Respect: The Life of Aretha Franklin

by David Ritz

  In March, Ebony ran its first feature on Aretha. The article began by mentioning that “she has become the top female interpreter of a gospel-tinged blues idiom pioneered by the old ‘blues preacher’ himself, Ray Charles.” It went on to say that she had “several fast-selling single records and four Columbia albums behind her… a number of TV guest spots, and a tight schedule of night club and theater dates that ought to net her at least $100,000 this year.” Elsewhere the article stated that John Hammond “signed her as one of Columbia’s ‘five-percent artists’—a choice deal which guaranteed the then 18-year-old singer high royalties for five years.” The writer concluded with a litany of Aretha’s complaints: that her former personal manager disrespected her; that her booking agents didn’t attend to her needs; and that Columbia didn’t give her the “same big build-up” that they gave Robert Goulet or Barbra Streisand.

  In response to the booking-agent disputes, Ruth Bowen said, “I can’t tell you how many times over the course of several decades that I have been fired and rehired by Aretha. That’s simply her way. If something didn’t go right at a gig, her first reaction is to blame the booking agent. The circumstances didn’t matter. A sudden snowstorm might result in a small audience, but it was my fault for booking her at a club who didn’t really appreciate her style of singing. I was used to moody artists because, after all, I had worked with Dinah. But Aretha was moodier than most. After a while I stopped taking it personally. When a gig went well, as many of them did, I was praised to the sky. When a piano was slightly out of tune or the dressing room was too small, I got hell. I simply shrugged my shoulders and took it in stride. This was what it meant to be working with genius.”

  Aretha’s genius is evident on her appearances on Steve Allen’s TV show, first in March, then again in May. Each time, Allen calls her “one of the most exciting young singers in the business today” and holds up the just-released Unforgettable album. Oddly enough, only one of the four songs she sings during her several appearances is from the Dinah album. She rips through a ferocious “Lover, Come Back to Me,” goes to the piano and bangs out a “Rock-a-Bye Your Baby with a Dixie Melody,” stays at the keyboard for a down-and-dirty “Won’t Be Long,” eviscerates “Skylark,” and returns to the piano to knock out a gutbucket “Evil Gal Blues,” a Dinah favorite. On camera, Aretha looks fabulous—svelte and sexy. Her gowns are elegant. As a performer, she’s on fire.

  Twenty-five years after she appeared on his show, Steve Allen told me, “A jazz pianist myself, I recognized her jazz chops. They were tremendous. But I also saw that she had enough poise and experience to sing standards. My motivation to have her on the show was simply to introduce her great talent, but I wanted to get her to sing some of my songs. Fortunately, she did. With the help of my friend Clyde Otis, a year later I was able to convince her to record two of my songs, thus bolstering their status as standards—‘This Could Be the Start of Something Big’ and ‘Impossible.’ ”

  In spite of good reviews, Unforgettable languished on the shelves, and, once again, Columbia executives tried to figure out a way to sell Aretha to a wider audience.

  “That’s when they turned her over to me,” said Clyde Otis. “Goddard Lieberson himself called and said, ‘We know she’s every bit the singer that Barbra Streisand is, but we can’t sell her to an adult market. We can’t cross her over. You know the R-and-B market, Otis. You’ve had hits. Cut an R-and-B hit on her and we’ll take our cue from Motown and cross her over to pop.’ I had no problem with that except for one thing—Ted White didn’t agree with Goddard. He saw how Barbra Streisand was selling to the masses and that’s the market he wanted for Aretha. He wanted to go after a white market. I’m a strong-minded fellow, but Ted was a lot stronger. He also had Aretha on his side. The two of them had been listening to Sinatra’s ‘Only the Lonely.’ They’d been listening to Pat Boone and Johnny Mathis singing ‘Friendly Persuasion.’ Hell, they even wanted me to do an arrangement of ‘That’s Entertainment.’ I tried to tell them that they were heading in the wrong direction, but I was outvoted. That was okay because, in the mainstream mode, I had a song of my own I wanted recorded. I knew that Aretha could do it perfectly.

  “I called Goddard and told him the situation. I said, ‘They wanna go white.’ He said, ‘Well, maybe she can have a crossover hit if you write it. So write her a crossover hit, Clyde, and just keep the budget low.’

