40 years of ‘Sexual Healing’: Marvin Gaye’s ode to… pornography?
If you’re of a certain age and of a liberated disposition, the drum machine in Marvin Gaye’s ‘Sexual Healing’ has almost certainly provided the undulating soundtrack to your love-making at one time or another. When the song was released in 1982, it was the most scintillating hit on the radio. These days, the man who asks, “shall we put on some music?” and pushes play on ‘Sexual Healing’ is likely to suffer immediate castration.
As well as being quite literally the son of a preacher man, Marvin Gaye was, how should I put this?… well, he was horny. Despite being a devout Protestant, he found it quite impossible to stop thinking about sex. After making his name in the world of Motown, the singer began a found himself in a particularly tumultuous relationship, which led to a tumultuous marriage, which to a chaotic divorce. He was also heavily dependent on cocaine at the time and used the drug as a sort of anti-depressant.
The Motown star had hit a plateau. He hadn’t had a hit since ‘Got To Give It Up’ and, despite friend and writer David Ritz’s efforts, nobody seemed interested in publishing his memoir. It was becoming increasingly apparent that the great Marvin Gaye was becoming something of an old has-been. Of course, that was all about to change. In an attempt to get Gaye’s career back on track, Ritz boarded a plane and flew to Ostend, Belgium, where the singer was staying at the time, having spent the last year or so travelling around the world. “I went up to his apartment and on his coffee table was this … kind of cartoon pornography in which women were violated in all sorts of awful ways,” Ritz later recalled. “I looked at it and I said, ‘Marvin, this is some sick [expletive]. What are you doing? What you really need is sexual healing.’”
Suddenly enthused, Marvin turned to Ritz and asked him to use that phrase as a starting point for some lyrics. Within 30 minutes, the poem was done. “I wrote most of the lyrics, including all of the verses and the chorus lyric, and Marvin wrote the melody and the bridge lyric,” he remembered. “Marvin immediately loved the song, and he thought it would be a hit. He said, ‘This is what I’ve been looking for.’”
Ritz was never paid for his work on ‘Sexual Healing’ and didn’t receive a writing credit, giving fans the impression that the song had been entire of Gaye’s devising. Indeed, the song seemed to capture something essential about the musician’s red-blooded philosophy, marking a new chapter in his career away from Motown. Suddenly, Gaye was an auteur. Ritz, meanwhile, was furious: “[I asked] an old friend of mine’s producer, who used to run Atlantic Records, and I asked him and he said, ‘Sue him!’ And I said, ‘I can’t sue Marvin Gaye — he’s my idol, my friend.’ And he says, ‘Sue him!’ and he hung up the phone on me. So I sued him. You know, I figured that was good advice and it was painful. And in the midst of the suit, he [Gaye] was killed.”
‘Sexual Healing’ lay the foundation for nearly every musky ballad that followed it. Alongside Barry White’s 1974 single ‘You’re the First, The last, My Everything’, it has come to encapsulate the very essence of vintage steam. It has been played and parodied countless times and, as a result, conjures up all manner of cheesy, erotic and playful connotations. It has come to be regarded as an artefact of a time when people didn’t just rut in silence while fingering their phones but ‘got down’. The underpants were baggy, the positions were tantric, and the music was anything but bashful.
