He was one day from forty-five.
He had made it through thirty years of performing. Through Tammi Terrell’s death and two broken marriages and bankruptcy and exile and addiction and paranoia and the long, grinding deterioration of the final months. He had made it through all of that.
He was one day from forty-five.
And then his father came back into the room.
—
There is a lyric in “What’s Going On”—one of the most quietly devastating lines in Gaye’s catalog—that goes: “Father, father / We don’t need to escalate / War is not the answer / For only love can conquer hate.”
He was singing about Vietnam. He was singing about the streets of America’s cities. He was singing about the world.
He was also, whether he knew it or not, singing about the house where he grew up.
The war that never needed to escalate. The hate that only love could conquer.
He sang those words into a microphone at Hitsville USA on a summer evening in 1970, and they went out into the world and have never quite left it.
He died fourteen years later, in a war that was never resolved, from hate that love never managed to conquer.
Father, father.
He was singing about his father.
He was always singing about his father.
And the father heard none of it.
Or heard it and was unmoved.
Or heard it and didn’t know how to let it in.
Or heard it and heard it and heard it, all those years, and still came back into the room with the gun.