Aretha Franklin (21 page)

The Fillmore West engagement was the brainchild of Jerry Wexler. He was determined that Aretha was not going to recede into being pegged as a soul star who occasionally sang a rock & roll song. He was determined to turn her into a full-fledged rock star with a total crossover audience. “We want these longhairs to listen to this lady. After that there'll be no problems,” Wexler promised at the time. He and Bill Graham had negotiated all of the details for the engagement, and presented the package to Aretha.

One of her business advisors was Ruth Bowen, who headed up a company called Queen Booking. Ruth had been booking Aretha for $20,000 a show. Since Bill Graham could not fit enough people in Fillmore West to guarantee a box-office gross totaling that amount, Atlantic Records agreed to underwrite the engagement and produce a “live” album from the event. Eventually all parties came to an agreement, and the Queen of Soul headed for Haight-Ashbury.

Aretha discarded her staid Donald Townes arrangements, and a new show was constructed out of contemporary rock & roll tunes and rocking versions of several of her classics. The music for this engagement was provided by an all-star assembly of musicians: King Curtis & the Kingpins, the brass of the fabulous Memphis Horns (led by Wayne Jackson), Billy Preston on the organ, Aretha herself playing electric piano (on five songs), Cornell Dupree on guitar, Bernard Purdie on drums, background vocals by the Sweethearts of Soul, and—on one song—special guest star Ray Charles.

The event at Fillmore West was an entire weekend engagement, held on March 5, 6, and 7, 1971. Bill Graham stepped onto the stage and announced, “For all of us here at the Fillmore West, this is a long-awaited privilege and a great pleasure, to bring on the Number One lady … Miss Aretha . . . Franklin!” From that moment to the end of the show, the energy level on-stage was enough to achieve “warp speed” on
Star Trek
.

Opening with an atomic-powered version of “Respect,” Aretha had the audience eating out of her hand from the very beginning. Gone were
the wigs and sequins. Her hair was groomed in a short and attractive Afro, and she wore a simple and casual floor-length white dress accented with gold. Four of her strongest performances were culled from the contemporary rock classics: Stephen Stills' “Love the One You're With,” Simon & Garfunkel's “Bridge over Troubled Water,” the Beatles' “Eleanor Rigby,” and the David Gates & Bread hit “Make it with You.” The crowd loved her.

“It was a nice little cabal between me and Bill Graham to pull this off,” Jerry Wexler remembers, “and we did it! I was never so delighted and surprised in my life to see the highly evolved, intelligent response of the San Francisco longhairs to every nuance and subtlety of Aretha's music. I couldn't believe it. But the response was as evolved and as well defined as though it had been an entire black audience. All of the Fillmore kids, the Haight-Ashbury acid brigade. I thought the music would never really resonate. But we took a gamble, and I think it helped a lot.”

Aretha's third and final show at Fillmore West was on a Sunday night, and was highlighted with the guest appearance of Ray Charles. Aretha had just finished singing a five-and-a-half-minute version of her recent hit “Spirit in the Dark,” and she walked off the stage to thunderous applause. When she returned for an encore, she walked back on-stage with Ray on her arm. “I just discovered Ray Charles!” she announced, as though she had just located a guest at a house party. Together, Aretha and Ray sang a reprised eight-minute version of “Spirit in the Dark,” complete with several bars of ad-libbed lyrics from Charles. At one point he took over the keyboard of her electric piano, which was positioned at the edge of “stage right.”

It was a historic moment—Aretha Franklin and Ray Charles together on the same stage—and Jerry Wexler had captured it on audio tape. According to Wexler, the whole duet was kind of a chance pairing, and was totally unrehearsed and excitingly spontaneous. “Ray was embarrassed because he had missed some of the words, and I had a hell of a job getting him to approve the release of the record, because he thought it made him look bad. I used all of my businessman's con on him. I wasn't fooling him. But I was just trying to say, ‘Ray, this is too good to keep ‘in the can,' you and Aretha—even if it's not a model of musical perfection.' He finally
went along with it. My two idols together!” Wexler exclaims. “Boy, if I only could have gotten them to do a duet album.”

