Marvin Gaye and Jimi Hendrix Spent One Night in London — By Morning Jimi Was Gone — Both Changed D

London in the late 1960s was a city that had decided it was the center of the world and for a specific extraordinary brief period of time, it was not entirely wrong. The music that was coming out of that city, or more precisely, the music that was arriving in that city from everywhere else and being transformed by the specific alchemy of London’s particular cultural moment was unlike anything that had been produced anywhere before.

British bands who had spent their childhoods listening to American blues and rhythm and blues records were sending that music back across the Atlantic changed, amplified, electrified in ways that were simultaneously tribute and transformation. American artists who had found in Britain an audience more willing to receive them than the segregated markets at home were discovering that the distance from the country that had defined them gave them a new kind of creative freedom.

Into this world came two men from America who had nothing obviously in common except the music and the specific irreducible fact of what they each were. Marvin Gaye had arrived in London as part of the ongoing expansion of Motown’s international reach. The calculated, carefully managed process by which Berry Gordy was turning his Detroit label into a global enterprise.

He was a Motown artist on a Motown schedule doing what the Motown machine needed him to do, which was to be Marvin Gaye in public while whatever was actually going on inside him remained in the private space that the machine had no access to and no interest in. He was 30 years old, he had hits, he had fame.

He had a marriage that was complicated and a creative life that was constrained by the same commercial logic that had made him commercially successful. He was in London doing press and performances and the various industry obligations that a touring artist accumulates and somewhere in the margins of all of that, in the space between the scheduled events, he found himself in a room where Jimi Hendrix was also present.

Jimi Hendrix was 25, 26 years old. He had been in London for 2 years. He had arrived from America as a relatively unknown session guitarist, had been discovered by Chas Chandler of The Animals, had formed The Jimi Hendrix Experience, and had in the 18 months since his first UK release become the most talked about musician in the world.

Are You Experienced? Axes Bold as Love, albums that were changing what the guitar was understood to be capable of that that were expanding the language of rock music in ways that the people making rock music were still trying to fully absorb. He had also in that same period become a figure of considerable complexity in the specific social world of late 1960s London.

He moved through that world with a freedom and a velocity that was exhilarating to watch from the outside and that the people who were closest to him understood was also consuming. He was everywhere and he was extraordinary and he was underneath the extraordinary, a man from Seattle who had grown up in poverty and instability, and who had found in music the same thing that Marvin Gaye had found in it.

The one place where what he actually was could come out without the management and the constraint and the performance of something other than the real thing. They recognized each other. This is the fact that everyone who was present that evening has consistently described as the most immediate and most striking thing about the encounter.

The speed and the completeness with which these two men who operated in entirely different musical worlds and had almost no professional overlap found each other’s frequency. They did not need the conversation to warm up. They did not move through the usual stages of polite professional exchange before arriving at something real.

They were real from the beginning. What they had in common was not primarily the music, but something underneath the music. The specific quality of being a person for whom music was not a choice, but a necessity, for whom the voice or the instrument was not a means to an end, but the thing itself.

The primary way of being in the world, the mode of existence that made all other modes of existence possible. The thing that, if it were taken away, would not leave behind a person who had lost a career, but a person who had lost the organizing principle of their entire selfhood. They were also, both of them, black men from America who had found in London a kind of freedom they could not find at home. Not the freedom from racism.

London had its own forms of that, its own ways of welcoming and simultaneously othering the black American artists who came through it. But a freedom from the specific, comprehensive, interlocking system of American racism that had shaped both of their lives in ways that were still being processed and understood.

A freedom from the specific weight of being black in America in the 1960s. From the particular exhaustion of navigating a society that was simultaneously claiming to address its racial inequalities and demonstrating, every day, in every institution and every interaction, that the addressing had not yet arrived. In London, at least, they were primarily musicians.

They could walk into a room and be heard as artists before they were categorized as anything else. This was a partial freedom, an incomplete freedom. A freedom that came with its own complications and its own costs. But it was real enough to matter. The conversation that happened that night has been reconstructed over the decades from the accounts of people who were in the room, and from the traces it left in the work that both men produced in the period that followed.

None of these reconstructions can claim completeness. The specific words are not preserved. The exact content of what passed between them exists only in the memories of people who were present, and in the inferences that the the music allows. What the reconstructions agree on is the duration. They talked through the night from the time they found each other in whatever room they were they were in until the point at which London morning was visible through the windows and the conversation had reached whatever natural resting point it had been moving toward for hours. This was not unusual for either of them. Both were men who found mornings difficult and evenings generative, who did their best thinking and their most important living in the hours between midnight and dawn. They talked about music. Specifically, they talked about what they each understood music to be for and what it required from the people making it and what it owed the people listening

to it. These were questions that both of them had been asking from their different positions in their different musical worlds with an urgency and a seriousness that the commercial machinery surrounding both of them consistently failed to fully acknowledge. Jimi Hendrix’s answer to these questions was architectural.

He understood music as a structure, not in the formal academic sense of musical architecture, but in the sense of something that had the capacity to contain the full complexity of human experience, that could hold simultaneously the beautiful and the ugly, the gentle and the violent, the personal and the cosmic.

