Marvin Gaye: The Songwriter Motown Tried to Stop

Marvin Gaye's own record label heard his best-known song and refused to put it out. Berry Gordy, the man who built Motown, listened to "What's Going On" and called it "the worst thing I ever heard." Gaye had to threaten to stop recording altogether before it saw daylight. It went to number two on the charts within weeks and is now regularly named the greatest album ever made.

That gap, between what a songwriter believes in and what the people paying for it are willing to release, is worth knowing before anything else about Gaye's career. He spent over a decade as a hired voice before he ever fought for that gap to close.

A minister's son who wanted to be Sinatra

Gaye was born Marvin Pentz Gay Jr. in Washington, D.C. in 1939, the son of a Pentecostal minister whose household was strict and, by Gaye's own later accounts, frightening. Music was the one thing that offered an escape: church choir first, then doo-wop with a group called the Marquees, who were absorbed into Harvey Fuqua's Moonglows. Fuqua brought him to Detroit and introduced him to Berry Gordy, and Gaye signed to Motown in 1961, initially playing session drums and angling to become a smooth jazz-pop crooner in the Nat King Cole mold, not the label's next R&B star.

He married Anna Gordy, Berry's older sister, in 1963. It tied him even more tightly into Motown's family business, for better and eventually for considerably worse.

Writing hits, mostly for other people

For most of the 1960s, Gaye worked inside Motown's factory system the way everyone did: singers sang, in-house writers wrote, and the two groups overlapped only sometimes. Gaye had more of a hand in his own material than most of the label's other stars, co-writing "Beechwood 4-5789" for the Marvelettes and "Dancing in the Street" for Martha and the Vandellas with Ivy Jo Hunter and Mickey Stevenson. But the songs that made him famous as a performer, "Ain't That Peculiar," "I Heard It Through the Grapevine," the duets with Tammi Terrell written by Ashford & Simpson, mostly came from Motown's stable of staff writers, not from Gaye's own pen.

If you're a performer who's ever felt like the material coming to you doesn't quite say what you want to say, that tension is exactly what pushed Gaye toward the fight that defined the rest of his career.

Obie Benson, a police beating, and a song nobody at Motown wanted

"What's Going On" didn't start with Gaye. Four Tops member Renaldo "Obie" Benson witnessed police violence against anti-war protesters in Berkeley and brought the idea to songwriter Al Cleveland. The two of them wrote most of it before it ever reached Gaye, who took the song, added lyrics shaped by stories his brother Frankie had brought home from Vietnam, reworked the arrangement, and made it his own.

Gordy hated it, thought it would wreck Gaye's image as a heartthrob, and sat on it for months. It was Motown's head of sales, Barney Ales, who finally released it as a single without full sign-off in January 1971. It hit number two on the pop chart and number one on the R&B chart within weeks. Only then did Gordy agree to let Gaye make the full album, on Gaye's own terms, with Gaye producing.

Building a concept album out of what he actually cared about

What's Going On, the album, is a nine-song sequence about Vietnam, urban poverty, police brutality, drug addiction, and the environment, recorded as one continuous piece rather than a collection of singles, which was close to unheard of for Motown in 1971. "Inner City Blues (Make Me Wanna Holler)" and "Mercy Mercy Me (The Ecology)" came out of that same session of finally being allowed to write about what was actually happening around him, not what the label thought would sell.

It's a useful case study in what happens when a songwriter finally gets creative control after years of not having it: not a scattershot mess, but the most focused, unified work of his career, arriving all at once because he'd clearly been holding it for years.

A title from someone else's mouth

More than a decade later, Gaye was in Belgium, broke, depressed, and largely estranged from Motown, working with keyboardist Odell Brown and his biographer David Ritz on what became his comeback. Ritz has said he suggested the phrase "sexual healing" almost as a joke, riffing on the idea of music and sex as medicine, and that Gaye built the song from there. The songwriting credit ended up disputed for years between Gaye's camp, Brown, and Ritz, eventually settled after Gaye's death. "Sexual Healing" won Gaye his only competitive Grammy, for Best Male R&B Vocal Performance in 1983.

What's worth taking from his career

Gaye's catalog splits cleanly into two halves: a decade of writing and performing other people's ideas of what he should sound like, and a shorter, later stretch where he insisted on saying what he actually meant and was proven right almost immediately. He didn't get there by being the most prolific writer at Motown. He got there by refusing to let a rejected song stay rejected.

He was shot and killed by his father in 1984, the day before his forty-fifth birthday, cutting off a comeback that had only just started. He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1987 and the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2016. If you've got something you actually need to say and the people around you keep telling you to write something safer instead, Gaye's fight over one single song is worth remembering. If you need a collaborator who'll help you say it right, go find your co-writer.

Sources: Songwriters Hall of Fame, Britannica, BMI: The Making of Marvin Gaye's "What's Going On", Wikipedia: What's Going On, American Songwriter: Sexual Healing, SecondHandSongs