Marvin Gaye Called Aretha the Night Before Their Session — Said He Couldn’t — She Never Forgave Him D

There is a version of music history that does not exist. In this version, two voices, the two greatest voices that black America produced in the 20th century, by the consensus of almost everyone who has ever been asked the question seriously, found each other in a recording studio in Detroit in the early 1970s and made an album together.

An album that would have contained everything that each of them was separately trying to say, and that the combination of their specific gifts would have allowed to say more completely than either of them could have said alone. In this version, the album exists. People listen to it. Critics write about it.

It sits alongside What’s Going On and Amazing Grace and the other landmarks of that era as evidence of what was possible when the most serious artists of a generation were given the space and the time and the creative freedom to make something that matched the full extent of their ambition. That version of history does not exist.

The album was never made. What exists instead is the phone call. Late at night, the night before the sessions were supposed to begin, a man picked up a telephone and called a woman and said something that she never fully forgave him for. Something that was honest in the way that Marvin Gaye’s honesty was always honest, not managed, not softened, not shaped for the comfort of the person receiving it, but direct and complete and exactly true in the moment it was spoken.

He said he could not do it. And Aretha Franklin, who had cleared her schedule and prepared herself and believed in this project with the specific serious fully committed belief of an artist who recognizes a genuine creative opportunity when it is placed in front of her, listened to those words and felt something that she would carry for a very long time.

To understand what the phone call meant. To understand what was lost when Marvin Gaye said he could not do it and what it cost both of them in ways that went beyond the album that was never made. You need to understand what Marvin Gaye and Aretha Franklin were to each other. What they had been from the beginning and what the possibility of this collaboration had represented to both of them.

They had known each other since they were young. Both of them had grown up in the world of the black church. Aretha in Detroit, the daughter of C.L. Franklin, whose New Bethel Baptist Church was one of the most important cultural institutions in the city. Marvin in Washington, D.C. in the Pentecostal tradition of his father’s ministry.

They had both learned to sing in church before they learned to sing professionally. They had both carried out of that church education the same foundational understanding of what music was for. Not entertainment, not commerce, but testimony. The specific irreplaceable act of standing in front of people and giving them something true.

When they encountered each other in the Motown world, Aretha tangentially connected through her Detroit roots and her presence in the black music world that Motown dominated, Marvin as one of Motown’s central artists. The recognition was immediate. Not personal, necessarily. Not the recognition of two people who are going to become close friends or romantic partners or the other forms of intimate connection that generate the most compelling stories.

The recognition of two artists who understood, from the first moment they were in the same room, that the other person was doing the same thing they were doing. Reaching for the same thing. Speaking the same language at the same level of fluency and the same level of seriousness. They respected each other in the specific way that serious artists respect other serious artists.

Not with the easy, publicly performed admiration that is more about one’s own reputation than about the quality of the other person’s work, but with the genuine, private, sometimes uncomfortable recognition that the other person has access to something you need, that their gifts illuminate something about what you are trying to do that you cannot fully see from inside your own work.

Marvin respected Aretha’s voice in a way that he did not often articulate publicly, but that the people who knew him well could hear in the way he talked about music when her name came up. He called it the truth. Not a voice that contained the truth or expressed the truth or pointed toward the truth, but a voice that simply was the truth, that had no gap between what it was producing and what was actually real.

He had spent his entire career trying to close that gap in his own work, trying to sing in a way that had no distance between what he felt and what the listener received. And Aretha Franklin, in his assessment, had closed it completely. She had accomplished what he was still working toward.

And he found this simultaneously inspiring and destabilizing in the way that encountering genuine mastery in a direction you are moving can be both of those things. Aretha respected Marvin in a different way. She respected the ambition of what he was trying to do. She had heard What’s Going On when it was released in 1971 and had understood immediately that it was something that changed the terms of what was possible, that it had expanded the frame of what a soul album was allowed to be in ways that everyone who came after would have to reckon with. She had heard in it not just a great album, but a proof of concept, a demonstration that the music she believed in was capable of more than even its greatest practitioners had previously demanded of it. She respected him for demanding more, for fighting for the right to demand more, for standing in Berry Gordy’s office and saying he would not make another love song until he had said what needed to be said, and then making What’s Going On and being vindicated so completely and so publicly that nobody could pretend

the fight had not been worth fighting. The idea of making an album together had been forming for years before it was ever formally proposed. It was one of those ideas that existed in the music world the way certain ideas exist, not quite spoken, not quite planned, but present in the atmosphere of every conversation between people who knew both artists and who had spent any time thinking about what their combined gifts might produce.

Jerry Wexler, who had signed Aretha to Atlantic and produced the recordings that had made her Lady Soul, had been thinking about it. Berry Gordy had been thinking about it with the specific commercial calculation of a man who understood that a duet album featuring Marvin Gaye and Aretha Franklin would sell in numbers that made the investment extremely attractive.

But the idea had not moved from the atmosphere into the practical reality of a scheduled session and a planned album and the specific detailed arrangements that turning a creative vision into a Motown production required. Not until the early 1970s. The details of how the project came together, whose idea it was in the specific originating sense, who made the call that moved it from possibility to reality, what conversations happened between Gordy and Wexler and the artists themselves, are not entirely clear from the public record. What is clear is that by some point in the early 1970s, the album was being planned. Dates were being discussed. A framework for what the record would sound like and what it would contain was being developed. Aretha was committed. She had heard enough of what Marvin was doing in the studio in the What’s Going On period to understand that a collaboration between them would require her to bring everything she had.

