Crate Cannon | Marvin Gaye’s “Sexual Healing”

Belgian Genesis

Marvin Gaye relocated to Ostend in February 1981, fleeing IRS pursuit, his second divorce, and a creative breakup with Motown. Concert promoter Freddy Cousaert put him up at his home, walked him on the beach, and dragged him to the boxing gym in the morning. The recording itself happened a half hour inland at Studio Katy in Ohain, where engineer Mike Butcher first heard the TR-808 demos Gaye had been programming on a hotel cassette deck. Sessions opened in December 1981 with guitarist Gordon Banks and organist Odell Brown sticking around after the European tour.

The title-origin story has at least four versions. Rolling Stone writer David Ritz showed up uninvited, observed Marvin's reading material, and suggested "sexual healing." Banks remembers it differently in The Atlantic, placing the conversation around Amsterdam's red-light district. Cousaert told HUMO in 1994 that Ritz contributed only the title. Frankie Gaye remembered yet another version. Take your pick. Lyric credit eventually landed with Gaye, Brown, and Ritz after a $15 million lawsuit settled posthumously.

Acclaim

Released October 1, 1982. Reached No. 1 on Billboard's Black Singles chart on November 6, 1982, in just its fourth week of release, making it the fastest-rising R&B single in five years. Stayed at the top for ten weeks. Peaked at No. 3 on the Hot 100, Gaye's eighteenth and final pop top-ten. At the 25th Annual Grammy Awards in February 1983, it took Best Male R&B Vocal Performance and Best R&B Instrumental Performance, the only two Grammys Gaye would win in his lifetime. The instrumental nod was for the Banks-led B-side.

Process

The Midnight Love sessions ran nine months across four studios: Studio Katy in Ohain (tracking and mixing), Arco Studios in Munich (additional vocals), Kendun Recorders in Burbank (horns), and Devonshire Studios in LA (remix and edit). Brian Gardner cut the lacquers at Allen Zentz Mastering.

The gear list is shorter than its mythology suggests. Per Banks, "CBS gave him a Roland Jupiter-8 and a Roland TR-808. That's all we used. No Moog. Marvin was not hip to the tech stuff." A Roger Linn LM-1 drum machine sat in the room too, with Fender Rhodes and Hammond rounding out the keyboard textures. The 808 architecture put the song at the front of a new era for the machine. Bambaataa had used it on "Planet Rock" earlier that year for hip-hop; Gaye made the case for it in slow-jam R&B.

Banks's own account of the building process is what makes the record sing. He told Jim Newsom: "I played seventeen lead lines on 'Sexual Healing' and he took most of them. That's where the vocals come from." Marvin would lift guitar phrases off Banks's playback and shape his vocal melody from them, working one or two bars at a time and punching in and out on tape because the studio had no sequencers. Harvey Fuqua's whispered "get up, wake up" intro was tracked separately.

Afterlife

The 808 groove has lived a thousand lives. WhoSampled tags the song Sampled in More Than 100 Songs and More Than 40 Covers, both well earned. The hip-hop receipts run deep:

• Big Daddy Kane's "Smooth Operator" (1989) lifts the chorus harmonies.

• Lord Finesse & DJ Mike Smooth's "Sexual Healin'" (1990) is the most direct flip, fittingly out of the Bronx.

• Fat Joe's "Envy" loops the bridge over an L.E.S. beat.

• Erick Sermon's "I'm Hot" takes the chorus.

• Young Love's "Sexual Healing Rap" gets the early-'80s answer-record honors.

Covers run the gamut. Hot 8 Brass Band gave it the New Orleans second-line treatment (later reissued on Tru Thoughts and featured in the Jon Favreau film Chef). Jimmy Riley cut a lovers-rock 7-inch with Sly & Robbie on the rhythm. Studio Rio put it through their Berman Brothers samba reconstruction for Mr Bongo, using the original Sony multitracks and tracked in Rio with sidemen who once played for Jobim. Kate Bush with Davy Spillane cut the most surprising version, a uilleann pipe lament that landed as a B-side to "King of the Mountain." And Michael Bolton did Michael Bolton.

The Glen Adams & Finesse Detour

In 1982, Brooklyn-based reggae veteran Glen Adams teamed with Bronx MC T-Ski Valley on a hybrid that's stayed a DJ's secret weapon for forty-plus years. Adams arrived in the U.S. with serious bona fides as organist for The Upsetters, Lee "Scratch" Perry's house band, where he wrote and played the spooky organ on Wailers cuts like "Mr. Brown" and "Duppy Conqueror." The 12-inch runs "Sexual Rapping" on the A, a rap-meets-Jamaican-disco rework, and "Sexual Instrumental" by Glen Adams & Finesse on the flip. Both sides were tracked at Blank Tape Recording Studio in New York with Adams handling production. Adelaide's Isle of Jura compiled the instrumental on Instrumental Dubs #1, putting it back in print on 140-gram wax alongside Tippa Irie and Carol Williams cuts. The dub instrumental anchors Lovers Dub | 01.

Legacy

Midnight Love sold over six million copies worldwide. Beyond the immediate commercial run, the single rewrote the playbook for what R&B could sound like with a drum machine doing most of the work. Quiet-storm radio adopted the template within months. The Isley Brothers' Between the Sheets, released April 1983, runs on a similar restrained synthetic palette; Banks himself credited the album with "influenc[ing] a lot of people doing a mellow thing with a funk vibe in it." Two decades later the DNA still shows through D'Angelo's Voodoo and Frank Ocean's Blonde. Pitchfork later ranked "Sexual Healing" at #18 on its 200 Best Songs of the 1980s, between "Into the Groove" and "Paid in Full." Gaye himself never got to enjoy the long arc; he was killed by his father in April 1984, eighteen months after the single hit number one.

Watch & Listen

• Official 4K remaster of the music video.

• Gaye's 1983 Grammy performance, his first and only on that stage.

• Marvin's 1983 interview on the song's sexual content.

• Mike Butcher's engineer's-eye account of the Studio Katy sessions in Electronic Sound.

• David Ritz's first-person essay on the song's origins for Boston Review.

• The Atlantic profile of Gordon Banks on the making of Midnight Love.

• Brussels Times feature on Marvin's Ostend rehab with Pascale Cousaert's recollections.