Aretha once explained to
Time
magazine that she had finally overcome her stage fright by pretending she was “just at a party, and the audience is just my friends.” If ever there was such a party, it was truly the one that Aretha threw in San Francisco that night. She closed the show with her version of Ashford & Simpson's “Reach Out and Touch (Somebody's Hand),” while walking out into the audience seated at her feet.

The three concerts and the resulting album all became the across-the-board smashes that Jerry Wexler had hoped for. The LP was released in May 1971, hit Number Seven on the album charts, and was certified Gold. Aretha reached a whole new audience with that particular album, and it encouraged her to take a new stance on her life. Stripping away the Las Vegas trappings of her first golden era, the Aretha Franklin of 1971– 1973 was the back-to-basics, hippie / black pride version of herself. It was an era of “natural” black hairstyles and a rediscovery of African roots for many black people in America. It was during this same period that Aretha recorded her next milestone album,
Young, Gifted and Black
.

Her fresh new outlook on life in the early 1970s was partially due to her romantic feelings toward the new man in her life: Ken Cunningham. He had served as her road manager in the late sixties and after her breakup with Ted White she began what was to be a six-year relationship with him. In 1970 she gave birth to her fourth son, whom she and Ken named Kecalf (pronounced “Kalf.”) The name is an acronym composed of the initials of the boy's parents: Kenneth E. Cunningham and Aretha Louise Franklin.

Together Aretha and Ken set up housekeeping in a high-rise duplex apartment off Fifth Avenue, on the chic Upper East Side of Manhattan. Although they never married, this was to become one of the most lasting and satisfying personal relationships in Aretha's life. Ken helped center her in a way that Ted never had been able to do. When she was breaking up with Ted, Aretha not only over-ate, but she would also drown her sorrows with liquor. In the early 1970s, Ken Cunningham helped her to drink less, and at one point, to shed some of the excess weight she had put on in the late 1960s.

At the time of the Fillmore West concerts, Jerry Wexler spoke to journalists in his room at the Huntington Hotel in San Francisco. When asked about Aretha's reported drinking, he stated, “She's got it under control now, I think.” For the time being her life generally seeemed to be “under control” as well, and she was free to explore some new directions with her music.

In August 1971, Aretha lost another one of her friends. King Curtis had been playing saxophone on her recordings since the
Aretha Arrives
LP in 1967. He often went out on tour with her, and he conducted the band for Aretha's historic
Fillmore West
album. He owned a building on East 68th Street in New York City. He was outside on the sidewalk, talking with some of the tenants, when a junkie reportedly started an argument with him and stabbed him to death. Aretha sang at his funeral, and the Kingpins and the Memphis Horns all played in his honor. In addition to his instrumentals on Aretha's albums, King Curtis had several Atlantic albums of his own, which stand as a testament to his vast musical talent.

In November 1971, Aretha agreed to appear on the syndicated television program
The David Frost Show
, as the starring guest for an entire 90-minute program. The show was to be structured as a salute to the Queen of Soul. A large portion of the show was to be taken up by musical numbers, but here were several interim segments that would consist of David Frost interviewing Aretha.

Word had gotten to Frost's producers that Aretha was a difficult television interviewee, and that she was notorious for giving one-word answers to expansive questions. Just to make sure everything went smoothly, a member of the production crew was sent to Ruth Bowen's office at Queen Booking to conduct a preliminary interview with Aretha, to see how conversational she was in person.

At the time, Ken Reynolds was working on the show as the assistant music talent coordinator. On that particular show, Reynolds recalls, “One of my responsibilities was putting together the pre-interview notes, which is to give David notes on what Aretha would be singing, what she wanted to talk about, and what the highlighted conversations should be. This was put together after you spent a certain amount of time just talking to the artist and getting the information.”

“I went up to Queen Booking,” he continues, “and it was a very informal meeting. In fact, Ruth Bowen and I sat on the floor, and Aretha sat on the floor as well! I told Aretha specifically what I was doing, that I was there to talk to her to put together notes so that when she came on the show that night, the conversation would go smoothly. When I spoke to Aretha that afternoon on the floor of Ruth Bowen's office, it was like I was talking to an old friend. I'd ask her, ‘How many kids do you have?' and she would say, ‘I've got four boys, and this one, he does this … and that one, he does that' … I'd ask, ‘Where do you live?' and Aretha would go into great detail … Everything I asked, I got very expansive answers for. So I put in my notes, ‘Aretha is a great talker. She's like talking to an old friend. She has all these great stories, and they just flow off of the tip of her tongue—it's going to be a great interview.'

