A Life of Musical Healing

WHEN JOHN LENNON died, it helped mark the end of an era familiar to our older siblings, but the excitement of which we could feel only vicariously through the albums and the stories that were handed down. Certainly when we hoped or exulted, as children of the seventies, we turned to the Beatles. Yet by the time we were teenagers, the Beatles had dissolved in a legal war that hurt their credibility.

But last Sunday witnessed the death of a singer who had managed to bridge the gap between the seventies and the sixties. Marvin Gaye had sustained the powerful appeal of his sixties recordings, while altering his style and his focus to offer comment on the new problems that faced the seventies and eighties. In doing so. Gaye became tied to the hopes of those generations in a way the Beatles had not.

From the distant and almost unchallengeable position of one of the elder statesmen of Motown. Gaye did not yield to the glitter favored by his flashier colleague Diana Ross. Instead, he kept a strain of witty criticism in his early seventies recordings. While Ross was yielding to the strain of music that can most accurately be called "disco," Gaye recorded songs like "Troubled Man," that commented on the loneliness of the early and mid-seventies even as he encouraged libidinal freedom with songs like "Let's Get it On" and "I Want You." It was this unique mixture of incisive comment on both personal desires and social ills that made Gaye a kind of bard for the seventies.

Marvin Gaye, just like Diana Ross, the Temptations, Smokey Robinson and Stevie Wonder, had a special right to carry the Motown torch. Hired as a drummer for Smokey Robinson, Gaye instantly began a career as a soloist that culminated in his rise as one of the first Motown stars daring to criticize the Establishment. He challenged the war with "What's Going On?," lashed out at pollution with "Mercy, Mercy Me," and called for hope by recording, with Tammi Terrell, the Ashford and Simpson hit "Ain't No Mountain High Enough." His songs also influenced later white artists; the Rolling Stones would re-record his "Can I Get a Witness?" just as James Taylor would re-record his "How Sweet It Is (To Be Loved By You)."

But Gaye's musical legacy was primarily stylistic; the Holland-Dozier-Holland team wrote many of the songs that were recorded at Motown, but each left their particular imprint on the songs. The Beatles, Stevie Wonder, Michael Jackson and the Rolling Stones would all acknowledge a debt to Gaye's subtle crooning style. And, of course. Gaye became a painstaking musician, playing most of the instruments on his later albums and earning a reputation as a studio perfectionist.

But the most salient feature of Gaye's style was, as he himself, acknowledged, he was "always looking for something new." His albums continued to surprise by including songs that represented a large gamut of musical influences. His very proficiency made him seem timeless--it became hard to believe that anything would stop the continuing progression of successful Gaye albums, a legacy recently sustained by his Oscar-winning "Midnight Love." Hard to believe--as the evidence indicates--that the gospel-playing father who started Gaye's career would put three bullets into his son's chest, reportedly over "bad blood" between them.

Gaye's sudden death is perhaps most disturbing seen against the sudden rebirth of his career. Like John Lennon, Gaye seemed to be beginning a third decade of musical influence. He translated "Let's Get it On" into "Sexual Healing," with the eighties touch apparent in the lyric, "Whenever blue teardrops are falling and my emotional stability is leaving me/There is someting I can do. I can get on the telephone and call you up baby." He added the strength of his new religion in the song "My Love is Waiting," and a sense of Third World struggles in "Third World Girl."

Unlike some other talents, Gaye's newfound religion (he was a born-again Christian) did not come to overpower his witty sense of both sexual and social confusion. His last album showed once again that he knew what was what in the 1980s, just as he had known in the sixties and seventies. Like his Third World Rasta Man, "he lived up to his part, 'and died' with a cause in his heart"--concerned with the precarious mental health of so many in our generation.