by David Ritz
“I finally got Ted White on the phone. He was still mad as a motherfucker. I wanted to know what was happening. He had nothing but scorn. He was still seething about Rick Hall and Muscle Shoals and my insistence that we record there. I apologized for Hall for the twentieth time but that made no difference. I told him that the past was the past and we had a hit on our hands but I needed Aretha back in the studio. He said something that surprised me: ‘I’m not even sure I’m her manager. I can’t control her. No one can.’
“So with the artist missing and management in doubt, what was I supposed to do? I decided, in my typical way, to leap before looking. I decided to act. I had this one song that I knew was cooking. I made a couple of dozen acetate copies of ‘I Never Loved a Man’ for DJs in key markets. These were guys I could count on. They’d let me know if I had a smash or whether I was simply jerking off. Within hours, I got the response I needed—they loved it, their listeners loved it, the phone lines started burning up. Airplay was immediate, but what about sales?
“Well, there are two sides on a forty-five single, and I had only one. I needed another song. Our distributors, who had heard ‘I Never Loved’ on the radio, started screaming for product. They knew me as an aggressive marketer and wanted to know what the fuck was wrong. I wasn’t about to tell them that I had lost control of my artist. All I could say was ‘Stand by.’ Meanwhile, every minute the record was being played on the radio but was unavailable in stores, we were losing money. To be perfectly honest, the other thought I had was this—if I could get Aretha Franklin on the pop charts and establish her as a bestselling act, the value of Atlantic would jump considerably and my own dream of selling more easily realized. In every possible way, I was motivated.
“Ten days passed, ten of the most difficult days of my life, before I finally got the call.
“ ‘Mr. Wexler, it’s Miss Franklin calling. I’m ready to record. However, I won’t be recording in Muscle Shoals. I will be recording in New York. I know you have studios in New York.’
“ ‘Yes, we do. What about the band?’
“ ‘Bring up the boys from Muscle Shoals. They understood me. As far as the backgrounds go, I’ll be with my sisters.’
“ ‘Beautiful.’ ”
“I remember arriving in New York with Aretha,” said Carolyn, “and feeling like we were all on a mission. We realized that our sister was on the brink of letting the world know what we had always known—that she was hands-down the scariest singer in the world. When she was in her element, no one could touch her. Well, we were her element. We arrived in New York as a family united, realizing that her problems with Ted had her on edge. Both in and out of the studio, she needed our support.”
“I think of Aretha as Our Lady of Mysterious Sorrows,” Wexler wrote in his memoir, Rhythm and the Blues. “Her eyes are incredible, luminous eyes covering inexplicable pain. Her depressions could be as deep as the dark sea. I don’t pretend to know the sources of her anguish, but anguish surrounds Aretha as surely as the glory of her musical aura.”
According to Wexler, when Aretha resurfaced and showed up at the Atlantic studios at 1841 Broadway in midtown Manhattan, Ted was not with her, only her sisters. She gave no apologies or explanations about where she had been.
“She came loaded for bear,” said Tommy Dowd, the Atlantic engineer who was at the controls. “She went right for the piano, where, without a word, she played piano over the existing ‘Do Right’ track. She and Erma and Carolyn laid down the vocal harmonies, an arrangement from heaven. All that was left was Aretha’s vocal. She ran it down once. Thank God I had pressed that Record button, because the rundown was unworldly. There was a calmness about her delivery, an attitude that said, Brother, I own this song, I’m gonna take my time, and I’m gonna drill it into your soul. When she was through, there was nothing to do but shake your head in wonder.”
“When it came to producing Aretha’s vocals,” said Wexler, “it was the same as Ray Charles. I didn’t say a word. She didn’t need my critique. She didn’t need anyone’s critique. Her taste in vocal riffs and licks was absolutely flawless. She was only twenty-four and yet had the poise, authority, and confidence of someone who had been singing for sixty years. Her voice was young and vital, but it also came from a place of ancient secret wisdom.”
