Respect: The Life of Aretha Franklin

by David Ritz

  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 in
terview. 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.

  Wexler didn’t see it that way. “She’s not at the top of her game,” he said about her Live in Paris album, the set taken from her show at the Olympia Theater. “She and the band aren’t on the same page. They’re out of tune, they miss their cues, and they’re struggling to find the right groove. Naturally she was excited to be performing in Europe for the first time, and naturally it had to be thrilling for her to see the international scope of her success, but when the music’s not right Aretha’s not right. Like Ray Charles, she hears every note being played by every band member. And when a note is wrong—and, believe me, there were scores of bad notes—for Aretha, it’s like squeaky chalk on a blackboard. It hurts. When she came home, she was hurting. Here you had the premier singer of our time touring the Continent with a ragtag band suitable for backing up a third-rate blues singer in some bucket of blood in Loserville, Louisiana. It was outrageous.”

  Aretha didn’t see it that way. Out-of-tune band or not, she had taken London, Frankfurt, Stockholm, Rotterdam, Amsterdam, and Paris by storm.

  When she returned home at the end of May, her latest release, “Think,” was flying up the charts. Her most recent album, Lady Soul, was hailed as her best yet.

  She found time to accompany her father to the first Southern Christian Leadership Conference convention since the death of Dr. King, where she sang in honor of the great man’s passing.

  That spring she also sat down with jazz critic Leonard Feather for the blindfold test, in which Down Beat magazine played records that the interviewee tried to identify. Aretha was able to name Sam and Dave, Peggy Lee, Nancy Wilson, and Esther Phillips. But she didn’t recognize Marlena Shaw and, amazingly, confused Barbra Streisand with Diahann Carroll.

  Her next press appearance was the biggest of her career.

  “When we learned that Time magazine was putting Ree on the cover,” said Cecil, “we all saw it as the greatest honor yet. Presidents were on the cover of Time. Prime ministers. Nobel Prize winners. Aretha remembered that Barbra Streisand had been on the cover of Time—the same Barbra who had started at Columbia around the same time as Ree. So, as far as public relations go, this was going to be the brightest jewel in her crown. Then, of course, it turned out to be a tremendous embarrassment that took her years to get over. On second thought, I’m not sure she ever got over it.”

  The story that came out on June 28 contained comments that Aretha claimed were either inaccurate or taken out of context. For example, according to Time, she said, “I might be just 26, but I’m an old woman in disguise—26 goin’ on 65.”

  Aretha was appalled by the treatment of her father, which she considered disrespectful. The article talked about how “his Cadillac, diamond stickpins and $60 alligator shoes testify to an eminently successful pastorate.” It also mentioned his failure to file federal tax returns. The fifty-one-year-old minister was described as a “strapping, stentorious charmer who has never let his spiritual calling inhibit his fun-loving ways.”

  She was further infuriated by the implication that her mother had abandoned her and her siblings and by the description of Ted White as “a street corner wheeler-dealer” who had “roughed her up in public at Atlanta’s Regency Hyatt House.”

  But it was the overall picture of herself that she found most disturbing. Time characterized her as a woman who “sleeps till afternoon, then mopes in front of the television set, chain-smoking Kools and snacking compulsively.”

  Cecil is quoted: “For the last few years Aretha is simply not Aretha. You see flashes of her, and then she’s back in her shell.”

  Before Time ran the story, Aretha was eager for any coverage she could get. The more stories, the more sales. But suddenly she saw that in-depth profiles could be far more revealing—and unflattering—than she had ever imagined. She had been used to puff pieces in Billboard, Down Beat, Ebony, and Jet. She had assumed Time would offer her nothing but praise. Why else put her on the cover?

