| Marvin Gaye Live! | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
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| Live album by | ||||
| Released | June 19, 1974 | |||
| Recorded | January 4, 1974 | |||
| Venue | Oakland Coliseum Arena, Oakland, California | |||
| Genre | Soul | |||
| Length | 43:41 | |||
| Label | Tamla | |||
| Producer | Marvin Gaye | |||
| Marvin Gaye chronology | ||||
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Marvin Gaye Live! is the second live album issued by soul musician Marvin Gaye, released on June 19, 1974, by Tamla Records.
In 1973, Gaye released his greatest-selling album, Let's Get It On , which made him the biggest-selling Motown artist during his lifetime. Motown Records, Gaye's label for over a decade, had long wanted Gaye to promote his recordings with a national tour but the rebellious singer, who had begun suffering from stage fright after the collapse of his beloved singing duet partner Tammi Terrell in October 1967 and whom later died of a brain tumor two and a half years later in March 1970, had refused to return to live performing only agreeing to do it only at sporadic times including when he was honored in his hometown in Washington, D.C. in May 1972 and performed at the Kennedy Center and briefly on the 1973 film, Save the Children. But with the success of Let's Get It On and Gaye's now-increasing spending habit, he reluctantly agreed to start touring again in the beginning of 1974. After rescheduling the concert for January 4, 1974, at the Oakland Coliseum Arena, Gaye took the stage in front of 14,000-plus screaming fans. He performed a new song which he dedicated to his girlfriend Janis Hunter titled "Jan" and performed most of his 1970s repertoire, only including his 1960s classics in a sped-up "Fossil Medley". Throughout his tours, Gaye began developing performance anxiety and had feared the public reception. To test the public, he reportedly forced his younger brother Frankie to come out before being confident enough to come out afterwards. The biggest fan response on the album came when Gaye retooled his song, "Distant Lover", into a slower-paced version starting the song out as he segued from "Theme from Trouble Man" (seventh track from his Trouble Man album) to the song itself producing female shrieks, which kept up as Gaye continued his show-stopping performance of the song. The performance soon became a Gaye trademark onstage and the singer continued to perform the song in that similar style until his final performances in the 1980s.
Commercially, the album was a big success and proved that, despite his fears, Gaye was still as convincing as a live performer as he was as a recording artist during the early-1970s. On August 31, 1974, the album peaked at #1 on the R&B album chart for two weeks while resting at #8 on the pop album chart. The live version of "Distant Lover" created such a frenetic response that Motown issued the live song as a single where it reached #28 on the pop chart and #15 on the R&B charts in the late summer of 1974. The album would go on to sell over a million copies.
The live album earned Gaye his fifth Grammy Award nomination for Best Male R&B Vocal Performance at the 17th Annual Grammy Awards, losing to "Boogie on Reggae Woman" by fellow Motown artist and close friend Stevie Wonder. [1]
| Review scores | |
|---|---|
| Source | Rating |
| AllMusic |   [2] |
| Christgau's Record Guide | C+ [3] |
| Tom Hull | B [4] |
Marvin Gaye was an American singer and songwriter. He helped to shape the sound of Motown in the 1960s, first as an in-house session player and later as a solo artist with a string of hits, earning him the nicknames "Prince of Motown" and "Prince of Soul".
What's Going On is the eleventh studio album by American soul singer, songwriter, and producer Marvin Gaye. It was released on May 21, 1971, by the Motown Records subsidiary label Tamla. Recorded between 1970 and 1971 in sessions at Hitsville U.S.A., Golden World, and United Sound Studios in Detroit, and at The Sound Factory in West Hollywood, California, it was Gaye's first album to credit him as a producer and to credit Motown's in-house studio band, the session musicians known as the Funk Brothers.
Let's Get It On is the thirteenth studio album by American soul singer, songwriter, and producer Marvin Gaye. It was released on August 28, 1973, by the Motown subsidiary label Tamla Records on LP.
"Let's Get It On" is a song and hit single by soul musician Marvin Gaye, released June 15, 1973, on Motown-subsidiary label Tamla Records. The song was recorded on March 22, 1973, at Hitsville West in Los Angeles, California. The song features romantic and sexual lyricism and funk instrumentation by The Funk Brothers. The title track of Gaye's album Let's Get It On (1973), it was written by Marvin Gaye and producer Ed Townsend. "Let's Get It On" became Gaye's most successful single for Motown and one of his most well-known songs. With the help of the song's sexually explicit content, "Let's Get It On" helped give Gaye a reputation as a sex symbol during its initial popularity. "Let's Get It On" is written and composed in the key of E-flat major and is set in time signature of common time with a tempo of 82 beats per minute.
"Ain't No Mountain High Enough" is a pop/soul song written by Nickolas Ashford & Valerie Simpson in 1966 for the Tamla label, a division of Motown. The composition was first successful as a 1967 hit single recorded by Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell, and became a hit again in 1970 when recorded by former Supremes frontwoman Diana Ross. The song became Ross's first solo number-one hit on the Billboard Hot 100 chart and was nominated for the Grammy Award for Best Female Pop Vocal Performance.
"I Want You" is a song written by songwriters Leon Ware and Arthur "T-Boy" Ross and performed by singer Marvin Gaye. It was released as a single in 1976 on his fourteenth studio album of the same name on the Tamla label. The song introduced a change in musical styles for Gaye, who before then had been recording songs with a funk edge. Songs such as this gave him a disco audience thanks to Ware, who produced the song alongside Gaye.
"Distant Lover" is the sixth song issued on singer Marvin Gaye's 1973 album, Let's Get It On and the b-side of the second single from that album, "Come Get to This." A live recording was issued as a single in 1974. The live version of the song was Gaye's most successful single during the three-year gap between Let's Get It On and his following 1976 album, I Want You.