“The method she’d begun in Muscle Shoals was continued in New York,” Dowd explained. “She played the instrumentals with the band while singing a scratch vocal to help the musicians understand exactly how she was going to tell the story. We’d then throw away the scratch vocal, and, with an instrumental take that was acceptable to her, she went into the studio to sing the lead to track. That was the moment of truth. She was out there alone on the other side of the glass; I was behind the board in the control booth with Wexler hovering over me and all the musicians gathered around. After a couple of takes, she nailed ‘Do Right’ for all time. We were speechless. We were stunned. We knew we were in the presence of rare and immortal greatness.”
“Do Right Woman—Do Right Man” was cut on February 8, 1967. Two days later Wexler released it as the B side to “I Never Loved a Man (the Way I Love You).” The response was immediate. “I Never Loved” flew to the top of the R&B charts and quickly crossed over, where it went top-ten pop and competed successfully with the Beatles’ “Penny Lane,” the Supremes’ “Love Is Here and Now You’re Gone,” the Rolling Stones’ “Ruby Tuesday,” and the Turtles’ “Happy Together.” It took Atlantic two weeks to do what Columbia had not been able to do in five years—turn Aretha Franklin into a superstar. “I Never Loved” became the first million-seller record of her career.
Cecil thought that the success of the first single helped heal Ted and Aretha’s marriage. “After all, it was Ted’s writer, Ronnie Shannon, who wrote the song, and it was Ted who brought the song to Aretha. That was the song that blew open the door. Aretha was always cognizant of that fact. It made her think that maybe, despite everything, she needed Ted to get where she was going. But that was just the beginning. That first single—‘I Never Loved’ and ‘Do Right’—was nothing compared to the next one with ‘Respect’ and ‘Dr. Feelgood.’ The second single put her into orbit. Things went crazy after those songs hit. Everyone in the world wanted her, and she required help.”
“Atlantic was very different than Motown,” said Wexler, “where the record company also managed and booked their acts. We were careful to make sure our artists had outside management, outside advisers, and outside booking agents. Aretha was not an especially trustful person—and with good reason—and it was important for her to have her own counsel. I saw that her relationship with White was rough, to say the least, and I could have tried to influence her to leave him. I could have persuaded her to hire management more sympathetic to Atlantic, but I knew that’d be a mistake. I had to separate church and state. The producer/record exec is one animal. The manager/agent is quite another. Plus, her manager/agent was also her husband.”
According to Aretha’s siblings, White was not only a savvy manager, but someone who recognized her talents as a composer.
“For all you might say about Ted,” said Cecil, “it was Ted who got Aretha to write. That was partly because he had a thriving song-publishing concern and wanted to build up his inventory of copyrights, but it was also because he saw that her talent as a writer rivaled her talent as a singer.”
In 1990, discussing Aretha’s first Atlantic album, Luther Vandross commented first on her writing, not her singing. “I’m not saying that the lady didn’t sing her behind off,” Luther explained. “She did. She turned it out, but what impressed me even more was that she wrote or cowrote the four best songs on the record—‘Don’t Let Me Lose This Dream,’ ‘Baby, Baby, Baby,’ ‘Dr. Feelgood,’ and ‘Save Me.’ As much as I adore Diana Ross and Dionne Warwick, the same can’t be said of them. Beautiful singers, but hardly writers.
“When I produced Aretha in the eighties, the first thing I told her was how much I loved ‘Don’t Let M
e Lose This Dream.’ It had this bossa nova–ish silky groove that was pure heaven. I asked her where the song came from. She said she’d been listening to Astrud Gilberto, the girl who sang with Stan Getz, and she wanted to write something with the feeling of Latin soul. You go from there to ‘Dr. Feelgood,’ which is basically nothing more than a twelve-bar blues. But the lyrics! And her piano playing! It’s like something my mama’s mama listened to—one of those original ladies, like Bessie Smith or Ma Rainey. I believe it’s one of the greatest blues ever written. Same is true of ‘Baby, Baby, Baby’ that she wrote with her sister Carolyn, another major talent. It’s another brilliant blues variation with a line that I wish I had written myself—‘I’m bewildered, I’m lonely, and I’m loveless.’ ”
Aretha wrote about composing “Save Me” with King Curtis. She called him a gentleman because, even though she described the musical contribution by her and Carolyn as minor, King gave them full credit as collaborators. She also sang King’s blistering “Soul Serenade,” another testimony to the great horn man’s pivotal role in helping Aretha become Aretha.
