by David Ritz
“What I didn’t realize when I started working with Aretha, though, was that she was not only a heavy smoker but a heavy drinker. She had a habit of getting loaded before a performance. In no way did that help her singing. When it comes to singing, Aretha needs no help of any kind. Everyone knows that she possesses natural genius. But she’d been using booze to numb the pain of her lousy marriage. It had become a crutch. That’s the word I used—a crutch—when I mentioned the problem. From day one I was honest with her. I also told her that she wasn’t doing herself any favors by smoking like a chimney—she was up to three packs a day. She said that smoking and drinking calmed her nerves. I said that was bull. Liquor didn’t calm her nerves at all. Liquor was just making her sloppy. I told her that in plain English. She didn’t like hearing it. Well, that was tough because I had raised her rate from about seven hundred fifty dollars a performance to five thousand and, before long, ten thousand.
“Now, I wasn’t in Columbus, Georgia, for the next incident. That’s when she fell off the stage and broke her arm. She said it was because the stage lights had blinded her. Maybe so. Her assistant told me it was because she was tipsy. Whatever it was, I hoped she had learned her lesson. Unfortunately, she hadn’t.”
The May 18, 1967, edition of Jet has a photo of Aretha at the Ford Hospital in Detroit, her arm in a cast. The story states that the break required surgery.
By June 20, she was back in the Atlantic studios.
“That first album put us on a roll,” said Wexler. “Everything in me said, Keep rolling, keep recording, keep the hits coming. She was red hot and I had no reason to believe that the streak wouldn’t continue. I knew that it would be foolish—and even irresponsible—not to strike when the iron was hot. I also had personal motivation. A Wall Street financier had agreed to see what we could get for Atlantic Records. While Ahmet and Nesuhi had not agreed on a selling price, they had gone along with my plan to let the financier test our worth on the open market. I was always eager to pump out hits, but at this moment I was on overdrive. In this instance, I had a good partner in Ted White, who felt the same. He wanted as much product out there as possible.
“The news that Aretha had been injured in concert was alarming, but Ted reassured me that she’d soon be back in the studio. She didn’t show up for the first few dates. That turned out to be standard operating procedure for Aretha. I didn’t ask why. She wasn’t the first emotionally fragile artist I’d worked with and she wouldn’t be the last. I saw my job as making her as comfortable as possible. I knew that once she did show up, it’d be more than worth the wait.
“Turned out the reason she was a no-show, though, didn’t have to do with her injury. She wouldn’t tell me directly—direct address is not Aretha’s style—but I finally got it out of Ted. Aretha was pissed at me over the fact that her sister Erma had gotten a deal. She thought I had set it up. Nothing could be further from the truth.”
Erma told me the backstory. “I was still living in New York,” she said, “and no longer singing with Lloyd Price. After five years I hadn’t gotten a single raise and decided I had had enough. I was grateful for the music I’d made for Epic, but the songs, as good as they were, never charted. I found work at IBM and was quite content. It wasn’t that I had given up singing—singing would always be my passion—but practicality required that I go to work. I was also happy to help Aretha on those first sessions. Then came ‘Respect.’ Well, that opened the floodgates. Aretha had given the Franklin name a new shine. I got several calls from producers. The most interesting was from Bert Berns, who said he had once been partners with Jerry Wexler and Ahmet Ertegun. He said he had his own label, Shout, and that he had written ‘Twist and Shout,’ a hit for the Isley Brothers and the Beatles. Now he had written another song he thought would be even bigger. He and a gentleman named Jerry Ragovoy had composed ‘Piece of My Heart’ and did I want to hear it? I did. I liked it, although I thought the calypso beat was wrong for my style. At the recording session, they let me change it into a soul groove. Everyone thought the result was great, including me. Bert was so excited he immediately signed me to an album deal. We got almost immediate airplay. I was thrilled when it went into the top ten on the R-and-B chart. I’m not sure how Aretha felt about that.”
