Aretha Franklin (26 page)

Almighty Fire
only made it to Number Sixty-three on the LP chart, and contained no hit singles. Somehow it garnered a Grammy Award nomination in the category of “Best R&B Performance, Female.” However, Donna Summer's sexy disco anthem “Last Dance” took the trophy.

Aretha's penchant for eccentric fashions reached new peaks in the mid-seventies. For a while she outfitted herself in silver lamé, to emulate the outrageous metallic costumes of Patti LaBelle's group, LaBelle—with Nona Hendryx and Sarah Dash. When “halter tops” and supportless “tube tops” were the rage, Aretha chose several for stage wear. No one seems to have told her that she shouldn't wear them. Around the time that the treasures of King Tut's tomb were making the rounds of the major American museums, Aretha was suddenly stricken with a bad case of “Egyptomania.” She was seen on one television special as if dressed for a barge ride down the ancient Nile.

“I remember her being carried out on-stage on a sedan chair like Cleopatra,” recalls Greg Porto, the designer of several Atlantic Records album covers. “She stood there in a multicolored outfit singing ‘You Light Up My Life.' She was trying to look like an Egyptian princess, but she just looked silly. When she hit the last note of the song, she lifted her arms up over her head to reveal gold lamé wings attached to the dress. She was trying to look like Nefertiti, but it was just an exercise in bad taste.”

One famous appearance on TV's
Midnight Special
found her exposing much too much flesh. She looked ridiculous in a bare-midriff halter top and see-through mesh pants. It was painfully obvious that she was surrounded by people who were giving nods of approval to her most inappropriate selections in clothing and musical material.

Years later, Aretha was able to admit, “I've had a couple of real disasters with stuff I've designed for the stage. Oh wow, they were bad!” She still
remembers one particular creation. She had purchased several yards of velvet that she had fallen in love with. However, she recalls, laughing, ‘When it was made into a dress, I decided it would look better on a sofa!”

In June 1978 Aretha played Carnegie Hall in New York City, and drew an all-star crowd. She was visited backstage by Dionne Warwick, Patti LaBelle, Stephanie Mills, and Andrew Young, U.S. Ambassador to the UN. Interest in Aretha's career as a performer was still strong, which made her albums from this era even more frustrating to listen to. They were so far below her capacity that it was disappointment for her longtime fans.

Aretha's final album of the 1970s was also her last full album for Atlantic Records. In 1979, disco had grown to become the hottest sound around. It was the year that Cher sold a million copies of her disco smash “Take Me Home,” Donna Summer and Barbra Streisand teamed up to produce the disco duet of all times “No More Tears (Enough is Enough),” and even Rod Stewart created a disco classic with “Da Ya Think I'm Sexy.” It seemed like a logical move and an assured bet that Aretha could go into the studio and create the hottest disco record of the year. What could the Queen of Soul come up with if she decided to make her bid at the dance craze that was sweeping the globe? When she went into the recording studio with producer Van McCoy, who created the Number One dance hit “The Hustle,” a hot dance-floor smash was anticipated.

What they produced together, was a complete mess titled
La Diva
. It was a mixture of grade-C numbers and rambling ballads that were torture to listen to. The closest Aretha came to disco was the song “Only Star,” which was an embarrassing bilingual debacle in English and Spanish. The album was a complete bomb, and has the distinction of becoming the lowest-charting new studio LP of her post-Columbia career. It contained no hit singles, and is acknowledged as the worst album of her entire Atlantic Records catalogue. It was a sad way to end a business arrangement that had brought Aretha her greatest commercial successes.

La Diva
represented her all-time career nadir. The sound of her proclaiming in song, “I'm a disco queen” signaled the end of her reign. The Queen of Soul had clearly lost her once-tight grip on her royal scepter.

