As a teenager in the 1950s, Marvin Gaye learned how to love from doo-wop songs, three-minute odes to innocence that didn’t curdle or grow up or live beyond their own pining harmonies. They were pure, and Gaye wanted to be pure too. “I was in love with the idea of love,” he once said. Which is sweet. But the fantasy of pop music should be just that—a fantasy. Believe it to the letter, and wait for your world to crumble. Vows break. Sadness sours. Divorce looms. Gaye was aware of these perils, but he spent much of his life haplessly wishing them away. His music always told a different story.
Gaye married Anna Ruby Gordy in 1963. He was 24; she was 41. He was an aspiring singer; she was the sister of Berry Gordy, founder of Motown Records. Looking back on the relationship years later, Gaye described it to biographer David Ritz as a mercenary move. “Marrying a queen might not make me king, but at least I’d have a shot at being prince,” he said. “I wanted her to help me cut into that long line in front of the recording studio.”
For a few years, though, Gaye was able to approximate the fairytale love he had always dreamed about. The couple adopted a baby boy. And Gaye’s bounding heart can be heard in his hits of the era like “How Sweet It Is (To Be Loved by You),” where he beams, “You were better to me than I’ve been to myself/For me there’s you and there’s nobody else.” But soon enough, infidelities arose. Fights erupted. Raised in a strict religious household, Gaye had trouble reconciling ideas of love and sex, and though this struggle would lead to some of his most fascinating songs, it also doomed him as a husband.
Complicating matters further was his extreme Oedipus and “Madonna-whore” complexes. He lost his virginity to a prostitute and went on to pay for sex through much of his life (and marriages). Meanwhile, he considered his mother to be the absolute pinnacle of womanhood, to a detrimental degree. “No other woman ever looked as good to me as Mother,” he said. He often referred to Anna as “Mama” as well. So as his wife helped her self-destructive husband become a star with her connections and encouragement throughout the ’60s, she could never be his mythical savior. Nobody could. Gaye described his own conundrum in typically candid terms: “Without Anna, how could I reach my next plateau? With Anna, though, how could I ever be a happy man?”
By the late ’60s, the couple was decidedly on the outs. Gaye was still part of Motown’s hit factory at that point and wasn’t writing his own songs, but he still offered performances that mirrored his emotions. He laced the skulking “I Heard It Through the Grapevine” with paranoia just as he and Anna were cheating on each other. He even recorded something of a breakup album, M.P.G., in 1969, filled with chugging songs that put love in past tense. But Gaye and Anna didn’t get divorced. Both were scared what would happen; Gaye was worried he would fall out of Berry Gordy’s good graces, while Anna, accustomed to the celebrity lifestyle, didn’t want to give up on her superstar husband.
As the ’70s began, Gaye entered his auteur period, breaking out of the Motown mold with What’s Going On. In 1973, at age 33, he fell in love once more, with a 16-year-old named Janis Hunter. A year later, they had a baby together. Gaye and Anna were still married. Finally, in 1975, as Hunter became pregnant with another child, Anna filed for divorce.
She had the right to be fed up, but the timing also made sense in the greater context of American marriage. In ’75, the number of divorces and annulments in the U.S. exceeded one million for the first time, more than doubling the tally from just a decade before. Reasons for the uptick were plentiful: evolving social mores, the declining role of religion, laws that simplified the process, and an overall sense of personal entitlement. In a previous generation, Gaye’s mother considered divorcing her husband, who never really loved Marvin and beat him relentlessly as a child, but she didn’t out of what she called “loyalty and responsibility.” But times had changed. “This is an era in which many Americans are far more concerned with their rights than with their responsibilities,” declared a 1976 New York Times article titled “Divorce Epidemic,” “and also a time when little premium is put upon patience or accommodation to less than ideal situations.”
Though Anna was trying to move forward, Gaye dragged his feet. He was ordered to pay $6,000 a month in alimony and child support, but he refused, allegedly telling Anna: “I’m not going to obey any court order no matter what they try to do me. The only thing I am going to do is take off my hat when I enter the courtroom.” For all the sympathy and understanding of Marvin Gaye’s music, the man could be a boor. He once claimed to be “the last of the great chauvinists. I’ll never change. I like to see women serve me—and that’s that.”
But no amount of ball swinging was going to settle his divorce. Gaye was terrible with money, often investing in bogus schemes and blowing untold sums on pot and coke, so when Anna asked for $1 million, he simply didn’t have the funds. So his lawyer proposed an interesting solution: Gaye would pay $600,000, half of which would come from the advance for his next album, with the other half coming from that album’s royalties. It was an insane idea. Of course Gaye agreed to it.