The centerpiece of the first Aretha album is, of course, her cover of Otis Redding’s “Respect.” Wexler told me that he personally played her version for Otis. “He broke out into this wide smile,” Wexler remembered, “and said, ‘The girl has taken that song from me. Ain’t no longer my song. From now on, it belongs to her.’ And then he asked me [to] play it again, and then a third time. The smile never left his face.
“If you listen to Otis’s original and then Aretha’s cover, the first thing you notice is that her groove is more dramatic. That stop-and-stutter syncopation was something she invented. She showed the rhythm section I had shipped up from Alabama—Jimmy Johnson, Tommy Cogbill, and Roger Hawkins—how to do it. I knew she’d been intrigued with the song for a couple of years and had tried it out onstage. She had already come up with this new beat. But the creation of the background vocals and ingenious wordplay was done on the spot in the studio. The backgrounds were more than wonderful aural augmentations. They gave the song a strong sexual flavor. The call for respect went from a request to a demand. And then, given the civil rights and feminist fervor that was building in the sixties, respect—especially as Aretha articulated it with such force—took on new meaning. ‘Respect’ started off as a soul song and wound up as a kind of national anthem. It virtually defined American culture at that moment in history.”
“The sock-it-to-me line helped shape the song for sure,” said Carolyn. “I had heard the expression on the streets and thought it might work in a call-and-response call with ‘Respect.’ Obviously, Otis wrote the song from a man’s point of view, but when Erma and Aretha and I worked it over, we had to rearrange the perspective. We saw it as something earthier, a woman having no problem discussing her needs. It turned out that it was interpreted in many different ways—having to do with sexual or racial politics. Far as I’m concerned, all those interpretations are correct because everyone needs respect on every level.”
The sock-it-to-me line gained further fame as a running gag on Laugh-In, the television comedy show that hit the airwaves the following year. Even Richard Nixon had a cameo in which he weirdly demanded, “Sock it to me.”
Spelling out the title—“R-E-S-P-E-C-T”—and juxtaposing it with the demands “Find out what it means to me” and “take care of TCB” were additional lyrical augmentations. “TCB” echoed Aretha’s own lyrics from “Dr. Feelgood,” in which she proclaimed that “taking care of business is really this man’s game.” In the fade of the song, she also referred to her recent past by singing, “I get tired, keep on trying, runnin’ out of fools and I ain’t lying.” “Runnin’ Out of Fools” was her biggest R&B single on Columbia. By calling out its title, she honored the soul-music tradition of self-referencing previous successes. She also sealed the deal on personalizing the song so that, in its composer’s own words, “it belongs to her.”
“I also heard ‘Respect’ as part of her ongoing fight with Ted,” said Cecil. “He might have respected her talent, but he didn’t respect her as a human being. He was a violent cat whose violence only got worse. I felt like Aretha was singing ‘Respect’ to Ted, but it hardly made any difference. He kept slapping her around and didn’t care who saw him do it.”
In April, in the first cover story on Aretha in a national magazine, Jet quoted White about his wife’s success: “We are getting calls from all over the country for her appearances… the European scene is throbbing for her. We have had to cancel a scheduled May European tour until fall because we can’t fit it into the present schedule.” He went on to say that he expected his wife to jump from making a hundred thousand in 1966 to a quarter million in 1967.
“Respect” hit the pop charts on April 29, 1967, a day after Muhammad Ali was stripped of his heavyweight-champion title for refusing to be drafted into the United States Army. It would go to number one on both the R&B and pop charts and become the song that would both define and forever change Aretha’s career. As a result of it, a few months later at the start of her show at Chicago’s Regal Theater, she would be crowned Queen of Soul by DJ Pervis “the Blues Man” Spann. Aretha took the ceremony seriously, noting the beauty of the “bejeweled crown” placed on her head, where it would remain, metaphorically, for the next five decades.
There was Bessie, there was Dinah, and now there was Aretha.
