Aretha Franklin (59 page)

Someone who Aretha has previously performed with, Fantasia, went to the press to make a statement about how she felt snubbed by
The Grammy Awards
telecast. Although she was nominated, and won a Grammy for “Best R&B Vocal Performance, Female” for her song “Bittersweet” that evening, she boycotted the show and refused to attend. According to her, she was mad that she wasn't invited to be part of the Aretha Franklin tribute on the show, and to demonstrate her hurt feelings, she decided to skip
The Grammy Awards
altogether.

According to Fantasia, “They were honoring someone who is my idol, Aretha Franklin, and there is no way I could have sat there and not got the happy feet and wanting to jump on the mike because she is my favorite. So I felt like, you know, at the end of the day I should have been on that stage so, I kind of did my own little thing last night.”
(32)
Speaking of huge diva egos, Fantasia obviously had one too!

Aretha was reportedly “unhappy” when she heard Fantasia's rant to the press. According to Franklin, “I was sorry to hear that Fantasia was upset because she did not get the opportunity to participate in my
Grammy Tribute this year. I recall that in the past, Fantasia participated in both my MusicCares Person of the Year tribute and my United Negro College Fund tribute. Fantasia is still young in the business and although we all love and appreciate her, she must understand that in this business of show business, she will not always get to participate in everything she would like participate in. I'm sure it was not an intentional omission. I will see Fantasia over the summer here in Detroit.”
(34)

TV talk show hostess Wendy Williams snagged a real coup when she got Aretha to grant an in-person interview with her. The diva had phoned Wendy Williams on the air in January to say “hello,” so she felt very comfortable with the idea of appearing on the talk show. When Wendy reached out to book Franklin for a TV interview, Aretha agreed, and Wendy flew off to Detroit to have a formal tea with Aretha.

The interview aired on
The Wendy Williams Show
, March 2 and 3, 2011. While they sipped tea at the Townsend Hotel in Birmingham, Michigan, Aretha mainly talked about her weight loss, food,
Dancing with the Stars
, Whitney Houston's self-destructive drug problems, Halle Berry, her sister Carolyn, and several other non-medical topics.

At the top of the interview Franklin admitted to Wendy that she had lost an astonishing total of eighty-five pounds since December, she still claimed that it was all due to a healthier diet. According to her, “I was looking at a lot of pictures, and I was saying, ‘You are entirely too fat for words!'”

When Wendy said to her, “We all found out that you were having abdominal surgery.”

Aretha said, “Is that what you heard?” “Well that's what was said,” admitted Williams.

Then Aretha replied, “O.K. Well a lot of things were said. I've left that behind. I'm feeling wonderful. I'm feeling great. And, I couldn't be feeling any better than I'm feeling right now.”
(35)

Apparently, Williams was granted one—and only one—question about Aretha's health problems. She had gotten it in, Aretha answered it the way she wanted to, and then it was on to much lighter topics.

To match the progressively growing interest in the singer, Aretha's three main record companies quickly began to put together musical compilations of her music. The first one to fully jump on the bandwagon
was Columbia Records, and their massive twelve disc boxed-set called
Take a Look: Aretha Complete on Columbia
. In addition to all of Aretha's original albums for Columbia, for the first time ever, the set included a planned but never released album called
A Bit of Soul
, a stripped down studio version of Franklin's jazzy LP
Yeah!!!,
a DVD of some of her early sixties television performances on
The Steve Allen Show
, and an historic and rare audio dialogue of teenage Aretha in the recording studio with John Hammond and Ray Bryant at the time she recorded her first non-gospel album, in 1960.

According to Marc Myers in
The Wall Street Journal
, the
Take a Look: Aretha Complete on Columbia
album was a total hit. “Before Aretha Franklin became the Queen of Soul, she was a budding Princess of Pop. Fresh from Detroit in 1960, the 18-year-old gospel singer signed with Columbia Records and went to work recording the American songbook— combining Ella Fitzgerald's lyricism with Mahalia Jackson's earth-moving passion . . . Clearly, the pre-'Respect' Franklin could ace anything the label put before her—from Hoagy Carmichael's ‘Skylark' to Neal Hefti's ‘How to Murder Your Wife.' But as the years passed, Columbia's outdated pop strategy for Franklin gained little traction with the exploding youth culture and civil-rights movement … Yet this set provides an illuminating look back at the superstar's awakening,” he claimed.
(36)

