The day an otherworldly voice was stilled by father's hand

By the time 44-year-old Marvin Gaye moved into the big, rambling house with his parents on South Gramercy Place, his cocaine habit was severe and his paranoia was deep. Enemies were conspiring against him, he feared.

- BY CHRISTOPHER GOFFARD

MARVIN Gaye's "What's Going On" has been called the best album ever.

He gave his father a .38-caliber revolver. To protect the house, he said. He had come full circle from childhood, to live with his mother, who adored him, and his disapproving father, who would kill him.

It was 1984. It might have been a period of triumph for the vocalist known as the King of Sensual Soul. The year before, he had finally won two Grammy Awards after decades of nominations. At the NBA All-Star Game in Inglewood, he had delivered a slowed-down, funkified version of the Star Spangled Banner that redefined the national anthem. He had broken free from Motown, his longtime label, with a hit comeback album, “Midnight Love,” and one of his signature songs, “Sexual Healing.”

Suave tenor, restless risk-taker, longtime sex symbol with an elegant-playboy persona, Gaye had an otherworldly voice. His falsetto found new registers of rapture and longing. His songs married carnality and spirituality, with an echo of the little boy singing in the gospel choir of his father’s church.

“My daddy was a minister,” Gaye said, “and so when I began to sing it was for him.”

Growing up in a slum of Washington, D.C., he had inherited his father’s harsh Pentecostal Christianity and his notions of discipline, heaven and hell. There was little tenderness in his relationship with Marvin Gay Sr., a jealous man who drank hard and dressed in women’s clothes, a habit that embarrassed the young singer.

They were at war from the start. The father beat the son regularly, and scorned nonreligious music as the devil's work.

"My husband never wanted Marvin," the singer's mother, Alberta, told a biographer. "And he never liked him. He used to say that he didn't think he was really his child. I told him that was nonsense. He knew Marvin was his. But for some reason, he didn't love Marvin and, what's worse, he didn't want me to love Marvin either.