  “The shock was severe,” said Ruth Bowen. “It was definitely a turning point for Aretha. She’d never trust the press again. It took her a long time to agree to any more interviews. It became another one of her many fears—this fear of having secrets revealed. She and I argued about that. I said everyone has problems. Most women go through troubled relationships. Millions of women struggle with alcohol. There’s no shame in that game—it’s merely life. But Aretha, bless her heart, doesn’t want to be seen like most women. She has an image she wants to maintain. And when Time blew that image, she went crazy. She even talked about suing them. ‘For what?’ I asked. ‘It wasn’t libel or slander. It was just a profile of how the reporter viewed you. Mainly, it was a valentine about your genius as an artist. Besides, a lawsuit will get even more people to read an article that you hate.’ I convinced her, but I couldn’t convince Ted. He did sue Time, though the suit never got anywhere. The irony, of course, was that Ted was furious to be described as a wife beater, while those of us with firsthand knowledge knew that to be the undisputed truth.”

  “Ree was pretty inconsolable over that Time piece,” said Erma. “She was convinced it would ruin her career. In truth, though, nothing could ruin her career—not with her turning out hit after hit. The cover story came in the spring around the same time ‘Think’ was tearing up the charts. That summer she was offered all sorts of TV shows. She appeared on Johnny Carson, proof that the Time profile didn’t hurt her at all. The opposite was true—it increased the public’s appetite to hear her records and see her in person. Her fees went up, but her pride was hurt and she wouldn’t stop talking about the lies that Time had spread. She wanted the world to believe that she had a happy marriage.”

  Ed Ochs’s Billboard article from July 13 proves Erma’s point. She told the reporter that, in addition to re-signing with Atlantic, she had also re-signed with her husband for personal management, adding, “We haven’t had any real trouble so far.”

  After Carson, she played the new Madison Square Garden on Eighth Avenue to an audience of some twenty-one thousand fans. Wexler was there.

  “I’d just come back from a music-industry convention in Miami, where I was to accept an award on Aretha’s behalf,” Wexler remembered. “In Florida, what I thought would be a pleasure turned into a nightmare. Gangster elements had taken over the industry’s black-power movement. During the banquet, King Curtis came up to me and said, ‘We’re getting you outta here. You’ve been marked.’ King escorted me out to safety. Later I was hung in effigy. Phil Walden, Otis’s white manager, received death threats. Marshall Sehorn, a white promo man, was pistol-whipped. It was some scary shit.

  “When I got back to the relative safety of New York City, I could not have been more grateful to King Curtis. I swore that I would convince Aretha to hire him as her musical director for live dates—not only because he had proved such an invaluable ally of mine but because he was the best man for the job. King was the consummate musician—a lean and mean tenor man who could go both ways in terms of jazz and R-and-B. The obstacle was Ted White, who had his own man. I did an end run around Ted and cornered Aretha. ‘King Curtis is the right call,’ I said. ‘You know it as well as I do. King can groove you up in a way that no one else can.’

  “Althoug
h she never acknowledged the fact that I had been right about the third-rate unit she had been touring with, she finally agreed to turn the baton over to King. As a result, her live gigs, starting with the Madison Square Garden show, were starting to sound as sharp as the recordings. The switch also indicated to me that Ted was losing influence. In terms of their marriage, the handwriting had been on the wall for a long time. I just knew she was close to giving him his walking papers.”

  “Aretha was not one to discuss her intimate relationships,” said Erma, “not even with her sisters—or especially not with her sisters, since we had fought over men. But after the Time article, she began calling me more and desiring my company. I had signed a new deal with Brunswick Records. Aretha certainly helped me. It wasn’t only her own success that convinced another label to take a chance on me, it was her own involvement. She was the one who suggested the Carole King/Gerry Goffin song ‘You Don’t Have the Right to Cry.’ She figured if she could hit with their ‘Natural Woman,’ I might hit with their ‘Cry.’ She even helped me place and voice the background parts. Of course I was disappointed when I didn’t get major airplay, but I was so glad to have my sister back in my camp. The more she moved away from Ted, the closer she moved to the family. We all knew that she was under great pressure. It was evident because she started gaining weight. Aretha is an emotional eater. When she’s not happy, she overdoes food. She was also drinking more than ever.”

  In its August 22 issue, Jet reported that friends were worried about Aretha’s weight problem. “At a recent public concert in the Windy City, some were startled to see how much she had gained since her last time around.”