Susan Whitall of
The Detroit News
glowingly assessed the boxed-set by stating, “As the DVD of her appearances on
The Tonight Show
[a/k/a
The Steve Allen Show
] illustrate, Franklin was a poised, satin-clad chanteuse, at ease with singing any part of the classic American songbook. Her jazz training and musicianship have not always been acknowledged, but she has the respect of musicians because she is not ‘just' a singer, but one of them, a gifted pianist and arranger … There are also times when she accompanies herself on piano on a song like Jimmy Reed's ‘Trouble In Mind,' that you can hear the stirrings of a new sound, the soulful, gospel-infused music that would soon explode for her and the entire country.”
(37)

At the same time that the
Take a Look: Complete on Columbia
album was released, Columbia / Sony Records also released a new single CD collection of the soul diva's jazz era music, entitled
The Great American
Songbook
. It took eighteen of her tracks from her Columbia career, and gave them a new spin. Several of the tracks are different mixes, and alternate takes on her early sixties music.

When Clyde Otis was originally interviewed for this book, I asked him if he remembered, “What nightclub was Aretha's
Yeah!!!
album recorded in?” He replied that he couldn't recall. It was revealed in the
Take a Look: Aretha Complete on Columbia
album that
Yeah!!!
was in fact a “live” studio recording, and that the applause and audience sounds were actually added to make it sound like she was performing in a jazz club. The 2011 boxed set and
The Great American Songbook
album both feature songs from
Yeah!!!
with the “ambient sound” and applause removed.

On March 25, 2011, Aretha Franklin was feeling well enough to celebrate her sixty-ninth birthday at a star-studded gala at the Helmsley Park Lane Hotel in New York City. Dressed in a white, loose-fitting dress with gold-colored accents, she danced, sang, and greeted guests who included Bette Midler, Tony Bennett, Smokey Robinson, and TV personalities Gayle King and Wendy Williams. Also on hand were two of the loves of her life, Willie Wilkerson, and Dennis Edwards of the Temptations.

She not only felt well enough to blow out the candles on her twotiered flower-lined birthday cake, when Dennis decided to serenade her with his version of the song “The Way We Were,” she joined in on the singing. This marked her first publicly sung song since her dramatic health scare of the previous year.

Bette Midler, who once recorded the Aretha-associated song “Drinking Again,” proclaimed of Aretha, “She was in fine form. It's wonderful to see that she had such a good time.”

Gayle King commented with delight, “There was a lot of love directed her way, and she appeared very touched by it all.”

The Queen of Soul herself reassuringly proclaimed to her guests, “I'm feeling fine and blessed to be here!”
(38)

After all of the recent talk about her health, Aretha's guests were just relieved that she had made it to this point. Already the concerned speculation had begun, with the public wondering if she would indeed make it to her seventieth birthday. According to one of the party attendees that night, there wasn't a dry eye in the house that evening.

On May 3, 2011, Aretha's album
A Woman Falling Out of Love
was released on her custom label, Aretha's Records, initially for sale exclusively at Wal-mart stores. Obviously, she had taken the album's title from her favorite song on her last Arista album, Burt Bacharach's “Falling Out of Love.” To publicize the album she went to New York City to appear on
The View
on April 28. On the show she sang two songs: one track from the new album—”How Long I've Been Waiting,” and one classic Aretha hit—”Think.” The following night, Aretha appeared on
Late Night with Jimmy Fallon
, where she chatted about and previewed the new album with “Sweet Sixteen,” and closed the show with “Freeway of Love.”

On
The View
Aretha looked especially comfortable chatting with Whoopi Goldberg, and the other hostesses, having “girl talk.” The only mention of Aretha's health was Whoopi carefully stating, “We know you don't want to talk about what was wrong, but how you feeling?”

