One day in 1973, Edward Townsend, a singer-songwriter who’d had a minor hit with the 1958 ballad “For Your Love,” invited a friend, the R. & B. superstar Marvin Gaye, to his home in Los Angeles, to hear some new tunes. Sitting at the piano, Townsend played a four-chord progression in the key of E-flat major while singing a melody that harked back to his doo-wop days. Townsend, then forty-three, had recently been released from rehab, and the song was a plea to a higher power to help him stay sober. “I’ve been really tryin’ baby, tryin’ to hold back this feeling for so long” was one of the lines.
Gaye, who was suffering from writer’s block after the huge success of “What’s Going On,” for Motown Records, in 1971, heard his friend’s song as a hymn to sex. Together, they created “Let’s Get It On.”
Motown’s music-publishing company, Jobete, took fifty per cent of the song’s copyright. Gaye and Townsend agreed to split their share of the composition’s future earnings. Gaye recorded the song in L.A., in March, 1973, with members of the Funk Brothers, Motown’s house band, who added the wah-wah guitar introduction and the song’s undeniable groove, in which the second and fourth chords are anticipated—slightly in front of the beat. Gaye, in addition to his soaring vocal, played keyboard on the record. The song, Gaye’s first No. 1, was one of the biggest hits of the year. It became a foundational track in the quiet storm of seventies R. & B. and soul, and has remained an evergreen—a steady earner.
“Let’s Get It On” launched a new phase in Gaye’s career; four years later, his song “Got to Give It Up” also reached No. 1. Before his death, a filicide by Marvin Gaye, Sr., in 1984, Gaye had a final smash with “Sexual Healing.”
Townsend’s career peaked with “Let’s Get It On.” He fell back into alcohol abuse, acquired a cocaine habit, and ended up living on the streets of Los Angeles. He eventually beat his addictions, and, near the end of his life, devoted himself to helping others on the street. He died in 2003, at the age of seventy-four.