Recorded in 1977, around the time Gaye’s divorce became final, the singer originally planned to produce something quick and mediocre, but the subject matter was too rich. The result was Here, My Dear, a 73-minute epic and the only double-LP he would ever make. Though birthed from contentious circumstances, the album still retains its power because it’s not just a heated diatribe, a peeved he-said to infinity. Unlike some of Gaye’s real-life actions, the album is nuanced, thoughtful, progressive.
After a scene-setting intro—“I guess I’ll have to say this album is dedicated to you”—the story begins in earnest with, fittingly, a doo-wop song. “I Met a Little Girl” boasts all the longing and vocal stacking of Gaye’s beloved ’50s music, but with the perspective flipped—he’s singing not as a green teen but as a man in his late 30s who has tried and failed at love, and is no closer to figuring it out. Gaye exquisitely sings all of the parts himself, creating an echo chamber of hurt. Though the singer spoke out against the women’s liberation movement of the era, there’s a generousness to his voice and sentiments, and a shared blame. “Then time would change you,” he squeals, “as time would really change me.” The song is nearly zen in its wistfulness, with a sumptuous arrangement and languid pace. Later, on a track called “Anger,” Gaye still takes the longview, condemning the soul-destroying properties of rage rather than giving into them. Perhaps the slow crumble of Gaye’s marriage across more than a decade allowed him a certain distance, and a way to make this very personal album feel like much more than one man’s loss.
Like much of Gaye’s ’70s work, Here, My Dear is a groove album. Voices, instruments, and hooks don’t jump out as much as they lay in the cut waiting to be discovered. Though it can sound redundant at first, its unvaried instrumentation and tempo strengthen the thematic bonds within. Three tracks called “When Did You Stop Loving Me, When Did I Stop Loving You,” are worked into the suite, all with the same easy sax funk, as if Gaye keeps returning to the question in hopes of a definitive answer. Spacious jazz backgrounds make tracks like “Sparrow” and “Anna’s Song” luxuriate in memories and idylls gone by—even when Gaye breaks character by screaming “An-na!” the vamp barely breaks its stride, acting as something of a calming agent.
Here, My Dear is not entirely civil. As in love and life, there is pettiness. “Is That Enough” aims at Anna’s spending habits, with Gaye somehow making divorce-court language sound effortlessly cool: “What could I do/The judge said she got to keep on living/The way she accustomed to.” Meanwhile, on “You Can Leave, But It’s Going to Cost You,” the singer claims that he was essentially held prisoner by Anna’s power and money for all those years, as he ventriloquizes his wife’s demands. “That young girl is going to cost you,” he sings, referring to his girlfriend Janis. “If you want happiness, you got to pay.” There’s a gorgeous hymn of forgiveness that could fit on What’s Going On, a strutting pep talk about getting your shit together, and “A Funky Space Reincarnation,” an out-of-place eight-minute misstep about space sex that has Gaye talking about people getting “plutotized” in a “plutotarium” on, um, Pluto. And yes, that was the single.
But neither the song nor the album was a smash. Here, My Dear peaked at No. 26 on a Billboard chart stuffed with disco acts like Chic, Bee Gees, and Village People in early 1979. Anna, unsurprisingly, was not a fan of the project. In a JET interview at the time, she took the high road, saying, “The things he said, the way the lyrics relate constantly to our personal marital relations, are certainly a violation of many things that I held sacred.” Anna threatened to file a $5 million invasion-of-privacy suit but it never materialized; in 1987, three years after Gaye was shot and killed by his father, she accepted his award into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.
Eighteenth-century author Samuel Johnson famously said that second marriages are “the triumph of hope over experience.” Which might help explain why, after getting through a tortuous divorce and then recording an album about that divorce, Gaye married Janis Hunter in 1977, mere months after his split with Anna was official. But Gaye’s self-destructive habits had only deepened; by the time of Here, My Dear’s release, at the end of 1978, it was Hunter who was thinking about filing for divorce. “Once we got married, things only got worse,” Gaye said of his relationship with his second wife. “I saw that I’d trapped myself again, but I couldn’t help it.” With his warped expectations of love, it was impossible for Marvin Gaye to fully experience the happy family life he so desired. But there were flashes. One can be heard on “Falling in Love Again,” Here, My Dear’s final full song, where he sounds free and joyous in a moment of satisfaction with Hunter. “So love me, as though there was no tomorrow,” he pleads, trying to freeze a moment of bliss before it’s gone.
