Al Green Looked at Marvin Gaye and Said You Are Not Singing From God — Marvin Could Not Argue D

It was the early 1970s and two men were circling the same question from different sides of the same city. Not literally the same city. Marvin Gaye was in Los Angeles, Al Green was in Memphis. But in the geography of black American music, they occupied the same territory. The territory of soul music at its highest and most serious expression.

The territory where the music stopped being entertainment and started being testimony. Where the voice stopped performing emotion and started transmitting it. Where the listener stopped being an audience and started being a witness. They were both in that territory at the same time.

And the territory was not large enough to accommodate two people of that stature without the question arising. Not publicly, not in the explicit, commercial way of a chart battle or a radio war, but in the private, serious, ongoing conversation that the music world has with itself about who is doing the thing most completely, most honestly, most fully.

Of who was doing it better. The question was never answered directly. It was not that kind of question and they were not that kind of men. But it was present. In the reviews and the critical conversations and the industry gossip and the specific, charged atmosphere of any room that both of them were known to be in at the same time.

And then they were in the same room. The meeting happened in Memphis in the early 1970s during a period when both of them were at the absolute peak of their creative powers. The details of how it came about, who arranged it, what the professional pretext was, whether it was planned or accidental, are not entirely clear.

What is clear is that Marvin Gaye and Al Green found themselves in the same building in Memphis. And that something happened between them that both of them talked about afterward in the careful, elliptical way of people who were describing the outline of something without giving access to its full interior.

Al Green had arrived at his peak through a route that was in some respects the mirror image of Marvin’s. Both of them had grown up in the black church. Both of them had brought the gospel tradition into secular music. Had taken the emotional technology of church music and applied it to the rhythms and subjects of everyday life.

The loves and losses and desires and griefs that constituted the actual texture of the lives of the people who were listening. Both of them had found in the space between the sacred and the secular a kind of music that was more powerful than either alone because it carried the emotional depth of the one and the human specificity of the other.

But the routes had been different. Marvin had come through Motown’s machine. Through the commercial discipline and the artistic constraint and the long, painful, eventually triumphant battle to make music that matched what he actually had to say rather than what the machine needed him to say. He had earned his artistic freedom through conflict.

Through years of giving the machine what it needed and slowly, quietly, building toward the moment when he could give it what he needed instead. Al Green had arrived differently. He had not come through a machine that told him what to say. He had come through a collaboration with producer Willie Mitchell and the Hi Records house band in Memphis.

That had been from the beginning a creative partnership rather than a commercial transaction. Willie Mitchell had heard something in Al Green’s voice that he wanted to build around rather than contain and what resulted from that hearing was a string of albums in the early 1970s. Let’s Stay Together, I’m Still in Love with You, Call Me.

That had a quality of unity and coherence and artistic intention that was remarkable even by the standards of an era producing remarkable music. What Al Green had that Marvin Gaye had spent a decade fighting for was already present in his work from the beginning. The freedom. The specific, unmanaged, completely present quality of a voice that was not performing emotion but transmitting it.

The sense of a man singing exactly what he needed to sing in exactly the way it needed to be sung without the gap that Ray Charles had heard in Marvin’s early work and that Marvin had spent 10 years closing. Marvin had heard Al Green’s records. He had heard them the way serious artists hear the work of other serious artists who are doing something in the same territory.

With total attention, with the specific, uncomfortable recognition of someone encountering work that illuminates the distance between where they are and where the music can go. He had said things about Al Green in private conversations with people who knew him well that reflected this recognition. He had called him a natural.

He had said that what Al Green did with his voice was something that could not be manufactured or learned or fought for. That it was constitutional. The product of a specific arrangement of gifts that some people are born with. And that no amount of work or determination can fully replicate. He had said this with admiration.

And underneath the admiration was something that was not quite jealousy but was adjacent to it. The specific, honest acknowledgement of a man who had spent a decade earning something that another man seems to have arrived with. When they met in Memphis, the conversation that followed was not the conversation of two men competing for a title.

It was the conversation of two men who recognized in each other the same fundamental commitment and the same fundamental question. The question of what the voice was for, what the music owed the people who listened to it, what it meant to sing from a place of genuine honesty rather than skilled performance.

Al Green had an answer to that question that was different from Marvin’s answer. His answer was theological. Not in the academic sense, not in the institutional church sense, but in the personal, experiential sense of a man who believed with complete conviction and without the ambiguity that most people bring to religious belief, that the voice was a gift from God.

And that using it honestly meant using it in service of God. That the highest expression of the gift was the expression that was most clearly in alignment with the divine source from which it came. He said this to Marvin. Not as doctrine, not as a position he was defending, but as the simple statement of what he believed, delivered in the direct, unpretentious way of someone for whom the statement was so fundamental that it required no elaboration or argument.

He said, “Only one of us is singing from God.” The room was quiet for a moment. What he meant by this was not that Marvin Gaye’s music was ungodly. Al Green was not a man who made that kind of simple, dismissive judgement about other people’s work. What he meant was something more specific and more personal.

He was describing his own experience. He was saying that when he sang, he was singing from a place that he understood as divine. A place of complete alignment between who he was and what he was doing. A place where the voice and the message and the source were all the same thing. And that he heard in Marvin’s music a voice of extraordinary quality reaching toward that place but not yet there.

Not yet in the complete alignment that he was describing. Marvin agreed. Not because he was being deferential. Not because Al Green had an authority over him that required agreement. Marvin Gaye was not a man who agreed with things he did not believe in order to avoid conflict or maintain a comfortable social surface.

