The anger, as it had always been in Gaye’s life, was directed most frequently at his father.
The relationship between the two men had never healed. It had simply been managed by distance—Marvin had kept his distance from his father for most of his adult life, spending years building a career in Detroit, then in Los Angeles, then in Europe, then on the road. The distance had kept them from each other’s throats.
Now there was no distance.
Marvin Gay Sr. was 69 years old. He was a man who had spent most of his adult life in a kind of angry frustration—a man who had been passed over for the church position he wanted, who had drunk too much, who had never found the stability he sought. His marriage to Alberta had been effectively over for years. He slept in a separate bedroom. He was, by the accounts of those who knew them during this period, not a happy man.
The two of them—father and son, two men who had never found a way to be in the same room without the air changing—were now living in the same house.
The confrontations escalated. The arguments between Gay Sr. and Alberta, and between Gay Sr. and Marvin, became regular features of life in the house.
—
At some point in late 1983, Marvin Gaye made a decision that, in retrospect, looks almost impossible to explain—except through the lens of his mental state at the time.
He persuaded his bodyguard, a man named Andre White, to give his father a gun.