The scene is Studio A at Hitsville USA, 2648 West Grand Boulevard, Detroit. June 1, 1970. The control room is a converted bedroom; the vocal booth is taped-off carpet under a low ceiling. Marvin Gaye is months into a quiet rebellion against Berry Gordy — Gordy has called the song he is fighting for un-commercial, and Marvin has refused to record anything else until the label puts it out. The musicians are arriving for a session nobody upstairs believes in.
Eli Fontaine is loosening his embouchure on an alto saxophone in the corner. He plays a few drifting bars while the engineer fiddles with patch bays. He isn't being recorded — he thinks. Three minutes later, on playback, Marvin hears the warm-up bleeding faintly under the count-in and says two words: leave it.
That four-bar phrase, played by a man who believed he was clearing his lungs, became the opening of "What's Going On." Almost any musician under forty has heard those bars and felt something. The man who blew them did not mean to write them.
The story is not anomalous; it is the whole record. The greeting voices at the top — the chatter, the laughter, the "what's happenin', brother" — were captured because two of Marvin's friends, Mel Farr and Lem Barney of the Detroit Lions, dropped by and were never asked to leave. James Jamerson, the bassist, is said to have tracked his line lying flat on his back on the studio floor with the bass on his chest, because by midnight he had decided that was the only position from which his fingers would play that part. David Van DePitte's string arrangement was built around figures Marvin had sung into a cassette in a Cadillac. The album was assembled out of moments other producers would have erased.
The discipline that made it possible was not creative. It was perceptual. Marvin's job, once he had won the fight to make the record at all, was to mistake nothing for an accident. The warm-up was the song. The friends in the room were the song. The bass player's improvised posture was the song. A different producer hears Eli Fontaine's wandering and waves a hand — roll tape from the top. Marvin heard the same thing and recognized what it actually was: the first authoritative answer to the question the lyric was about to ask.
You can hear this discipline in other rooms. Link Wray slashing a speaker cone before "Rumble" because he heard what the broken cone said. The Beatles keeping the feedback that opens "I Feel Fine" — a two-second wash any tape op would have trimmed. Brian Eno later turning the principle into a card deck, so that other people could be reminded to listen for what they had already done.
The instinct is not loose. It is rigorous. It refuses the false economy of erasing the thing that arrived unannounced because it did not match the plan. The plan is a hypothesis about the song; the moment is the evidence. Most great records are not built from the take that was tried. They are built from the things nobody quite intended.
A producer who plans everything ends up with a record that exactly meets the plan. A producer who can hear ends up with a record nobody could have written down beforehand. Eli Fontaine spent the rest of his life telling people he hadn't meant to play it. Marvin's contribution was knowing he had.