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Four decades later Gerry remembered it this way in a phone call as we reminisced about writing this song:

“You sat down at the piano and out came some gospel chords in 6/8 tempo. Those chords were exactly where I thought the song should go. You made it really easy for me to come out with the lyrics. You made it effortless.”

I don’t know that I would have called it effortless. Our preparation and discussion on the way home had been an important
part of the process. It put me in the right place to be a conduit for those chords. And then, once we had a verse and a chorus, effort was involved in thinking of a slightly different lyrical direction for the second verse that fit with the music already set up by the first verse. If Gerry thought my chords were exactly right, I was blown away by his lyrical imagery. A soul in the lost-and-found… a lover with a claim check… How did Gerry come up with these things??

The next day we recorded a piano-vocal demo and brought it to Jerry Wexler. He loved the song and said he’d get back to us after he played it for Ahmet and Aretha. As soon as we left, Wexler took our demo into the other room and played it for Ahmet, who also loved it. Then they had to play it for their engineer, Tom Dowd, the arranger, Arif Mardin, and then, of course, the song had to be approved by Aretha herself. Evidently she liked it enough to give it the final and most essential thumbs-up.

We didn’t know about any of these interim steps until after the song had been recorded. We remained in limbo for days. Most conversations between Gerry and me went like this:

“Ya think Ahmet’ll like it?”

“Why wouldn’t he?”

“What about Aretha?”

“I have no idea.”

“Ya think they’re gonna do it?”

“God, I hope so!”

We heard nothing—not a word—until Jerry Wexler invited us to come in and listen to the finished recording.

Oh. My. God.

Hearing Aretha’s performance of “Natural Woman” for the first time, I experienced a rare speechless moment. To this day I can’t convey how I felt in mere words. Anyone who had written a song in 1967 hoping it would be performed by a singer who could take it to the highest level of excellence, emotional connection,
and public exposure would surely have wanted that singer to be Aretha Franklin.

Few people would consider it hyperbole to call Aretha’s voice one of the most expressive vocal instruments of the twentieth century. Hearing that instrument sing a song I had participated in creating touched me more than any recording of any song I had ever written. I knew that Gerry and I had delivered a song that took Jerry Wexler’s title to its most romantic, emotional conclusion, and I knew that the music I had written had captured the spirit of black gospel in a way that gave Aretha something familiar she could run with—and run with it she did! But Aretha was not alone in creating that incomparable recording. She was assisted by the soaring string crescendos that wrapped themselves around her glorious vocal performance and brilliantly complemented by a solid rhythm and blues basic track and the soulful background vocals of her sisters, Erma and Carolyn Franklin.

But a recording that moves people is never just about the artist and the songwriters. It’s about people like Jerry and Ahmet, who matched the songwriters with a great title and a gifted artist; Arif Mardin, whose magnificent orchestral arrangement deserves the place it will forever occupy in popular music history; Tom Dowd, whose engineering skills captured the magic of this memorable musical moment for posterity; and the musicians in the rhythm section, the orchestral players, and the vocal contributions of the background singers—among them the unforgettable “Ah-oo!” after the first line of the verse. And the promotion and marketing people helped this song reach more people than it might have without them.

But in the end it was Aretha’s performance that sent our song not only to the top of the charts but all the way to heaven.

It takes a lot more people to deliver a song than most people are aware of, but you, the listener, are the most important person
in the process. You complete the circle. You inspire us to write, sing, arrange, record, and promote songs that move us because we hope they will move you, too. There might still be an “us” without you, but you make us matter, and you make us better.

In 1970 I would record “Natural Woman” with a simple arrangement along the lines of the original demo. My 1970 version is slower than Aretha’s and has a few chords from Arif’s arrangement that weren’t on my original demo.

