By 1973, Marvin Gaye was at the top of the world. A Motown star that had just come off of the label's most groundbreaking record in the socially-sharp epic What's Going On and the seductive masterpiece to-come that was Let's Get It On. But anyone familiar with Gaye's tale knows that those successes came tantamount to years of drug addiction, womanizing and the gamut of superstar isms. Gaye's ex-wife, Jan Gaye (who sang back-ups on his embattled disco classic "Got To Give It Up") recently released her memoir After The Dance: My Life With Marvin Gaye, detailing a tortured, but passionate relationship that thinned for those very reasons before it's eventual demise in 1981. Below you will find a link to an excerpt from the book, wherein she divulges Gaye's crippling insecurities and paranoia in firsthand accounts of those trying years, tucked away in the Santa Monica mountains, hiding their affair from the world and more pressingly, Gaye's current wife at the time, Anna Gordy (big sis to Motown chief Berry.) But outside of the clear infidelity (which would be rampant for both parties through their 8-year relationship) and the drug-addled nature of their affair, Jan conveys the tale of a couple that is wholly infatuated with one another, but living in the aftermath of the just-passed sexual revolution, compounded by all of the smoke and all of the white stuff, the Gayes simply could not last. Read the excerpt from Jan Gaye's After The Dance: My Life With Marvin Gaye by hitting the link and grab a copy of it on Amazon today.
