by Bob Stanley
While Ertegun was the smooth businessman, immaculate in dress and manners, and Dowd was the diligent kid at the mixing desk, Wexler could be relied upon for cultural broadsides and grand pronouncements, and soon became the Matthew Arnold of pop. He had grounds, too. For a start, he was the man who, while working at Billboard, had coined the expression ‘rhythm and blues’, instantly granting what was previously called the race chart a little more respect. He also understood the mechanics: soul, he said, was ‘a semantic fabrication. It was just a stage of the music, it evolved to a certain point.’ But, when you got right down to it, ‘it was rhythm and blues’. Ertegun, Dowd and Wexler. All three, like Leiber and Stoller, like Andrew Oldham, were very sure of themselves, their taste and their ideas on pop culture.
Ertegun, though, was first and foremost a money man. Before starting the label he spent a year hanging around a friend’s record shop, getting a feel for what people were seeking out. One day in 1948 he was on the phone to a record distributor in New Orleans who was looking to buy five thousand copies of Stick McGhee’s ‘Drinkin’ Wine Spo-Dee-o-Dee’. The original label, Ertegun discovered, had just gone bust. He tracked McGhee down that same day and re-recorded the song, selling six hundred thousand copies and financing Atlantic’s studio recordings for the next few years.
Ertegun’s first love was the blues, which is where Ray Charles came from. Initially, Charles was a pianist with a gift for mimicking his heroes Louis Jordan, Nat King Cole and Charles Brown. Occasionally he’d hint at what was to come with an arresting, untamed vocal – as on Leiber and Stoller’s ‘The Snow Is Falling’ in ’51 – but Atlantic pampered him until he struck gold. First he wrote ‘I Got a Woman’, an R&B number one in January ’55 based on the Southern Tones’ gospel record ‘It Must Be Jesus’, and later covered by Elvis Presley, the Beatles and Them. Then in ’59 came ‘What’d I Say’, a call-and-response record of yeahs, oohs and ahhs that lasted six minutes and was equal parts church revival and bordello dirt.3 It sounded like nothing that had gone before. From this point until the mid-sixties Charles was cited as an influence by pretty much every aspiring musician, from Stevie Wonder to the Searchers: Brother Ray, the Genius, Soul Brother Number One. In no doubt of his ability, he became a dilettante, first cutting jazz instrumental albums, then toying with country on a cover of Hoagy Carmichael’s ‘Georgia on My Mind’ (US no. 1 ’60), a single that bled its torn loyalties – the South was home, but in 1960 it was also on the civil-rights frontline. Charles cut a whole album, Modern Sounds in Country and Western, in 1962. Blending country and soul was brave, but a delicate operation. By now he had left Atlantic after getting a large cheque from ABC-Paramount. Without Ertegun, Wexler and Dowd to question his judgement, Brother Ray went headfirst into the orchestrated countrypolitan sound and scored two of the biggest hits of his career (‘I Can’t Stop Loving You’, ‘You Don’t Know Me’, both US and UK Top 10) and a US number-one album. But the commercial success of this fusion diluted his artistic impulses – jazz, blues, even R&B were largely abandoned. By the mid-sixties he had repeated the country trick much too often (the sequel was called Modern Sounds in Country and Western 2), hurting his credibility with his rock-critic fanbase and fellow musicians so badly that he was barely spoken of by the end of the decade.
Barbara Lewis was maybe the most underrated Atlantic act, with a voice like polished jade on the half-fairground, half-boudoir shuffle ‘Hello Stranger’ (US no. 3 ’62): you would die happy if, just the once, someone sang the song directly to you. Aretha Franklin, though, was their biggest signing in every sense. With a voice that wrecked microphones half a mile distant, she sang like a force of nature. Signed to Columbia by John Hammond – who perceived her as a successor to Billie Holiday – Aretha had released some fine, softly sung material, but, bringing her to Atlantic in ’67, Ahmet Ertegun encouraged her to let rip, and the volume rarely dropped below eleven on any of her Atlantic singles from ’67 onwards.4 Even on ‘I Say a Little Prayer’ (UK no. 4, US no. 10 ’68) she sounds confined, straitjacketed, first at her dressing table, then her work desk; compare it to Dionne Warwick’s lavender-dabbed rendition and you know in a trice whose love is the more physical.
