Aretha Franklin (18 page)

Jerry Wexler distinctly remembers the several Cooke songs that appeared on Aretha's early Atlantic albums. “She loved Sam, and usually if you saw a Sam Cooke song, it was her idea. Like ‘A Change Is Gonna Come,' on which, incidentally, James Booker played organ.”

On the R&B side, she recorded James Brown's “Money Won't Change You,” Ray Charles' “Come Back Baby,” and Curtis Mayfield's “People Get Ready,” which was a big hit for Mayfield's group, the Impressions. She also recorded seven of her own compositions (five of which were written with Ted White, one with Carolyn Franklin) including “Don't Let Me Lose This Dream,” “Think,” and the lowdown blues classic “Dr. Feelgood (Love Is a Serious Business).”

Jerry Wexler recalls that Aretha's scope for musical appreciation was virtually boundless. “It was amazing how much rock & roll she liked, and there was absolutely nothing racist about her attitudes. She was totally open to anything from any quarter if it was good,” he claims. “Only once did we have to stop the session because we weren't going anywhere. I even remember the song, it was The Box Tops' ‘The Letter.' She always wanted to do that song; we tried it a couple of times and never could get a handle on it.”

One of the cuts on
Aretha Now
was a Clyde Otis song called “A Change.” Aretha had stayed in touch with Clyde since they had both left Columbia Records. To capitalize on her success with Atlantic Records, Columbia had released Aretha's single of Clyde's composition “Take a Look” in the fall of 1967. The song “A Change” was a hot song out of the same snappy mold as “See Saw” and “Think.” In fact, it was such a hot record that Atlantic wanted to release it as a single. However, Clyde Otis and Jerry Wexler got into an argument over the royalties on the music publishing rights, and this caused a rift in Clyde and Aretha's friendship that hasn't been resolved in the ensuing twenty years.

“We fell out on ‘A Change,'” Clyde Otis recalls, “because with that one, they wanted to use it for a single, and it probably would have been a great single, but I felt that they wanted to rip me off regarding the ownership of the publishing. I wouldn't go along with their terms, and that was really the beginning of when we didn't really talk, or communicate any further.”

According to Otis, he was angry Aretha didn't step in and resolve his reported stalemate with Wexler. “She was hiding behind Wexler's coat, and he was saying, ‘Clyde, my God, you ought to give up the publishing [rights].' And I was thinking to myself, ‘Jesus Christ!' I just got real pissed, and she didn't intercede. She didn't say anything. I offered them a deal which I felt was fair, and that was to give them half, but they wanted more than half. The wanted at least a two-thirds share in the publishing, and I said, ‘No way! I'm not going to do that.' We got real pissed at each other, and that was really when I stopped seeing her. She would have recorded more of my songs, but we just sort of hit a stone wall with that particular song.” Since that time, he claims, “I've stopped in to see her when she's appearing someplace, and it's been cordial, but it was never as warm again.”

Naturally, there are two sides to this story. Appraised of Otis' comments, Wexler laughingly exclaimed, “Oh, balls! All that I have to say about that is ‘balls'!”

Of all of the lasting relationships that Aretha cemented during this period, the most enduring is her friendship with Cissy Houston. Cissy has recorded with Aretha throughout three decades. Cissy and the Sweet Inspirations have appeared on Aretha's albums starting with the Clyde Otis sessions at Columbia in 1965, to her Atlantic albums beginning with
Aretha Arrives
(1967), through her Arista era with Luther Vandross on
Jump to It
(1982) and
Get It Right
(1983). Originally, Cissy was the choir director of a gospel group in Newark, New Jersey. One of the members of her choir was her niece, Dionne Warwick. In the early sixties, Dionne started making demo recordings with a newly formed songwriting team, Burt Bacharach and Hal David. Beginning with “Don't Make Me Over” in 1962 and proceeding through “I'll Never Fall in Love Again” in 1969, the triumvirate of Warwick, Bacharach and David had one of the biggest strings of Top Forty hits of the decade.

Meanwhile, Cissy and the Sweet Inspirations began doing background vocals for everyone in the music business from Wilson Pickett to Elvis Presley, from Connie Francis to Bette Midler. In 1968 they even had their own Top Twenty pop hit, “Sweet Inspiration.”

