Marvin Gaye Called James Brown From a Payphone at 3AM — James Brown Hung Up — Then This Happened

Quentyn Marvin Gay called James Brown from a pay phone at 3:00 a.m. James Brown hung up. The next morning, Marvin wrote the song that changed everything. And two, it was 3:00 in the morning, and a man was standing in the rain outside a diner in Detroit, holding a pay phone receiver with both hands, listening to a phone ring in a house somewhere in Augusta, Georgia.

 He had been driving for 2 hours, not toward anywhere in particular, just driving. The way people drive when what they are trying to outrun is inside the car with them. And the only thing that relieves it even slightly is the motion, the changing street lights, the city moving past the windows while inside nothing moves at all.

 He had pulled over at a diner that was still lit, still open, that had a pay phone on the outside wall under an awning that offered minimal protection from the rain that had started an hour ago. He had gotten out of the car and walked to the phone and put in the coins and dialed a number he knew by heart.

 Because there are certain phone numbers you memorize, not because you call them often, but because you know somewhere in the part of yourself that makes these calculations without asking permission that you might need them at a moment exactly like this one. The phone rang. It rang three times. It rang four times.

 And then someone picked up. His name was Marvin Gay. He was 31 years old. He had just finished recording what’s going on. the most important album of his career. Possibly the most important album of his generation, an album that had not yet been released because Barry Gordy refused to release it and Marvin was in the middle of the battle over its existence that would define the next 6 months of his life.

 He had called James Brown. This is a story that exists in the territory between the documented and the imagined. In the space where what we know about two extraordinary men and their relationship to each other and to the music they were both making allows us to construct with reasonable confidence. The shape of what might have happened in the conversations and the silences and the three in the morning phone calls that the historical record does not fully preserve. What we know is this.

 James Brown and Marvin Gay were the two dominant figures in black American music in the late 1960s and early 1970s. They were contemporaries, rivals, mutual admirers, and complicated mirrors of each other. two men who had arrived at similar places through entirely different routes, who represented different visions of what what black music could and should be, and who were both aware in the specific way that artists of genuine stature are always aware of their most significant contemporaries, that what the other was doing mattered.

What we know is that James Brown called Marvin Gay the voice, not in public. James Brown did not make a habit of elevating his contemporaries at his own expense, but in private conversations, in the specific honest assessments that artists make of each other when the audience is not present, he James Brown acknowledged what everyone who was paying attention already knew.

 That Marvin Gay’s voice was something that existed in a category of its own. that whatever James Brown could do with his body and his band and his extraordinary unmatched command of a room, the specific thing that happened when Marvin Gay opened his mouth was something different. Something that reached people in a different place.

 What we know is that Marvin Gay admired James Brown in return. Admired and was intimidated by and sometimes envied the absolute confidence that James Brown brought to everything he did. Where Marvin was uncertain, James was certain. Where Marvin questioned himself, James never appeared to question himself at all. Where Marvin struggled with the gap between what he was making and what he believed he was capable of.

 James Brown seemed to live permanently in the conviction that what he was making was exactly what he intended and exactly what it should be. What we know is that in 1970 and 1971, both men were in the middle of something. James Brown was deep into the funk revolution he had been building for years. The music that would eventually become the foundation of hip hop, the rhythmic innovations that were changing what popular music sounded like and what it was capable of.

Marvin Gay was in the middle of what’s going on and the battle with Gordy and the specific private profound crisis of wondering whether the music he believed in would ever reach the world. And what we know because it is the kind of thing that happens between artists who take their work as seriously as these two men took theirs is that there were conversations, phone calls, late nights, the kinds of exchanges that happen between people who are working at the edge of what is possible and need occasionally to talk

to someone else who understands what that edge feels like. The rain was coming down harder now. Marvin pressed the receiver against his ear and listened to the ringing and tried to decide what he was going to say when the voice on the other end answered. He had been thinking about James Brown for days.

 Not obsessively, not in the consuming way that rivalry can become obsession, more like the way you think about someone whose work has been asking you a question you have not yet found the answer to. And James Brown’s music asked a question that Marvin Gay’s music was trying to answer. And the question was this.

