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Still, Gaye’s story is arresting, even ten years after his death. He grew up the son of a combative preacher who led a half-Jewish, half-fundamentalist storefront sect. By the mid-1960s Gaye was an established Motown star–perhaps the label’s most naturally charismatic one. But his status was a bit awkward because of Berry Gordy’s paternalism and Gaye’s marriage to Gordy’s sister, who was 17 years his senior. Gaye pal David Ritz, who wrote The Master’s liner notes, says that Gordy squelched Gaye’s version of “I Heard It Through the Grapevine” in favor of Gladys Knight’s less dramatic one in 1967. When Gaye’s malevolent reading was released a year later, it became a thrilling international hit, one of the best-selling singles of the 1960s. As the decade turned, empowered by this stardom and radicalized by his Vietnam-vet brother, he grew a beard, donned an earring, and planned an epic of socially conscious soul. What’s Going On, also released over Gordy’s objections, established Gaye as a visionary recording artist. The sound was unlike any previous Motown music (indeed unlike any previous rock music), a classy, impeccably recorded melange of predisco rhythms, pulsing guitars, MOR strings, jazzy saxes and piano, and impressionistic studio additions, from almost Beatles-esque song codas to backing tracks of conversation and chat. Most adventurous was his singing. Derived from his great interest in vocal harmonizing, according to Ritz, the songs on What’s Going On are marked with complex, almost contrapuntal vocal tracks: a whisper and a falsetto mix beneath scatted ululations. While the title of “Inner City Blues (Make Me Wanna Holler)” obviously refers to blacks, the song’s litany of societal and economic pressures remains abstract and strangely intimate, almost as if the several separate voices in the songs are murmuring to each other rather than to the listener. Gaye’s stardom culminated in his almost religiously carnal 1982 hit, “Sexual Healing.” A heavy drug user who beat his wife, Gaye was $4 million in debt when his father shot him in the midst of a family quarrel in 1984.

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