cultural icons.

  Onstage, he wore plain clothes—usually a sacklike T-shirt and loose jeans, to fit his heavy frame—and he rarely spoke to the audience that watched his every move. Even his guitar lines—complex, lovely, rhapsodic, but never flashy—as well as his strained, weatherworn vocal style had a subdued, colloquial quality about them. Offstage, he kept to family and friends, and when he sat to talk with interviewers about his remarkable music, he often did so in sly-witted, self-deprecating ways. “I feel like I’m stumbling along,” he said once, “and a lot of people are watching me or stumbling along with me or allowing me to stumble for them.” It was as if Jerry Garcia—who, as the lead guitarist and singer of the Grateful Dead, lived at the center of one of popular culture’s most extraordinary epic adventures—was bemused by the circumstances of his own re-nown.

  And yet, when he died on August 9, 1995, a week after his fifty-third birthday, at a rehabilitation clinic in Forest Knolls, California, the news of his death set off immense waves of emotional reaction. Politicians, newscasters, poets, and artists eulogized the late guitarist throughout the day and night; fans of all ages gathered spontaneously in parks around the nation; and in the streets of San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury—the neighborhood where the Grateful Dead lived at the height of the hippie epoch—mourners assembled by the thousands, singing songs, building makeshift altars, consoling one another, and jamming the streets for blocks around. Across town, at San Francisco City Hall, a tie-dyed flag was flown on the middle flagpole, and the surrounding flags were lowered to half mast. It was a fitting gesture from a civic government that had once feared the movement that the Grateful Dead represented, and that now acknowledged the band’s pilgrimage across the last thirty years to be one of the most notable chapters in the city’s modern history.

  Chances are Garcia himself would have been embarrassed, maybe even repelled, by all the commotion. He wasn’t much given to mythologizing his own reputation. In some of his closing words in his last interview in Rolling Stone, in 1993, he said: “I’m hoping to leave a clean field—nothing, not a thing. I’m hoping they burn it all with me. . . . I’d rather have my immortality here while I’m alive. I don’t care if it lasts beyond me at all. I’d just as soon it didn’t.”

  Garcia’s fans and friends, of course, feel differently. “I think that Garcia was a real avatar,” says John Perry Barlow, who knew the late guitarist since 1967, and has co-written many of the Grateful Dead’s songs with Bob Weir. “Jerry was one of those manifestations of the energy of his times, one of those people who ends up making the history books. He wrapped up in himself a whole set of characteristics and qualities that was very appropriate to a certain cultural vector in the latter part of the twentieth century: freedom from judgment, playfulness of intellect, complete improvisation, anti-authoritarianism, self-indulgence, and aesthetic development. I mean, he was truly extraordinary. And he never really saw it himself, or could feel it himself. He could only see its effect on other people, which baffled and dismayed him.

  “It made me sad to see that, because I wanted him to be able to appreciate, in some detached way, his own marvel. There was nothing that Garcia liked better than something that was really diverting, and interesting, and lively and fascinating. You know, anything that he would refer to as a ’fat trip,’ which was his term for that sort of thing. And he wasn’t really able to appreciate himself, which was a pity, because, believe me, Jerry was the fattest trip of all. About the most he would say for himself was that he was a competent musician. But he would say that. I remember one time he started experimenting with MIDI—he was using all these MIDI sampled trumpet sounds. And he started playing that on his guitar, and he sounded like Miles Davis, only better. I went up to him, the first time I ever heard him do it, and I said: ’You could have been a great fucking trumpet player.’ And he looked at me and said: “I am a great fucking trumpet player.’ So, he knew.”

  JEROME JOHN GARCIA was born in 1942, in San Francisco’s Mission District. His father, a Spanish immigrant named Jose “Joe” Garcia, had been a jazz clarinetist and Dixieland band leader in the 1930s, and he named his new son after his favorite Broadway composer, Jerome Kern. In the spring of 1948, while on a fishing trip, Jerry saw his father swept to his death in a California river. “I never saw him play with his band,” Garcia told Rolling Stone in 1991, “but I remember him playing me to sleep at night. I just barely remember the sound of it.”

  After his father’s death, Garcia spent a few years living with his mother’s parents, in one of San Francisco’s working-class districts. His grandmother had the habit of listening to Nashville’s Grand Ole Opry radio broadcasts on Saturday nights, and it was in those hours, Garcia would later say, that he developed his fondness for country music forms—particularly the deft, blues-inflected mandolin playing and mournful, high-lonesome vocal style of bluegrass’s principal founder, Bill Monroe. When Garcia was ten, his mother, Ruth, brought him to live with her at a sailor’s hotel and bar that she ran near the city’s waterfront. He spent much of his childhood there, listening to the boozy, fanciful stories that the hote
l’s old tenants told, or sitting alone, reading Disney and horror comics, and poring through science-fiction novels.

  When Garcia was fifteen, his older brother, Tiff—the same brother who, a few years earlier, had accidentally lopped off Jerry’s right-hand middle finger while the two were chopping wood—introduced him to early rock & roll and rhythm & blues music. Garcia was quickly drawn to the music’s funky rhythms and roughhewed textures, but what captivated him most was the lead-guitar sounds—especially the bluesy mellifluence of players like T-Bone Walker and Chuck Berry. It was otherworldly-sounding music, he later said, unlike anything he had heard before. Garcia decided he wanted to learn how to make those same sounds. He went to his mother and proclaimed that he wanted an electric guitar for his upcoming birthday. “Actually,” he later said, “she got me an accordion, and I went nuts. Aggghhh, no, no, no! I railed and raved, and she finally turned it in, and I got a pawn-shop electric guitar and an amplifier. I was just beside myself with joy.”