The unlikely moment Marvin Gaye finally started to enjoy performing
Marvin Gaye had three dreams as a child: to become a pilot, a pro football player, or a singer.
Realising he was afraid of heights quickly put the kibosh on plan A, and plan B did not lead to any contract offers in the NFL, which left him, by default, with the option of becoming the greatest soul singer in the world, a job he still spent much of his career irrationally embarrassed by.
“I used to cringe a lot,” Gaye admitted to a reporter in 1969, talking about how he felt seeing himself on television. He had all the confidence in the world when it came to his talent and the messages he wanted to communicate, but he just felt more at home writing or working in the studio than being on stage.
“It’s no secret that I’m not crazy about touring,” Gaye told the Dayton Journal Herald in 1977, “I do it to live, to survive. My company [Motown] won’t give me enough advances to live”.
As much as Gaye was associated with the glory days of Motown, that relationship had soured, to put it mildly, by the late 1970s. With his masterpiece, 1971’s What’s Goin’ On, moving further away in the rearview mirror, his career was stagnating under the weight of creative differences with Berry Gordy and, more importantly, the collapse of his own marriage to Gordy’s sister, Anna Gordy Gaye.
It was a very messy and public collision of private and professional problems, and it ultimately led to Gaye recording an album, 1978’s Here, My Dear, that he described as “an alimony settlement” in a vinyl format: “It’s a conceptual record, my statement on marriage and divorce. My wife will get the royalties”.
It was a low point for Gaye in many ways, as he was forced to file for bankruptcy while still dodging years of unpaid back taxes. Even so, in the aftermath of Here, My Dear, something unexpected happened. Divorced, 40, and feeling liberated to plan a future with his girlfriend, Janis Hunter, Gaye also started reprocessing his relationship with his own persona on stage.
“I’m not an extrovert by nature,” he told the Honolulu Star-Bulletin in 1979, “It’s always been difficult for me to be highly animated on stage in a business that calls for high animation. But I have just begun to accept that this is my living, this is my job, this is my destiny, and I should be as well-rounded an artist as I can. It’s interesting now because I’m coming out, I’m blossoming into a full performer. I’m enjoying performing, and it’s never been that way before.”
Unfortunately, Gaye’s newfound comfort as a touring artist was also coming at a time when his recording career was on the rocks. Here, My Dear had been a commercial failure, and his attempts to write a disco record in Hawaii went nowhere, partially due to his struggles with cocaine addiction. Things didn’t fully come together for him again until 1982, when he finally got clean, broke away from Motown, signed to CBS, and recorded the biggest single of his storied career, ‘Sexual Healing’; for a brief moment, he was living the dream again and leaving the cringe behind.