According to Arif Mardin, “The soul sound of Atlantic in the sixties depended on some tightly played horns and a great rhythm section, playing danceable and hard rhythmic patterns. And then the Sweet Inspirations would be called in, and Cissy would come up with a background vocal arrangement. You had the singer, the star—it could be Aretha Franklin, it could be Solomon Burke, it could be Wilson Pickett, or—you name it—all the greatest singers. You could call it an artistic assembly line, in a way, and Cissy Houston actually was part of this mechanism.”

The first song Aretha worked on with the Sweet Inspirations at Atlantic was a cut from
Aretha Arrives
called “Ain't Nobody (Gonna Turn Me Around).” Until that point at Atlantic, Aretha had done the background vocals along with her sisters Carolyn and Erma. For this particular session, however, her sisters weren't available.

Tom Dowd recalls, “When it came to getting someone to sing with Aretha, we had the ideal solution. Because we had these girls that had the same basic musical root as Aretha, which was a church root, or a gospel root, and that chemistry just worked beautifully.”

Aretha immediately formed a rapport with Cissy and the Sweet Inspirations, because they had both come from strong gospel backgrounds. “That's one of the reasons that we grooved together so good, because we do come from the same place,” Aretha said. “Different churches, but the same place. Whenever we got together, we knew that we were going to sing, that we were going to do some good singing, wherever ‘here' was. It's always going to be like that.”

Aretha and The Sweet Inspirations really started cooking in the studio on
Lady Soul
. The unmistakable sound of Cissy Houston and her group can especially be heard on “Chain of Fools,” “Groovin',” and “Ain't No Way.” In fact, on “Groovin'” and “Ain't No Way” Cissy can be heard singing solo background vocals mid-song.

Jerry Wexler credits Cissy Houston with coming up with some of the most memorable background vocals on Aretha's albums in the late
1960s. “They'd come into the studio,” Wexler recalls. “She'd listen to the tape, and they'd gather around the microphone and start working out. It was a collaboration, it was a communal thing. Most of it came from Cissy Houston and the girls. Most of the ideas, most of the lines, and most of the parts.”

Whenever possible, Aretha also took the Sweet Inspirations on the road. According to her, “They have worked together for so long, if you spring something on them, they can go with it. Because they know you, and they know you so well, it doesn't have to be rehearsed. They can ad-lib and stay right with you.”

Cissy and her group weren't with Aretha in 1968, when she did
Aretha in Paris
, because Cissy had a family to raise and she didn't travel overseas often. In fact, during several of her recording dates with Aretha, Cissy would bring her daughter Whitney to the studio, and the little girl would peer through the glass from the control room and watch her mother and Aretha sing.

“I remember when I was six or seven, crawling up to the window to watch my mother sing,” Whitney Houston says. “And I'd be talking to Aunt Ree. I had no idea then that Aretha Franklin was famous—just that I liked to hear her sing, too! I just remember being in an atmosphere of total creativity. When I heard Aretha, I could feel her emotional delivery so clearly. It came from deep down within. ‘That's what I want to do,'” she recalls.

Whitney has stated many times that one of her greatest musical inspirations was and continues to be, Aretha Franklin. It all began in those recording sessions at Atlantic Studios in New York City, when Whitney used to watch “Aunt Ree” sing with her mother. According to Aretha, “Cissy toured with me on a number of dates, and we're old and very good friends, and she used to bring Whitney to some of my recording sessions. I read some of her [interviews] and I think that it's fabulous she's been influenced by me. I had no idea that Whitney felt as close to me as she does—but it's lovely.”

There were also several star musicians on Aretha's first four Atlantic albums. Eric Clapton, who at the time was a member of the rock group Cream, played the guitar obbligato on the song “Good to Me as I Am
to You” on the
Lady Soul
album. Bobby Womack, Joe South, and King Curtis were all heard on these classic Aretha albums, and guitar player Duane Allman played on several of her sessions. Duane later united with his brother Gregg Allman to form the Allman Brothers Band. One of the concert dates that included Cissy Houston and the Sweet Inspirations was Aretha's triumphant return to New York City's Philharmonic Hall on October 13, 1968.
Variety
raved, “More than 4,500 fans turned out for two shows Sunday, ready to clap, stomp and holler in celebration of this soulful superstar, and they got even more than they had bargained for in the superb performance of Cissy Houston and the Sweet Inspirations … The audience's appreciation of the Inspirations was most strikingly expressed in the second show, during ‘Ain't No Way.' Four times the house exploded with applause for Miss Houston's high soprano counter-singing to Miss Franklin's lead.”

