Marvin Gaye: Father, Father There’s Far Too Many of Us Dying

Marvin Gaye was born into a God-fearing home to a sweet, wholesome mother and crossdressing, philandering, pentecostal preacher father who ruled his children with an iron fist. Despite his tense upbringing, Marvin Gaye found his calling—music—and used it as his ticket out of his repressive home life. He chased away his shame and followed his muse to the top of the charts; through a sea of cocaine and sex, becoming one of the biggest and most gifted entertainers of all time before sinking into addiction and depression and ultimately winding up back at home with his parents. This was a move that would prove to be more devastating than any of his volatile sexual relationships and more deadly than any drug he’d ever taken.

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This episode was originally published on September 25, 2018.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Disgraceland as a production of Double Elvis.

Speaker 2 (00:14):
The stories about soul singer Marvin Gay aren s. He
slept with more women than Chamberlain. He did more cocaine
than John Belushi and Richard Pryor combined. He ate acid
with Bootsy Collins and George Clinton. He could dunk on
Jesse Jackson. And he was born into a god fearing
home to his sweet, wholesome mother and cross dressing, philandering

(00:37):
Pentecostal preacher who ruled his children with an iron fist.
But despite his strict upbringing, Marvin Gay was able to
find his calling music and use it as a ticket
out of the repressive inner city blues he was raised in.
Marvin Gay was immensely talented. He was also paranoid, dangerous,

(00:59):
and borderline suicidal. He barricaded himself in his Hollywood Hills
home behind his Ak forty sevens and his attack dogs.
He took a knife to his wife's throat. He did
enough drugs to put a thoroughbread in the ground. But
through it all he made great music. That music I
played you at the top of the show, and that
wasn't great music. That was a preset loop from my

(01:21):
mellotron called Fox Trot Moving Piano low MK one. I
played you that loop because I can't afford the license
for Footloose by Kenny Loggins. And why would I play
you that specific slice of bacon esque sounds Messina cheese?
Could I afford it? Because that was the number one
song in America on April first, nineteen eighty four, And

(01:45):
that was the day that Marvin Gay rose his hand
to his father and consequently brought about his own demise.
On this episode, Fox Trot Moving Pianos, bacon Esque cheese,
cross dressing dads, shame and trail, and Marvin Gay, I'm
Jake Brennan and miss his disgraceland. The sound of his

(02:30):
feet in women's pumps putting pressure on the old wooden
stairs pumped out the sound of shame the trail. How
could his old man do this? His father? For God's sake.
The rest of the family stood by, pretending not to
be bothered by the sight of their patriarch descending from
his second floor bedroom in their home in Washington, DC's

(02:51):
Simple City neighborhood. But how could they not there he
was the man of the house, Marvin Gay, wearing a
poke dress, fake pearls around his neck, the aforementioned pumps
in a crooked wig from Crowns that he had no
doubt picked up from one of the church ladies he'd
preached to on Sundays. Young Marvin couldn't stand it, but

(03:13):
there was nothing he could do about it. His father
was going to do whatever the hell he wanted to do,
and if that meant wearing ladies clothes at the breakfast
table on a Saturday morning or retreating behind his bedroom
door with fat bottomed women from church while his wife,
Marvin's mother busied herself with making their home downstairs, and
so be it. There was nothing anyone could do about it.

(03:36):
Marvin Gay Senior was going to do whatever the hell
Marvin Gay Senior wanted to do, because Poka Dot dress
or no Poka dot dress, he was still the man
of the house. But it was bad, real bad, bad enough.
Marvin's last name was Gay. But now with the rumors
spreading around the neighborhood that his preacher dad was some

(03:56):
sort of homosexual cross dressing freak, Marvin could barely show
his face out of the house without some neighborhood kids
starting something. So for young Marvin Gay. This meant one
fistfight after another, but Marvin could hold his own, and
in some way this helped. It made him feel like
he was proving something to himself, to his father, that he,

(04:17):
while even just a boy at the time, wasn't betraying
his manhood like he believed his father was betrayal. It
was a constant, unspoken theme in the Gay household, and
their father, a one time Pentecostal preacher, preached strict adherence
to the Lord's Way, and any deviation from that heavenly
path was seen as a betrayal. It met with strict,

