Aretha Franklin (23 page)

During the recording of the album, the spirit moved several of the members of the congregation. Several of the women at the service went into dramatic “testifying” trances and fits of rejoicing. “I remember Gertrude pitched one of her regular ‘hissies,'” Wexler recalls of Clara Ward's mother. “I mean where they go into a gospel trance, and the ladies with the white coats with the Red Cross on them lead them to the ambulance, and they go into rigor and they speak in tongues.”

Released in June of 1972,
Amazing Grace
was a calculated risk. Would the members of the “me generation” flock together and follow Sister Franklin to church? The answer was an astonishing “yes!” The album not only went Gold, but made it to Number Seven on the LP charts alongside such unlikely company as the Rolling Stones'
Exile on Main Street
and Jethro Tull's
Thick as a Brick
. In addition to the success of the album, the single version of “Wholly Holy” logged four weeks on the pop singles chart.
The New York Times
was to refer to Aretha's
Amazing Grace
as “among her finest achievements,” and it ended up winning Aretha her eighth Grammy Award, in the category of “Best Soul Gospel.”

“I think the record was so successful because the choir was great, we had a good audience, and we had the preparation,” Jerry Wexler recalls. “If we had the tenacity to bring ‘the devil's rhythm section' into church, you understand there had to be a hell of a payoff for it, because it could have been dangerous. Of course, it is not like there isn't a tradition of all kinds of instruments in the sanctified church. Again,
Amazing Grace
has spontaneity and a soulful feeling too.”

Aretha changed her formula slightly for her next album, by changing producers for the first time since she had joined Atlantic Records in 1966. As she has done at Columbia with Clyde Otis, Aretha was taken by the idea of recording an album with another of Dinah Washington's producers, Quincy Jones. (On
Amazing Grace
, Aretha had shared co-producing credit with Jerry Wexler and Arif Mardin.) On 1973's
Hey Now Hey (The Other Side of the Sky)
, Aretha shared producing credit with Quincy Jones. It was her most inconsistent album since her days at Columbia.

Jones once proclaimed that “Aretha always had a fire in her; music's been her ticket to freedom.” Although their album together contained one of her hottest hit singles, “Angel,” the rest of
Hey Now Hey
turned out to be a real fire extinguisher. Peaking at Number Thirty on the LP charts, it was her first Atlantic album not to crack the Top Twenty-five, and began a seven year cycle of career tailspin.

First of all,
Hey Now Hey (The Other Side of the Sky)
sported one of the worst album covers of the entire decade. A rudimentary pencil-sketch portrait of Aretha featured a double-image sketch of her superimposed— upside down—in the middle of her face. Although she was again depicted
wearing an African headwrap, this particular sketch looked like an entry in a junior-high-school art contest. The interior of the gatefold LP cover contained cartoon versions of Franklin, Jones, and several inner-city street characters. Aretha herself was drawn as a reed-thin Egyptian princess with enormous wings, a fully exposed breast, and a microphone in her hand. Another of the cartoon characters on the LP's interior is a black matador who is bullfighting. However, instead of fighting a bull, he is waving his cape at a giant syringe. The album design is credited to Aretha Franklin, Ken Cunningham, and artist Jim Dunn. The concept might have sounded great during a late-night conversation, but in its ultimate execution it was an instant visual turn-off.

This album is most significant for yielding the hit single “Angel,” which was written by Carolyn Franklin. It peaked at Number Twenty on the pop chart, but on the R&B chart it went right to the top, becoming her thirteenth Number One soul hit. It is still one of the most-requested hits in Aretha's repertoire.

Three of the cuts on the album were great jazz numbers. A slow and beautiful version of Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim's “Somewhere” is especially moving, and the be-bopping “Moody's Mood” provided the album with its high points. (Together with “Just Right Tonight,” those two cuts were included on the 1984 Atlantic release called
Aretha's Jazz
. The other side of the
Aretha's Jazz
LP was culled from
Soul ‘69
.) What Aretha and Quincy should have done at the time was to go all the way, and produce the ultimate Aretha Franklin jazz LP. Instead, they filled it up with one great ballad (“Angel”) and a bunch of rambling grade-B songs.

