Respect: The Life of Aretha Franklin (19 page)

“Aretha Franklin tells chums she doesn’t need a house because she recently purchased a four-bedroom beauty (estimated cost: $60,000) on Detroit’s exclusive Northwest Side… her husband, Ted White, just bought her a lovely white mini-mink coat. So, she asks, ‘How about Santa bringing me just a little more love?’ ”

“The world was showering love on my sister,” said Erma, “but that at-home love—the kind of love we need to get by—wasn’t coming her way. As a singer, she was enjoying more success than ever before, but that doesn’t mean she wasn’t suffering.”

I
n 1968—the year of the Tet offensive, the rising revolts in the streets of America, the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., the race riots, and the brutal Democratic Convention in Chicago—Aretha Franklin, at twenty-six, became the most admired recording artist in the country. And yet, according to her siblings, manager, producer, and booking agent, she had never been more miserable.

“Ree was at the crossroads,” said Carolyn, “and didn’t know which way to go. She sang a song by Ronnie Shannon, the same guy who wrote ‘I Never Loved a Man,’ that said, ‘I just can’t see myself leaving you.’ But then she sang another song, one that she wrote. She called it ‘Think.’ Ted put his name on it, but Ted had nothing to do with it. I was there when Aretha wrote it, all by herself. She tells him to think what he’s trying to do to her. She cries out for her freedom. She sang ‘Think’ as powerfully as anything she’d ever sung in her life.”

“I’m sure ‘Think’ had personal meaning for Aretha,” said Jerry Wexler. “But it also resonated on a large cultural level. Young people were telling the war establishment to think what they were doing. Black America was telling white America to think what they were doing. The song spoke to everyone, and, like ‘Respect,’
became another way in which Aretha became a spokesperson for her generation.”

“Think,” part of
Aretha Now,
her fourth Atlantic album, didn’t come out until the spring of 1968.

In January of 1968, backed by the miniskirted Sweet Inspirations, she had torn apart “Chain of Fools” on the
Jonathan Winters Show.

Billboard
reported that in Inglewood, California, on January 23, “Aretha Franklin launched the new $16 million Forum’s entry as a concert facility.” The article went on to say that, improbable as it might seem, she had opened the show with “No Business Like Show Business,” a throwback to her mainstream Columbia material.

“We had nothing to do with her concert presentations,” said Wexler. “That was strictly her domain. She had off nights, of course, but on her on nights, Aretha was the consummate performer. In my view she was challenged by what I consider lapses in taste. This has not only to do with some of her more outlandish stage outfits, but the songs she chose. I remember that I once gently asked Aretha whether she just possibly might think that her Judy Garland/Al Jolson–style numbers might not work in the turbulent sixties. She looked at me like I was crazy. She didn’t say these words, but her expression told me,
You worry about the records and I’ll worry about my show.
”

The accolades kept coming.

The mayor of Detroit, James Cavanagh, came to her concert at the city’s Cobo Hall on February 16 to hand her a proclamation declaring Aretha Franklin Day. Dr. King himself flew in for the occasion, citing her extraordinary service to his Southern Christian Leadership Conference.

King’s appearance was a complete surprise to Aretha. It was the last time she saw him alive.

That same night, three trade magazines—
Record World, Billboard,
and
Cash Box
—each presented her with a plaque calling her the female vocalist of the year.

“This was the point at which I believe she took the queen thing seriously,” said Erma. “But who could blame her? Awards were coming from organizations all over the world. The honors were making her dizzy.”

“The honors made her sing even harder,” said Cecil, who was there that night. “The honors took her to a new place in her artistry. Never in my life—not in church, not at any show or any concert—have I heard folks scream like they screamed that night at Cobo. When she sang ‘Respect,’ the crowd woke up the dead and the dead danced a dance of joy.

“Daddy, of course, was beaming with pride. After the concert, he met with Dr. King. I heard Dr. King discuss the situation in Memphis where two sanitation workers had been crushed to death by a faulty truck. The conditions under which those workers operated were appalling, and the union struck. Dr. King told my father that he needed his help in what was shaping up as the next great battle in the civil rights struggle. Daddy assured him he would do what he could, and, in fact, in March my father did travel to Memphis and lend his support.”

Reverend Franklin was back in Detroit when, on April 4, Dr. King was assassinated on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel.