“I pleaded with Ted to tell Aretha the truth about me and Bert Berns,” said Wexler. “Bert and I had suffered a bad falling-out, even though I had enormous respect for him. After all, he was the guy who brought over guitarist Jimmy Page from England to play on our sessions. Bert, Ahmet, Nesuhi, and I had started a label together—Bang!—where Bert produced Van Morrison’s first album. But Bert also had a penchant for trouble. He courted the wise guys. He wanted total control over every last aspect of our business dealings. Finally it was too much, and the Erteguns and I let him go. He sued us for breach of contract and suddenly we were enemies. I felt that he signed Erma, an excellent singer, not merely for her talent but as a way to get back at me. If I could make a hit with Aretha, he’d show me up by making an even bigger hit on Erma. Because there was always an undercurrent of rivalry between the sisters, this only added to the tension.”
Aretha saw history repeating itself. She still believed that John Hammond had gone behind her back to sign Erma at Columbia. Now Wexler was doing the same, using Bert Berns as his proxy.
“I don’t know if Ted White was able to set her straight on the story,” said Wexler, “but she finally did show. There was a chill in the air. Even though we were ‘Jerry’ and ‘Aretha’ after the first album, she reverted to calling me ‘Mr. Wexler,’ and I had to go back to calling her ‘Miss Franklin.’ She was also still having mobility problems with her elbow. Yet when she sat down at the piano, she elbowed her way into the deepest grooves imaginable. I remember thinking, Man, when Aretha arrives, all superfluous problems disappear. That’s when I knew we had to call this second album Aretha Arrives.”
On four of the songs on that album, Aretha employed her sisters, Erma and Carolyn, on background vocals. They can be heard most effectively on the album’s big hit, “Baby, I Love You,” by Ronnie Shannon, the writer of “I Never Loved a Man.”
“But sometime while we were making that record, Aretha’s mood turned,” said Carolyn. “She didn’t like the idea of Erma working with Bert Berns and me going out on my own. That’s when she took up Jerry Wexler’s decision to use the Sweet Inspirations.”
Cissy Houston, head Inspiration, had already sung on two of the songs on I Never Loved a Man. She and Aretha shared a church background. The other Inspirations—Estelle Brown, Sylvia Shemwell, and Myrna Smith—were equally adept at creating close harmonies in the gritty gospel mode. Wexler called them “one of the pillars of the Atlantic Church of Sixties Soul.” They proved solid replacements for Aretha’s sisters and in the future would become a semipermanent part of Aretha’s studio sound.
Key players from Muscle Shoals—Spooner Oldham, Tommy Cogbill, and Roger Hawkins—were brought back in. From Atlanta, Wexler also recruited Joe South, the great guitarist/composer.
“When I saw Aretha in that studio in New York City,” South told me, “I was awestruck. I’d heard the first record she’d done and considered her a goddamn saint. I’d written ‘Hush’ that became a hit for Deep Purple but I hadn’t yet written ‘Games People Play’ and I wasn’t all that confident. I’d always felt that soul music was my heart, but hell, this was the big time. Besides, I was white and I was about to play behind the blackest genius since Ray Charles. ‘It ain’t about color,’ said Wex. ‘Aretha’s color-blind. She’s already gotten a taste of how funky those Muscle Shoals boys can be. She’ll love you.’ Well, Wex was right. She did. I remember standing there while she was singing that old blues ‘Going Down Slow,’ the one that had been done by everyone from Guitar Slim to B.B. King. I mean, she was wailing in a way where I had goose bumps. She nodded at me to play a couple of licks. I gave it all I had and suddenly she smiled. The woman smiled! Brother, that smile has carried me through life. That smile
was the only validation I needed to let me know that I belonged in the same room as her. Aretha Franklin smiled!”
Wexler invited critic Nat Hentoff to the sessions. In his liner notes Hentoff wrote, “She still didn’t have complete mobility with her elbow but nonetheless, in several of the slow numbers, she provided bedrock accompaniment on the piano. For the faster numbers, she couldn’t play with her right hand, but on ‘You Are My Sunshine,’ undaunted, she used only her left, and the resultant rhythmic drive is a witness to the extent of spirit within her.”
When I spoke with Hentoff some thirty years after the session, his memory of it was still vivid. “You have to put it in context,” he said. “This was the late sixties, when free jazz was dominating the New York scene. I was hungry for something more accessible. I was eager for sound that reaffirmed the roots of the music I loved best. I saw Aretha as the living embodiment of that reaffirmation. Like most jazz critics, I had a prejudice against pop songs and pop sensibilities. But Aretha broke down that prejudice. Her songs had great pop appeal. In fact, she became one of the dominant pop artists of our time. But in doing so, she never compromised an iota of her authenticity as an artist schooled in the deepest and most creative tradition of blues, gospel, and jazz.”