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All across America there were equivalent, if less successful, versions of Stax and Atlantic. More than any other modern pop genre, soul had identifiable regional variations, usually with their own local imprint. Generally, the further south you headed, the rawer, more gargled and more guttural it became, while the north – especially Detroit – was more about straight-ahead dancefloor action; simply, one was more agrarian, one more industrial. Cincinatti had King, a bruiser of a label, covering hardcore black music across the board with no particular interest in crossing over. Their lynchpin was James Brown, who never quite reached number one but had more hit singles in America than anyone bar Elvis. Houston, Texas, was home to Duke (Bobby Bland) and Backbeat (Carl Carlton); Nashville provided intense country soul on the SSS International group of labels; New York had the Scepter and Wand labels owned by Florence Greenberg, home to the stentorian Chuck Jackson5 and Tommy Hunt, both very adult, well groomed, manly singers. Wand was also home to Maxine Brown, a one-time beauty queen with a smile that could make you buckle and bend, and she sang like no gauche teenager: their records defined ‘uptown’ or ‘big-city soul’ – mid-tempo, heavily orchestrated, fond of tympani and Latin flicks and fancies.
As the genre tightened, became more immediately recognisable, more consciously manufactured, Aretha Franklin became its figurehead. Nicknamed Lady Soul, she was less about elegance than R.E.S.P.E.C.T. Her legend, which has survived some disastrous records,6 tends to reduce all other female soul singers to the runner-up category: ‘There are singers,’ said Ray Charles, ‘then there is Aretha. She towers above the rest. Others are good, but Aretha is great.’ For my money there were several who had a little less lung power, but were more nuanced: Betty Harris, Bettye LaVette and Gladys Knight. With a crack in her voice that she used sparingly, exquisitely, and with her round cheeks and liquid eyes, Gladys Knight was a true Georgia peach, and many claim her bone-rattling take on ‘I Heard It through the Grapevine’, a US number two in late ’67, is at least the equal of Marvin Gaye’s hit a year hence. More than anyone, she presented soul as an adult format. Moving north in the early sixties she hooked up with Van McCoy,7 a New York writer/producer of almost unwavering class and melodic strength: he gave Gladys her best material, from the stately, neo-classical string-bed of ‘Giving Up’ in ’64 to the Sprite-lite disco ‘Baby Don’t Change Your Mind’ thirteen years later. In between was a lengthy sojourn with Motown, who underused her talents horribly. By the mid-seventies, signed to Buddah, she was accessing Jim Weatherly’s country-soul writing (‘Midnight Train to Georgia’, US no. 1 ’73) and movie themes (‘The Way We Were’, UK no. 4 ’74), a palette broad enough to make her the cross-border superstar that Atlantic had dearly wanted Aretha Franklin to become. These days Gladys Knight runs a chain of chicken and waffle restaurants, and has taken to calling herself the Empress of Soul. I’m not going to argue.
Philadelphia had been a major player on the US charts since the demise of classic rock ’n’ roll and the rise of teen-idol pop at the end of the fifties, largely because of a TV show called American Bandstand. Presented by Dick Clark, it offered a wholesome pop mix that kids wanted and parents couldn’t object to. It also changed the rules of American television by being multiracial. The main beneficiary of the show was a local label called Cameo Parkway, and they had a real find in sixteen-year-old Dee Dee Sharp. Her 1962 single ‘Mashed Potato Time’ (US no. 2) was a direct steal from the Marvelettes’ ‘Please Mr Postman’ but was irresistible, one of the finest girl-group 45s, all chorus and squealed anguish. She followed it with soundalikes (‘Gravy’, ‘Ride’, ‘Do the Bird’, all US Top 10 hits), before being given the bossa-soul ‘Wild’8 in ’63; from this point on her records sold progressively less but got more beautiful. Performing 1965’s ‘I Really Love You�
�, a ripe ballad with what sounds like a full symphony orchestra behind its depth-charge percussion, she sounds desperate, heavily lipglossed, sultry as hell. It was magical, but struggled to number seventy-eight in late ’65 – Dee Dee had to make do with being both a has-been and a forerunner of the decade ahead.
Also from Philly, Barbara Mason had one of the laziest, most coquettish voices in all pop. Her biggest hit, a US number-five hit on the tiny Arctic label in 1965, was ‘Yes I’m Ready’, a faux-naive song with a wide-eyed, out-of-tune vocal by teenage Barbara: ‘I don’t even know how to love you, but I’m ready to learn.’ She sang as if she had one finger in her mouth, making baby eyes at the poor sap who was about to fall hook, line and sinker. ‘I don’t even know how to hold your hand.’ Who was she fooling? All her records were decidedly handmade, adding to their charm. In the seventies she made the tense, repetitive and breathy ‘Give Me Your Love’ with Curtis Mayfield; the eighties saw her nudging a little harder, scoring a club hit with a song about a bisexual boyfriend, ‘Another Man’ (UK no. 45 ’84).
