Aretha Franklin (15 page)

Roger Hawkins, who played drums on several of Aretha's first hit recordings at Atlantic, had never met a singer quite like her. “Aretha's emotion made everything work,” he recalled. “I played to her voice.”

In various combinations, Tom Dowd and Arif Mardin assisted Jerry Wexler on all of the recordings of this era. At times they would serve as co-producers, on other recordings they were the recording engineers and they would also handle the musical arrangements, often alongside Wexler.

“One of the world's greatest singers,” is how Mardin describes Aretha. “The excitement she generates in the studio is unmatched. I've seen musicians stop playing to listen to her sing. She backs up that God-given voice with her genius—her choice of phrases, notes. She did three-part backup harmony on one cut and remembered every intricacy. She can do those things. She can go anywhere. All the possibilities are there. With a person like that, there's no stopping.”

“Most singers will have a bad night or make a bad record,” Dowd explains. “She couldn't. But she could make better ones. If you gave her enough input, she could get close enough to grasp it and come up with something that was one step beyond what you'd given her.”

According to Wexler, he was amazed by her musical intuition and her knowledge of that glorious instrument that is her voice. “When she overdubbed her vocals, she would do these incredible inversions and licks, and I would think, ‘That's it!' ‘No,' she'd say, ‘wait a minute there,' and she'd do one better. You never knew what visions she has about another lick, another inversion, another variation that would top the last one. She might even sing eight bars to get one note in. All singers have that to a degree, but not the way she did. She had a perfect fix on what she was doing and whether it came off or not, and how it could be improved.”

Describing her own approach to recording during this period, Aretha explained, “If a song's about something I've experienced or that could've happened to me, it's good. But if it's alien to me, I couldn't lend anything to it. I look for a good lyric, a good melody, the changes. I look for something meaningful. When I go into the studio I put everything into
it. Even the kitchen sink! I
love
to record. I love music. I do background vocals because I like the sound I get when I harmonize with myself.”

From February 1967 to February 1968, Aretha released an unprecedented six Top Ten pop singles and three Top Ten albums. Five of the singles were certified Gold (sales in excess of one million copies), and two of the albums were certified Gold (sales of 500,000 copies). Only one other solo performer in history of recorded music had accomplished that feat in a single year: Elvis Presley. The record-buying public had crowned Elvis “The King of Rock & Roll,” and it wasn't long before they began to refer to Aretha as “The Queen of Soul.”

Aretha's soulful conquest of the record charts began with the single “I Never Loved a Man (The Way I Love You).” It was released on February 10, 1967, hitting Number Nine on the pop charts, Number One on the R&B charts, and it became her first million-seller.

At the time, Bob Rolentz was the head of Atlantic Records' promotion department. “She started from zero, from zip, no hits, no one knew who she was,” he recalls. “It was that voice. It just grabbed people by the collar. That first record, ‘I Never Loved a Man,' in three months was a national treasure. She just exploded. Now this was a black woman, a hefty black woman, certainly handsome and charismatic, but so damned unlucky [in her personal life].”

The record was such a smash that the “B” side of the single, “Do Right Woman—Do Right Man,” charted on the R&B charts. It peaked at Number Thirty-seven.

The single “Respect” was released on April 10, 1967, and by the week of June 3, when it was the Number One record in America, it also made it into the British Top Ten. Not only was the song “Respect” a Number One pop hit, but it topped the R&B chart as well.

Otis Redding first recorded the song “Respect,” which was his own composition. His version peaked at Number Thirty-five on the pop charts in 1965. When he heard Aretha's blistering cover version of his song, he is quoted as having exclaimed, “I just lost my song. That girl took it away from me!”

“Respect” has an interesting history all its own. In 1965, Redding was recording his album
Otis Blue
, with the group Booker T. & the MGs. The drummer of the group was a man name Al Jackson. During a break in
the recording session, Otis sat down with Jackson and began to complain about the ups and downs of his career, and how difficult touring was. According to Jackson, “I said, ‘What are you griping about, you're on the road all the time? All you can look for is a little respect when you come home.' He wrote the tune from our conversation.” Coincidentally, Tom Dowd was the engineer on Otis' recording of the song, and he was also the engineer on Aretha's Number One version of the same song.