At the same session, she covered “It Was You,” a James Brown song from the late fifties. “Aretha wanted to release it as the first single,” said Wexler. “She sang it beautifully but I thought the chart was a little stiff. So we held it back, along with a strong Van McCoy song, ‘So Soon.’ Listening to it years later, I can’t believe it was not released back then. But there was so much great Aretha product and she was cutting it so fast and furiously that, at any given moment, we really had more than we could use. For years to come we’d put out two Aretha albums a year but had enough material to put out even more. Sales-wise, we were doing fabulously.”
“Atlantic Smashes Own Sales Records,” Billboard reported. “The Atlantic-Atco combine’s gross volume for the first three months of this year was up almost 100 percent over the similar period in 1966.”
Time magazine also ran an article about Atlantic’s hot streak. In Wexler’s mind, more than ever, it was time to sell. He convinced the Ertegun brothers to accept $17.5 million from Warner Brothers–Seven Arts.
“A poor boy from Washington Heights,” said Wexler, “I was suddenly a millionaire, the first in my old neighborhood. I was thrilled. But I was also foolish. I was convinced that, due to Aretha, Atlantic Records had reached the height of our success. I was ridiculously wrong. As years went on, the industry looked at our deal as a joke. Had we waited a few years, we could have gotten ten times as much. At the time, I saw the sale as a triumph. Later I saw it as a disaster.”
The other disaster came on the final day of the sessions for Aretha Arrives—Sunday, July 23—when the Twelfth Street riot broke out in Detroit.
“I’ve never been so frightened in my life,” said Earline. “Cecil had gone to New York because Ree was fighting so bad with Ted. Carolyn and Erma were also out of town. I was home alone and as soon as I saw the burning and looting I called Cecil, who told me to go to Reverend’s. I figured that would be the safest place. When I got there the phone was ringing off the wall—Erma and Carolyn and Aretha calling to make sure their daddy was safe. Their daddy was everything in life to them. Reverend was cool. Reverend was always cool. Nothing bothered him. I think he felt like he had special protection from God. I was hoping I could borrow some of his protection. That day it felt like the end of the world.”
“I was shocked but I wasn’t shocked,” said Cecil. “It was started by a police raid, but it was so much more than that. Police brutality had plagued the city for decades. Civil unrest was everywhere. My father had been working for years to find solutions to uncaring city policy that ignored our people’s basic rights. It didn’t take much of a spark to ignite the fire. The police raided a club and that was it. My first thought, of course, was for Daddy and Earline. When I learned they were okay, I attended to Aretha, who, due to the friction with Ted, wasn’t in good shape. She’d been drinking, and the news freaked her out. She started talking about hiring private detectives to go in the city and rescue Daddy. I told her that Daddy was fine, that no one was more respected by his own people than Reverend. I spoke to several of the deacons at New Bethel and they made sure that his house was being protected. But Aretha was inconsolable. She was sure something terrible would happen to Daddy. That thought had her beside herself.”
Aretha had been worried about her father for other reasons. In 1966, he had been indicted on four counts of tax evasion. The government claimed that he failed to report over $75,000 in income in the years 1959 through 1962. Both he—and later his daughter—would claim that a disgruntled congregant had undermined him by going to the IRS. C.L. actually wrote President Lyndon Johnson, arguing that he didn’t realize that cash gifts from his congregation were considered income. The president didn’t respond. In 1967, Franklin pleaded no contest; he was fined $2,500 and put on probation.
“He told all of us,” said Cecil, “that he was convinced that it was his role as a civil rights leader and fellow traveler with Dr. King that got the IRS on his back.
