Marvin Gaye Killed: Soul Music Loses Its Conscience

Marvin Gaye spent his final months living in his parents' house in Los Angeles, trapped between cocaine addiction, suicidal depression, and a volatile relationship with his father. Marvin Gay Sr. was a cross-dressing Pentecostal minister who had beaten his children throughout their upbringing and whose contempt for his son's success had calcified into open hostility. On April 1, 1984, the day before Marvin's 45th birthday, his father shot him twice with a .38 caliber pistol that Marvin himself had given him as a Christmas present four months earlier. The killing ended one of the most remarkable careers in American popular music. Gaye had joined Motown Records in 1961 as a session drummer and within three years became one of the label's biggest stars, recording "How Sweet It Is" and "I Heard It Through the Grapevine." His duets with Tammi Terrell produced some of Motown's most beloved recordings. When Terrell collapsed in his arms onstage in 1967 from a brain tumor that would eventually kill her, Gaye withdrew from live performance for years. His artistic breakthrough came in 1971 with "What's Going On," an album about Vietnam, poverty, and environmental destruction that Motown founder Berry Gordy initially refused to release, calling it uncommercial. Gaye threatened to never record again. Gordy relented, and the album became Motown's biggest-selling release to that point. Gaye followed it with the sexually explicit "Let's Get It On" in 1973, proving he could dominate multiple registers of American music. Financial troubles, an expensive divorce from Anna Gordy, IRS debt, and deepening drug use pushed Gaye into European exile in the early 1980s. He recorded "Sexual Healing" in Belgium, winning two Grammy Awards in 1983 and staging a comeback that seemed to promise redemption. Marvin Gay Sr. pleaded guilty to voluntary manslaughter and received a five-year suspended sentence after doctors discovered a brain tumor that may have affected his behavior.