Diana Ross walked into Motown Recording Studios in Hollywood, took one breath, and walked straight back out. The pregnant singer had come to record a duets album with Marvin Gaye, the company's troubled soul prince, and found the room thick with marijuana smoke. The album that emerged from that standoff, Diana & Marvin, hit stores on October 26, 1973, and it remains one of the strangest artifacts of Motown's golden era.
A project stalled since 1970
The project had been floating around since 1970, but Gaye was in no shape for duets. After the death of his singing partner Tammi Terrell, he had sworn off recording with women altogether, calling such pairings cursed. It took the success of his album What's Going On and a direct pitch from Motown boss Berry Gordy to change his mind. Gaye agreed, partly because he wanted to reach Ross's enormous pop audience.
The first sessions showed how fragile the arrangement was. Engineer Russ Terrana remembered Gaye arriving unusually early and lighting up. When Ross complained to Gordy, Gaye's response was blunt: if he couldn't smoke, he couldn't sing. The cigarette went out, Ross came back in, and the tapes rolled, but the tension set a pattern for everything that followed.
When Ross complained to Gordy, Gaye's response was blunt: if he couldn't smoke, he couldn't sing.
Separate vocals, stitched together
Motown eventually gave up trying to record the two stars together. Ross and Gaye laid down their vocals separately, and Terrana stitched the performances into duets in the mixing room. The label also made a telling choice on the cover, putting Ross's name before Gaye's. Gaye fought for the title Marvin & Diana and for a producer credit, but Gordy refused both.
The finished album did respectable business. In the United States it peaked at 26 on the Billboard 200 and at 7 on the R&B chart, with sales above 500,000 copies. Britain embraced it more warmly: a number 6 peak and a gold certification for sales above 100,000. The singles told a scattered story, with "You're a Special Part of Me" climbing to number 12 on the pop chart while "Don't Knock My Love" stalled at number 46.
The real hits came from unexpected places. Two covers of songs by the Philadelphia soul group The Stylistics, "Stop, Look, Listen (To Your Heart)" and "You Are Everything," became British singles. The latter reached number 5 in the UK. In Brazil, "Don't Knock My Love" went all the way to number one, a reminder that the album's appeal stretched far beyond the American pop market.
The album's cover became a small piece of pop iconography, with Ross's and Gaye's hair flowing in opposite directions, an image other artists later imitated. It was a fitting visual for a record built from two people pulling in different directions. Yet the music held together, smoothed by Terrana's mixing and the professionalism of two singers who could not stand in the same room for long. The album also had a long afterlife. In 2001 it was reissued on CD with four bonus tracks, including three unreleased recordings from the 1972 sessions and the 1978 duet "I'll Keep My Light in My Window."
Diana & Marvin is not the album either star would have chosen as a centerpiece. Gaye's own Let's Get It On had come out two months earlier and became his best-selling Motown release. Ross was coming off Touch Me in the Morning. The duets album was squeezed between their solo triumphs, a compromise project that somehow produced a handful of enduring songs and a cover that outlived the friction behind it.