The cover photo of
La Diva
depicted Aretha lounging on a long red sofa in a pair of cowboy boots and a very unflattering, low-cut leather
dress. She may as well have sat this dance out; there was nothing on the album worth hitting the dance floor for.
Rolling Stone
, in its review of
La Diva
, lamented that “Aretha Franklin has regressed from being one of our most powerful R&B performers into a mere purveyor of over-arranged pap.”

As though ending the decade on a career low point weren't bad enough, Aretha's life was once again struck by tragedy. In June 1979, burglars broke into her father's Detroit home. Reverend Franklin was shot twice. He eventually lapsed into a coma from which he never recovered, and died five years later. Aretha began flying to Detroit at least twice a month to visit her bedridden father.

Her brother Cecil said at the time, “It's been a very disconcerting, tragic year for her. She did several benefits to help offset his medical bills, and spent a great deal of time personally taking care of him.”

In late summer of 1979, Aretha headlined a concert at the Greek Theater in Los Angeles. The review that appeared in
Soul
magazine commented that Aretha seemed to be “preoccupied” throughout the concert, which included her versions of Earth, Wind and Fire's “September” and “Boogie Wonderland.” For the encore, Aretha came on-stage and said, “For those of you who would like to know, my dad is much better tonight.” When she attempted to say more, tears prevented her from continuing to speak. She regained her composure and dove into the George Benson hit, “The Greatest Love of All,” a song that is an anthem for survivors—which is exactly what Aretha Franklin is.

The 1970s had been a decade of extreme contrasts for Aretha. She scored some of her greatest successes with albums like
Amazing Grace
,
Aretha Live at Fillmore West
, and
Young, Gifted and Black
. However her final trio of Atlantic albums marked a creative low point, and her father's tragic shooting had cast a new shadow over her life. Although she was happily married to Glynn Turman, her dad's health was always in the back of her mind. As she had done so many times before, Aretha looked to her music for solace. The only direction that her life could take from this point was a sharp turn upward.

I
n 1980, Aretha's contract at Atlantic Records lapsed and it was time for her to shop for a new record label. As in her situation fourteen years before, she needed to find the right company, one that would get behind her and totally revamp her career. When she left Atlantic, she felt that she had been neglected by the company.

“I had some great years there and I'm appreciative for the launching pad with which they provided me after being with Columbia for five years,” she said at the time. “However, sometimes you stay with a situation just a little too long, and there were things that left quite a bit to be desired, especially toward the end. I guess around 1975 I began to notice a change in their general approach. We weren't hitting. I felt it was because of lack of promotion more than anything. No airplay. It doesn't make any difference how good your product is; if people don't hear it, what does it mean? How can they buy it if they can't hear it?”

In 1967 she had been amazed at the personal attention that she received from Jerry Wexler, Tom Dowd, Arif Mardin, and Ahmet Ertegun. “They didn't just sit in a big office and go through the paperwork and count the money,” Aretha recalled of her golden era at Atlantic. “They really got involved with the projects, which was rather out of the ordinary. Particularly in the sixties, that was unheard of, with the chairman of the board down in the studio with his sleeves rolled up, dealing with what was going on.” She longed to find herself in that kind of nurturing situation again.

Since her last three albums had landed on the marketplace with a resounding thud, she needed some serious help if she was going to pull her sagging recording career out of the danger zone. Her new saviors turned out to be Clive Davis and the small but heavy-hitting label he ran—Arista Records.

Arista was born in 1974, when Davis took over a small operation called Bell Records. When he started with Bell, he inherited two unknown singer / songwriters who were under option to the label. Dropping everyone else's options, he decided to retain the pair of songwriters, who had released only one album apiece.

Davis, who had made his mark in the recording business at Columbia by discovering, signing, and developing stars like Janis Joplin and Sly & the Family Stone, was out to prove that he still had the Midas touch. He changed Bell's name to Arista, and proceeded to turn the company into a major hit-making force. He also turned the two unknown singer / songwriters into major-league stars. Their names were Barry Manilow and Melissa Manchester.