He built things with sound. He constructed sonic environments that were not just music, but worlds, places you could enter and move through and be changed by. He talked to Marvin about this, about the guitar as a technology for building those environments, about the specific physical experience of playing at volumes and with effects that most musicians of his era were not using, that created a relationship between the instrument and the body and the air of the room that was unlike anything else. He talked about the freedom of it, the way that playing like this removed the gap between intention and sound, made the instrument an extension of the nervous system rather than something being operated by the nervous system. Marvin listened with the complete penetrating attention that was one of his most essential qualities. He was hearing something that was both entirely foreign to his own musical world and entirely resonant with the thing he had been trying to understand about his own

work. The gap that Jimmy was describing, the gap between intention and sound, the gap between what you meant and what came out was the same gap that had been occupying Marvin since Ray Charles told him he was singing someone else’s life years earlier. The gap that What’s Going On was in some sense his attempt to close.

He talked to Jimmy about this, about the voice as an instrument with limits and possibilities that were different from the guitar’s limits and possibilities, but that shared the same fundamental challenge. The challenge of getting what was actually inside you to come out in the music rather than a managed, mediated version of it.

The challenge of closing the gap between the person and the performance, of making the performance the person rather than something the person was doing. Jimmy heard this and recognized it. He had spent his career in London being told that what he did with the guitar was technically extraordinary and it was but that the technical extraordinariness was the point.

The people around him in the British rock world were so dazzled by the mechanics of what he did that they consistently missed the thing underneath the mechanics, the thing that the mechanics were in service of, the emotional content. The specific, personal, culturally specific content of a black man from Seattle who had grown up poor and unstable and who was putting all of that into the guitar in ways that the white British musicians who admired him could hear as virtuosity but could not fully decode as testimony. Marvin heard the testimony. He had been trained by his own life and his own music and his own ongoing negotiation with the gap between what he was and what he was allowed to be in public. To hear the thing underneath the technical surface, he heard what Jimmy was saying not just in the conversation, but in what he understood about the music from having listened to it. He told Jimmy that he was the most honest musician he had encountered in years. Not the most skilled, not the most innovative, the most honest.

In the specific sense of honesty that was the thing Marvin valued most and struggled with most. The quality of a sound that was the direct unmediated expression of the person producing it. The quality that Ray Charles had heard was missing from Marvin’s early work and that Marvin had spent years trying to find. Jimmy was surprised by this.

He was not accustomed to being told by someone whose artistic seriousness he immediately recognized that what he did was honest rather than spectacular. The distinction mattered to him in a way that was visible to Marvin and that Marvin understood because it was the same distinction that mattered most to him. They talked until morning.

By the time the light was coming through the windows, something had shifted in both of them. Not in a dramatic, explicitly articulable way, neither of them would have been able to say in the morning exactly what had changed or how or why. But something had moved. Some calibration had adjusted. Some understanding had arrived that had not been present the night before.

Jimmy left. He always left before the conversations were fully finished. This was part of his nature, part of the specific restlessness that characterized him. The conversation between them had not ended, had simply reached a point at which he needed to go and he went. Marvin sat in the room after he left and looked out the window at London morning.

He was thinking about what Jimmy had said about the gap between intention and sound, about the guitar as a technology for eliminating that gap, about what the equivalent technology was for the voice. He went back to Detroit. He went back into the Motown machine. He continued doing what the machine required.

But something had changed in the way he listened to his own voice on playback, in the way he thought about what he was trying to do when he stood in front of a microphone. In the specific, gradual, barely perceptible shift in his understanding of what closing the gap actually required.

Jimi Hendrix died on September 18th, 1970. He was 27 years old. He had been alive for the conversation in London, and he was gone before Marvin Gaye released What’s Going On, which came out in May 1971. He did not get to hear what had come out of that night, what the conversation had contributed to, what Marvin had eventually found after years of looking for the thing that the night in London had pointed toward.

But it was there. In What’s Going On, in the specific quality of presence that the album carried, the sense of a man who had finally eliminated the gap between himself and the music, who was singing his own life rather than someone else’s, who had found the technology for closing the distance between intention and sound.

It was there in the conversational, intimate quality of the recordings, in the way the multiple layered voices created the same effect that Jimmy’s layered guitar parts created, the sense of a whole world being built inside the music, of a complete environment that the listener could enter and be changed by.

They had talked about the same thing from different sides. Jimi with the guitar, Marvin with the voice. The same question, the same challenge, the same fundamental commitment to honesty as the highest form of musical expression. One of them lived long enough to find his answer. The other found his answer and then showed the world what it sounded like.

The night in London was one night. The conversation that happened in it was one conversation, and neither of the men who had it could have told you the morning after exactly what had been said or what it was going to produce, but the music knew, the music always knew, and in the years that followed in What’s Going On and Let’s Get It On and everything that Marvin Gaye made after that night in London, the conversation continued in the only language that either of them had ever fully trusted, the music kept talking. It is still talking now to if this story moved you, if you felt something hearing about two artists who found each other’s frequency in the space of one night and changed after. Subscribe and hit that like button. Share this video with someone who needs to be reminded that the most important conversations sometimes happen in the margins of the scheduled life and leave a mark that never fully fades. Leave a comment telling us what does Marvin Gaye’s music mean to you. Ring

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