Sam Cooke Told Marvin Gaye to Make That Music Whatever It Costs — Three Days Later Sam Was Dead

Sam Cooke Told Marvin Gaye to Make That Music Whatever It Costs — Three Days Later Sam Was Dead

There are conversations that change the direction of a life without the people having them knowing that is what is happening. Conversations that seem in the moment like the ordinary exchange of two men who respect each other’s work and have found an evening free of professional obligation and are using it to say the things that the presence of other people usually prevents them from saying.

Conversations that only reveal their true weight afterward when the circumstances that followed them have made it impossible to pretend they were ordinary. This was one of those conversations. It was December 1964 Los Angeles, a city in the specific complicated unresolved state of a place that had been the promise of something better for two generations of black Americans who had moved there from the south and had discovered that the promise was real enough to sustain hope but imperfect enough to sustain grief simultaneously.

The weather was warm. The music industry was in the middle of one of its most generative periods. The British invasion had disrupted the established order of American pop and the black artists who had been quietly building something in the spaces that the disruption opened were finding new audiences and new possibilities and new complications in roughly equal measure.

Marvin Gaye was 25 years old. He had been a Motown artist for 3 years. He had hits. He was becoming famous in the accelerating machinery-assisted way that Motown made people famous and he was also in the quieter, more private way that runs underneath commercial success, still figuring out what he was for, still finding the distance between what the voice could do and what it was being asked to do and wondering if that distance was something that could ever be fully closed.

 Sam Cooke was 33 years old. He was already the thing that Marvin was becoming, was already on the other side of the question that Marvin was still asking, had already found and made and given to the world a body of work that demonstrated with the completeness and the authority of something fully realized what it looked like when an artist found what the voice was for and gave it everything.

 Sam had grown up in Clarksdale, Mississippi, the son of a Baptist minister, the same gospel lineage that had shaped Marvin. He had been singing since before he could read, had stood in church choirs as a young child and discovered the same thing that Marvin would discover a decade later in Washington, D.C. That the voice was a separate thing from the person, that it had its own intelligence, its own knowledge, its own relationship with the people who were listening, that existed apart from anything the person behind the voice

consciously intended. He had crossed from gospel to secular music in 1957 and had been condemned for it by the same forces that would later condemn Marvin for the same crossing. The church said he was selling out. The black establishment said he was wasting his gift, and Sam had looked at all of them and decided that the gift was not diminished by the audience it reached.

That a voice that could move people in a club on a Saturday night was doing the same work as a voice that moved them in a church on a Sunday morning, the work of reaching inside a person and touching something that ordinary life left untouched. He had become the most successful black artist in America.

 You Send Me, Wonderful World, Twistin’ the Night Away, Chain Gang, beautiful, effortless, perfectly crafted songs that were also, and this was what the chart positions could not convey, genuinely great in the sense that they would still be great 50 years later. And then A Change Is Gonna Come, which was Sam Cooke deciding that the gift was not just for beauty but for truth, that the most important thing a voice of his power could do was not to make people feel good, but to make people feel real.

 To say the things about what it meant to be black in America in 1964 that needed to be said by someone with enough audience that the saying could not be ignored. Marvin had idolized Sam Cooke since he was a teenager. Not the way people idolize celebrities. Not the surface admiration for the hits and the fame and the specific glamour that Sam carried with him in public.

 The ease and the elegance and the absolute assurance of a man who occupied every room he entered as if the room had been built for him. Marvin had idolized Sam in the deeper sense of hearing someone do what he himself was trying to do. And hearing it done so completely and so well that the gap between where Marvin was and where Sam was became the primary source of his own ambition.

 He had studied Sam’s recordings the way serious students study the masters. Not just listening but analyzing. Taking apart the specific choices that produced the specific effects. Understanding not just what Sam was doing but how and why. He had studied the voice. The grace of it. The effortlessness that was not effortless but such complete mastery that it appeared effortless.

 He had studied the songwriting. The ability to take a simple human situation and find inside it a melody and a lyric that made the situation feel universal. That made every person who heard the song feel that it was specifically about their life. And he had studied the courage. The specific hard-won publicly demonstrated courage of a man who had decided that his music was going to say something true about the world and had been willing to pay whatever that cost.

A change is going to come the song that Sam had written in 1963 and released in 1964. The song that had emerged from the specific conditions of the civil rights era and from Sam’s own experience of being denied entry to a hotel in Louisiana because of the color of his skin.