“I knew that Aretha was going to be the guest for the entire show, and to me, the worst thing that could happen was that the host would run out of things to talk about. So, knowing that Aretha was scheduled to sing thirteen songs, I did a little bit of mathematical calculation: 13 songs, at an average of three minutes each, is 39 minutes. An hour-and-a-half show—90 minutes—has only 71 minutes of tape time, and the remainder of the show is spent on commercials. Now, 39 from 71 leaves about 32 minutes devoted to talking, so I had listed twenty-five areas of conversation in my report to David Frost.

“I returned to the show and gave my report to David, and he said, ‘Oh wow! This is great!' The evening arrived, and the show started out smoothly. As soon as she came out on-stage she sang two songs back-to-back: ‘Since You've Been Gone' and ‘Soul Serenade,' and she just blows everybody away. After the first two songs, she comes over to David and she sits down, and David goes, ‘Aretha! Aretha, we're so glad to have you here, blah, blah, blah . . . Tell me, how many kids do you have?' And she turns to David and says, ‘Four.' ‘What are their names?' ‘Clarence, Edward, Teddy, and Kecalf.' ‘Where do you live?' ‘New York.'

“And within the first segment of talking to her, he had gone through all of my twenty-five areas of suggested conversation! She was obviously
totally intimidated by the presence of the audience and the television cameras. All of a sudden she wasn't talkative—she froze, and she gave one-word answers to every question.

“I had written all of these great notes—'She's talkative. She's so loquacious.' And then, when David asked her the same questions, she answered with one word! I remember, at one point, David just looked at the camera and put the notes aside and talked. He was determined to make her talk, and at some point he did get sentences out of her. He didn't get stories out of her like he got out of Diahann Carroll, or like he got out of Sophia Loren, but he did get her to talk. David called me up to his office after the show, and I thought, ‘Oh shit! This is it—I'm getting fired!' I got up there and he said, ‘Ken, I want her back on the show!' I nearly went into shock, but he meant it, because he was so in love with her musical talent.”

Reynolds also remembers another amusing episode that occurred in the middle of the taping of that particular show. While the video tape was still rolling, Aretha suddenly excused herself, got up, and left the stage, leaving Frost to fill in with a monologue. “In the middle of one of the interview segments,” Reynolds remembers, “Aretha says, ‘Could you excuse me?' Which threw everybody off for a shock—you're on TV, what do you mean, ‘Can I be excused?' If you're the only guest, and then there'll be nothing! So David is in shock, but he says, ‘Of course,' and this was not cut out of the tape. She gets up, goes offstage, and she walks back on-stage smoking a Kool cigarette! She had gotten up in the middle of a live television taping to get a cigarette—I couldn't believe it! But that's Aretha.”

At the time Aretha appeared on
The David Frost Show
that fall, she was at the height of her love affair with Ken Cunningham. Reynolds remembers that “one of the things we talked about in our interview was that she and Ken were opening a boutique and it was called Do It to Me, and it was going to be up in Harlem at 125th Street, but it never opened. She was real excited about that. But I tended to think that she always got very excited about anything that her man did, that she's been involved
with. She's one of those women who believes in the Tammy Wynette philosophy of: ‘Stand By Your Man.'”

Reynolds' main contact with Ken Cunningham came at the camera-blocking rehearsal that afternoon for
The David Frost Show
. He recalls that “Ken Cunningham was a tall, nice-looking man. He didn't have a whole lot to say, and stayed pretty much in the background. Again, Aretha paid a lot of attention to him, asking him lots of questions about his opinion. But he was very unobtrusive. He wasn't a showbiz husband, he wasn't butting in, or demanding anything of the crew.”

Young, Gifted and Black
is Aretha's most highly acclaimed studio album of the 1970s. The songs on it showed her off with such strength, confidence, and vocal dexterity that it was no wonder it sold so phenomenally well, and it contained five different hit singles. Its release coincided with the whole “black pride” phase of her career, which she reflected in her personal style, her public statements, and her music.