I was 14, riding in the passenger's seat of my mom's '78 Dodge Omni, on the way home to Tennessee from my Aunt Ruby's house in Kentucky. It was Sunday afternoon and I was searching the radio to find Kasey Casem's Weekly Top 40. And we heard the news. Marvin Gaye had been shot. By his
father.
Seeing my confused and sad reaction, my mother – just that once – allowed me to listen to Marvin's song "Sexual Healing" on the radio. In Mom's eyes, the gravity of death trumped age-inappropriate lyrics.
That's what I love about pop music. It squeezes itself into all kinds of places, probably not the ones the artists imagined. Perhaps "Sexual Healing" wasn't quite meant for the Sunday School crowd. Still, I couldn't get enough, and it wasn't the message – it was the music. No matter that I was an awkward white girl in the rural south in the 1980s. My older brother had given me Marvin Gaye's Greatest Hits for my 12th birthday, and I thought his early Motown songs like "Ain't That Peculiar" and "Pride and Joy" were some of the most exciting pieces of music I'd heard in my life. I got older and collected his records, getting deeply into Vietnam-era "consciousness" songs like "Mercy Mercy Me (The Ecology)" "Inner City Blues (Make Me Wanna Holler)" and "What's Going On." Today my collection is full of his albums (I use the term loosely), including a box set, and I regularly return to disc 4 to hear divorce anthem "When Did You Stop Loving Me, When Did I Stop Loving You." In that one, Marvin sings the flip side of the love song, with real-life anecdotes so honest and personal that you almost feel like listening is intruding. Marvin's songs swing from ecstatic to deeply troubled, from forgiving to bitter and back again. The constant is honesty, even at its most blistering.
The parts of his life not spelled out in songs will come to light in the new "American Masters" documentary,
"Marvin Gaye: What's Going On," airing tomorrow at 9 on Rocky Mountain PBS. This documentary (which I haven't seen yet) promises to explore the paradoxes of the soulful, romantic singer who also lived a life of torment.
I trust the program will also reveal a man who was more than the sum of his life's tragic parts: divorce, addiction, family friction, and death at the hands of his father. He was complicated, that's for sure: the Trouble Man, the Wonderful One. He put his life in songs – blended honesty with sorrow and soul to make something beautiful.
The greatest art sometimes comes from pain, which is just a shame. Artists like Marvin unabashedly put it out there for us. All we can do, I guess, is take it in.
Do you remember the day Marvin died? What does his music mean to you? I always look forward to your comments.
- Allison, Rocky Mountain PBS