 The song that was simultaneously a piece of music and a political act and a personal testimony and a prophecy. Marvin had heard A Change Is Gonna Come and felt something shift in his understanding of what was possible. Not shift dramatically, not all at once, not in the way that transformations appear in retrospect as single moments of illumination that can be pointed to and dated and described.

 More like the first movement of something very large that would keep moving for years, that would not fully arrive at its destination until much later, but that had been set in motion by a song. They found themselves in the same city in December 1964. The professional circumstances that brought them to Los Angeles at the same time are not precisely documented, but the overlap was real and they were aware of each other’s presence and they met.

Not at an industry event, not at a formal occasion with an audience and a context that required the management of impression. In private, at a location that the public record does not specify with precision and that was in any case less important than what happened there. They talked. The conversation that followed was not about the music in the technical sense.

 It was not about production choices or vocal technique or the specific mechanics of how either of them achieved what they achieved in a recording studio. It was about the music in the deeper sense, about what it was for, about what they each believed they were doing when they stood in front of a microphone and opened their mouths and gave the world whatever came out.

 Sam had answers that Marvin did not yet have. This was not a matter of talent. Marvin’s talent was, by any honest assessment, comparable to Sam’s. It was a matter of experience and of the specific kind of clarity that comes from having already found the thing you were looking for and having spent several years living inside the consequences of that finding.

 Sam had made A Change Is Gonna Come. He had crossed the line between entertainer and artist in the full sense, had made music that was going to outlast its commercial moment, that was going to mean something to people who had not yet been born when it was recorded. He talked about this to Marvin. About what it had cost, about the industry’s discomfort with it, about the specific resistance that music with political and social content encountered from the commercial machinery that controlled who got heard and who did not, about the calculation he had made

that the cost was worth it, that the music that told the truth was the music that lasted, that the artist who gave the audience what they needed rather than what they wanted was the artist who mattered in the way that actually mattered. And then he said something that was more personal than any of that, something that was not about the general question of what art was for or the political question of what black artists owed their audience, something that was specifically about himself and about Marvin and about what he heard when he

listened to Marvin Gaye. He said, “You have more in you than you have given yet.” He said it the way Sam Cooke said things, with the specific gentle authority of a man who knew the difference between flattery and truth and was incapable of the former. He was not telling Marvin he was talented.

 Marvin knew he was talented. He was telling him that the talent was a container and the container was not yet full, that what Marvin had put into the music so far was real and good and not nothing, but that there was more. That the voice could hold more than it had been asked to hold, that the world needed more than what it had been given.

 He told Marvin that the music they were both capable of making, not the hits, not the commercial product, not the record that moved units and pleased executives, was music that could do something to the people who heard it that almost nothing else could do, that could reach inside them and touch something that their ordinary lives and their ordinary relationships and the ordinary cultural products they consumed left untouched, that could make them feel for a few minutes fully seen and fully understood and fully accompanied in whatever they were carrying.

He said, “Make that. Whatever it costs, make that.” Marvin heard this. He absorbed it in the specific way he absorbed the most important things. Completely without performing a reaction, letting it go down and find its level in whatever space inside him was large enough to hold it. And then he said something back.

Something that was also personal, also specific, also the kind of a thing that only gets said between people who have established enough trust that the ordinary protections can come down. He said, “I will, but I need you to still be here when I do.” The conversation ended. The evening ended. They went their separate ways.

Sam to whatever the rest of that night contained, Marvin to whatever waited for him. 3 days later, Sam Cooke was shot and killed at a motel in Los Angeles. He was 33 years old. The circumstances of his death were from the beginning complicated and disputed and never fully explained to the satisfaction of anyone who cared about the truth of what had happened.

 The official account, the one that was accepted and recorded and became the public record, was contested by the people who knew Sam and who found in the official account too many things that did not add up. He was gone 3 days after the conversation. Marvin Gaye found out the way people find out things like this, suddenly without adequate preparation, without any of the gradual warning that allows the mind to begin its adjustment before the adjustment is required.

 He found out and he felt something that he would carry for the rest of his life. Not grief in the simple, clean sense of missing someone whose company you valued, the more complicated grief of losing someone at the moment when you had just understood what they meant to you and what the conversation you had just had was going to mean for what you did next.

He had said, “I need you to still be here when I do. Sam would not be there. The days that followed Sam’s death were days that Marvin moved through in a specific kind of numbness. Not the absence of feeling, but the presence of too much feeling for any of it to be fully processed. He went through the professional obligations, the appearances, the recordings, the meetings with Motown executives about the next single and the next album and the next tour.

