Respect: The Life of Aretha Franklin

by David Ritz

  “She also sang a song she’d written and Mersey had orchestrated a few years earlier, ‘Without the One You Love.’ I’m keenly competitive with other writers and don’t give out compliments easily, but I was certain she had written a standard. If you listen to the record, it’s her, not Teddy Harris, who’s on piano. When she anchors herself at the keyboard, you get an entirely different Aretha. She’s more centered and more powerful.

  “The folk scene had started up and Aretha, who always wanted to be up-to-date, talked about singing ‘Puff the Magic Dragon’ by Peter, Paul, and Mary. I thought that was not a good idea. Instead I played her Sam Cooke’s version of Pete Seeger’s ‘If I Had a Hammer,’ another Peter, Paul, and Mary hit. Sam had done it on his live Copa date and that’s all Aretha needed to know. She was crazy for Sam. In fact, we were in the studio on some session when word came down that Sam had been killed by some woman in Los Angeles. Aretha got up and left and didn’t come back for a week. I certainly understood.”

  At the end of January 1965, Aretha appeared on Shindig! promoting “Can’t You Just See Me,” another attempt at the teen market by the soon-to-be twenty-three-year-old.

  “Sinky wrote the song,” Clyde Otis told me, “a little dance ditty that we thought might work. By then, though, nothing was working, at least not commercially. On the B side we did something called ‘Miss Raggedy Ann,’ a song about a doll. Aretha thought it was cute. She said it reminded her of her childhood. I thought it was beneath her, but my marching orders was to cut as many tunes on her as possible—so that’s what I did. Our last year in the studio together was the craziest. Ted wasn’t really talking to me and I was happy not to talk to him. Aretha was as remote as she could be. I felt like she needed counseling ’cause she kept missing gigs and kept taking all kinds of abuse from Ted. But no one appointed me her counselor and I simply shut up and supervised the session. It got bizarre.

  “I was friends with Neal Hefti, the marvelous writer who did such fabulous songs and charts for Count Basie. Neal wrote a movie theme for a Jack Lemmon flick, How to Murder Your Wife. It wasn’t one of Neal’s best, but Columbia wanted me to produce it on Aretha. Turned out to be another snoozer. You can sum it all up with the opening lines of a tune she wanted to cut, called ‘A Little Bit of Soul.’ It talks about how she’s struggling to compose a song and, to quote the lyrics, ‘if I don’t get me a hit soon I won’t be here long.’ Well, it wasn’t long before Columbia and Aretha both decided they had had enough of each other.”

  In March, a month after the assassination of Malcolm X at the Audubon Ballroom in New York City, Aretha appeared on Shindig! and sang “Can’t You Just See Me.” The tune entered the pop charts at number ninety-five and rose no higher. Meanwhile, Marvin Gaye’s “How Sweet It Is,” the Temptations’ “My Girl,” the Righteous Brothers’ “You’ve Lost that Lovin’ Feeling,” and Petula Clark’s “Downtown” became not only blockbuster hits but classics that would be played for decades to come.

  In April, President Lyndon Johnson ordered ground troops into Vietnam.

  In May, Aretha’s “One Step Ahead,” yet another single, was released, and while it never crossed, it did climb into the R&B top twenty.

  “It was our answer to the Dionne Warwick phenomenon,” said Clyde. “It wasn’t a cover or a Bacharach song, but it tried to create that refined and relaxed feel. Of course, Aretha is twice the singer Dionne will ever be, but Dionne had this defined personality—this very appealing musical persona—and it’s my contention that Aretha still lacked an identity.”

  On May 29, Billboard reported that Columbia had recruited one of their A&R men, Bob Johnston, to bring Aretha to Nashville “with the hope of duplicating his Patti Page ‘Hush, Hush, Sweet Charlotte’ success.” Those sessions, in May and October of 1965, actually took place in New York and proved to be Aretha’s last for the label.