Her dream was coming true—the fairy-tale dream of a little girl whose father had promised her the moon. The dream, though, was rooted in a storybook sensibility where everyone lives happily ever after. Aretha bought into that fairy tale as a child and clung to that fairy tale despite harsh reality. In 1967, the year of her dazzling breakthrough, she was in the throes of emotional chaos. Even though it was her husband/manager who was controlling a career that, in a matter of a few months, had taken off like a rocket, her marriage had officially become a misery.
13. KEEP ROLLING
The blues is a motherfucker,” said Carmen McRae, “and not everyone can sing ’em. It’s more than chops. You have to live ’em. If you ask me, Billie Holiday’s greatest album was Lady in Satin, done just before she died. Her voice was rough around the edges, but her blues were deepest. In Aretha’s case, her greatest album is that first one on Atlantic, when her voice was the strongest, but, from what I heard, her blues was also the deepest.”
“America had the blues,” said Jerry Wexler, “and Aretha’s blues reflected that. Antigovernment feeling was fermenting. The civil rights movement was fermenting. The bullshit Vietnam War was building. But this was a different kind of blues. It was blues with an attitude—a black attitude. In the first part of the sixties, Motown reflected less militant middle-class desires. Motown was beautiful, but Motown, at least in its early configurations, was mild. Aretha was anything but mild. Her voice carried the assertiveness of a new class of not only blacks no longer content to get-along-and-go-along but also young whites whose discontent with the status quo was deep. The seeds of the soul revolution had been planted by artists like Ray Charles and Solomon Burke and Sam and Dave. But it didn’t come to full fruition until Aretha. Aretha’s ‘Respect’ happened in 1967. James Brown’s ‘Say It Loud (I’m Black and I’m Proud),’ great as it was, didn’t come along till 1968.”
“Funny,” Ray Charles told me, “but the first Aretha song I remember loving wasn’t ‘Respect’ or any of those first hits, but Sam Cooke’s ‘Change Is Gonna Come.’ I thought that was the one that explained who she was and how she was changing up the shit. When I heard that, I realized Aretha was my one and only true soul sista.”
She also proved to be a devoted sister: she took time from her hectic schedule to attend the wedding of her brother Cecil to his bride, Earline, on April 30 at the New Bethel Baptist Church with Reverend C. L. Franklin presiding. Two thousand people were in attendance.
“Aretha could not have been sweeter,” Earline told me. “She even helped design my dress. At the beginning, my sister-in-la
w gave me every indication that I’d be a welcome member of her family. She was loving and supportive, at least for the first two or three years. But as her personal life began to unravel, so did our relationship. As much as she loved and came to depend upon Cecil, that’s as much as she’d come to resent and distance herself from me.”
In the spring of 1967, Aretha was moving at a frenetic pace. The demand for her concerts shot up overnight. Her performance fees quadrupled.
“Ted was eager to make money,” said Cecil. “His attitude was that he’d been hanging tough, waiting for this very moment—and he wasn’t about to be denied. So, using Ruth Bowen, he was booking her everywhere he could. It was especially crazy because both Ted and Aretha were drinking more than usual. Neither of them did well when they were high on liquor. It brought out the worst in them.”
“I had booked Erma and Carolyn before Aretha came to me to officially ask me to become her agent,” said Ruth Bowen. “The timing was perfect. I was there for the birth of a star and happy to help her and Ted. I liked Ted. He was smart, well spoken, and hardworking. He agreed with Aretha that I was the right agent to figure out how to maximize her earnings. I could book her into bigger and more prestigious venues. The days of the Village Vanguard and Village Gate were over.
“One of the first big gigs I got her was at a nightclub Gene Chandler was opening in Chicago. I went out there to make sure everything went like clockwork. It didn’t. Aretha came out looking grand, but when she sat down, the piano stool collapsed. She landed on her rear. But being the complete professional, she made a joke of it, got back up, and played standing up until a sturdier stool was brought. I wanted to kill Gene. This was my first date for my new client and he couldn’t even provide a decent seat! I was sure she’d never work with me again. But I have to say that she was very understanding. She went on to give a stirring performance and thanked me for what was a big payday.