He did what the machine needed him to do. He gave it what it asked for. But something had changed in the space behind his eyes. Something that the people who knew him well could see without being able to name. A quality of distance. Of a man who was present in the room, but also somewhere else. In a conversation that had ended 3 days before it was supposed to end with a man who had told him to make something and was no longer alive to see it made.

 He had been given a direction by someone who was now gone. The weight of that was specific and personal and not something that could be dissolved by grief or managed by time in the ordinary way. It was a commitment. Not the formal, legal kind, the real kind. The kind that exists in the space between two people who understood each other and said true things to each other and whose understanding does not end when one of them dies, but continues in the surviving person as a responsibility. Marvin carried it.

Through the years of Motown hits and the commercial success and the artistic frustration and the marriage to Anna and the complicated personal life. He carried it through the gradual building of the creative pressure that would eventually produce what’s going on. The feeling which grew more acute every year that the music he was making was not yet the music he had promised to make.

 That the container was not yet full. That Sam had said there was more in him and he had not yet found it. The finding took 6 years. It took everything that those 6 years contained. Tammi Terrell’s death, the television footage of burning cities, Frankie’s stories from Vietnam, the two years of silence to create the conditions in which what Sam had pointed toward could finally be reached.

He had said, “I need you to still be here when I do.” Sam was not there, but the promise was. The pact, which is what the conversation had become in retrospect, in the way that conversations between people who understood each other deeply sometimes become agreements without being explicitly framed as agreements, was now a pact with someone who was gone.

 A commitment made to a voice that could no longer hear whether or how it was being honored. Marvin Gaye never spoke about this publicly. He never said, “Sam Cook told me to make the music that costs something and I promised him I would and then he died 3 days later and I have been trying to keep that promise ever since.” He was not that kind of man.

 He was a man who kept his most important things private, who did the significant work of his inner life without narrating it, who let the music speak for the commitments that the conversations had produced. But the music spoke. What’s Going On was the music speaking. Not directly about Sam, not as a tribute or a homage or an explicit acknowledgement of the conversation in December 1964, but as the fulfillment of what the conversation had pointed toward.

The music that told the truth, the music that costs something. The music that did the thing that Sam had described, reached inside people and touched something that almost nothing else could touch. Sam had said, “Make that. Whatever it costs, make that.” Marvin had said, “I will, but I need you to still be here when I do.

” He made it without Sam being there. He made it over the explicit opposition of Berry Gordy and the implicit opposition of an industry that was not ready for it, and he made it anyway. He made it because he had promised, not in the formal sense of a promise that was stated as a promise, but in the real sense, the sense that is binding regardless of its form, of a commitment made to someone whose opinion mattered and whose absence made keeping the commitment both harder and more necessary.

Let’s Get It On was the music speaking in a different register. Sexual Healing was the music speaking in yet another. E- Each album was a different attempt at the same thing. The The thing Sam had described. The music that reached inside people and accompanied them in whatever they were carrying.

 Each album was a different answer to the same commitment. The commitment made in December 1964, 3 days before Sam Cooke was killed, in a room in Los Angeles where two men had been honest with each other in the way that only happens when there is enough trust and enough shared understanding to make honesty feel safe. Sam Cooke was inducted in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1986.

 Marvin Gaye was inducted in 1987. They are on the list of the most important figures in the history of American popular music. Permanent neighbors, the man who showed what was possible and the man who spent 20 years trying to make it more possible, to extend what Sam had demonstrated into a larger and more sustained body of work. The pact between them, the one that was never explicitly made and never explicitly acknowledged and never spoken about publicly by the one man who was still alive to speak about it, is audible in every serious thing Marvin

Gaye ever made. In the willingness to fight for the music that told the truth, in the refusal to give the machine what it needed when what the machine needed was less than what the music required, in the specific, costly, necessary courage of an artist who had been told what he owed and had decided to pay it regardless of the price.

He never told anyone what Sam had said that night, but every album said it for him in the music that reached inside people. In the music that cost something, in the music that did what Sam had described, and in the specific irreplaceable quality of a voice that had been pointed toward the truth by another voice, and had spent 20 years trying to get there.

Sam Cooke had said, “Make that.” Marvin Gaye spent the rest of his life making it. If this story moved you, if you felt something hearing about a pact made in the last days of a life and kept for 20 years by the man who survived, subscribe and hit that like button. Share this video with someone who needs to be reminded that the promises we make to the people we have lost are the ones that shape everything we do after.

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