(04:40):
oftentimes violent discipline. But somehow, in nineteen fifties America, to
Marvin's dad, dressing in women's clothing was not a deviation
from the heavenly path progressive nah, more likely extreme hypocrisy.
And like I said, Marvin Gay Senior did whatever the
hell he wanted to do. He was the powerful male

(05:01):
head of a family who ruled his household with violence, fear,
and intimidation. His family was petrified of him and thus
powerless to do or say anything about his behavior, however,
hypocritical and embarrassing. Now, ain't that peculiar, but the contradictions
didn't stop there. Despite his own sins, Father as he

(05:22):
was called, tried his best to discipline out any secular
and therefore sinful interest from his kids. Going to the
movies on a Saturday to see Disney's Lady in the
Tramp a betrayal of God, reading Charlotte's Web a betrayal
of God, and singing in a street corner dowop band
as young Marvin was at the time, definitely a betrayal

(05:42):
of God. But Marvin loved music and he was good
at it. He knew it. If hearing his voice bounce
off the walls of the church on Sundays didn't prove it,
then the looks he was starting to get from young
and old women alike sealed it. Gay my ass. He
thought women loved him. How could he be gay, he wondered,
And that shit wasn't hereditary? Was it? Besides? Was his

(06:05):
dad even gay? Despite the women's clothes and his marriage
to Marvin's mom, he was openly sleeping with other women,
so young Marvin Gay. To clear up any confusion, added
an e to the end of his name, just like
Sam Cook before him, and followed his golden voice from
the Street Corner serenades of Washington, d C. The Hitsville, USA,

(06:26):
and the hit factory known as Motown Records. Motown was

(06:49):
great for Marvin, and there was much to learn from
Motown's rich stable of musical talent, The Miracles, Martha and
the Vandellas and the Temptations. Plus Barry Gordy, Motown's founder
and leader, was a genius, modeling his studio and record
label after the neighboring General Motors Auto factory in Detroit. Gordy,
through Motown, pumped out hit hit after hit with his

(07:13):
assembly line approach to record making. House songwriters like the
Holland Doser Holland Team composed the lyrics, the melodies and
the music, and house studio musicians the Funk Brothers laid
down the tracks and contracted stars like The Supremes and
the Four Tops came in and sang the vocal. Finally,
genius producers like Norman Whitfield and the five Tool player

(07:35):
Smokey Robinson saw the track through to completion, mixing it
and readying it for the pressing plant, airwaves, the record stores,
and ultimately the record shells of young Americans, both black
and white everywhere Motown in the early nineteen sixties was
the place for black musicians. Motown's success at the time

(07:55):
was unrivaled, and its unofficial title of Hitsville, USA was
no stretch. Marvin Gay couldn't have found himself in a
better place. He broke in as a studio musician, but
quickly made his vocal talents known and cracked the charts
with the hit single Stubborn Kind of Fellow in nineteen
sixty two. He followed it up with subsequent hits Hitchhike,

(08:16):
Pride and Joy, Can I Get a Witness? And more,
and in no time established himself as one of Motown's
biggest stars. June twenty first, nineteen sixty three, Chattanooga, Tennessee's
Memorial Auditorium, the Motown label's Motortown Review was in town
to put on a show The Temptations, Little Stevie Wonder,

(08:36):
Mary Wells, Martha Reeves and the Vandellas, and at the
top of the bill Marvin Gay. It was showtime, but
the headliner was nowhere to be found. Martha Reeves knew
what was up. Marvin's stage fright had probably gotten the
better of him again. She scurried about the backstage looking
for Marvin, and found him huddled in a corner near
the exit, almost with one foot out of the door. Literally,

(09:00):
he was shaking, hunched over, smoking a cigarette, sweating on
the verge of a panic attack. He couldn't do it again.
He told her he couldn't go on stage. The band
wasn't ready. Of course they are, Marvin, they always are.
Martha told him he wasn't ready. You're a star, Marvin,
you were born ready, baby, Martha reassured him. The crowd

(09:22):
wasn't right. There was going to be empty seats. Marvin.
It's a packed house, just like it is every night,
and everyone in there is dying to see you perform.
Marvin thought to himself that all these things may have
been true, but regardless whether the band was in tip
top shape, whether the house was packed, and whether or
not the crowd was dying to see him, none of