He agreed because what Al Green said was true and he recognized it as true in the same moment that he heard it. He was not singing from God. He was singing from everything. From his father’s house and his mother’s love and the years at Motown and the battle with Gordy and the grief for Tammy and the rage at what was happening in the world and the desire and the longing and the faith that kept surviving despite everything that tested it.

He was singing from all of it simultaneously and what came out was extraordinary, was real, was something that reached people in a place that most music could not reach. But it was not the specific thing that Al Green was describing. The complete alignment. The place where the instrument and the message and the source were one thing rather than the complicated, multiple, sometimes contradictory thing that Marvin’s music contained.

He understood this. He had understood it before Al Green said it in some unarticulated form that the conversation had given a language to. And the giving of a language to something that has been present without language has consequences. He went back to Los Angeles and he disappeared. Not immediately.

Not in a single dramatic withdrawal that announced itself as a response to the conversation in Memphis. But gradually, over the weeks and months that followed, Marvin Gaye began to retreat from the world in a way that the people around him recognized as significant without fully understanding its cause.

He stopped performing. Not for the first time. He had done this before after Tammy’s death and had emerged from the silence with What’s Going On. But this silence was different. The previous silence had been productive in the visible sense of producing music. The recordings that became the album, the creative ferment that was legible to the people around him as work even when it did not look like work.

This silence was quieter than that. More internal. Less oriented toward a specific creative output and more oriented toward a question that had been given a new and more precise form by what Al Green had said in that room in Memphis. What was the voice for? He had asked this question before. He had been asking it since Ray Charles told him he was singing someone else’s life.

He had found one answer to it in What’s Going On. The answer that said the voice was for truth, for testimony, for the specific, urgent, morally serious act of looking at the world clearly and saying what was there. He had found another answer in Let’s Get It On. The answer that said the voice was for intimacy, for desire, for the particular, embodied human experience of wanting and being wanted that the church had always told him was incompatible with the sacred.

But, Al Green was pointing toward a third answer. An answer that contained both of the others and went beyond them. An answer that said the voice was for something that aligned all of these things. The truth, and the desire, and the faith. Into a single, unified, completely present act of singing that was simultaneously personal and universal and divine.

He did not know how to make that. He had not yet found the conditions under which making it was possible. And in the absence of those conditions, he went quiet. Two years. The disappearance lasted in its most complete form, approximately two years. Not an absolute silence. He was not entirely absent from the music world, did not entirely stop making records.

But, a retreat from the full engagement that his career had required. A withdrawal from the performing and the public presence and the commercial activity that the industry needed from him. During those two years, Al Green was doing something of his own. He was moving toward the conclusion that what he had told Marvin in Memphis was not just a description of his music, but a prescription for his life.

That the complete alignment he was describing, the place where the instrument and the message and the source were one thing, required not just a particular quality of singing, but a particular quality of living. That you could not sing from God indefinitely while living in ways that were not aligned with what that source required.

In 1974, a woman poured boiling grits on Al Green during an argument and then took her own life. He experienced this as a divine message. As a call. He became an ordained minister and began moving away from secular music toward gospel. He did not stop making beautiful music. The gospel recordings he made in the following decades were extraordinary.

Were the work of a voice that had found its fullest expression in the alignment he had been describing all along. But, the secular Al Green, the Al Green of Let’s Stay Together and I’m Still in Love With You, that Al Green was largely finished. Marvin watched this. He watched the man who had told him that only one of them was singing from God make the decision to sing only from God and accept whatever that cost commercially and professionally.

He watched and he felt something that was not quite relief and not quite grief and not quite recognition, but some combination of all three. He came back from his two-year retreat with Sexual Healing. Which is not, on the surface, a song that is obviously about the question that Al Green had raised in Memphis.

It is a song about desire. About the specific, urgent, embodied need for human connection and physical intimacy that is the subject of the most popular music But, underneath the desire and the specific quality of the voice that was delivering it, something had changed. Something that the two years of quiet had produced.

A quality of presence that was different from what had been there before. More complete, more unified, more like the thing Al Green had described as singing from a single source, rather than from the complicated multiple of everything that Marvin contained. He had not achieved what Al Green had achieved.

He had not found the complete alignment, the place where all of it was one thing. But, he had gotten closer. The two years of quiet had moved him in the direction that the conversation in Memphis had pointed toward, and what came out the other side was music that reached people in a way that even his earlier work had not quite reached them.

Sexual Healing was number one. It won two Grammys. It proved that the voice could still do what it did even after everything the years had put through it. But, Marvin Gaye was 44 years old. He had, at most, 18 months left to find the answer to the question that Al Green had given its most precise form in that room in Memphis. He did not find it.

He was not given enough time to find it. Al Green is still alive. He is still singing. He is still, by his own account, singing from the place he described in Memphis. The complete alignment. The single source. The voice and the message and the origin as one thing. The gospel recordings he has made in the decades since the 1970s are the work of a man who found what he was looking for and has stayed found.

Marvin found his way closer to it. But, he did not get there. And the question of what he might have made, what the voice might have been capable of, if he had been given another decade to keep moving in the direction the conversation in Memphis had pointed, that question sits alongside the other unanswered questions of his life and career as evidence that what was lost was real and significant and not replaceable by anything that exists.

He agreed with Al Green in that room in Memphis. He said, “You are right.” And then he disappeared for two years. And when he came back, the voice was closer to the thing that Al Green had described. Not there, but closer. Closer than it had ever been. If this story moved you, if you felt something hearing about two men asking the same question and arriving at different answers and what the asking cost both of them, subscribe and hit that like button.

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