My Father Used To Say To Me, "Remember What Happened To Marvin Gaye."
God damn, this one hurts, doesn't it? Now click the jump and let's see, as the saying goes, how art is made.
In 1969, Marvin Gaye, together with his wife Anna, wrote the music for the above song, along with some inoffensive lyrics, and gave it to "The Monitors", a farm-team Motown vocal group. Here's the Monitors' version:
Nothing wrong with that, right? Unlikely to propel them to stardom, a destination that proved to be beyond the Monitors' ability to reach. Having swung and missed, Marvin then re-recorded with another group of Motown farm-team guys, "The Originals". The lyrics aren't any better, but the instrumentation and vocals are familiar:
This feels like an early Marvin Gaye song, but it doesn't really go anywhere. It's background music for a dance at a traditionally black college of the early Seventies. The Originals didn't have any more luck with the song than the Monitors did.
At this point, we need to talk about Marvin Gaye's creative process. He was a magpie, he was restless. There have been many stories told about how he would get five or six talented musicians in a room and lead them through a composition, using their ideas and modifying them on the fly, then recording the result and, to everyone's chagrin, releasing it as a Marvin Gaye composition. He did it all the time. He also didn't like to throw ideas away. He'd return again and again to something, particularly the doo-wop music of his roots.
So now we're in 1974 and it's time to record "Let's Get It On". Marvin's marriage is falling apart. It's his own fault; he couldn't be faithful to Anna, who was older than he was and who had really been almost a mother figure to him. He wanted to be the man in a relationship, he wanted someone subordinate, someone younger. Many artists would have swallowed their personal troubles and knocked out the record. How many times did the Eagles do that? Marvin was also broke. He needed the money. The record needed to get done. He had about all the tracks he needed.
But, because he's Marvin Fucking Gaye, he circles back around. Digs out the old masters for the Originals version of "Just To Keep You Satisfied". The song reminds him of Anna. So what does he do? He takes it apart and he re-sings it, re-tracks the vocals, keeps the rest. And because he is, as previously discussed, Marvin Fucking Gaye, he opens his heart in a way that's honest and real and thoroughly, completely, despicable. He takes the case for his divorce to the American public, but he doesn't tell the truth. Not all of it. He recasts a fairly simple cause for separation --- namely, the sexual involvement of Marvin Gaye with other women --- and he imagines it as a necessary, painful process in which he couldn't keep Anna satisfied. He places her on a pedestal and begs her forgiveness even as he lays the blame on her. It's just a warmup of what he would wind up doing over a double album in Here, My Dear, but it's enough.
I want you to read the lyrics and listen to the song. For most of the track, they don't quite fit, it's an obvious chop and shut once you know the story behind it. Let's start:
You were my wife, my life, my hopes and dreams For you to understand what this means, I shall explain I stood all the jealousy, all the bitchin' too Yes, I'd forget it all once in bed with you Ooo darling how could we end up like this? Oh baby let me reminisce
Oh and when we, woo, stopped the hands of time You set my soul on fire, my one desire Was to love you and think of you with pride And keep you satisfied, oh baby oh baby We could not bear the mental strain Leave you, I never meant to Now you see how much you hurt me But if you ever need me, I'll be by your side Though the many happy times we had Can never really outweigh the bad Oh I'll never love nobody like I loved you baby
It's time for us to say farewell, farewell my darlin' Maybe we'll meet down the line
So far, honestly, this is Marvin the liar, Marvin phoning it in, Marvin just closing out the record with the least possible effort. And then we have the magic, so pure that John Singleton used just this part for "Baby Boy", so perfect that the rest of it is immediately forgiven. While The Originals belt out the original doo-wop background, Marvin buries his marriage in front of the one million people who bought the record and all the millions more who heard it floating through the air somewhere.
It's too late for you and me, it's too late for you and I Much too late for you to cry It's too late for you and me, much too late for you and I It's too late for you and me, much too late for you to cry baby
It's too late for you and me. The reasons are irrelevant, exposed as just so much useless posturing. The hearts of the people involved want what they want. It's too late for you and me, much too late for you and I. There's no return.
Every real relationship you have with someone --- a marriage, a partnership, a long affair, doesn't matter --- every real relationship you have that comes to an end has that moment. It's sparse. There's almost no instrumentation, just a spaced-out guide from the bass and the Originals resurrected from tape for a completely different purpose. Front and center, Marvin's voice. It's too late.
Ah we tried, God knows we tried Now it's too late to live and love and ah it's too late baby It's too late for you and me, much too late for you to cry Oh oh ohhh it's much too late Well, all we can do is, we can both try to be happy
Again, we'll hear Marvin come back to that "let's both be happy" bullshit in Here, My Dear, but it rings false there, too. When you break the jug, as Octavian notes in Rome, you cannot mend it with regret. You don't want to. If you really wanted that person to be happy, you'd stay in the relationship with them. What you want is to be happy yourself. It's this huge overarching driving force and it doesn't care about the victims.
The song qualifies as art in a couple of different ways. It's innovative, it's interesting, it's heartfelt, it's artificial in the traditional sense --- it's from the hand of man. It's an assemblage. It's not Muddy Waters and Willie Dixon in a room blowing the blues. It's a man loading up an old reel-to-reel tape and looking for inspiration and finding it. Most of all, it's a work of the ego, of the self. That's art: when you put aside petty considerations like being decent to other people or kind or even truthful, and you create. It's art, and if you can listen to Marvin sing those key lines without thinking about someone then, brother, you haven't loved enough yet to know anything about love. Everybody involved with this recording is dead or senile or disappeared but the art remains. The art has value and meaning and reality past the artists. If you want to make a fucking difference in this world beyond selling a piece of real estate or taking drink orders you'd better learn to do this.
Oh, yeah. My father used to say to me, "Remember what happened to Marvin Gaye." What happened to Marvin Gaye? His father shot him dead. I generally obeyed the old man. He usually said what he meant and meant what he said.