Listen to two cancelled Christmas songs recorded by Marvin Gaye in 1972
After helping to shape the sound of Motown through the 1960s, with stand-out singles like ‘Ain’t That Peculiar’, ‘How Sweet It Is (To Be Loved By You)’, and ‘I Heard It Through the Grapevine’, American singer-songwriter Marvin Gaye stepped into his full stride with his seminal 1971 album, What’s Going On.
The timeless release brought us immortal classics like ‘Mercy Mercy Me (The Ecology)’, ‘Inner City Blues (Make Me Wanna Holler)’, ‘What’s Going On’ and ‘What’s Happening Brother’. Besides the album’s perfect musical construction, courtesy of Gaye and Motown’s in-house studio band, The Funk Brothers, it drove home a powerful message humanitarian message. The album’s songs are sung from the imagined point of view of a Vietnam veteran returning to his home country only to encounter hatred, poverty, and injustice.
“In 1969 or 1970, I began to re-evaluate my whole concept of what I wanted my music to say,” Gaye once told Rolling Stone. “I was very much affected by letters my brother was sending me from Vietnam, as well as the social situation here at home. I realised that I had to put my own fantasies behind me if I wanted to write songs that would reach the souls of people. I wanted them to take a look at what was happening in the world.”
The highly accessible soul style and poignant message struck a chord with the US population, with the title track reaching number two on the Billboard Hot 100, anchoring the album in the top ten for several weeks.
With such unprecedented success, Gaye felt immense pressure heading into the What’s Going On follow-up, especially after the disappointment of his 1972 single ‘You’re the Man’, which failed to breach the top 40 of Billboard’s Pop chart. Avoiding the follow-up through 1972, Gaye focussed instead on a film score for the Ivan Dixon movie Trouble Man and also tried his hand at a Christmas hit.
Towards the end of 1972, Gaye co-wrote and produced two Christmas songs for a Holiday 45. On the unique festive recordings, Gaye made heavy use of his Moog synthesiser, which had been given to him by Stevie Wonder. The proposed A-side was ‘I Want to Come Home for Christmas’. The song’s subject laments that he won’t be able to go home to see his family at Christmas; the song brings a darker tone when the listener discovers that the subject is a prisoner of war in Vietnam.
When Gaye pitched the two recordings, ‘I Want to Come Home for Christmas’, and its B-side, ‘Christmas in the City’, they were sadly rejected by Motown and remained unreleased until the 1990s, when they were both released on separate compilations. Ostensibly, Motown lifted the red flag due to the A-side’s, particularly dour subject matter. Listen below.
