I can’t recall the first time I heard Marvin Gaye’s I Want You, the third in Marvin’s string of commercial block busters released on Motown records in the 1970’s, with accuracy. My godmother used to employ Marvin’s music as a kind of soundtrack to the goings-on in her south side Chicago apartment. No matter the activity, there was Marvin in the background playing just loud enough to melt one song into another and emit a calm-inducing murmur that wafted gently from room to room like smoke from an incense ember. I am also certain that I Want You was part of this mélange, I just couldn’t say with certainty. I do, however, remember vividly the first time I put I Want You on a turntable, put the needle to the groove, raised the volume and sat perfectly still.

I was already a huge Marvin Gaye fan by this time. I had listened to Whats Going On until the wax had worn thin. I was also quite familiar with—and fond of—Let Get It On and various other compositions from the odd collections found on Marvin’s “Greatest Hits” compilations. I remember breaking down on April 1, 1984 when it was confirmed that the news of Marvin’s death was not a blasphemously unfunny April fool’s joke. Marvin Gay Sr. had indeed shot his son dead in the house Marvin had bought for him and his wife, thrown the still smoking murder weapon into the front yard and sat quietly on the porch until the police came. The ensuing outpouring of grief and tributaries entrenched “I Want You” and “After the Dance,” the two major singles from I Want You, on my best music recordings in music recording history list. But I still had not listened to the whole album.

Looking back, it was appropriate that I waited until I was half-way grown before sitting still and watching the record spin round and round. This was grown man’s music so even then I only caught on to half of what I was listening too. But what I did hear was transformational, an aural index explaining how God had directly created sensuality with the expressed intention for it to, as James Baldwin explained, “Infuse all that we do.”

Since then I have become a pseudo-historian on Marvin Gaye. I now know about his ascendance, his victory, his despair, his descent and his death. I now know every lyric he ever crooned on tape including the dirty utterances hidden in between the layers of vocal tracks he seamed together like instruments in an orchestra. I know a lot about Marvin. But Eric Michael Dyson knows more and Mercy, Mercy Me: The Art, Loves and Demons of Marvin Gaye is proof positive. The following excerpt tracks Dyson's exploration of I Want You and the dynamic relationship between Marvin and Janis Hunter, the second great love of his life. Love is Love.

One of the most beautiful and enduring artistic monuments to their (Marvin and Janis Hunter) relationship is preserved in I Want You. Along with Trouble Man, this was Gaye’s favorite album. And it was the first album that Gaye completed in his “Marvin Gaye Recording Studio,” which he had built in 1975 in the heart of Hollywood. I Want You is an album stitched together by the conceptual thread of romantic pursuit. It hangs together on a marvelous erotic conceit: that romance is the core of sensual truth, its surest revelation, and that sex is merely the commerce of a higher spiritual economy. “It’s an opera about a relationship,” says Gary Harris, a prominent music business executive. “Love found, desire, desperation, the absolute ‘I got to have her.’ He meets her, gets her, loses her, sees her at the party and tries to get back with her. It’s all interwoven in this dramatic way.” The opening song, “I Want You,” states the album’s thesis: desire built on sustaining mutuality. The capacious feel of the tune is evoked by the lush orchestration of its individual elements—congas, horn ostinatos, descending stinging guitars, thumping bass, and the luxurious interplay of Marvin’s angelic and earthy vocals. The song is aural foreplay, the dance of seduction—and by its mellow, fusion jazz disco beat, that’s quite literally the case. Marvin foreshadows in the structure of the song its function: the more-than-a-minute long lead-in is a gesture of sonic foreplay. The introductory build-up climaxes in Marvin’s declaration—breathtaking for the swiftness with which it pleads its case—that “I want you the right way I want you, but I want you to want me too.” That’s the song and album in a nutshell: to love, and give love in return. Marvin’s desire floats through the song as nimbly as his vocals tear at the gently swaying wall of sound. But if he has phrased his desire in sensual terms, his bottom line is an old-fashioned commitment: “Don’t play with something you should cherish for life.” But our romantic hero must overcome resistance, since he acknowledges that “you don’t want me right now, but I’m going to change your mind, someway, somehow.”