  “Was I hurt that I was being dumped as Ree’s producer?” said Clyde Otis. “Well, I wasn’t thrilled. I still saw myself as the guy who could turn her into a superstar. Deep in my heart I did believe she was as great as Dinah. No other woman out there could touch her, and yet I also had to admit that our work together had really gone nowhere. Aside from five or six superb cuts, I hadn’t captured her greatness. I hadn’t been able to give her an identity. Sure, I could say that desperation did us in. Both she and Ted were so desperate to have hits they lost their judgment and were going in five different directions at the same time. The big brass at Columbia was also desperate to recoup the advances they gave her. But lots of great music has been created in a mood of desperation. In our case, the stars simply weren’t aligned.

  “I’d known Bob Johnston for years. In fact, I produced Bob back in the fifties when he wanted to be a singer. I cut one of his songs—‘Born to Love One Woman’—and brought him from Texas to New York. I knew Bob was a real talent. I wished him good luck with Aretha but also told him that he’d be lucky if she showed up half the time. From what I understand, my predictions turned out to be optimistic. For a long time she went into a cocoon and no one knew where to find her, not even her husband. Strange woman. Brilliant woman. A woman blessed with inordinate talent. And yet, for all our time together, a woman I never really understood or even got to know. I saw her as a woman holding in secret pain—and I wasn’t let in on those secrets.”

  The first Bob Johnston/Aretha session, on May 25 at Columbia Studios, produced four songs, including a misguided, string-laden, horn-heavy attempt to reinvent Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein’s “Why Was I Born” as a gospel lament. The second session, at first scheduled for later in the summer, was postponed till October.

  “I was asked to locate Aretha,” said Clyde Otis, “who was said to have disappeared. But I had no more knowledge of her whereabouts than the CBS brass. I wished them luck and went my merry way. My hope was that the ‘live’ quartet session I produced—Yeah!!!—that came out that summer would do some business. When it bombed, I knew I was permanently out of the Aretha Franklin business.”

  In a parallel universe, on June 15 and 16, 1965, Aretha’s label mate Bob Dylan entered the same Seventh Avenue Columbia Studios and cut the first session for what would become his landmark Highway 61 Revisited. His producer was Tom Wilson. In July, Dylan shook up the folk world by going electric at Newport. Days afterward, he was back in the studio, this time with a new producer—the same Bob Johnston who had been working with Aretha. It was Johnston who supervised the recording of, among other songs, “Desolation Row.”

  Two months later, Johnston was back with Aretha, who, after an extended stay in Detroit, finally showed up at the midtown studio, where she cut her last three Columbia sides. It seems fitting that two of them—“Swanee” and “You Made Me Love You”—represented a return to the mainstream showbiz style she had adopted four years earlier with “Rock-a-Bye Your Baby with a Dixie Melody.”

  “It was disheartening,” said John Hammond. “Bob Johnston is a great producer. Look at what he did with Dylan. He also did great work with Simon and Garfunkel, Johnny Cash, and Leonard Cohen. Don’t fault Bob. At that point, the confusion surrounding Aretha and her camp was enough to undermine any project.”

  That same summer of 1965, between the two Johnston sessions, Aretha had flown home to Detroit to help her brother and sister celebrate C.L.’s nineteenth year as pastor at New Bethel.

  “I don’t remember Ted being at the event,” said Carolyn. “I do remember feeling relieved that we wouldn’t have to deal with the tension that was always there between Ted and Daddy. We wanted to have Aretha to ourselves—back in the bosom of her family. I had just turned twenty-one and had begun feeling my oats. Like Erma, I had my own R-and-B record out and was determined to have my own career as a writer and a singer. One of the beautiful things about singing for our father was that—at least for a night—we could put behind whatever little jealousies that had been brewing with Ree. Erma had always encouraged my career and later Aretha did too. But during that time when she still ha
dn’t broken through to the big time, I think she secretly worried that we’d get there before her. Personally, I didn’t have that worry. Erma and I were good—very good—but Aretha was great.”