Jerry Wexler confirms that
Hey Now Hey (The Other Side of the Sky)
was the product of a complete shift away from the original blueprints. “Quincy's album started out to be a jazz album,” he says, “and then it just started to drag on and on and on, and they changed their approach in the middle, and they went to make a regular commercial pop / soul album. Frankly, that [album] was a disappointment to me.”

One of the songs that Aretha and Quincy produced together was “Master of Eyes (The Deepness of Your Eyes).” It has a sort of psychedelic-narcotic feeling, with echoing vocal tracks, and someone blowing a set of
Middle Eastern pipes, like those of a snake charmer. The song was released as a single and made it to Number Thirty-three on the pop chart. However the song was not included on
Hey Now Hey
.

[In 1994, when
Hey Now Hey (The Other Side of the Sky)
was released on CD for the first time, the song “Master of Eyes (The Deepness of Your Eyes)” was added as the last track of the album, which makes perfect sense. When the 2007 album
Rare & Unreleased Recordings from the Golden Reign of The Queen of Soul
was released by Atlantic Records, it included eight tracks from the sessions for
Hey Now Hey
that were never released. Perhaps a full album that gathers together all of these tracks produced with Quincy Jones would be the ultimate way this material should be heard.

The year 1973 was one of high exposure for Aretha. She was seen singing and performing in comedy skits on
The Flip Wilson Show
, and she even showed up on an all-star tribute to big-band jazz great Duke Ellington. The extravagant January 13 television special was called
Duke Ellington . . . We Love You Madly
, and the producer and musical director was Quincy Jones. Also on the 90-minute CBS program were Count Basie, Ray Charles, Peggy Lee, Sarah Vaughn, Billy Eckstine, Sammy Davis, Jr., Joe Williams, James Cleveland, Quincy Jones, and the ever-sophisticated Duke Ellington.

Aretha's personal appearances that year found her playing three of the largest venues in America: the Houston Astrodome, the Boston Garden, and the Los Angeles Forum. In September 1973, Aretha was one of several black entertainers who appeared in a benefit concert at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City, held to raise money to aid drought victims in West Africa. She also played a series of concerts in South Africa that year, of which she clearly stated, “I made them give me a contract in which I specify that I won't sing before any segregated audiences. They'll either have to be totally integrated or all-black. I won't sing for an all-white audience. Black people must be able to come and hear me sing.”

That same year, Aretha had the sad task of singing at Clara Ward's funeral, which was held in Philadelphia. She sang one of the songs that made Clara famous, “The Day Is Past and Gone,” which Aretha had recorded at the age of fourteen. In 1972 she had sung at Mahalia Jackson's funeral, performing another selection from the
Songs of Faith
album, “Precious
Lord,” Suddenly, all of the great ladies that Aretha had known and looked up to as a child were gone: Dinah Washington, Mahalia Jackson, and now Clara Ward. It was up to her to carry on in their tradition.

In 1973 Aretha went back in the studio with Jerry Wexler to produce what was to be remembered as their last great album together,
Let Me in Your Life.
Whatever momentum she lost with the lackluster
Hey Now Hey,
she temporarily regained with this album. As a total album package,
Let Me in Your Life
is one of Aretha's most beautiful, sophisticated and classy LPs. It showed her off as a mature and focused performer, weaving songs of love and devotion. None of the songs on this album are soul shouting sprees, rock & roll, or dance tunes. A majority of the songs contain her signature piano playing and Arif Mardin's horn and string arrangements. It is as pleasant and unified as Billie Holiday's
Lady in Satin
or Barbra Streisand's
People
—yet it is 100-percent Aretha.