(09:42):
that will keep the rumors for being whispered, the rumors
that Marvin gay was well gay. Marvin couldn't stand them.
It was just like the old neighborhood, except it wasn't
his dad's cross dressing that was stoking the rumor mill
about his sexuality. It was Marvel fan's on stage vibe.
He was a star and a sex symbol, sure, but

(10:04):
he wasn't necessarily manly, not exactly the pro football Jim
Brown's stud type. He had soft eyes, he was sensitive,
a touch effeminine, and to those who doubted his masculinity,
Marvin's last name kind of said at all with or
without the E. And of course there was the way
he danced on stage at the Motortown Review. It was

(10:26):
queer peculiar, to say the least. To think that there
was a time when Marvin Gay, the smoothest operator of
them all, couldn't dance is almost unthinkable, but it's true.
Go back in YouTube some of the early sixties footage
and you'll find a man trying to do the hitchhike
but instead doing the Elaine benis no joke. But all

(10:48):
of that aside, there was what was inside Marvin. Was
he gay? He didn't know for sure. No, of course
he wasn't. He was one of the biggest sex symbols
in the land. On tour, they practically had to beat
the women off of him with a stick. Plus, being
gay just wasn't allowed. His dad would never have accepted it,

(11:09):
and not to mention the closed mind in machismo culture.
Back at Hitsville in America in the early nineteen sixties.
Never he thought his dad betrayed his own manhood by
cross dressing. Marvin never would. He was a man's man.
So Marvin did what he thought he was supposed to do.
He jumped up on stage and played the part. And

(11:30):
when the show was over, he jumped into the beds
of beautiful women everywhere and played the part there too.

Speaker 1 (11:37):
We'll be right back after this word word word.

Speaker 2 (11:45):
Marvin leaned back in his chair and took a hit
off the joint and then turned to his friend Smokey Robinson. Smoke,
I'm going to do it, Marvin, you crazy man. No,
for real, I'm going to do it. Fuck Berry Gordy.
I don't need Motown. I don't even need music, Marvin.

(12:06):
You can't play football. You'll get killed out there. Besides,
the Detroit Lions don't need no stoned soul singer playing
wide out. You watch Smoke, I'm gonna do it. Since
the days of the Motortown Review, Marvin Gay had done
almost as much for motown as motown had done for

(12:26):
Marvin Gay. His single I Heard It Through the Grapevine
was a smash hit number one on the charts, the
R and B charts, and the pop charts. The album
he'd fought tooth and nailed to make, What's Going On,
an album he had complete creative control over, a protest album,
was a massive smash commercially and critically. Think about that

(12:49):
for a minute. You're Marvin Gay. You're a part of one,
if not the most successful hit making machines of all time,
motown records, with a tried and true, can't beat recipe
for success. And you decide you want to do it differently.
You decide you don't want to work with house songwriters,
you want to write the songs yourself. And you decide

(13:12):
you don't want to be limited to house musicians. You
want to use whatever musicians you want to use, and
you want to produce the record yourself. And oh yeah,
fuck that bubblegum baby love shit, it's the same old song. No,
you're gonna make an album of protest songs, and you do,
and you nail it. What's Going On was a massive

(13:33):
success by any creative or financial measure. But if the
true measure of being an artist is taking risks to
express yourself, to give voice to others through what you create.
The Marvin Gaye was the early seventies pop music what
Pablo Picasso was the twentieth century visual art. And still
Barry Gordy wasn't going to give Marvin what he wanted,

(13:55):
a new contract in his own recording studio to continue
making records. It's his way, so fuck it. Marvin would
quit the business altogether. He'd go play football in the
National Football League for the Detroit Lions. A tryout was arranged,
and Marvin wasn't terrible, but the coach had mercy and
did Marvin a favor by not inviting him to camp.