I
n 1963, with something like thirty-three top 10 hits to Aldon’s credit, Donnie had begun negotiating with Screen Gems Television and Columbia Pictures to sell Aldon Music. The sale took place on April 12, 1963, with Donnie, then twenty-nine, becoming executive vice president in charge of all music publishing and recording, conducted primarily under the banners of Screen Gems–Columbia Music and Colpix Records. Al Nevins stayed on as a consultant until he passed away on January 25, 1965. He would have been fifty that year.

At first Gerry and I were unhappy about the sale, and Barry and Cynthia shared our dismay. We thought of ourselves as members of the Aldon Music family, and we were convinced that the new circumstances would herald the end of our careers. To assuage our vehement disapproval, Donnie sat down with Barry, Cynthia, Gerry, and me in the Manns’ living room. He swore he’d be just as active on our behalf as head of Screen Gems–Columbia Music as he’d been at Aldon. He’d get covers just as he always had, and it would be to our advantage that he would be in charge of Colpix Records.

“Nothing’s gonna change,” Donnie said. “It’ll only get better. I’ll be able to place your songs in movies.”

We were not convinced.

“You could win an Oscar!”

We thought that was too far-fetched.

Donnie gave us more examples of how he could get us theme songs for the television shows and movies he would now control. His logic was unassailable, but we were still miserable. Donnie showed singular patience in keeping the discussion going until Barry acknowledged the underlying reason we were so upset: Donnie was selling us as if we were chattel.

The problem was, we
were
chattel. For $6,000 Gerry and I had not only signed over our copyrights, we had given Aldon Music’s owners, heirs, and assigns the right to sell our services. But the worst part wasn’t the sale. It was the feeling that the circumstances around our professional and creative family were about to change, and the head of the family had the power to make that decision no matter how we felt about it. We were about to lose the physical location that had inspired so many songs. We would no longer be writing in the cubicles at 1650 not-really-Broadway. We would be writing at 711 Fifth Avenue in the corporate office building that housed the New York headquarters of Screen Gems–Columbia Pictures—a location in some ways as far from Tin Pan Alley, 1650 Broadway, and the Brill Building as Wall Street was from the Bronx.

Donnie’s gift for persuasion won the day. Before he left he extracted a promise from the four of us to keep an open mind. Then he proceeded to come through with TV and movie themes for his writers, and he put the corporate might of Colpix Records behind artists such as James Darren, Paul Peterson, and Shelley Fabares, all of whom recorded songs by Screen Gems–Columbia Music writers. Donnie also released recordings on Colpix by writers, artists, and musicians from his stable, including Barry Mann,
Toni Wine, saxophonist Artie Kaplan, and Earl-Jean. When the Colpix release of Freddie Scott’s
“Hey Girl”
(produced by Gerry, arranged by me, and written by both of us) made the top 10 in 1963, Gerry and I were so jubilant that we didn’t object to how often Donnie said, “See? Didn’t I tell you? This is great! Sheel, how great is this?” But when the successful British Invasion pushed Colpix artists off the charts in 1965, Gerry and I and the Manns started grousing again. We missed the spirit of the cubicles. We yearned for the old sense of burgeoning possibilities. And at a time when young people across America were becoming increasingly aware of corporate interests’ control over their lives, we didn’t like being owned by a corporation.

Hoping to diminish our discontent, Donnie called us into his office and announced that he would soon be producing a new television show featuring four young men who, he assured us, would soon become America’s Beatles. Unlike most groups who came together on their own, Donnie would assemble this group through auditions.

“I mean, what better way than auditions to put a group together? They’ll be great!”

“Isn’t that kind of artificial?” I asked. “How can you put a group together and expect them to have chemistry when you don’t even know if they’re going to like each other?”

“It doesn’t matter how they come together. They can’t help but be successful because of all the great songs you guys are going to deliver.”

Donnie went on to explain that the Monkees would need several songs for each weekly show and even more songs for their albums, which Colpix would release and cross-market through the TV show.

“The Beatles may not need your songs,” he said, “but the Monkees will.”

