Marvin Gaye: Simple City, a Detroit Lions Tryout and the .38 He Bought

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

Marvin Pentz Gay Jr. was born in Washington, D.C., in 1939 and grew up in a housing project known as Simple City, under a Pentecostal minister father who beat him throughout childhood. He credited his mother with saving his life and encouraging his singing. In 1956 he left high school for the Air Force, hated the regimentation and faked mental illness to get a general discharge, with a sergeant noting he could not adjust to authority. He signed with Motown's Tamla label in 1960 hoping to be a jazz crooner, refused the label's finishing classes, and earned $5 a week as a session drummer behind the Marvelettes and a young Stevie Wonder before becoming a solo star and duet partner of Tammi Terrell.

In 1967 Terrell collapsed into his arms onstage at a Virginia college; diagnosed with a brain tumor, she had seven operations and died in 1970. Despite I Heard It Through the Grapevine spending seven weeks at No. 1, Gaye sank into depression and tried out for the Detroit Lions, who turned him down. When Berry Gordy rejected a protest song inspired by the Four Tops' Obie Benson witnessing police violence in Berkeley, Gaye refused to record until it was released, won creative control and a $1 million contract, and cut the album in 10 days. Divorce from Anna Gordy, a $4.5 million tax debt and cocaine drove him to London and then Ostend, Belgium, where a Roland TR-808 shaped his 1982 comeback.

• Gaye layered his own tenor, growl and falsetto through multitrack tape to act as his own backing choir.
• He built a personal studio known as Marvin's Room and could earn $100,000 for a single performance.
• A judge directed royalties from the double album Here, My Dear toward his alimony to Anna Gordy.
• His 1982 comeback single won two Grammys and preceded his drum-machine national anthem at the 1983 NBA All-Star Game.
• On April 1, 1984, a day before he turned 45, his father shot him with the .38 handgun Marvin had given him for protection.