  “In some ways,” Erma told me, “you could compare us to the Jacksons. Jermaine could sing, Jackie could sing, and so could Marlon. All the brothers have tremendous talent. But then here comes Michael, a once-in-a-generation talent. He took it to another level—the genius level. I think that’s how we viewed Aretha. Her ability was not of this world. At the same time, Carolyn and I knew that our strengths were not inconsiderable. We also shared Aretha’s drive to be noticed, appreciated, and paid. By that time I had cut a couple of dozen songs for Epic—not hits, but all solid stuff. I felt that Ree continued to resent my presence in the business. I only wish that we all could have sat down and discussed these issues—Carolyn and I were certainly eager to do just that—but Aretha was not one to verbally express her feelings. She kept everything inside until it was time to sing. Then she put her every last emotion smack in your face. This served her art but it did not serve our sisterhood. Except for these wonderful occasions when our focus was on our beloved father, we tended to fall into misunderstanding. This sisterly strain, together with the sisterly love and concern, went on forever.”

  After her father’s anniversary celebration, Aretha went into hiding. Erma remembered visiting her once or twice in the midtown apartment that she and Ted shared. Carolyn recalled her visiting Detroit every few weeks to check in on her three sons. Cecil looked back on it as a time when Aretha and Ted were often separated.

  “He had different women and she knew it,” said Cecil. “Everyone knew it. She was not only frustrated with that, but also the fact that Columbia had not marketed her correctly. She was seriously thinking about leaving Ted, leaving Columbia, and making a fresh start.”

  For the rest of 1965 and all of 1966, Aretha would not make another record.

  “I know many of the producers did lots of things to try and lure her back into the studio,” Hammond told me, “but she stopped answering anyone’s call. I had an idea that she might want to go back to our original plan of five years earlier and record a pure blues album. Someone else had the notion of having her do a Mahalia-style gospel album with modern orchestrations of sacred hymns. At that point, though, she had closed the door. I assumed she was simply waiting for our contract to run out. I assumed her management was shopping her to other labels.”

  Years later Aretha looked back at her Columbia experience in a positive light. She had been introduced to the world as a major artist. She had proven she could sing jazz, pop, blues, and rhythm and blues with uncanny emotional strength. Her vocal technique was beyond reproach. From “Today I Sing the Blues” to “That Lucky Old Sun” to “Just for a Thrill” to “Skylark” to “This Bitter Earth” to “Take a Look” to “Impossible,” she had recorded a series of masterpieces. For all her missed recording and performing dates, she had nonetheless demonstrated that, year in and year out, she was capable of showing up and turning out a steady flow of brilliant performances. In five years, she had cut some eight albums. She appeared on television as a well-groomed figure, an appealing singer whose interpretations of songs in any number of genres were, more often than not, thrilling.

  And yet no one was thrilled—not Aretha, not her husband, Ted, and certainly not the executives at Columbia Records. Everyone wanted more. Everyone wanted hits. After all, Aretha had not crossed over from gospel to pop for mere critical acclaim. She had crossed over in search of the American dreams—glory and gold.

  “She definitely fell into a depression,” said Erma. “I remember being in her New York apartment watching her looking out her window at the gray sky and falling snow. ‘What are you thinking about, Ree?’ I asked her. ‘I’m not thinking,’ she said. ‘I’m just dreaming.’ ‘Dreaming about what?’ ‘That things will get better.’ ”

  Some things did get better—spectacularly better—but some things got spectacularly worse.

  Part Three

  ATLANTIC

  12. NEVER LOVED

  In 1966, Jerry Wexler, age forty-nine, was a hungry man—hungry for even greater success in a field where he had already proven himself. The field—root righteous rhythm and blues—was his lifelong passion.

  “I was born hungry,” he told me. “The hunger never went away. In fact, I believe that gnawing hunger is the driving force behind every great record man. And more than anything, I wanted to be a great record man.”

  Wexler was a dynamo—personable, charismatic, opinionated, confident to the point of being cocky. Along with Ahmet and Nesuhi Ertegun, he was one of the owners of Atlantic Records. Children of the Turkish ambassador to the United States, the Erteguns were renegade and highly educated aristocrats who, like Wexler, had been consumed with black music since their childhood. This fanaticism for funk had driven the company since 1949, when, with its first hit, Stick McGhee’s “Drinkin’ Wine, Spo-Dee-O-Dee,” the label was established as a gutsy independent willing to go where the mainstreams were not. Corporate Columbia and mom-and-pop Atlantic were at opposite poles of the music business.