Once again, Donnie’s instinct for business put him ahead of the curve. Starring Michael Nesmith, Davy Jones, Micky Dolenz, and Peter Tork,
The Monkees
TV show was a runaway hit, and so were the songs written by Donnie’s writers, among them Tommy Boyce and Bobby Hart, Barry and Cynthia, and Gerry and me. Released on Colpix and widely promoted by weekly exposure on national television, our Monkees songs sold remarkably well. Our success with that group was a mixed blessing for Gerry, because the critics whose opinions he most respected considered the Monkees a manufactured group with a bubblegum flavor and no staying power. Several decades later, some of the same critics would acknowledge that the Monkees had risen to the occasion with more musical ability than the critics had originally attributed to them.

Gerry felt a little better about our association with the Monkees in 1968 after a movie called
Head
was released. Written by Jack Nicholson and Bob Rafelson, directed by Rafelson, and starring the Monkees, the film was enthusiastically embraced by the counterculture. I’d like to believe
“The Porpoise Song,”
written by Gerry and me, was chosen for the opening of
Head
solely because it complemented the images over which it was used, but it probably didn’t hurt that Donnie was in a position to advocate for its use in a Columbia picture. Notwithstanding our identification with young people rebelling against The Man, material security remained important to the Goffin family. If our lifestyle was in danger, it was not from a financial wolf at the door.

Later I would come to appreciate Donnie’s timing and wisdom in selling Aldon to a multimedia corporation. If Donnie had increased his own opportunities for success, the sale had also undeniably increased the opportunities for his writers. Donnie would expand the musical knowledge of the next generation in the seventies and eighties when he presented performances on television by emerging and well-known acts, first on a late-night
ABC-TV show called
In Concert
and then as the host of a series called
Don Kirshner’s Rock Concert
. Among the artists he introduced were the Rolling Stones, Curtis Mayfield, Chuck Berry, the Steve Miller Band, Blood, Sweat & Tears, Ike and Tina Turner, Alice Cooper, Led Zeppelin, Seals and Crofts, Billy Preston, the Isley Brothers, the Allman Brothers, Poco, and Kansas.

When I reconnected with Donnie and Sheila in Florida in 2010, I asked Donnie how his family was. He told me with characteristic enthusiasm how great his and Sheila’s by then adult children, Ricky and Daryn, were, and how great it was to be the grandparents of five grandchildren. Of course they were great. They were Donnie’s family, and they were as proud of him as he was of them. When I told him he had been right to sell Aldon Music to Screen Gems, his face lit up like a sunrise.

Donnie’s heart stopped beating on January 17, 2011. When I visited with Sheila and Daryn after his memorial service, I told them something that I want to say to the world. Between his work with songwriters and his presentation of an array of groups on television that a lot of viewers might not otherwise have seen, Don Kirshner was one of the most significant influences on popular music in the twentieth century.

Donnie, babe. You were great.

T
he journalist Alfred Gilbert Aronowitz was born in Bordentown, New Jersey, on May 5, 1928. His articles and columns about the Beats and, later, his regular column in the
New York Post
called “Pop Scene” had a sense of immediacy and irreverence that resonated with readers who had come of age around the end of the fifties. Aronowitz first captured my husband’s attention when Gerry learned that Al had known Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac. Gerry’s interest was further piqued by Al’s relationship with the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. But perhaps Aronowitz’s most compelling credential was that he was a confidant of the man who had written
“The Times They Are A-Changin’.”

Released by Columbia Records in January 1964, Bob Dylan’s album
The Times They Are A-Changin’
was a collection of self-composed, sparsely arranged, and lyrically unsettling songs that connected with mainstream audiences. While the executives at Columbia saw huge potential income in selling the concept of rebellion to a nation of willing teenagers, other men in positions of power and influence saw Bob as a threat. That he was. Bob Dylan
was empowering young people to refuse to be a cog in the military-industrial machine, and they were listening.

At twenty-two, I should have understood Bob’s appeal, but I didn’t appreciate until much later the social significance of his lyrics or the allure of his dry humor and unpretentious musical presentation.