“My father called me with the news,” said Cecil. “I’m not sure how he heard but the first thing he said was that he’d been trying to call Aretha and had not been able to get through. Aretha was in the midst of her worst period with Ted. On top of that, the crazy demands of her career were growing each day. She was planning to go on this monster European tour and had the world on her mind. Daddy worried about what the news would do to her. His phone was ringing off the wall and he asked me to try to reach her. When I did, she had already heard and was very shook. Because Aretha was Dr. King’s favorite singer, I knew that Mrs. King would want her to sing at the funeral. I said, ‘Ree, you’ve got a lot going on. If
you’re not up to it, don’t worry about it.’ ‘No, Cecil,’ she said, ‘if I’m asked, I’ll go. I have to.’ And of course she did.”

Aretha chartered a plane to attend the funeral in Atlanta. When I asked her about her singing at the service, she had no distinct memory of it. Furthermore, she did not recollect what song Mahalia Jackson had sung. The only detail she recalled was the fact that Gladys Knight and the Pips, unable to find a commercial flight, had asked if they could fly on her plane. She accommodated them and distinctly remembered that they never thanked her. She insisted that this moment of what she considered ingratitude be recorded in her autobiography.

“We all have mechanisms for dealing with unspeakable pain,” said Cecil. “Aretha’s way is to focus on some little thing that happened to offend her. That’s her way of coping with the enormous hurt inside. After the funeral—with so much craziness going on in her life—I wondered if she was going to cancel a big-band jazz recording session Wexler had set up in New York and the European tour to follow. I figured it’d be too much. But off she went—her, Ted, and a whole entourage of tour managers and musicians.”

Before the start of the sessions and the tour, she signed a new contract with Atlantic. Wexler turned it into a media event.
Billboard
reported, “Aretha Franklin and Atlantic Records have negotiated a new contract even though her original contract with the label had several years to run. At a luncheon at the Hotel St. Regis to celebrate the new deal and her departure on her first European concert tour, Jerry Wexler, Atlantic’s executive vice-president, said that Miss Franklin will receive one of the largest guarantees ever given to any recording star but to reveal the sum would be in ‘gross taste.’ ” Wexler continued to hype the deal in the media. He told
Jet
that the contract was “the greatest that any single recording artist has signed in the history of the recording business.” The magazine went on to say, “He refused, however, to divulge the amount of hard cash involved, but added, ‘it was upwards of a million dollars.’ ”

On two days in April, Aretha showed up at the Atlantic studios in New York to start what Wexler was calling her first real jazz
album. His idea was simple—to emulate the famous
Genius of Ray Charles
album that Atlantic had recorded in 1959 in which Charles performed with a Count Basie–style big band using actual members of Basie’s band.

“It was time to get out of the rut,” Wexler explained. “Aretha was as much a jazz singer as anything else—gospel, R-and-B, or blues—and I wanted the world to know it. We already had enough unreleased inventory in the can where I knew I could always release a single. This time I wasn’t looking for a single. I wanted her wailing in front of a big band.”

“I was given the honor of writing the arrangements,” said Arif Mardin, “and used Ernie Wilkins—to me, the greatest of Basie orchestrators—as my inspiration. By then, Tommy Dowd was a coproducer along with Jerry.”

“Jerry let me handle many of the logistics,” Tommy Dowd told me, “and, with me behind the board, we had a good shorthand. He made several song suggestions to Aretha, and so did I, but in the end she picked the songs she wanted to sing. She came in with songs by Smokey Robinson, Percy Mayfield, and Sam Cooke. She had fabulous taste. I was surprised that the first thing she wanted to do was ‘Today I Sing the Blues’ because she had done it on her first Columbia album. ‘I didn’t do it right, though,’ she told me. ‘I didn’t do it justice.’ Well, when Arif got through with his chart, justice was done.”

David “Fathead” Newman, the great saxophonist and charter member of the Ray Charles band, played on both the
Genius of Ray Charles
and these jazz sessions with Aretha.

“I thought that Ray album was a once-in-a-lifetime experience, but Aretha made it a twice-in-a-lifetime thing,” David explained. “Like Ray, she came in and took over. I know Wexler and Tommy were called the producers, but it was Aretha who ran the show. She knew where she wanted every note. If the third trumpet was out of tune, she said so. If the rhythm section hadn’t found the pocket, she found it for them. All energy came from her, whether she was seated at the piano or standing in front of the mic.
She didn’t need more than one or two takes. She made us play above our heads. Joe Newman, Ernie Royal, and Snooky Young—all Basie cats who were also on the Ray album—had backed up everyone from Jimmy Rushing to Joe Williams to Arthur Prysock. But in Aretha’s presence, they were humbled, just as I had heard that Miles and Dizzy had been humbled in the presence of Charlie Parker. I remember after we did ‘Today I Sing the Blues,’ Joe Newman shaking his head and whispering to me, ‘Man, this bitch is so fuckin’ good I may have a heart attack and drop dead right here, a happy man.’ ”

“Today I Sing the Blues” was recorded on April 17.