(14:17):
The thought of Dick Budkiss and Deacon Jones teeing off
on Marvin gay was too much, so Marvin continued to
negotiate with Barry Gordy and ultimately got what he wanted.
Two years later, Marvin emerged from his new studio with
the long player Let's Get It On, And it was
a stunning creative achievement. Except the subject matter of this

(14:39):
album wasn't social unrest, it was sex. Marvin Gaye was
a freak, and Let's Get It On brought out something
else and him as a writer and performer, something the
world hadn't seen in him before. A sea was storming
inside of him. He'd been trying to hold back this
feeling for so long, but now it was time to
let the love come out. If Marvin couldn't improve his

(15:02):
manhood on the football field, then he would in America's bedroom.
Let's Get It On was unapologetically horny, sensual, and smooth.
No one was smoother than Marvin Day. He'd always been
capable of gripping listeners with the singing at once intimate, rough, vulnerable,
dirty and innocent. But when the subject matter was sex

(15:23):
and only sex, well, his voice was a Spanish flag trap.
An off record and out on the town. Marvin's sexual
conquests were the stuff of legend. Everyone wanted him, and
Marvin was down to freak. Despite an irrational jealous streak
that was being fueled by increasing cocaine use, Marvin encouraged

(15:45):
his girlfriend and later wife, Jan Hunter to have sex
with other men, and not just any other men, his
young protegee singer Rick James, and his biggest singing rival
at the time, Teddy Pendergrass. Rumor was circulating that Marvin
and Jan slept with Mick Jagger and his girlfriend Jerry

(16:05):
Hall after a night out at Studio fifty four, and
that he was sleeping with actress Margot Kidder as well
as with the girlfriend of Love Story actor Ryan O'Neill
while O'Neill was doing his best to creep on Marvin's wife, Jan.
Marvin didn't mind these rumors. They burnished his manly image. However,
stories about Marvin's bisexuality, sex with Richard pryor sex with

(16:29):
Marlon Brando would not surface until years later. After Let's
get it on. The sex, the drugs. It was all
becoming too much for Marvin. He was one of the
biggest stars in the Lamb, but despite the fact that
the entire world wanted him, Marvin Gaye retreated with his
wife into his cabin in the woods, on top of
a mountain of cocaine and under a blanket of paranoia.

(17:09):
Marvin put the knife down. I loved you too much, Jan, Marvin,
take the knife away from my throat. Jan. This love
is killing me. I beg you to provoke me. Provoke
me right now so I can take us both out
of our misery. Marvin Gaye was high as fuck and

(17:33):
drunk on paranoia, a mix of psychedelic mushrooms, pharmaceutical gray cocaine,
and the recent realization that his wife Jan had taken
him at his word that she should sleep with singer
Teddy Pendergrass, and it had driven Marvin into a violent ranch.
But before things got all Oj and Nicole, Marvin got
hip and dropped the knife. Jan split with the kids,

(17:55):
and Marvin eventually got himself ready for a world tour,
which was saying something thing because Marvin Gay hated touring,
he hated performing, and by the late seventies and early
eighties he'd managed to at least morph the goofy Olaye
Venice dance moves into something passing as smooth on stage.
But Marvin's stage act as of late was now bordering

(18:17):
on a parody of himself high to the gills on cocaine,
nightly paranoid. It was something to prove I'm not gay, Dad,
I swear Marvin the Ladies Man reduced himself to stripping
down to his underwear on stage to close out the show.
If his natural talent, even in this drugged out Hayes,
hadn't been so immense, it would have been pathetic. But

(18:39):
somehow the show managed to stay on the rails on stage. Anyway,
off stage, things were about as far off the fucking
rails as they could get. Marvin's drug use would have
made Keith Richards blush. His blood type was cocaine, and
his fear had him firmly in its grips. Fear of
not being able to perform, fear of his fans turning

(19:01):
their back on him, fear of the Lord's wrath. And
all these fears weren't unfounded. Marvin's ability to perform was
in question. His shows because of his drug use were suffering,
and not every show was a sold out smash. And
as for the Lord, well, Marvin, going as far back
to his early Motown days, had always felt pangs of guilt,

(19:23):
shame for going secular and eskewing the Lord's path, and
for disappointing his father, the Preacher. And of course there
was always the fear, the voice in his head, the
one that questioned his manhood, his sexuality. To allay these
fears on the road, Marvin traveled with two men to
help him through the darkness, one his coke dealer, the

(19:43):
other his priest. Marvin's hotel suites would have one room
adjacent for one and another adjacent for the other, and
Marvin before and after his shows would run back and
forth between each to get high and then to seek
the Lord's forgiveness. Literally caught between heaven and hell. Something
had to give. Marvin couldn't keep up with the madness.