Throughout the 1970s, Arista scored one hit after another with its varied roster of stars that included Patti Smith, Ray Parker Jr., Alan Parsons, Air Supply, Phyllis Hyman, and Angela Bofill. While he was interested in developing new talent, Clive Davis has also been credited with reviving the careers of several singing stars of the sixties and seventies, such as Melanie (
Sunset and Other Beginnings
, 1975), Martha Reeves (
The Rest of My Life
, 1976), and Eddie Kendricks (
Vintage ‘78
). However, he really perfected his craft when he totally revamped the careers of Dionne Warwick, Aretha Franklin, and Carly Simon.

Dionne had one of the most commercially successful recording careers in the music industry from 1963 to 1972. With Burt Bacharach writing and producing her songs, she had one of the longest-running hot streaks in the business. As in Aretha's situation with Jerry Wexler, when Dionne and Bacharach parted company, her career hit a six-year low point. Also echoing Aretha's dilemma, Warwick spent most of the seventies going from producer to producer, looking for the magic that was somehow lost.

In 1979, Dionne signed with Arista Records, and with her debut album on the label,
Dionne
, she scored the biggest-selling album of her career.
Produced by Barry Manilow at the height of his fame, the LP became the first Platinum album of Warwick's career. She won two Grammy Awards and scored on the music charts with the million-selling single “I'll Never Love This Way Again” and the hit “Déjà Vu.” By matching the right artist with the right producer, Clive Davis virtually resurrected Dionne's career at a point when it was floundering.

When Aretha's contract lapsed with Atlantic, Davis was taken with the idea of doing for Aretha what he had just done for Dionne, by bringing her back bigger than ever. Aretha, likewise was interested to see what Arista could do for her. “I was reading the trade papers,” she explained in 1980, “looking at where they [Arista] were on the charts, how they promoted their records, the product released, and how they ran their company. I liked what I saw.”

Clive Davis distinctly recalls the negotiations with Aretha in early 1980. “Her New York attorney called me to find out if we were interested,” says Davis, “and I was interested! We discussed the business arrangements. When that had been resolved, then the two of us decided it would be good to have a face-to-face meeting, and I went to her home in Los Angeles, for a meal.

“She was interested in joining Arista, based upon what she knew of me over the years. I've been very friendly with a number of people she knows well—Stevie Wonder and a whole group of people. I'm certain she noted what happened with Dionne. She was very aware, she reads the trades very carefully.

“She was just as gracious as could be,” Clive recalls of their initial meeting. “She was very aware of my career, and what I was doing at Arista. She was very much looking forward to it, and we said that we would work as a partnership, and as a team. That's what she had missed since the Jerry Wexler days. Basically, the only one she had worked with as a partner was Jerry.”

At the time, Aretha was being considered by everyone in the business as a phenomenal talent who was wasting her voice on unworthy material. With regard to song choices, Davis claims, “Material is like a pitcher on a baseball team. The vocalist could be enormous, and without hit songs, you could just wait there, as you know from many other artists who could
still sing as well as they ever did, but without the right material, they can't do it.”

Performing in concert on April 25, 1980, at Avery Fisher Hall in New York City's Lincoln Center, Aretha turned to the audience and introduced Davis as “the eloquent president of my new record company.” She was at a turning point in her career, and she was about to enter a new phase.

She had begun the year at the bottom of her popularity, but the Avery Fisher Hall performance marked her official low point.
Rolling Stone
magazine ripped into her with its review of the concert: “Franklin obviously craves the kind of comeback that Dionne Warwick enjoyed this past year. But to judge from her sloppy distracted performance at Lincoln Center, the road back won't be easy.” The reviewer found her show to be “a particularly excruciating exercise in masochism as Franklin and the band lost each other in a lumbering sludge.” Her singing of Michael Jackson's “Don't Stop ‘Til You Get Enough” with two male dancers, and Peter Allen's “I Go to Rio” while twirling a beach umbrella, caused the magazine to describe her show as having “the trappings of a tacky burlesque show.”