“We wanted to cut at least two or three songs a day,” said Wexler. “That was the most economic way to do it. But after the first one, Aretha split. She didn’t say why. She was simply gone.”

The next day she showed up to record Smokey Robinson’s majestic “Tracks of My Tears,” a major hit for Smokey and his Miracles in 1965.

“It didn’t seem like an obvious vehicle for a jazz big band,” said Arif, “since it’s essentially a rhythm-and-blues song. But Aretha was insistent that it would work. She gave me her ideas for harmonizing the horns and building up the chorus. Although she neither reads nor writes music, she was a co-arranger. She had the section sounds mapped out in her mind and I essentially adopted her plan.”

The plan to complete the album before she left on her first European tour, though, had to be abandoned when, without explanation, Aretha canceled the rest of the April sessions.

“We weren’t sure whether she’d make the European trip at all,” said Carolyn, “but she did show up at the airport. I was happy to be invited to sing background vocals. When we got to Paris, it was early May, and Ree got happy in a hurry. Paris was beautiful. Paris was the highlight. The city has always played a big part in Ree’s imagination. Aretha is a Francophile. At different points in her life, she’s started to study French. She loves the French cooking and the French designers. So playing the Olympia was a major thrill. The Parisian audiences loved her. Atlantic recorded us for a live album.
The only problem was the band. Wexler didn’t put it together. Ted did. The band lacked the fire that we’d been used to in the studio. And then the band became another point of contention between Aretha and Ted. She accused him of hiring the wrong musicians. He accused her of slacking on her singing. It got bad, even as the crowds kept getting bigger.”

In London Aretha got to hang out with Ahmet Ertegun in his chauffeur-driven Rolls-Royce.

“Aretha loved Jerry Wexler because he was a passionate fan and a great producer and a salt-of-the-earth street guy who knew how to sell records,” said Carolyn. “But I think she got even more of a kick out of Ahmet because he was so sophisticated. He was European royalty. He took us to exclusive private clubs and chic boutiques on Carnaby Street where you had to have appointments to shop. Ahmet was on the cutting edge. He dressed like he was on his way to visit the queen of England. The man was cleaner than the board of health. He took us by the store where a man custom-made his shoes. He told us he had over sixty pairs. I didn’t even know a woman with that many shoes. The shoemaker’s wife designed cashmere scarves, and Ahmet bought us each six scarves in different shades of soft pastels. It was a beautiful day. That night Ahmet came to our gig at the Finsbury Park Astoria, where Lou Rawls showed up and sang a duet with Ree.”

The filmed Swedish concert, attended by Crown Prince Carl Gustav and Princess Christina, shows Aretha opening with “There’s No Business Like Show Business” followed by “Come Back to Me.” The audience seems somewhat in shock. They’ve come for a soul show, not a Broadway revue. But with her take on the Stones’ “Satisfaction,” she’s off and running. In this, only her second year at Atlantic, she has enough Atlantic hits to round out the evening and give the crowd what they came to hear. She sits at the piano and invokes the spirit of “Dr. Feelgood” with supernatural force.

At what will later be tagged “The Legendary Concertgebouw” in Amsterdam, Ted has agreed to allow cameras backstage for a brief preshow interview. Aretha looks overwhelmed; she’s painfully shy
and awkwardly inarticulate. She answers questions with one or two words in a retiring little-girl voice. When the reporter asks her to explain the remarkable surge in her career, she simply says, “Atlantic Records.” A nattily dressed Ted White lurks in the background. By the time Aretha gets to the stage, the promoter is struggling with crowd management. The fans reach for her, wave copies of her albums, scream hysterically. Some charge the stage. The security is woefully inadequate. Aretha appears frightened. Ted is onstage with her, ready to push back the crowd. Later, when she sits at the piano to do an astounding “Good to Me As I Am to You,” fans are surrounding her, seated at her elbow. The scene is unsettling, and yet the moment she opens her mouth to sing, she’s in full creative control.