*Here, My Dear*—the album that bombed on release, that confused its audience, that prompted its subject to consider suing—has been reassessed as one of the great confessional albums in American music.
The totality of the work Marvin Gaye created between 1961 and 1983 represents one of the most sustained creative achievements in the history of popular music. He worked across commercial pop, R&B, protest music, orchestrated soul, explicit sexuality, biographical narrative, and experimental fusion, and he brought to all of it a voice of extraordinary range and flexibility—a voice capable of a falsetto as delicate as thread or a guttural roar as raw as any blues singer who ever lived.
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PART TWENTY-FOUR: WHAT THE FATHER LEFT BEHIND
Marvin Gay Sr. lived for fourteen years after killing his son.
He briefly returned to the house on Gramercy Place following his release on probation. By approximately 1986, he had moved to a nursing home in Inglewood, California. Later he was relocated to a nursing home in Culver City.
He did not give extensive public interviews during these years. He was not sought out by the press in any sustained way. He was an old man—first in his seventies, then in his eighties—living out the consequences of what had happened in a quiet institutional setting.
In his statements at sentencing, he had said:
“I’ll carry it with me ’til the day I die.”
“I’m paying the price now.”
“If I could bring him back, I would.”
“I’m really sorry for everything that happened. I loved him.”