  “The budget was high and I did come up with a crossover hit. I called it ‘Take a Look.’ Aretha called it a hit. So did Ted. I ran over and played it for Goddard. He even said it was going to be her breakthrough song. It was pop, but deeper than pop. It had soul and it had a message. It was going to let her leap ahead of Streisand. It just couldn’t miss.”

  11. FOOLS

  The big pop hits in 1964 ran an astounding gamut. Ethereal Brazilian jazz made it on the charts in the form of Stan Getz and Astrud Gilberto’s exquisite reading of Antonio Carlos Jobim’s “The Girl from Ipanema.” For the first time in his storied career, jazz giant Louis Armstrong had a number-one pop hit with “Hello, Dolly.” Beyond the initial successes of the Beatles and the Supremes, there were also hits from the Four Seasons (“Rag Doll”), the Dixie Cups (“The Chapel of Love”), the Beach Boys (“I Get Around”), the Shangri-Las (“Leader of the Pack”), Dean Martin (“Everybody Loves Somebody”), and Roy Orbison (“Pretty Woman”).

  The pop landscape was, and I suspect always will be, littered with an eclectic mix of music, a smattering of jewels and junk. Aretha was right to think that she had crafted a jewel in singing Clyde Otis’s masterly “Take a Look,” the song that he and Lieberson were certain would raise Aretha to a higher commercial level. The melody soared. The lyrics, a self-confrontational examination into the dark heart of mankind, mirror “This Bitter Earth.” The movement is from despair to hope. Otis asks what has become of the precious dream. He sees it floating away in “bloody bloody stream.” We’re told that there’s no winner when the prize is hate; only love can change our fate.

  Aretha attacks the first six words—“Take a look in the mirror”—with startling immediacy. It’s an order you can’t ignore. She wrings out the soul of the song with the kind of intensity that would convince the most skeptical record executive that the single would have to sell. It didn’t.

  “I was miffed,” said Clyde Otis. “If you listen to something like Bobby Vinton’s ‘Mr. Lonely,’ a number-one hit that came out the same year as ‘Take a Look,’ you’ll hear a song about the solitude of war seen through the point of view of a soldier. There’s nothing wrong with the melody or the story. But I’d have to say it’s a cliché, a clichéd melody and clichéd lyrics. At the same time, it was a smash. Compare it to ‘Take a Look,’ though, and it’s night and day. Aretha is no cliché. She’s singing for all humanity. She’s singing about the deepest mystery out there—why evil is so strong. Remember—we were cutting this album during what they were calling the Freedom Summer. We were all shocked all those three young volunteers—Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman, and James Chaney—had been shot to death in cold blood by the Klan down in Mississippi. Their only crime was trying to register black voters. So when Aretha was singing ‘Take a look,’ that’s what we wanted people to look at.

  “Aretha sang it so strong that we cut it two ways—with strings and then again with a close-harmony horns and girl backup singers. One version was better than the other, but we still didn’t get any chart action.

  “Maybe we were ahead of our time. Maybe if I had waited a few years I would have been in sync with the Curtis Mayfields and the Marvin Gayes who had great success with message songs. There are record men who say they can read the tea leaves. They say they can predict hits. I was one of them—and I knew this was my biggest hit, until the marketplace told me otherwise. Aretha, though, couldn’t be deterred from her determination to beat Barbra Streisand at Barbra’s own game. I kept saying, ‘Ree, you can outsing Streisand any day of the week. That’s not the point. The point is to find a
hit.’ But that summer she just wanted straight-up ballads. She insisted that she do ‘People,’ Streisand’s smash. Aretha sang the hell out of it, but no one’s gonna beat Barbra at her own game. She also insisted on singing ‘My Coloring Book,’ another song Streisand had cut. Bob Mersey had written a beautiful chart for Barbra. ‘Write a more beautiful chart,’ Aretha told my arranger Sinky Hendricks. I told Ted White that I thought it was a mistake to go head-to-head with Streisand. ‘She wants the world to hear that whatever material Streisand is handling, she can handle with even more polish,’ said Ted. ‘It’s more important for Aretha to mark out her own territory,’ I argued. The argument did no good. She and Ted also demanded that we include a bluesy thing that they wrote, called ‘I’ll Keep On Smiling.’ I considered it a throwaway. Of course I couldn’t tell her that. I couldn’t tell her that I thought the inclusion of ‘Jim’—an extremely subtle jazz ballad done by Sarah Vaughan she had heard on her brother’s phono when they were kids in Detroit—was not going to break the bank. The truth is that Aretha could and did sing all these things quite easily and quite wonderfully. But where was the continuity? My feeling was that she wanted to be all these people—Sarah and Streisand and Sinatra—but still didn’t know who she was. ‘She’s a hit maker,’ Ted White would tell me, ‘get her hits.’ ‘Then why are you making her sing standards?’ I asked. ‘She’s singing everything because she can sing everything,’ Ted said. ‘We throw it all against the wall and see what sticks. The more variety, the better.’