(20:06):
He was capsizing. After the sexual Healing Tour ended in
nineteen eighty three, Marvin retreated to the home he bought
his parents in the West Adams District of Los Angeles.
Now living under the same roof with his domineering, judgmental dad,
Marvin was a shell of himself, reduced to being a high, insecure,
paranoid little boy and a mama's boy. At that nothing

(20:30):
had changed from when he was a little kid. Marvin
still sought solace from his father's verbal abuse in his
mother's arms. And father, as Marvin's dad was called, was
still cross dressing, still constantly on his back about his
sinful lifestyle, doing drugs, betraying the Lord through the Devil's music, etc.
And Marvin felt the shame of it all well. However,

(20:53):
different and no matter the conflict, Marvin Gay and Marvin
Gay Senior had one thing in common there need to
be received as men. What we now call toxic masculinity
was a cloud that hung heavy over the Gay household. Marvin,
eager to impress upon his father his capacity to protect
their family, gave father a thirty eight caliber smith and Wesley.

(21:17):
Marvin owned a few firearms himself, purchased because of his
increased conduced paranoia, but arming his dad would prove to
be a disastrous decision. April first, nineteen eighty four, Marvin
heard his mother yelling in fear from down the hall.
He could hear his father's voice shouting her down, and

(21:37):
then his mother again crying out in pain. Father was
beating his woman, Marvin's mom something fierce. Marvin felt his
eyes cross in anger. His throat went dry despite the
cocaine dripping from the back of his nose. His hands
started to shake, his pulse started rapidly pumping blood to
his brain, which was now a black box of shame anger.

(22:00):
He literally felt something in him snap as he rose
out of his bed and just his bathrobe and beanie cap.
The sound of his feet hurriedly pounding the wooden floorboards
of the upstairs hallways sent notice to father that this
beating might not go unchallenged. Just then, Marvin burst into
his mother's bedroom and did what he'd been wanting to
do his whole life. Beat the living hell out of

(22:23):
his old man. That hell had it coming. That hell
was an impenetrable cage. That stole part of Marvin's childhood,
stole part of his confidence, stole part of his identity.
That hell was on the ropes. Marvin, in a blind rage,
rained blow upon blow on to his father until Marvin
finally snapped back into reality. He looked at father, crumpled

(22:46):
on the floor. He'd be all right, but Marvin, Marvin
had that old feeling again, a mix of shame and betrayal.
He headed back to his room, sank into bed, and
steeled himself for his coming depression. But he should have
steeled himself for the coming storm that was the wrath
of his father. For in what seemed like an instant,

(23:07):
Marvin Gaye's dad was standing above him in his bedroom,
looking down on the boy he'd brought into this world
and the man he'd take out of it. His eyes
were black like a doll's. You could smell the meen
on him. At his side. In his hand the thirty
eight Smith and Wesson that Marvin gave him. He took
aim at his son point blank. Marvin knew what was coming, deliverance.

(23:32):
His father pulled the trigger two shots, one in the shoulder,
one in the chest. Marvin Gaye died almost instantly, sad
and senseless. But Marvin was free, free from the shame,
free from the betrayal, free from the paranoia and the addiction.

(23:53):
And there's a theory that Marvin Gay deliberately antagonized his
father as part of some paternal suicidal death wish, knowing
that his dad, armed with the gun he'd given him,
would be unable to let it go and would finally
do what the cocaine was unable to do. The liver
Marvin gave from the shame and the pain to set
him free, and remarkably, Marvin Gay Senior was also free.

(24:19):
He pleaded guilty to voluntary manslaughter and received what amounted
to a slap on the wrist, five years suspended sentence
for killing for killing his son. His whole life, Marvin
gay struggled with the shame of his father, the cross dresser,
and the notion repeatedly reinforced by his father that Marvin.
Despite his success, he was somehow an embarrassment. Somehow he

(24:43):
was someone who'd betrayed the Lord and betrayed his family
by making a living in the Devil's Workshop as a
secular entertainer. But in the end, it was his father
who committed the ultimate betrayal, betraying the parental covenant, breaking
the one rule every parent should until their dying breath
to protect their children. Shameful, some would say a disgrace.

(25:08):
I'm Jake Brennan in this this Disgraceland. Disgraceland was created
by Yours Truly and is produced in partnership with Double Elvis.

(25:31):
Credits for this episode can be found on the show
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(25:51):
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(26:16):
Rock a Roller, He the Bead down Man,