The singer Marvin Gaye said it was impossible to follow: “He drained our fans”
Once Berry Gordy and the rest of the Motown team had worked out how to churn out hits, there was no stopping them, and at the end of those hits were some of the greatest artists to ever make music.
One of the artists who properly stopped you in your tracks was Marvin Gaye. He passed far too young at just 44, but the music he left behind still gets talked about like it dropped yesterday. Sure, it was that voice that grabbed people straight off, but it’s the feeling – the raw humanity in his songs – that kept folks coming back. You only need to stick on What’s Goin’ On to hear it in full force.
Gaye didn’t just exhibit musical maturity with an album like this, but he also showed those who he worked with how sure of himself he was. It’s hard to imagine now, given we know how much of a success the record was, but at the time, Motown were reluctant to release it. Berry Gordy particularly had reservations, as he was never too keen on releasing political music.
The label had often been criticised for its reluctance to talk about politics, especially during a period when the civil rights movement was in full swing and also when a lot of other artists were writing about the Vietnam War. As such, when Gaye came forward with a concept album written from the point of view of a war veteran who had just returned home, Gordy wanted nothing to do with it.
Refusing to hold his tongue and living up to his reputation of being hard to please, Gordy was pretty brutal when he first listened to Gaye’s offering. Turning the record off, he said that it was “the worst thing I ever heard in my life”. Despite these harsh words, Gaye was still adamant about releasing the record, and after plenty of negotiation and convincing, Motown finally agreed. The rest is history.
When you have a visionary like Gaye, it’s hard to imagine that there are any artists who could remotely threaten upstaging him, and yet this was how high the quality on offer at Motown was. The label acted as a starting point for artists that we consider some of the greatest to ever lay lyrics on wax, including the likes of Diana Ross, Michael Jackson and Smokey Robinson. However, the artist who Marvin Gaye said was the hardest to follow was Stevie Wonder.
“I hated it when he came out before me,” said Gaye, “Because he had twice the energy of all of us combined. He drained our fans dry.”
He’s right, Stevie Wonder really had the art of live performance down to a tee. While we all know him now for the classics he reeled out for years, one of Wonder’s first-ever successful singles was a recording of him playing live that pretty perfectly captured every ounce of energy that went into his shows. The track was called ‘Fingertips’, which was a jam Stevie Wonder would change depending on the response of the crowd. Despite only being 12 years old at the time the recording was done, it was clear that Wonder had a knowledge of playing live that other people could only dream of.
Marvin Gaye was one of the greatest vocalists and performers of his generation. His ability to stand by his ideas and execute them perfectly is a skill that plenty of artists persistently pine for. However, even a talent like Gaye struggled to hold a candle to a brain like that of Wonder.