Chicago had been the home of urban blues in the forties and fifties, which subtly informed its soul in the sixties. The Dells, from Harvey, Illinois, deserve a mention here if only for their longevity. Formed in 1952, they were a presence on the Chicago scene all the way through R&B, doo wop and soul’s mutations. Their songs usually built from a quiet group-harmony base, subtle, almost supper club, until the moment when their baritone Marvin Junior stepped in, and then all hell broke loose. On the churchy ‘Stay in My Corner’ (US no. 10 ’68), the aerated skip of ‘It’s All Up to You’ (no. 94 ’72), or even on ‘Love Is Blue’, originally Luxembourg’s 1967 Eurovision entry and the Dells’ sole UK hit in 1969, he sounded like he’d been asked to encapsulate the sum of human suffering inside thirty seconds.9 Curtis Mayfield, though, was the king of Chicago soul, and the best ambassador the genre ever had. While Atlantic loved to cut deals, invest heavily and duly accrue the riches, Mayfield was the people’s champion. ‘It’s All Right’, he sang, have a good time ’cos it’s all right.
Leader of the Impressions, he had a sweet, high-registered voice, and his face beamed gentle inspiration. He radiated yearning on their first hit, 1961’s castanet-heavy ‘Gypsy Woman’, a minimalist one-act soul tableau; he radiated devotional love on 1964’s deathlessly pretty ‘I’m So Proud’ (US no. 14 ’64). He radiated kindness and innocence, and the Impressions’ run of sixties hits – ‘I’m the One Who Loves You’, ‘Talking ’Bout My Baby’, ‘You Must Believe Me’, ‘Meeting Over Yonder’ – is one of the most uplifting sequences in all pop. You can hear splashes of Mayfield in the Jimi Hendrix Experience – the title track of Electric Ladyland is more or less an Impressions pastiche, and even the glockenspiel of ‘I’m So Proud’ makes a slight return on ‘Little Wing’. In turn the Isley Brothers (‘That Lady’) and Prince (‘If I Was Your Girlfriend’) also borrowed Mayfield’s beatified falsetto.
By the end of the sixties Mayfield had his own label, Curtom, he produced hits for others (Major Lance, Jan Bradley, the Winstons) and he dropped the veil, singing about black pride with no less benevolence. Chicago’s urban blues may have been sonic fuel for the Rolling Stones’ fire, but it also gave inspiration to Mayfield’s inner-city cries. His song titles had often suggested civil rights (‘People Get Ready’, ‘Keep On Pushing’), but by the end of the decade they spelled out slogans: ‘This Is My Country’, ‘Choice of Colors’ and ‘We’re a Winner’ were all fine records, but I reckon he’d got to the nub of the issue with a more universal message on ‘It’s All Right’ (US no. 4 ’63) much earlier on: ‘When you wake up early in the morning, feeling sad like so many of us do, hum a little soul. Make life your goal. And surely something’s got to come to you.’
1 From November 30th 1963 to January 23rd 1965 there was no Billboard R&B singles chart. No reason was given, but the prevailing wisdom was that the chart methodology was in question, as Caucasian acts were scoring big hits. However, Cashbox, Billboard’s main rival, continued to print R&B charts during 1964, and each of their number ones was by a black act.
2 In spite of exhaustive efforts by Sam Cooke’s manager, Allen Klein, no alternative story of his death was ever uncovered, let alone proved. Cooke’s widow Barbara started seeing his close friend and Valentinos guitarist Bobby Womack within days of the shooting. Womack began to liberally borrow clothes from the dead man’s wardrobe, and the couple married barely ten weeks after Cooke’s death, an event that biographer Peter Guralnick later described as the ‘punchline of a dirty joke’.
3 Stax’s Jim Stewart was besotted with ‘What’d I Say’, it was his lodestone, which goes some way to explaining the direction his Stax productions took, away from country and rockabilly, focusing on R&B.
4 Aretha’s Columbia recordings are often dismissed en masse, which is daft: her 1965 single ‘Sweet Bitter Love’, written by Van McCoy, is as intense and beautiful as anything she cut for Atlantic.
5 Chuck Jackson was inadvertently the biggest influence on the Welsh singer Tom Jones; it’s a shame he didn’t have the same talent for self-promotion.