That night, in the middle of the show, Aretha's father bounded onto the stage to present his daughter with Gold record certifications for her single “I Say a Little Prayer” and for her album
Lady Soul
. Aretha's first two years and her first four albums on Atlantic Records had established her as
the
solo female singing star of the decade. Throughout 1967 and 1968, she had certainly made up for lost time. She now had a career basis from which she could grow, stretch, and experiment—which is exactly what she did on her next album.

Soul ‘69
represented a departure from her debut quartet of albums on Atlantic. Her singing on this record shows off the soulful delivery she had perfected on her previous albums for the label, but the material was mainly jazz. However, the music on this album was not the type of smoky, nightclub-style jazz she had recorded on her
Unforgettable
album; this was swinging, funky, fully orchestrated jazz. In a very real sense,
Soul ‘69
combined the best aspects of her jazz recording on Columbia with the confidence and vocal power she had gained by singing songs like “Respect” and “Think.”

Although it was titled
Soul ‘69
, Jerry Wexler believes that “the title is a misnomer. That should have been called
Aretha's Jazz Album
.” This album is actually a patchwork quilt of different sessions, stitched together into one album. There is some straightforward jazz—including
“Ramblin'” and “I'll Never Be Free.” There are some jazzy treatments of country & western tunes—on Rudy Clarke's “If You Gotta Make a Fool of Somebody” and John Hartford's “Gentle on My Mind” (which was a hit for Glen Campbell). And she even chose a couple of recent pop hits to reinterpret: Smokey Robinson & the Miracles' “Tracks of My Tears” and Bob Lind's “Elusive Butterfly.” In addition, she also re-recorded her first Columbia song, “Today I Sing the Blues.”

“I love that album. People don't know that Aretha made a jazz album, because of this unfortunate title,” Wexler still laments. “It's a jazz album, and it is terribly misnamed, and I'm ashamed of myself. And the reason I permitted to happen is because my then-partner Nesuhi Ertegun had some kind of promotion going on at that time, which he thought would be beneficial if we called it
Soul ‘69
, rather than
Aretha's Jazz
, which it should have been called. And I permitted him to euchre [trick] me into this.”

Although
Soul ‘69
was not a huge pop or R&B smash—commercially it is an absolutely brilliant testament to the genius and scope of Aretha's singing. Although Latin bongos and jazz saxophones on “Elusive Butterfly” were not what her new allegiance of R&B fans wanted to hear at the time, this was music that was meaningful to Aretha at the time, and she gave it all of the emotion and feeling that she gave any music she sang.

Jerry Wexler remembers being a bit taken aback by Aretha's insistence on recording “Gentle on My Mind” and “Elusive Butterfly.” However, Aretha was the songstress of the day and if she had wanted to record her version of the Manhattan Yellow Pages, he wasn't about to stop her. According to Wexler, “Her taste could sometimes be very mainstream. That's part of her genius too. When it went off a bit, it went off in its own way.

“She picked those songs. I didn't like those songs for her. We also had ‘Fool on the Hill,' which we never completed, and I was against that too. We have damn near a finished record on it,” Wexler reveals. Along with almost a dozen other unreleased cut from this era, “I've got enough for an album,” he said in 1988. “But the masters don't exist anymore, because they were destroyed in a fire. I do, however, have a seven-and-a-half [inches per second] tape of the sessions, which Atlantic is considering using to put out an album, which I still think they should do.”

Soul ‘69
was recorded in sessions held in April 1968 and September 1968. This was the first Aretha album on which Jerry Wexler shared the production credits. His co-producer on this LP was Tom Dowd, and Arif Mardin arranged and conducted the material it contained. If Aretha wanted to do jazz, Wexler was determined to assemble the best jazz musicians he could find to accompany her. The songs “Ramblin',” “Pitiful,” “Crazy He Calls Me,” and Sam Cooke's “Bring It On Home to Me” featured Ron Carter on bass, Junior Mance on piano, and Kenny Burrell on guitar. Joe Zawinal (of the group Weather Report) played the Hammond organ on “Crazy He Calls Me” and the electric piano on “Bring It On Home to Me.”