The songwriters whose material was utilized on this album give one an idea of the caliber of the songs: Bobby Goldsboro, Leon Russell, Stevie Wonder, Bill Withers, and Ashford & Simpson. The musicians, likewise, were all top-notch: Cornell Dupree, Bob James, Richard Tee, David Spinoza, Rick Morotta, Ralph MacDonald, Donny Hathaway, Willie Weeks, and the background vocals of Cissy Houston.

The album was released in February 1974, and made it to Number Fourteen on the LP Charts. There were two singles released from
Let Me in Your Life
: “Until You Come Back to Me (That's What I'm Gonna Do)” and “I'm in Love.” Aretha especially remembers recording “Until You Come Back to Me.” “Stevie Wonder wrote that,” she recalls. “I was staying in New York at the time, up on 88th Street between Fifth and Madison, right down the street from the Guggenheim Museum. And, let's see—I think we had a dry spell there, and that was a resurgence of hits. Thank you, Stevie!”

“Until You Come Back to Me” went Gold, hit Number Three on the pop charts, and became her last Top Ten hit of the decade. “I'm in Love,” which Bobby Womack composed, hit Number Nineteen on the pop charts. However, on the R&B charts, both songs hit the top, becoming her fourteenth and fifteenth Number One R&B smashes since signing with Atlantic.

All of the songs on
Let Me in Your Life
were produced by Jerry Wexler, Arif Mardin, and Aretha Franklin, except for four cuts (“With Pen in Hand,” “Oh Baby,” “If You Don't Think,” and “A Song for You”) that added Tom Dowd to the production lineup. A remake of the Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell hit “Ain't Nothing Like the Real Thing” was also released as a single and went on to win Aretha another Grammy Award the following year.

In 1974, Aretha won a Grammy Award for the little-known single, “Master of Eyes (The Deepness of Your Eyes).” “Ain't Nothing Like the Real Thing” brought her number of Grammys to an astonishing total of ten. For eight years in a row she had captured the title of “Best R&B Performance, Female.” She had won in that category every year since its creation in 1967. During the beginning of 1974, the Queen of Soul was comfortably seated on her throne, at the top of the record world. Unfortunately, when things began to go awry later that year, she had much farther to fall.

A
retha once commented, “I cannot imagine an artist—or anyone creative—who does not have a lull from time to time.” For her, the lull began in 1974 and lasted for five years. It would be easy to point a finger at any one of several possible reasons why her creative success began to slip away. These factors included a change in musical styles, the advent of disco music, poor song selections, and several exceedingly ill-chosen career moves.

Her next pair of album releases,
With Everything I Feel in Me
(1974) and
You
(1975), are among the five most disappointing albums of her entire career. The most bewildering aspect of these two albums is the fact that they represent Aretha's final recordings with Jerry Wexler as producer. Actually, the production credits on both of those albums list Jerry Wexler and Aretha Franklin as its producers, so she has to share the blame.

Jerry Wexler comes to a dead stop when our conversation comes around to his 1974 and 1975 LPs with Aretha. “I don't want to talk about those albums,” he says flatly. “I'm not happy with them, except for an occasional, isolated song such as ‘Until You Come Back to Me.' There were some good songs, you know, lurking somewhere in those albums. I'm not saying that they're bad albums, but I'd rather not talk about them.”

According to him, the last Aretha album that he really put his heart in was
Let Me in Your Life
. “That album was the beginning of things winding down,” he recalls. “There would be some great individual songs on the subsequent albums, like ‘Until You Come Back to Me,' for example,
which I think should have been a smash. Stevie Wonder wrote that song, and I think it's one of the greatest things she ever did. But somehow we didn't get lucky with it.”

When
With Everything I Feel in Me
was released in December of 1974, “luck” took a holiday. The disc was Aretha's first Atlantic LP to fail to make the Top Forty on the album chart. It comprised a disappointing mixture of mid-tempo songs and ballads that never seemed to get off the ground. It is also the first Aretha album to utilize synthesizers and echo effects. Somehow the Queen of Soul was lost in the mix, and she failed to find an audience this time around.