  “Ted was giving the marching orders, so I reached out to other writers. I called Van McCoy, a bright up-and-coming composer. I knew Van had written ‘Abracadabra’ that Aretha’s sister Erma had recorded on Epic. I liked the song and I liked Van. I asked him if he had anything for Aretha. He gave me ‘Sweet Bitter Love,’ and I thought it was a perfect Aretha vehicle. She fractured it. She loved it so well that she kept singing it, even when she left Columbia. She was devoted to this song. She attached herself to the tune so closely, I believe, because it ran true. She and Ted were starting to have their problems. She was tired of taking his orders. She was living through a ‘Sweet Bitter Love.’ When she got to the bridge and sang, ‘My magic dreams have lost their spell,’ she turns it into grand opera. Was it a masterpiece? Hell, yes. Was it a hit? Hell, no.

  “And talking about masterpieces, how about her version of ‘But Beautiful,’ cut during those same sessions? She had Nat Cole’s version in mind, but I told Sinky to listen to the orchestration Ray Ellis had written for Billie Holiday. I challenged him to improve upon that. That’s the only album that Billie had cut for Columbia, just before she died in the late fifties. I thought Billie’s ‘But Beautiful’ was the benchmark, but I didn’t play it for Aretha because she didn’t require inspiration or motivation. Every time Aretha sang, she was motivated to outdo every version that came before her. Sinky’s chart was gorgeous, and Aretha brought home the bacon. She’s not Billie, but Billie’s not Aretha. Billie bleeds. In every song she dies a slow death. She’s like the dying swan in that ballet. Aretha works through the pain and comes out on top of it. Billie died young. Working with Aretha, I knew that, no matter what, she wasn’t gonna die young. She was introverted on the outside but the lady had inner toughness. She had inner steel. For all her uncertainties about this or that, she had what it takes to survive this tough bloody music business.”

  Otis understood Aretha on both a deeply personal and a creative level. Yet in spite of their rapport, their initial work together was far from a commercial success. When the summer sessions of 1964 failed to yield a single hit, Clyde Otis received word that it was time to change course entirely.

  “Lieberson and Mersey got together and decided it was time to quit fooling around and go right at the teen market,” Otis told me. “By then, Ted and Aretha were frustrated enough to go along with the program. They knew they had to drop the throw-everything-against-the-wall-and-see-what-sticks shtick. And they were ready. Forget the standards. No more ‘That’s Entertainment,’ no more Judy Garland songs. We were going for the kids. I’d found her a song called ‘Runnin’ Out of Fools’ that I thought might get us some airplay. It was a little ditty that I worked up in an R-and-B vein. Ted didn’t like that. By then, Ted and I were practically at each other’s throats. He was sure I was the wrong producer and I was sure he was the wrong manager. Aretha was stuck with me because her contract with Columbia ran through 1966 and Columbia saw me as the guy to get her over. I was stuck with Ted because Aretha saw him as the guy to get her over. Anyway, we put out ‘Fools,’ and while you couldn’t call it a smash, they started playing it on the radio and you heard it all over Harlem. Turned out to be the only semi-hit she ever had on Columbia. To this day, people still remember it.

