I DON'T KNOW if anyone keeps stats on how many of those profiled by PBS' "American Masters" had troubled relationships with their fathers, but I'm guessing just one would be recorded as having lost his life in the conflict.

That would be the subject of tonight's "Masters" presentation, "Marvin Gaye: What's Going On," a tragedy in several acts that ends the way you already know it did.

But knowing the destination doesn't have to spoil the journey, and thanks to Gaye, whose music here is tied effectively to the ups and downs of his nearly 45 years, it's a trip worth taking, however bumpy the road.

No one deserves to be remembered more for the way they left life than for the life itself, and Gaye, who left behind enough good work - and good friends - to overwhelm the messiest of obituaries, doesn't have to be.

Still, it's hard not to cringe in the early scenes of "What's Going On" as narrator Jesse L. Martin, who's reportedly set to play the singer in a film called "Sexual Healing," introduces the Rev. Marvin Gay Sr., an angry man but charismatic preacher who was often physically abusive and sometimes dressed in women's clothes.

A complicated guy who fathered a complicated son, his effect on Marvin Jr. - who added the "e" to the family name - probably would have been considered far-reaching even if he'd never picked up the gun that killed the singer in 1984.

As one Gaye biographer, David Ritz ("Divided Soul") puts it, the younger man's "penchant for misery was creative."

Which was good, because without the music, this might have been a bit of a slog.

Gaye, who also seems to have had a penchant for swinging between his father's expectations and his own ambitions, was hiding parts of himself as early as his church-choir days, starting with the music of the street corners, doo-wop.

"Marvin sang that all the time, the music that we loved . . . But he never sang it around that house," recalls singer Bobby Taylor, a close friend who's just one of the Motown veterans who weigh in.

"I think Marvin's father's voice, telling him, 'No, no, no,' really haunted Marvin," suggests Ritz.

Discharged from the Air Force, which he'd joined at 17 after quitting high school, for what Gaye himself described as "something about being unable to adjust to regimentation and authority," he ended up in Detroit and at Motown Records, where he continued to have problems with regimentation and authority.

Both were personified by Motown's Berry Gordy, whose sister, Anna, 15 years Gaye's senior, would become his first wife.

Marrying into the Motown family didn't seem to soften the rough edges. Gaye "was a very competitive person," says biographer Michael Eric Dyson ("Mercy, Mercy Me").

"Marvin wanted to get there first, he wanted to be acknowledged as the only one, and he wanted to be seen as the superior one, when he's on stage with, you know, Stevie Wonder," Dyson says.

"And Stevie Wonder goes out and basically kicks his butt, you know. I mean, who's going to compete against Stevie Wonder? He's blind, he's a kid and he's a genius. That's a hell of a combination. And Marvin was not nice in the way he framed it: 'Don't let that little blind sucker go on before me, anymore.' "

But then, if nice were all you wanted, you probably wouldn't be looking for it in the story of an artist who mined his own pain for our pleasure. *

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