The disturbing final words of Marvin Gaye
The death of Motown legend Marvin Gaye came as a shock to the entire music industry. It wasn’t just that Gaye was still young and on a major comeback during the early 1980s, it was the grisly result of a family conflict that sent Gaye to an early grave. The conflicts that had existed between Gaye and his father, Marvin Gay Sr, had been well-known, but nobody could have predicted that the elder Gay would resort to shooting his son.
After a period of faltering commercial success and heavy drug abuse, Gaye returned to the mainstream with his 1982 hit single ‘Sexual Healing’. The song’s parent album, Midnight Love, went platinum in the United States and boosted Gaye’s profile. However, Gaye’s cocaine abuse returned while he toured behind the album, and the resulting paranoia made the singer highly combative. When he returned from tour, Gaye shifted his focus to caring for his mother, along with his two sisters.
When Gaye returned to the family home, his father had taken a business trip to the family’s home in Washington D.C. When the elder Gay returned to Los Angeles, he and his son continued the antagonistic relationship they had built over the years. Gaye’s two sisters eventually moved out of the family house due to the quarrels between the pair. In a 1985 interview, Gaye’s sister Jeanne claimed that her father said multiple times that if his son ever touched him, he would kill him.
Gaye entered a period of depression during this period, often discussing suicide and even attempting to jump out of a car while it was still moving. In the 1991 biography Divided Soul: The Life of Marvin Gaye, Jeanne Gay told author David Ritz that “there was no doubt Marvin wanted to die”. While celebrating Christmas in 1983, Gaye gave his father a .38 Special pistol to protect himself from potential intruders.
A verbal argument broke out between Marvin Sr and Gaye’s mother, Alberta, on April 1st. Gaye attempted to mediate but largely defended his mother. When Marvin Sr began shouting in Alberta’s face, Gaye shoved his father down and began physically attacking him. “Marvin hit him. I shouted for him to stop, but he paid no attention to me,” Alberta later told Ritz. “He gave my husband some hard kicks.”
A few minutes later, Marvin Sr fulfilled the threat that he had previously made. Returning with the same gun that his son had bought him a few months earlier, Marvin Sr shot Gaye twice in the chest. Gaye’s brother Frankie and his wife Irene heard the gunshots from the guest house on the property. As Frankie tended to his brother, he heard what he alleged to be Marvin’s final words. “I got what I wanted… I couldn’t do it myself, so I had him do it,” Frankie claimed in his book Marvin Gaye, My Brother. “It’s good, I ran my race; there’s no more left in me.”
From his final words, Frankie and some of the other Gay family members believed that Marvin had provoked his father into killing him as a form of suicide. “He put himself out of his misery. He brought relief to Mother by finally getting her husband out of her life,” Jeanne Gay said in Divided Soul. “And he punished Father, by making certain that the rest of his life would be miserable… my brother knew just what he was doing.”
For his actions, Marvin Sr pleaded no contest to a voluntary manslaughter charge. He was given a six-year suspended sentence and five years of probation. Gaye’s death was initially treated as an April Fool’s Day joke by many, as the disturbing nature of his death proved to be too unbelievable for some, but as realisation set in, the loss to music was palpable.