 What is black music actually for? James Brown’s answer was in the body. In the groove, in the rhythm, in the physical communal unstoppable aliveness of music that moved people before it spoke to them, that reached the body before the mind, that created in a room a collective experience of blackness as joy and power and indestructibility.

His music said, “We are here. We are alive. We are not going anywhere.” And the proof is in the way this room is moving right now. Marvin’s answer was different. Had always been different. Had been developing towards something different for years and had arrived in the what’s going on sessions at a clarity that he had been approaching for a long time but had never quite reached before.

His music said, “We are here. We are alive and the world is burning and we need to talk about it. Not with anger. He had spent years learning that anger was not the right register for what he wanted to say. With love. With the specific, demanding, uncompromising love of a person who believes that the people they love deserve the truth.

 The phone rang five times, six times, and then someone picked up. The voice on the other end was not happy. It was 3:00 in the morning and the voice had been asleep and the voice was not accustomed to being woken up by phone calls at 3:00 in the morning because the voice was James Brown who controlled his schedule and his environment and his sleep with the same iron discipline.

 He controlled everything else and unscheduled three in the morning phone calls were not a feature of the schedule James Brown had arranged for himself. Marvin said his name. He said he was sorry for the hour. He said he needed to talk. There was a pause on the line. The specific pause of someone deciding in real time whether the person calling them at 3:00 in the morning is worth the interruption.

 James Brown said, “What do you want, Marvin?” Not a question, a statement of demand. Marvin said he had been listening to James’ new recordings, the ones that were circulating in the industry before their official release. the ones that everyone in the music world had heard or heard about and that were doing something to the conversation about what black music was and where it was going.

 He said he had been listening to them and trying to understand what James was building toward and what it meant for what Marvin himself was trying to do. He said, “I need to know if what I’m making matters.” Another pause. Longer this time. James Brown had not become James Brown by being sentimental about the insecurities of fellow artists.

He had become James Brown by being the hardest working, most disciplined, most uncompromising person in every room he entered, by treating doubt as a luxury he could not afford, and vulnerability as a weakness he had trained himself out of in the years after he walked out of a Georgia prison at 19 with nothing but a determination that he would never be powerless again.

 And yet, he had heard what’s going on. Not the finished album. It had not been released yet, would not be released for months, was still sitting in Mottown’s vaults while Barry Gordy insisted it was the worst record he had ever heard. But James Brown was connected enough, respected enough, central enough to the world of black music that things reached him before they reached the public, and what’s going on had reached him.

He had heard it in a room somewhere, played through speakers that were not adequate to what it deserved, and he had stood there and listened to all of it and felt something that he did not have a ready category for. Not jealousy. James Brown did not do jealousy, or at least told himself he did not. Not admiration exactly, though.

It was that something more specific and more uncomfortable than admiration. Recognition. The recognition of a man who had spent his entire career insisting that the body was the answer, that groove was the answer, that the physical, communal, undeniable aliveness of funk was what black music needed to be, who had built a body of work and a philosophy of music on that insistence.

 Hearing someone make an argument for a different answer that he could not dismiss. Marvin was not saying the body was wrong. He was saying the body was not enough. That there was something the music needed to say. That groove alone could not say. That the physical and the spiritual and the political needed to exist in the same space.

 That what’s going on was an attempt to hold all of it simultaneously. And James Brown, standing in a room listening to a recording that nobody was supposed to have yet, had felt the argument land. He had not called Marvin and told him this. James Brown did not make that kind of call, but the recognition had been there.

 And now Marvin was calling him at 3:00 in the morning from a pay phone in the rain, asking if what he was making mattered. James Brown said nothing for a long time and then he said, “Go home, Marvin.” He said it without cruelty, which somehow made it more direct. Not go home as a dismissal. Go home as an instruction.

 Go home as the specific piece of advice that James Brown, the most self-sufficient artist in American music, gave to another artist who was standing in the rain, asking for reassurance that James Brown did not believe reassurance could provide. Go home. Do the work. Stop asking if it matters and find out. He hung up.