“We made it back to Detroit when the riots were over, and the city looked like a war zone. Over forty people had been killed, nearly two thousand injured, something like seven thousand arrests. They were calling it one of the worst riots in American history. Governor Romney had called in the National Guard, and then President Johnson called up the Eighty-Second Airborne. Detroit had gone absolutely crazy. Aretha begged Daddy to move out of the city entirely. She wanted him to find another congregation in California, where he was especially popular—or at least move out to the suburbs. But he wouldn’t budge. He said that, more than ever, he was needed to point out the root causes of the riots—the economic inequality, the pervasive racism in civic institutions, the woefully inadequate schools in inner-city Detroit, and the wholesale destruction of our neighborhoods by urban renewal. Some ministers fled the city, but not our father. The horror of what happened only recommitted him. He would not abandon his political agenda. I remember someone saying, ‘Reverend, aren’t you afraid to stay?’ He liked that question because it gave him a chance to quote the scripture that says, ‘A perfect love casts out all fear.’ Daddy had very little fear.”
By summer’s end, “Baby, I Love You” was certified gold, Aretha’s third million-seller single, while she was performing for Dr. King at the annual banquet of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in Atlanta. King asked if she would join other artists—including Joan Baez, Sammy Davis Jr., Harry Belafonte, and Sidney Poitier—in appearing at a half a dozen benefit concerts for his organization in October. Aretha readily agreed. From Atlanta, she flew to California, where, according to her booking agent Ruth Bowen, she grossed a combined $100,000 for concerts in San Diego, Long Beach, and Oakland.
“I was worried about her,” said Ruth, “because of all the drinking. I think the excitement of so much success happening so suddenly—together with the anxiety caused by the riots—got to her. I spoke to Ted White about it, but his drinking was worse than hers. For a while she separated herself from him—but then she went back because she was afraid her career would collapse without him. Cecil and I talked a lot. I said, ‘Listen, at some point she’s gonna decide she can’t take anymore and when that happens you’re gonna have to step in.’ ‘That’ll be my father’s role,’ Cecil said. ‘He managed her before and he’ll manage her again.’ ‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ I told Cecil. ‘A famous minister like him has neither the time nor the knowledge to manage a superstar like Aretha.’ ‘Well, I don’t have the knowledge either,’ said Cecil. ‘I do,’ I told him, ‘and I’ll teach you everything you need to know.’ ”
The marital discord, though, was not something Aretha discussed.
“Everyone knew it,” said sister-in-law Earline, “everyone knew that Ted White was a brutal man. But Aretha… well, she’s a
lways clung to this fairy-tale story line. She wanted the world to think she had a storybook marriage. She hates to admit being wrong—that she’d chosen the wrong man to share her life and manage her career. Rather than admit that, she’ll go on living with the mistake longer than she needs to. Which is actually what happened with her and White. It took her at least two years longer to get rid of him than it should have. His sorry ass should have been out of there a long time ago. But she was having all those hits and making all that money. She was scared of rocking the boat, until one day the boat capsized and she nearly drowned.”
14. NATURAL
The pace was frenetic. As Aretha entered her midtwenties, she was trapped by a manager/husband who, along with her producer Jerry Wexler, successfully engineered a career that was moving at lightning speed. Just as Wexler wanted her to quickly record as many songs as possible, Ted White wanted her to headline all the major venues eager to book her. Ambitious since childhood, Aretha wanted to respond to these demands—and she did, but at a cost.
“Sometimes she’d call me at night,” said Wexler, “and, in that barely audible little-girl voice of hers, she’d tell me that she wasn’t sure she could go on. She always spoke in generalities. She never mentioned her husband, never gave me specifics of who was doing what to whom. And of course I knew better than to ask. She just said that she was tired of dealing with so much. My heart went out to her. She was a woman who suffered silently. She held so much in. I’d tell her to take as much time off as she needed. We had a lot of songs in the can that we could release without new material. ‘Oh, no, Jerry,’ she’d say. ‘I can’t stop recording. I’ve written some new songs, Carolyn’s written some new songs. We gotta get in there and cut ’em.’ ‘Are you sure?’ I’d ask. ‘Positive,’ she’d say. I’d set up the dates and typically she wouldn’t show up for the first or second sessions. Carolyn or Erma would call me to say, ‘Ree’s under the weather.’ That was tough because we’d have asked people like Joe South and Bobby Womack to play on the sessions. Then I’d reschedule in the hopes she’d show. Any way you look at it, the work she did during 1967, her first year at Atlantic, will go down in the history books as some of the strongest rhythm and blues that the soul nation has ever produced.”