Meanwhile, Aretha's debut Atlantic album,
I Never Loved a Man the Way I Love You
, was released in March of 1967. It peaked on the LP charts at Number Two, was certified Gold, and eventually sold 800,000 copies. In 1987,
Rolling Stone
proclaimed it one of the “100 Best Albums of the Last 20 Years,” in a special issue of the publication. According to the magazine, “With her first album for Atlantic, Aretha Franklin unleashed the gospel-bred vitality that had been bubbling under her tepid Columbia pop and jazz sides. It remains the best of her highly successful Atlantic efforts.”

Aretha's second Atlantic album,
Aretha Arrives
, was released in August 1967, and hit Number Five on the LP charts. One single was pulled from the album, the hit “Baby, I Love You,” which made it to Number Four on the pop charts and Number One on the R&B charts.

Before she was due in the recording studio to begin work on
Aretha Arrives
, Aretha was hurt while she was giving a concert performance in Georgia. She fell off the stage when she moved too close to the edge of it, and the accident left her with a shattered right elbow. Although her elbow was in a cast, and in spite of her doctor's opposition, she was determined to play the piano on her second Atlantic LP. On the album's faster paced songs, she was unable to play with her right hand, so on songs like the cooking cut “You Are My Sunshine,” she was forced to pound out her part on the keyboard using only her left hand.

“When it came about that she couldn't play,” recalls Jerry Wexler, “we really had to work hard to generate a good personal sound, to make sure that her essence came across on record.”

According to him, Aretha's piano playing was an essential ingredient in his formula for musical success. “In my opinion, one of the reasons that we clicked right away,” he explains, “was because I put Aretha at the piano. When a musician who writes songs can play anything, I like to have them
play on that record—whether he can play or not. It happens that Aretha is a magnificent player. At CBS, they didn't avail themselves—or only occasionally—of having her be part of the rhythm section. But by having the soloist, or the featured artist who's going to be singing on the record, by having him put his input into the track, it puts you in a whole different level of the game.”

Aretha Arrives
features one of the most diverse song lineups of any of her LPs. Only Aretha could sing the Rolling Stones' “Satisfaction,” and Frank Sinatra's “That's Life” on the same album, and pull it off. She also tackled Willie Nelson's “Night Life,” and ? & the Mysterians' “96 Tears.” These songs represented what Aretha had in mind for herself to record, and Jerry Wexler claims he would never have chosen some of the material for Aretha that she inevitably picked for her albums. “I don't really like ‘That's Life' myself,” he says; however, he admits that she somehow made it work. “It's because of her magic, man. She put the magic to it. You see, part of Aretha's genius is the unspoiled naiveté that she brings to songs like ‘That's Life.' There's a side of Aretha that respects—and almost adulates—that big Las Vegas aspect. There's some bad parts, but there's some good parts to it too. It's the same innocence that the Supremes brought to their early songs. It's believing in those little soap operas, and those little dramas.”

The song “Baby, I Love You” was written by Ronnie Shannon, who had written “I Never Loved a Man.” Aretha distinctly remembers the recording session: “It was done at Atlantic's studios in New York, in that one big room. It was big enough for the rhythm section, but intimate enough for the vocals. Those sessions were a lot of fun, and there was a lot of good food coming in and out of the studio. Lots of burgers, cheeseburgers, fries, milkshakes. In between takes we would sit and chat with whoever was producing, Jerry or Arif. They'd be enjoying those burgers so much I couldn't wait until mine came!”

“Baby, I Love You” was certified Gold, but the album was not. Probably, if another hit single was released off of the album, it too would have gone Gold, but there was such a demand for Aretha by the end of the summer of 1967 that the next three singles all came off her third Atlantic album, the triumphant
Lady Soul.

Her next smash was a song written by the hit-making team of Carole King and husband Gerry Goffin, with Jerry Wexler. The song is considered by many to be the finest performance of her career: “(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman.” Released September 7, 1967, the single peaked at Number Nine on the pop chart, and it became a Number Two R&B hit.