  “Aretha had a thing for covers. Occasionally she and Ted would bring me a song that they wrote, but it usually didn’t measure up. Later she told me she was the one who wrote it. He just put his name on it. Anyway, she was not what you call a prolific writer, but, as an interpreter, she always felt she could outdo the original. She usually did. On the Runnin’ Out of Fools album, she covered a couple of Motown things. She was always talking about her good friend Smokey Robinson and so she recorded the big hit he had on Mary Wells, ‘My Guy.’ We even followed the original Smokey chart. I thought the vibe was too kicked-back for Aretha, but Aretha did it anyway. She redid the other big Motown hit that season, Brenda Holloway’s ‘Every Little Bit Hurts.’ If she was going cover crazy, she might as well cover a song of mine. I could use the royalties. So I got her to do ‘It’s Just a Matter of Time,’ a tune Sinky and I had written with Brook Benton back in the fifties. Inez and Charlie Foxx had done ‘Mockingbird’ the year before and Ree wanted to do it again. Same goes for other teen-style hits, like ‘The Shoop Shoop Song.’ Dionne Warwick had started singing those Burt Bacharach/Hal David songs. Practically all of them went top ten. That’s why Aretha sang ‘Walk On By.’ She thought she could have a hit right behind Dionne’s. I didn’t. I said, ‘Dionne had this soft, subtler thing that works with Burt’s melodies. You’re too strong for his stuff.’ She sang it anyway. Later she proved me wrong on another Bacharach/Dionne combination—‘Say a Little Prayer’—but by then she had established her own identity on Atlantic and practically anything she did sold. This was years earlier, during her last days on Columbia, where, to my mind, she was sounding desperate. To me, Runnin’ Out of Fools is not prime-time Aretha. It’s Aretha and Ted feeling like they’re running out of time. I said they were fools to be chasing all these teeny hits. If they had given me more time, Sinky and I could have written her original hits in the R-and-B style, just like we’d done for Dinah Washington and Brook Benton. But Ted and Aretha, man, they were in a hurry. They thought the train was leaving without them.”

  “The sad thing,” said Jerry Wexler, who would be the savior in the next chapter of Aretha’s musical story, “is that Clyde, for all his talent, was behind the curve. His string sessions and jazz sessions with Aretha were fine, but when he put her in an R-and-B bag, the bag was at least five years old. There just weren’t any hits in that bag. The sound he gave Dinah in the early sixties was fine, but it was passé. R-and-B is very street, very right-now, very immediate. His grooves were tired.”

  “I had two distinct disadvantages,” Otis explained. “First, my relationship with Ted was going nowhere fast. We didn’t like each other. He thought I was old hat. He thought I took too long in the studio. I saw him as just another amateur throwing his weight around because he happened to be the artist’s husband. He kept telling me how for years he had supported Aretha’s career with his own money. He was saying that if it weren’t for his financial backing, she’d never have gotten this far. But I knew he was exaggerating like crazy. Ever since she came to Columbia, she had worked steadily—R-and-B shows, nightclubs, jazz festivals. I’m not saying she was getting rich, but she was booking good money—and I suspect he was living off her. Which brings me to my second disadvantage. Ted and
Aretha were often at odds with each other. They did not present a united front. I think she was coming to the same conclusion as me—that Ted was living off her. She had problems with Ted but she also had problems of her own. She missed many sessions without ever telling me why. Just didn’t show. Some people said she was drinking, but I didn’t see any of that. I saw that she’d get down in the dumps sometimes and didn’t want to work. I saw how Ted would force her to work—and maybe she needed that push. But I also saw that sometimes that push became a shove. He didn’t hesitate slapping her around and didn’t care who saw him do it.

  “Things got crazier when I got word from the boss upstairs, Goddard Lieberson, that she probably wouldn’t re-sign with Columbia when her contract ran out in a year or so. So they were eager to get as much inventory on her as possible before her commitment ran out. Because I had seen her live in the jazz clubs and knew how good she was in that setting, I suggested a live album. But in those days, portable equipment was expensive and sometimes unreliable so I was told to do a studio album with her jazz trio, the one led by Teddy Harris, and then sweet it with applause to make it sound like a club. We called the record Yeah!!! In Person with Her Quartet, and I thought it was one of her best. If you want to hear exactly who Aretha Franklin was at the period in her life—just before she switched labels—listen to Yeah!!!

  “I got Kenny Burrell, the jazz guitarist from Detroit who’s one of the best who’s ever played, to sit in with the trio. Kenny added so much subtlety and class. Her regular guys—Beans Richardson was on bass and Hindel Butts on drums—they swing from start to finish. The sessions went smoothly. I don’t even remember Ted being there. I do remember, though, that Steve Allen dropped by to hear her sing two of his songs—‘This Could Be the Start of Something Big’ and ‘Impossible,’ the tune Nat Cole had recorded in the fifties. He was knocked out. I was knocked out how she did Erroll Garner’s ‘Misty.’ Erroll was a friend of mine, and a few months later I played him Aretha’s version. Sarah had sung ‘Misty’—everyone had sung ‘Misty’—but Erroll actually had tears in his eyes after hearing Aretha. ‘Goddamn,’ he said, ‘she makes it seem like she wrote it.’