Vulnerable - Marvin Gaye

...contained a battle between his vulnerable romantic, willing to strip naked for his muse and his dick-brained heathen who feeds his own freakish fantasies, but here he shows what side his virtuous self is on. He finds refuge in the same concepts of deep romantic commitment that gave his sex records so much power. Probably more than any other soul vocalist except Al Green, Marvin understood that love's truest messages came from the give and take and ...
...make money quick, he shelved Vulnerable in order to try and make Love Man, a disco album that would have put a dent in his austere reputation as one of soul music's purest and most commercially unfettered artists.

Fortunately, or unfortunately for Marvin, his integrity couldn't make him finish it, and he was doing so much cocaine at the time that he wasn't in any shape to function, much less create. By 1980 the album was radically ... more

To anyone who has listened to any part of his body of work, it isn't a surprise that Marvin Gaye was a huge jazz fan. Take his vocals, for instance. It was his love of Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughn and Frank Sinatra along with the stirring orchestras of vocal harmonies that surrounded him as a member of the doo wop group The Moonglows and his Hebrew Pentecostal background that served as his vocal influences. And for his first twenty years as a performer he thrilled audiences by forging an artistic style that combined exquisite phrasing and intensely personal vocal interpretations along with the ritual of discovery and submission through extravagant praise that he heard as a boy: that need to reach and be reached, to touch and be touched, to heal and be healed through majestic prayer to one's maker. You could hear that fusion in his immaculate '60s singles, those Motown machine concoctions as simple and as complicated as winter or spring. It was the core that fueled the humanism that made What's Going On such a compelling work and it was the glue that held his sex suites together, commanding them to a world stage.

But he wanted to do more. He had started his career in the very early '60s, making jazz albums for Motown with lackluster (at best) results; covering Sinatra, Lee, Como, Martin and Holiday songs the way most modern soul vocalist cover his standards—by imitation and not interpretation of the songs themselves. As his soul singles began to sell hundreds of thousands of more copies, he shelved his jazz leanings, but the genre never left his musical vocabulary. It was jazz structures and conceptual tone poems that served as the foundation of the amazing musical subtlety and sophistication of What's Going On. And improvisational structures served as the backdrop for Marvin to create funk groove after funk groove throughout his '70s oeuvre. But his dream to make it as a jazz artist laid beyond his grasp. Finally in 1978, ripped to emotional shards by two divorces, ailing from a maddening cocaine intake, and with a wealth of acquired knowledge under his belt, he recorded seven jazz standards, which he would form into an album called Vulnerable. Released in 1997, it is a concept album of tortuous romantic estrangement where Marvin lays out all of his romantic torments and calls on his higher angels to help absolve him of his misery, aided by his own noble self revelation, free of ego or selfishness. And the result is one of Marvin's finest musical moments, a movable feast of amazing vocal skill and yet another example of Marvin Gaye's massive talent.

It starts out with a moping question "Why Did I Choose You?" It stews in moodiness and threatens self-pity as Marvin bemoans fresh heartbreak. But just as it is about to go overboard, his choir of heavenly multi-tracked voices serve as those higher angels, snapping himself out of his self-pitying funk, giving him the courage to see his relationship's beauty as a whole and not just as a sum of its ending. And when he comes to

"and when I lost my heart so many years ago,
I lost it lovingly and willingly to you.
And if I had to choose again
I would still choose you"
you see Marvin the pure romantic. With his heart in his throat, Marvin doesn't blend love and heartbreak as much as he comes to the understanding that they exist on the same emotional plane and that there is such an ever so thin line between the two. And he does it all with such a vocal and interpretive beauty.

"She Needs Me" is Marvin doe-eyed, almost childish in his emotionalism, but his delivery contains a potency and power that give life to his hypersensitivity. So much of Marvin's vocal readings contained a battle between his vulnerable romantic, willing to strip naked for his muse and his dick-brained heathen who feeds his own freakish fantasies, but here he shows what side his virtuous self is on. He finds refuge in the same concepts of deep romantic commitment that gave his sex records so much power. Probably more than any other soul vocalist except Al Green, Marvin understood that love's truest messages came from the give and take and emotional intensity of a deeply committed relationship, not out of casual fucking. And it is that understanding that gives "She Needs Me" its beauty.

"Funny" and "This Will Make You Laugh" are irony plays, Marvin singing the blues beneath layers of schmaltz. The cocktail jazz threatens tedium, but as soon as Marvin's chops suck you in, it's inconsequential. The songs intentionally work against themselves as Marvin lyrically tells his muse and his audience that he's over his woman while his performances, in their anguish, beg to differ. But the one with the most punch is "Funny." He starts the song in the same pseudo-Sinatra mode that he did with his early Motown albums—controlled, composed and mannered to a fault. But as the layers of his tenor kick in, the song turns into a feast of emotional contrasts. "Funny" isn't a lie as much as it is a constructed attempt to fool himself, and as the song progresses, he takes layers and layers off the pretense until he, the only one left who believes in his con, gives himself up, stark naked once again in front of his audience. "Funny" is essential Marvin, the vocal heavyweight champ in fine interpretive form.