The title of the song was a concept Jerry Wexler envisioned. He, in turn, suggested to Carole King and Gerry Goffin that it would be a great idea for a song for Aretha Franklin. “The expression ‘he's a natural man' is one of the rubrics of the blues. So I came up with the idea: ‘You make me feel like a natural woman,' that line. And they were kind enough to give me a [writer's credit on] the song.”

Its follow-up was the Gold single “Chain of Fools,” which was written by Don Covay. At first the song was about field hands at work down South, but Aretha's version was slanted to become about a chain of unworthy lovers. Covay rewrote some of the lyrics of the song, which had been composed with Otis Redding in mind. “I did some minor surgery to the song to adapt it to Aretha,” Covay says. “Originally it was far more of a blues thing.” According to Jerry Wexler, “When we finished recording, [songwriter] Ellie Greenwich [‘Da Doo Run Run'] came by the office and I played it for her. She heard another [possible vocal] part there in the background. She sang it for me and I pulled her into the studio with her girls for another vocal background that filled out the record.”

Aretha's sixth single released in her first year at Atlantic was “(Sweet Sweet Baby) Since You've Been Gone.” It was released on February 9, 1968 (her first was released on February 10 of the previous year), and it became a Number Five pop hit, and her fifth Number One smash on the R&B chart. In January of 1968, her third Atlantic album
Lady Soul
was released, and it became a Number Two LP on the album charts, and was certified Gold. Like her debut Atlantic album, the
Lady Soul
LP was also rated by
Rolling Stone
magazine as one of “The 100 Best Albums of the Last 20 Years.” That particular issue of the magazine (August 27, 1987) proclaimed that “on
Lady Soul
, Aretha Franklin sat down at that piano and earned her title, playing and singing her heart out in a way truly fit for a queen … packing whole lifetimes of emotional trauma, romantic yearning and physical release into
Lady Soul
's three-minute blasts of soul dynamite.”

Since shifting record labels from Columbia to Atlantic, Aretha had logged a year in the music business that was phenomenally triumphant. No one was more surprised or overwhelmed than Aretha herself. In the summer of 1967, as the song “Respect” made Franklin the hottest new voice on the airwaves, she suddenly found herself very much in demand. She was almost instantly swept up into playing in the major leagues of what she referred to as “the game of show business.” After lingering on the fringes of stardom, she was beginning to reap the rewards. In the second week of August, 1967, she made a splash on late-night TV's
The Tonight Show
, flew to Atlanta to entertain a convention of black radio deejays, and then zipped back to Manhattan to headline the New York Jazz Festival on Randall's Island.

After seven years on Columbia Records in virtual obscurity, her popularity skyrocketed, and the world couldn't get enough of Aretha. From February to August of 1967, she sold over 3.5 million copies of her albums and singles. She confessed to
Newsweek
magazine, “I'm very surprised about the whole thing. I thought that we'd have another five years on the edge of success before we went over.”

For Aretha, one of the most exciting events of the year was having her first Atlantic release, the single “I Never Loved a Man (The Way I Love You)” certified Gold. “It had looked for the longest time like I would never have a Gold record,” she confessed at the time. “I wanted one so bad!”

When the year ended, all three of the major music industry trade magazines—
Billboard
,
Cash Box
, and
Record World
—each proclaimed her the top female vocalist of 1967. From that point on, the accolades just kept coming.

Aretha became the embodiment of a new meaning for the word
soul
. Ray Charles tried to explain what soul was by saying, “It's like electricity— we don't really know what it is.” Mahalia Jackson claimed that blues and soul began with “the groans and moans of the people in the cotton fields … before it got the name ‘soul,' this musical thing has been here since America's been here. This is a trial-and-tribulation music.”

But is soul something that only black people can emulate or feel? Aretha didn't think so. “It's not cool to be Negro or Jewish or Italian or
anything else,” she explained. “It's just cool to be alive, to be around. You don't have to be Negro to have soul. I can think of lots of white people who have soul: Eileen Farrell [the opera singer], Charles Aznavour [the French singer / songwriter] are two. It's something creative, something alive. It's honesty.”