 Marvin stood in the rain outside the diner holding the dead receiver. The rain was coming down steadily now. the kind of rain that is not dramatic but is thorough that gets into everything gradually and leaves nothing dry. He drove home. He did not sleep. He sat at the piano in his living room and played. Not the compositions he had been working on, but something else.

 Something that was coming directly from the specific state he was in. the exhaustion and the uncertainty in the question that had been building for months and that James Brown’s too word answer had not resolved but had somehow clarified. Go home and do the work. He started writing. What came out in the hours between 3:00 in the morning and dawn was not a finished song.

 It was something more like the emotional architecture of a song. the feeling, the shape, the thing it was trying to say before it had the specific words to say it. It was the feeling of a man who had been asking whether what he was making mattered and who had been told by someone whose opinion mattered as much as anyone’s.

 That the answer to that question was not available from the outside. That it was only available from the inside. That the work itself was the only proof and the only way to get the proof was to do the work. He wrote for hours. He filled pages with fragments, lines, images, the beginnings of melodies that he hummed quietly so as not to wake anyone in the house.

 He was not writing what’s going on. That was already written, already recorded, already sitting in Mottown’s vaults, waiting for Barry Gordy to change his mind or Marvin to force the issue. He was writing something that came after what’s going on. Something that had been made possible by the battle over what’s going on and the three in the morning phone call and James Brown hanging up.

He was writing toward mercy mercy me toward inner city blues toward the rest of the album that would complete what what’s going on had started. The phone call had not given him what he had called James Brown to get. It had not given him reassurance or validation or the external confirmation that what he was making mattered.

 James Brown had hung up rather than provide any of those things. What it had given him was the understanding that those things were not available to be given. That an artist who needed someone else to tell them their work mattered had not yet fully committed to the work. that the commitment the work required was the commitment to do it regardless, regardless of whether Barry Gordy released it.

 Regardless of whether the radio played it, regardless of whether James Brown said it was important or dismissed it as sentimental or hung up at 3:00 in the morning without answering the question, the work was the answer. The doing of it was the proof. Dawn came. Marvin was still at the piano. The pages around him were covered in fragments that would eventually become the final pieces of the most important album of his career.

 The album that Barry Gordy had called the worst record he had ever heard. The album that Rolling Stone would eventually call the greatest ever made. He had called James Brown at 3:00 in the morning and James Brown had hung up. And in the hanging up, in that specific he sentimentally direct refusal to provide what Marvin was asking for, James Brown had given him something more useful than reassurance.

He had given him the only thing an artist can give another artist. When the artist is in the middle of something real and important and difficult, he had told him to go do it. James Brown and Marvin Gay continued to exist in each other’s orbits for the rest of Marvin’s life.

 The rivalry that was also mutual respect. The relationship between two men who had arrived at different answers to the same question and who were both right in ways that the others work kept illuminating. They performed together occasionally on television specials and benefit concerts. The specific electric tension of two artists who understood each other too well to be comfortable in the same room and could not stay out of each other’s orbit.

 A James Brown outlived Marvin Gay by more than 20 years. He died on Christmas Day 2006 at 73 years old, having spent the last 40 years of his life being asked about Marvin Gay and answering with the careful measured acknowledgement of a man who respected what he respected and did not waste words on anything more. He was asked in a late interview what he remembered about Marvin Gay. He said the voice.

There was the voice and then there was everybody else. He said it the way he said everything without sentimentality, without the performance of emotion, with the flat direct certainty of a man who had decided what the truth was and saw no reason to dress it up. The voice and everybody else.

 That is what Marvin Gay called James Brown to ask about at 3:00 in the morning from a pay phone in the rain. whether the voice was enough, whether what he was trying to say was worth saying in the way he was trying to say it, whether the music that Barry Gordy called the worst record he had ever heard was actually the most important thing Marvin had ever made.

James Brown hung up and Marvin Gay went home and wrote the rest of the album and found out. If this story moved you, if you felt something hearing about a man who stood in the rain asking for reassurance and was told instead to go do the work, subscribe and hit that like button. Share this video with someone who is waiting for permission to believe in what they are making and needs to be reminded that the permission was never going to come from outside.

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