Gaye stretched and bent and ornamented the melody with the same intuition he brought to everything he sang. He made it his own without abandoning it. He was relaxed and unhurried and completely in command. The crowd erupted when he finished.
Those who saw it in person or watched it on television described it in superlatives. It was widely called one of the greatest national anthem performances ever given.
Three months earlier, Gaye had returned to the United States from Europe. He had resumed using cocaine. The fragile equilibrium he had achieved in Belgium was already cracking.
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On May 16, 1983, Gaye appeared on the television special *Motown 25: Yesterday, Today and Forever*, performing “What’s Going On” to honor Berry Gordy and the label’s silver anniversary. It was the same broadcast that featured Michael Jackson debuting the moonwalk.
The Sexual Healing Tour began April 18, 1983, in San Diego. It was the first concert tour Gaye had undertaken in four years. It ran for 51 dates—50 in the United States and one in Canada.
By the standards of Gaye’s commercial peak, the initial demand was enormous. At Radio City Music Hall in New York, he broke Barry Manilow’s existing record of five sold-out shows with six consecutive sell-outs.
But behind the scenes, the tour was troubled.
Gaye had begun using PCP on the road—phencyclidine, a dissociative drug significantly more powerful and destabilizing than cocaine. The PCP deepened and accelerated a paranoia that had been building for years. By mid-tour, he was wearing a bulletproof vest on stage. He had hired armed bodyguards. He was increasingly convinced that his life was in danger—that someone, in some configuration he never fully specified, was plotting to kill him.