According to Aretha, “I'm feeling wonderful. Fabulous … The weight loss came from the surgery. It was not bariatric surgery … I feel wonderful. I've got more energy. I changed my diet; going to Whole Foods [grocery store] now; getting all the best stuff. I dropped the chitlins, dropped the ham hocks, dropped all that stuff and I get some—I won't say ‘better' food—but ‘other' food.”
(39)

When
A Woman Falling Out of Love
was released, for Aretha there had been an eight-year gap between non-holiday studio albums. She had been announcing both it, and her own record label—Aretha's Records—for the past five years, and nothing ever came of either of them. Finally, with all of the publicity that her health issues had stirred up, she was able to secure a distribution deal in America through Wal-mart stores, and on the Wal-mart website. The fact that she “executive produced” the album herself instantly spelled out the precautionary words “train wreck.” Indeed, the album ends up with the train off-of-the-tracks most of the time amidst its twelve-song road. However, she still delivers a few solid performances here.

Two major mistakes really mar this album. The first one is giving one of her sons a solo in the middle of her album. Her fans don't want to buy this album to hear Eddie Franklin sing “His Eye is on the Sparrow,” they want to hear Aretha sing it. The second major mistake, is ending the album with “My Country ‘Tis of Thee.” It is the 2008 studio recording
she produced for President Barack Obama's inaugural. This song is lushly orchestrated, but it ends the album on a somber note.

As an album,
A Woman Falling Out of Love
is a patchwork quilt of divergent styles. It varies from heartfelt blues on B. B. King's “Sweet Sixteen,” to invigorating pop on “New Day.” Along the way she also delivers two over-produced but interesting new versions of pop classics: “Theme from
A Summer Place
” and “The Way We Were.” Aretha enlisted actor Billie Dee Williams to do a surprising little spoken-word passage in the middle of “A Summer Place,” and on “The Way We Were” she duets with Ronald Isley of the Isley Brothers. Unfortunately, neither of these men are credited or thanked on the album in any way. Omissions like this never happened at Arista! Or, was there some behind-the-scenes drama between Aretha, Williams, and Isley that made her purposely remove their names?

The big pre-release hype on the album was the promise that Aretha sings an incredible gospel song on it with Karen Clark-Sheard, called “Faithful.” Aretha must have mixed the vocal tracks, because it is mostly Franklin warbling by herself while Karen barely gets in a line or two underneath her. For all the big “wall of sound” effects, the song is ultimately more overwrought than inspiring. Both voices are lost in what sounds like a gospel shouting match.

“New Day” is the album's strongest track by far. The song was written by Aretha's son, Kecalf Franklin Cunningham, along with Norman West. It has a more of a memorable “hook” to it than any of the other new songs on
A Woman Falling Out of Love
. With a strong chorus line, and catchy beat to it, it shows Aretha's voice off well, and is light and refreshing in sound.

While
A Woman Falling Out of Love
features some very strong songs, especially “New Day” and “Sweet Sixteen,” it also hits several wrong notes along the way. It bounces too abruptly from blues, to pop, to eighties retro, to gospel, to romantic, to patriotic. There are way too many mood swings here. Listening to it makes one long to have Clive Davis take the reigns of her recording career again. He knows how to pick out a hit song, and he knows how to structure an Aretha album that has a strong beginning, middle, and ending.

The press reviews for
A Woman Falling Out of Love
were mixed. According to Thomas Conner in
The Chicago Sun-Times
, “On 2003's
So Damn Happy,
her last album with Arista, Franklin made a stab at updating her music to fit the times, and it mostly worked. For
A Woman Falling Out of Love
, however, she's in retreat. The songwriting is ‘70s, the production is ‘80s, the arrangements are pure ‘90s smooth jazz. Instead of a contemporary queen, we get an unsettling Eartha Kitt-enish cougar anthem (‘How Long I've Waited,' one of two songs here Franklin wrote and produced), clumsy jazz-club scat singing (‘U Can't See Me'), an icy reading of ‘Theme from
A Summer Place
.'”
(40)

In a review entitled, “For Aretha Franklin Fans, These Are Trying Times,” Allison Stewart in
The Washington Post
claims of
A Woman Falling Out of Love
, “Executive-produced by Franklin, recorded for Franklin's own label and appears to indulge every wrong musical instinct Franklin has ever had. This is the sound of a legend doing exactly as she pleases, which in Franklin's case means plenty of lite R&B ballads and underdone covers of overdone standards, such as ‘The Way We Were.' … a muddy-sounding
hot mess
of an album!”
(41)