Not the carefully managed, commercially considered version of herself that certain contexts required, but the full thing. The church thing. The thing that her voice had been doing since she was a child standing in her father’s church in Detroit and the congregation stopped what they were doing and stared.

She prepared for it. She is a person who prepares, who brings to everything she does the discipline and the seriousness and the total commitment that genuine mastery requires, who treats the creative work as something that demands everything and gives it everything. She prepared for the album with Marvin Gaye the way she prepared for everything that mattered to her, completely.

The session was scheduled. The studio was booked. The musicians were arranged. The specific practical machinery of a Motown recording session was put in motion, pointing toward a date in the early 1970s when Marvin Gaye and Aretha Franklin would be in the same studio and would make something together.

The phone rang the night before. Marvin’s voice on the line was the voice he used when he was being direct. Not the performing voice, not the voice he used in interviews or in public situations where some management of impression was required, but the private, honest, unmediated voice that the people who knew him well recognized as the voice that meant he was about to say something true regardless of how it landed.

He said he could not do it. He did not say he did not want to do it. He did not say the project was bad or that the concept was wrong or that Aretha was not the right partner. He said he could not do it. In the specific, honest, internally transparent way that Marvin Gaye spoke about his own limitations when he was being most honest about them.

What he meant by this, the specific content of the inability he was describing, is something that requires the full context of who Marvin Gaye was in the early 1970s to fully understand. He was in the middle of something, not just the What’s Going On battle, though that was part of it. Something larger.

A confrontation with his own artistic identity that had been building for years and that the What’s Going On period had made acute. A question about what he was trying to do and whether he was doing it and whether the specific creative situation of a duet album, with all the compromises and negotiations and mutual accommodations that making music with another artist of equal stature requires, was a situation in which he could do it.

He was afraid that making an album with Aretha Franklin would require him to be a version of himself that was not the version he was trying to become, that the The of their voices and their histories and the commercial expectations that surrounded any project featuring both of their names would pull the music towards something that was technically extraordinary but not the true thing.

Not the thing that What’s Going On had been. Not the thing he was still trying to figure out how to be. He was afraid, in other words, of the collaboration itself. Of what two voices that powerful in the hands of producers whose commercial instincts were as refined as Gordy’s and Wexler’s would inevitably become.

Of the gap between what the album would be and what he needed to make. He said he could not do it. Aretha listened to this. She heard it with the specific penetrating attention of a woman who had spent her life learning to hear what people were actually saying underneath what they appeared to be saying.

She heard the fear in it. She heard the honesty in it. She heard the specific particular quality of Marvin Gaye being completely truthful about something that was costing him to be truthful about. And she did not forgive him. Not because she could not understand the honesty. Aretha Franklin was not a person who was incapable of understanding honesty.

She was one of the most honest artists who ever lived, had made her entire career from the specific uncompromising transmission of what was true. She understood honesty. She did not forgive him because the honesty arrived too late. Because the schedule had been made and the musicians had been booked and the studio had been reserved and she had prepared herself.

Completely. In the way she prepared for everything that mattered. And the phone call came the night before. Not weeks before. Not with enough time to process and adjust and find another path. The night before. The album that was never made is one of the great losses of that era. Not because what they separately made was insufficient.

Aretha’s Amazing Grace and Marvin’s What’s Going On are among the most complete artistic achievements in the history of recorded music. But because what they might have made together was something that existed in a space that neither of them could fully access alone, that required the collision of their specific gifts to become possible.

And that the phone call the night before made certain would never happen. They remained in the same world. They encountered each other at industry events and award ceremonies and the various occasions that the music industry creates for bringing its most significant figures into the same room. The relationship was cordial in the public sense.

Professional, respectful, maintaining the surface of two people who understood each other’s importance and treated each other accordingly. But Aretha never fully forgave him. The people close to her have confirmed this in the careful protective way of people who are relaying something they know to be true without violating the trust of the person whose private feelings they are describing.

She carried it. Not obsessively. Not in a way that defined her relationship to Marvin or to his music or to the world they both inhabited. But she carried it. Because what Marvin had done, however honest his reasons, however understandable the fear that had produced them, was something that had a specific cost.

The cost of a creative opportunity that does not come again. That arrives once in a specific configuration that makes it possible and then is gone. The album could have been rescheduled. The sessions could have been pushed back, rearranged, approached differently. But the specific moment, the alignment of who they both were in the early 1970s, at that particular point in their respective artistic journeys, that moment could not be recovered.

Marvin Gaye died in 1984 without making the album. Aretha Franklin died in 2018 without having made it either. The album remains in the territory of what might have been. Alongside the other great artistic collaborations that circumstances prevented, the recordings that were never recorded, the music that the world did not hear because the people who might have made it could could not find, in the time they had, the conditions under which making it was possible.

There is a version of music history that does not exist. In this version, two voices found each other in a studio and made something that matched the full extent of what they were capable of together. Marvin called the night before. And the version that does not exist remained the version that does not exist.

What we have instead is everything they each made separately. Which is more than enough to understand what was there. More than enough to hear, in the spaces between what Marvin made and what Aretha made, the conversation they were having with each other even when they were not in the same room. The album that was never made is present in both of their bodies of work.

In the specific ways that each of them pushed against the limits of what their music was allowed to be. In the questions they were both asking and the answers they were each, separately, finding. They made the album. Just not together. Just not in the same room. Just not in the version of history that required a phone call not to be made.

The other version, the one that does not exist, would have been extraordinary. What exists is not less than that. But it is different. And the difference matters. If this story moved you, if you felt something hearing about the music that was never made and the phone call that prevented it, subscribe and hit that like button.

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