The next track goes beyond even that. "The Shadow of Your Smile" is Marvin at his most magical and emotionally devastating. Like the previous two songs, it's an irony play, but where he emphasized on the irony itself before, here he focuses on the feeling of heartbreak. And the result is almost unbearable in its emotional impact. It starts with him humming and Bobby Scott's orchestra harkening the morose beauty of the arrangements of "Lady in Satin." Marvin's woman is gone and he is so unbelievably hurt that he loses concept of reality and he can only see a surreal world of haunting romantic imagery and flickering ghosts of love past, transparent enough to vision but not real enough for him to grasp. His lost love appears as an apparition, affecting him so much that his cognitive skills blur and his dreams blend into his visions as his life becomes a nightmare that he never can wake up from. In the midst of all this turmoil, he begs her to take him back, to turn his world right side up, to heal him, to restore any semblance of reality to his existence. And when he realizes she can't or won't, he faces the reality that is his nightmare's epicenter, stares out into the cold, dark nakedness of the end of a beautiful love affair and breaks down in tears. Most haunting is the end where Marvin, in his most hurt falsetto, croons

"Now that I remember spring
and all the joy that love can bring
I'll be remembering the shadow of your smile"
Here is where he realizes that his catharsis is not enough to free him, that he is doomed to his world of surreal, heartbreaking madness for the rest of his days. He ends as he began, humming, half broken down, half searching for heaven as if he is trying to heal himself but doesn't know how or where to start. In a career spanning dozens of classic singles, this stands among his absolute best.

"I Wish I Didn't Love You So" is another gem overflowing with contrast and imagery, augmented by his multi-tracked chorus of voices. On one end, his soft, demure and hypersensitive midrange baritone—the one closest to his ever so soft speaking voice—starts softly, almost timid, evoking Shakespearean lyrical imagery. Then comes in his boisterous, rich, garrulous high tenor, the cocksure tenor that reached the macho brothers with its badass pretensions. With it he snarls "little girl" at his muse, preparing to put his woman in his place. The result is two radically different interpretations in one song: the baritone cowering over his woman, and the tenor telling her off, trying to prove his manhood and show how emotionally impenetrable he is. But as the bridge comes, both crash violently into each other, resulting in sorrow and despair as Marvin desperately tries to free himself of his bond of sadness and fails miserably, left in the same mind altering pastoral state of romantic madness.

"I Won't Cry No More" the final track, ends with Gaye emotionally spent. He's tried crying, screaming and begging, grasped at every single solitary emotional straw of absolution in order to free him of his muse and now he's resigned to his fate. What his delivery doesn't say speaks much louder than what it does, as beneath his sorrowful, monotone croon lies a crumbling spirit—a soul leaving the rigors of reality, a body wanting nothing but mortal closure. His nothingness takes a overwhelming form as he slowly shuts down, clamming up as he becomes a prisoner in his own lack of feeling. A fitting but frightfully tortured ending to an epic of an album which, despite its miniscule duration, contains an ocean of emotional depth and power.

So why did this lost masterwork never get released during his lifetime? The same answer to all of his problems during that time and for the final years of his life: dope and money. By late 1978, Marvin wasn't selling any records whatsoever. Here My Dear, his bitter, coarse, insane, erratic and brilliant paean to his ex-wife sold poorly and evoked a bitter reaction from critics and fans. Wanting to make money quick, he shelved Vulnerable in order to try and make Love Man, a disco album that would have put a dent in his austere reputation as one of soul music's purest and most commercially unfettered artists.

Fortunately, or unfortunately for Marvin, his integrity couldn't make him finish it, and he was doing so much cocaine at the time that he wasn't in any shape to function, much less create. By 1980 the album was radically altered from a disco suite to a apocalyptic concept album called In Our Lifetime. But before he could finish, his cocaine addiction had escalated to freebasing. By early 1981, in order to recoup something out of his ill and intransient star, Berry Gordy took the composite sketches of the album and released them to Gaye's angered disapproval, basically ending his relationship with Motown Records. On Valentine's Day 1997, Vulnerable was finally released.

And even though it took 20 years for it to see the light of day, it is wonderful that the album is out. Vulnerable shows a whole new shade and a whole new light to soul's greatest male vocalist. He had already spent a career proving that he was one of popular music's most protean talents, But Vulnerable is a surprise even for him. It is another star in his multi-tasseled résumé, another feather in his peacock cap, where once again he shows the magical ability to transform pain into wondrous beauty.

 

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