United is a studio album by soul musicians Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell, released August 29, 1967 on the Motown-subsidiary label Tamla Records. Harvey Fuqua and Johnny Bristol produced all of the tracks on the album, with the exception of "You Got What It Takes" and "Oh How I'd Miss You". Fuqua and Bristol produced "Hold Me Oh My Darling" and "Two Can Have a Party" as Tammi Terrell solo tracks in 1965 and 1966, and had Gaye overdub his vocals to them in order to create duet versions of the songs.
You're All I Need is the second studio album by soul musicians Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell, released in August 1968 on Motown-subsidiary label Tamla Records. Highlighted by three hit singles written by Nickolas Ashford and Valerie Simpson, You're All I Need was recorded throughout 1966 and 1967 and features two Top 10 Billboard Hot 100 hits, "Ain't Nothing Like the Real Thing" and "You're All I Need to Get By". It peaked at #60 on the U.S. Billboard 200 Album Chart. You're All I Need was the two singers' final collaboration effort, as Terrell would become ill following recording, before succumbing to a brain tumor in 1970.
The Soulful Moods of Marvin Gaye is the debut studio album by Marvin Gaye, released in 1961, and the second long-playing album (TM-221) released by Motown. The first was Hi... We're the Miracles (TM-220). It is most notable as the album that caused the first known struggle of Gaye's turbulent tenure with the label.
I Heard It Through the Grapevine! is the eighth studio album by soul musician Marvin Gaye, released on August 26, 1968 on the Motown-subsidiary label Tamla Records. Originally released as In the Groove, it was the first solo studio album Gaye released in two years, in which during that interim, the singer had emerged as a successful duet partner with female R&B singers such as Kim Weston and Tammi Terrell. The album and its title track are considered both as Gaye's commercial breakthrough.
Live at the London Palladium is a live double album by soul musician Marvin Gaye, released March 15, 1977, on Tamla Records. Recording sessions took place live at several concerts at the London Palladium in London, England, in October 1976, with the exception of the hit single "Got to Give It Up", which was recorded at Gaye's Los Angeles studio Marvin's Room on January 31, 1977. Live at the London Palladium features intimate performances by Gaye of many of his career highlights, including early hits for Motown and recent material from his previous three studio albums. As with his previous live album, Marvin Gaye Live!, production of the record was handled entirely by Gaye, except for the studio portion, "Got to Give It Up", which was managed by Art Stewart.
Marvin Gaye at the Copa is a live album recorded at the exclusive New York club, the Copacabana, where singer Marvin Gaye performed in August 1966, over a year following The Supremes' ballyhooed 1965 performance there. Marvin was only one of just a few R&B musicians after Sam Cooke and Jackie Wilson to perform at the club where performers such as Sammy Davis, Jr., Nat King Cole and Frank Sinatra had performed at regularly. Marvin was the second act from Berry Gordy's fabled Motown label following the Supremes to perform at the nightclub and would be followed by The Temptations in 1968 and Martha (Reeves) and the Vandellas that same year. According to the liner notes later on, Marvin's performance there was a success, however, an ongoing feud between Gaye and his brother-in-law, Motown recording boss Gordy, was said to have been one of the reasons why the album was eventually shelved with the duo fighting over how the album was to be produced. The album had been scheduled for release in January 1967 as Tamla 273 before its permanent shelving. In 2005, Hip-O Select Records, a Motown-associated label created to re-release or release unreleased material from Motown's vaults re-mastered sessions from this album and released it that year.
"You're the Man" is a song composed by singer Marvin Gaye and songwriter Kenneth Stover and released on the Motown subsidiary, Tamla, in the summer of 1972. Composed primarily on the basis of the 1972 presidential election, the song was supposedly the first release from Gaye's next album, You're the Man, but the song's modest success forced Gaye to shelve the album in protest.
"Let Your Conscience Be Your Guide" is the debuting single for singer Marvin Gaye, released as Tamla 54041, in May 1961. It was also the first release off Gaye's debut album, The Soulful Moods of Marvin Gaye, in which most of the material was the singer's failed attempt at making an 'adult' record compared to Motown's younger R&B sound.
Gwen Fuqua was an American businesswoman, songwriter and composer, most notably writing hit songs such as "Lonely Teardrops", "All I Could Do Was Cry" and "Distant Lover". She acquired her full name after marrying Harvey Fuqua and kept the name after their divorce.
Marvin Gaye: Live in Montreux 1980 is a taped performance of singer Marvin Gaye's performance at the Montreux Jazz Festival, recorded on July 17, 1980. Gaye included this performance as part of a European tour. Gaye performs a majority of his hits from his recent disco-funk hits "Got to Give It Up" and "A Funky Space Reincarnation", to his duet hits with Tammi Terrell including "Ain't No Mountain High Enough" and "Ain't Nothing Like the Real Thing", in which Gaye re-interpolated the songs as a somber tribute to Terrell, who died over a decade before, to sixties Motown classics such as "I'll Be Doggone", "Ain't That Peculiar", "How Sweet It Is " and "I Heard It through the Grapevine", to seventies standards such as "What's Going On", "Trouble Man" and "Let's Get It On". The Montreux set was later released as a CD/DVD in 2003.
James Nyx Jr., sometimes credited as James Nyx, was an American songwriter for the Motown label. He co-wrote "Inner City Blues ", which became a #9 hit for Marvin Gaye in 1971.
The Final Concert is a 2000 release of a 1983 show in Indianapolis. It is not the last concert from Marvin Gaye's final tour, but is the last one recorded.
What's Going On Live is a live album recorded in 1972 by American soul singer Marvin Gaye and released posthumously in 2019 by Motown. The album documents a live performance of his masterpiece What's Going On and has received mixed feedback from critics.