  “When I came on board in the fifties,” said Wexler, “Ahmet had already signed Ray Charles. Before him, Ruth Brown was the big hit maker. I didn’t really earn my stripes in the studio until the sixties, when I hit with Solomon Burke and Wilson Pickett. While Motown specialized in soothing soul—which, by the way, was beautiful—I was more attracted to screaming soul. I like it raw. Fortunately, I signed on early to what was becoming the golden age of soul. At the same time the British Invasion was in full swing. But that attracted Ahmet, who is a natural-born internationalist, far more than me. While he was signing Cream, King Crimson, and the Bee Gees, I found myself deep in the Memphis–Muscle Shoals axis where a small army of blues-minded white boys were writing brilliant head charts—basically made-up-on-the-spot-in-the-studio arrangements. Their spontaneous methodology became one of the great epiphanies of my life.

  “The more traditional way, of course, were orchestrations notated well in advance of the studio. In short, written music for the musicians to read. But the southern boys just liked to jam—and God, did they ever! Visionaries like Chips Moman, Tommy Cogbill, Roger Hawkins, Spooner Oldham, Jimmy Johnson, and David Hood might have looked like hillbillies, but they were secret geniuses of the good groove. They laid it down with neither preparation nor forethought. The shit just happened.

  “Not only was the music magnificent, it sold like hotcakes. Pickett was burning up the charts. What’s more, I had cut a favorable distribution deal with Jim Stewart at Stax, where Sam and Dave and Otis Redding, backed by one of the most ferocious rhythm sections of all time—Booker T. Jones, Al Jackson, Steve Cropper, and Duck Dunn—had taken off like a rocket. The soul world was exploding around me. So while Ahmet had begun combing the Continent for rock talent, I was mining Memphis and Muscle Shoals, where, relatively late in life, I was getting a whole education about how to run a recording session.”

  “We saw Wexler as a savior,” said Jimmy Johnson, the guitarist who would play on many Aretha records. “He said he was charmed by our easygoing southern ways, but, man, he was the one who charmed us. He had the thickest New York accent I’d ever heard. He had more energy than a hound dog chasing a rabbit. He was a hustler in the best sense of the word—a go-getter—and, best of all, he was big-time and we sure weren’t. Whatever he had—his connections, his promotional skills, his ability to get songs on the radio—we wanted. Plus he had the ears of a wolf. He wanted it down and dirty. He had all the best stories about Ray Charles and Professor Longhair and Clyde McPhatter and anyone else you could think of.”

  “My history with Aretha began in the fall of 1966 when I was at Muscle Shoals recording Wilson Pickett,” Wexler told me. “Percy Sledge, another of our soul-singing artists, came by the studio and started giving Pickett a hard time, telling him he was sounding like Otis or James Brown. Well, Wilson hated James—they h
ad once fought over a woman—and now Pickett, pissed as hell, went after Sledge. Literally. To protect my label’s interest—after all, both these singers were making us serious money—I stepped in between them. Pickett flung me out of the way and was ready to do battle with Percy, a former boxer, when suddenly the phone rang. ‘Calm the fuck down!’ I exhorted. The men backed off as I picked up the receiver. ‘Jerry,’ said a female voice. ‘It’s Louise Bishop. Aretha’s ready for you.’

  “I’d been waiting to hear those words for a long time. Louise Bishop was a gospel DJ out of Philly. Back then, the best way to get to Aretha was through the gospel world. More than a year earlier, when I had learned Aretha was unhappy at Columbia, I’d tell Louise and others that I’d love to talk with her. The person who answered my call, though, wasn’t Aretha. It was Ted White. From John Hammond and Clyde Otis, I had heard Ted White stories—how he not only ran the show but wanted to run her recording sessions. From friends in Detroit, though, I also knew that White represented serious songwriters and had a sharp sense of music. From the first moment we spoke, I realized he was a slick cat.