6 Presumably in an attempt to score more sales with white fans, Atlantic fed Aretha inappropriate material like ‘Bridge over Troubled Water’ and ‘Eleanor Rigby’. Like Ray Charles years before, her reputation suffered and the hits dried up. During the soul-obsessed mid-eighties she came back with an electro hit (‘Who’s Zoomin’ Who’) and a George Michael duet (‘I Knew You Were Waiting for Me’) which sold well but, again, hardly made the most of her extraordinary voice.
7 McCoy’s best known hits are Barbara Lewis’s melty ‘Baby I’m Yours’ (US no. 11 ’65), the Marvelettes’ ‘When You’re Young and in Love’ (UK no. 13 ’67), Jackie Wilson’s ‘I Get the Sweetest Feeling’ (US no. 34 ’68, UK no. 9 ’72) and, under his own name, the supernaturally cheerful ‘The Hustle’ (US no. 1, UK no. 3 ’75). But among his list of chart flops are some of sophisticated soul’s crowning moments: Aretha’s ‘Sweet Bitter Love’, Esther Phillips’s ‘Some Things You Never Get Used To’, Irma Thomas’s ‘It’s Starting to Get to Me Now’, Teri Thornton’s ‘Why Don’t You Love Me’, the Ad Libs’ ‘Giving Up’, Judy Clay’s ‘Haven’t Got What It Takes’, the Sweet Things’ ‘You’re My Loving Baby’. I can’t recommend these records highly enough.
8 The title wasn’t misplaced. The Zombies recall Dee Dee being thrown off a tour bus out in the boondocks after she started yelling and waving a gun around.
9 One double-sided 45 of the floor-filling ‘Make Sure’ backed with a Vietnam lament called ‘Does Anybody Know I’m Here’ (with a particularly extreme intervention from Marvin Junior) is the best, most concise way into the Dells’ enormous catalogue.
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THE RAKE’S PROGRESS: BOB DYLAN
I was born very far from where I’m supposed to be. And so I’m on my way home.
Bob Dylan
Bob Dylan walks into a bar. He’s just pre-fame, but on the brink. A man he’s never met before walks right up to him and starts giving him a really hard time, starts making fun of him, imitating his voice, doing everything to wind him up short of punching him in the face. And still Dylan wins the fight, because instead of becoming angry or teary or sneery, he refuses to let this man exist.
Before Dylan, all pop stars projected a persona to the outside world. Usually it was a professional competence, sometimes a little aloof (Sinatra), or cuddly (Como), but – even with the Beatles and the Stones – they let it be clear; you knew what they were about. Bob Dylan was closed, entirely self-sufficient. He was his own planet and, naturally, you desperately wanted to find a way to travel there.
Bob Dylan created, for good and ill, the modern rock star. On the debit side, he pioneered sunglasses after dark; along with the Stones he sealed the concept of snotty behaviour as a lifestyle, snarled at the conventional with his pack of giggling lickspittle dogs, and extended Brando’s ‘What have you got?’ one-liner into a lifelong party of terse putdowns. Un
like the Stones, this came naturally to Dylan – he was sharp as a needle, and very funny with it. Instead of ‘Look at that stupid girl,’ he sang, ‘Something is happening here but you don’t know what it is.’
The positive, and most radical, impact of Dylan was gently disguised. He realised that self-education and self-transformation, the open quest for who or what you might be, could be a thrilling and rewarding challenge – and that following this pursuit in the public eye made it all the more rewarding. Yet this wasn’t the legacy Dylan handed down to everyone. David Bowie understood it and so, to a lesser extent, did Bruce Springsteen. Unfortunately, others who were less quick-witted were happier copying the arid Dylan, borrowing the superficial stance of the outsider.
Dylan broke new ground in several other ways. He was the first figure in modern pop to have the burden of ‘generational spokesman’ to bear. He initially built this position by digging at the Masters of War, and predicting a Hard Rain on the acoustic records he cut during his Woody Guthrie phase, from 1962 to 1964. Poking fun at Tin Pan Alley, he associated himself with styles and moves that folk fans considered unmanufactured, then took the brunt of their anger when he formed a fearsome beat group in 1965. Also, he was the patron saint of non-singers. He sang in a voice that was entirely unfamiliar: needling, unsifted, but impossible to ignore. Most significantly, he wrote pop lyrics that were well beyond teenage fripperies, that had genuine wit. Dylan sounded deep. Gerry Goffin, writer of songs like ‘Will You Love Me Tomorrow’, ‘Up on the Roof’ and ‘Some of Your Lovin’’, lost his mind once he heard Dylan, deciding everything he’d ever written was shallow and worthless, trashing his old tapes and acetates, to the horror of his friends.