When he returned to the United States in October 1982, the stability collapsed almost immediately. He resumed freebasing cocaine. The paranoia, which had never entirely disappeared, intensified. The tour that followed—the Sexual Healing Tour, beginning in April 1983—was by multiple accounts an experience of professional triumph and personal deterioration in equal measure.
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THE NBA ALL-STAR GAME ANTHEM—A CLOSER LOOK
February 13, 1983.
Marvin Gaye’s performance of “The Star-Spangled Banner” at the NBA All-Star Game at The Forum in Inglewood is one of the most discussed single performances in the history of American sports spectacle, and it merits more than a passing mention.
The logistics of the performance were unusual. Gordon Banks, one of Gaye’s musical collaborators, played a pre-recorded studio arrangement from the stands. Gaye sang live over the playback—a hybrid approach that gave him the harmonic and rhythmic structure of the studio performance while allowing him to interpret the melody freely in real time.
What he did with that latitude is, by the accounts of those who heard it in person and saw it on television, something between performance and conversation—a man talking to a melody, bending and stretching it, letting it breathe.
The crowd’s reaction—which began with the respectful silence customary for the national anthem and broke into applause and cheering before Gaye had finished—was immediate evidence of what the performance had achieved.
It has been replicated and analyzed by subsequent anthem performers. It has been cited as evidence of the specific genius of Marvin Gaye’s voice: the ability to move through a melody without losing it, to ornament without distorting, to make something completely personal out of something designed to be universal.