Respect: The Life of Aretha Franklin

by David Ritz

  On the musical front, Wexler was able to coax Aretha down to Florida. On February 16, Aretha showed up at Criteria studios in Miami together with her sisters and her cousin Brenda. She was also armed with three original compositions.

  “Aretha had written the basics of ‘Day Dreaming’ some time earlier,” said Carolyn, “and when I first heard it, I knew it was a monster. It was about Dennis Edwards and a famous limo trip the two of them had taken together from Saratoga Springs to New York City with the champagne flowing and the curtains drawn. It’s a head-over-heels-in-love song with a silky-smooth feel-good groove. Ree had Erma, Brenda, and myself come to Miami to sing it with her. We were all stoked. It had hit written all over it.”

  “That was a marvelous day,” said Erma. “At that same session Aretha cut her ‘Rock Steady.’ Jerry Wexler had the good sense to fly in Donny Hathaway. He was an almost painfully shy guy, but, brother, when he played that opening line on organ, we were off and running. That line defined the song. Aretha absolutely tore up the vocal. We knew it was an instant classic.”

  “The third original Aretha wrote for that session was ‘All the King’s Horses,’ ” said Cecil. “If ‘Day Dreaming’ was the upside of Aretha’s friendship with Dennis Edwards, ‘King’s Horses’ was the downside. As she said, all the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t put their two hearts together again. I’d been trying to tell her that Dennis was hardly a staunch supporter of monogamy, but she had to learn that for herself. No matter, she got a couple of good songs out of that relationship. And on ‘King’s Men,’ she switched over to celeste, an instrument that gave the song a sad and lonely feeling.”

  When released in 1972, “Rock Steady” and “Day Dreaming” were top-ten hits on both the R&B and pop charts. “All the King’s Horses” reached number seven on the R&B charts.

  A month later, Aretha was in California. Wexler had convinced her to record a live album over three nights at Bill Graham’s Fillmore West in San Francisco, one of the principal palaces of late sixties/early seventies hippie culture. Making that happen wasn’t easy. The first obstacle was money.

  “Aretha was getting from forty thousand to fifty thousand a show,” said Ruth Bowen, “and Graham wouldn’t pay anywhere near that. His club didn’t have that kind of capacity. Neither Aretha nor I was willing to compromise.”

  “I stepped in and said that Atlantic would make up the difference,” said Wexler. “We’d underwrite the funding. That’s how much importance I ascribed to the project.”

  The next problem was Aretha herself, who was not enamored of the alternative-culture crowd.

  “She was afraid she didn’t belong there,” said Wexler. “She saw the flower children as devotees of bands like the Jefferson Airplane and the Grateful Dead. She was afraid they wouldn’t understand or relate to her. She had, after all, come out of gospel and R-and-B. She saw hippies as somewhat alien. But I liked the venue—Bill Graham was a friend—and I saw it as a chance to broaden her market. The hippies loved the blues. Graham had booked B.B. King and Buddy Guy, and I saw no reason why Aretha wouldn’t be absolutely sensational in that setting.”

  “I’ve played a million gigs,” said Billy Preston, her organist during those nights. “I’ve played a million churches, a million buckets of blood, a million nightclubs, and a million concert halls. But never, ever have I experienced anything like playing for Aretha at the Fillmore. It wasn’t that the hippies just liked her. They went out of their minds. They lost it completely. The hippies flipped the fuck out. Fans say that B.B. King Live at the Regal or Ray Charles Live in Atlanta or James Brown Live at the Apollo are the greatest live albums of all time. And, no doubt, they are great. But, brother, I was there with Aretha at the Fillmore. I saw what she did. And I’m proud to say that I helped her do it. What she did was make history.”

  “Give King Curtis major props,” said Wexler. “By the time she got to the Fillmore, his Kingpins were tighter than tight. What Basie was to jazz, King was to R-and-B. His band was locked and loaded, a unit that included the Memphis Horns, a rhythm section of Billy on organ, Cornell Dupree on guitar, Jerry Jemmott on bass, Bernard ‘Pretty’ Purdie on drums, and Pancho Morales on congas. I suggested that, in addition to her repertoire of hits, she add ‘Love the One You’re With,’ a hit for Stephen Stills, and ‘Make It with You,’ a Bread hit. She smashed them both.”

  “The highlight, of course,” said Billy Preston, “was when she left the stage to get Ray Charles, who was sitting somewhere in the back of the club. I know Ray well. I know how he hates to sit in. That’s not his style. But even Ray couldn’t refuse the Queen. That happened on our last night. It was a Sunday.”

  “I rarely go out to hear anyone,” Ray told me. “But I happened to be in San Francisco that night when my friend Ruth Bowen called to say that Aretha was performing in the city and I should go see her. There are many female singers I like—I love me some Gladys Knight, I love me some Mavis Staples—but Aretha is my heart. It also doesn’t hurt that Aretha is the name of my mother. Anyway, I love Ruth and I love Aretha and I figured that I’d have my man find a table way in the back where I’d slip in, hear a set, and slip out. When I got there, who do I run into but my old friend Jerry Wexler. He tells me that they’re recording an album that night. ‘Ray,’ he says, ‘will you sing a song with her?’ ‘Don’t think so, Jer. Not tonight. Besides, I really don’t know her material.’ ‘Her material is your material, Ray.’ ‘Just came to listen,’ I say, ‘not to sing.’ So Jerry leaves me alone and I’m just digging the show. Excuse my French, but I have to say that this bitch is burning down the barn—I mean, she’s on fire. She does a version of ‘Dr. Feelgood’ that’s a hundred times better than the record. She’s turned the thing into church. I’m happy all over when suddenly she turns up at my table shouting to everyone, ‘Look who I’ve discovered! I discovered Ray Charles!’ That was a line that Flip Wilson was using on his TV show, when Columbus comes to America where he tells everyone he’s discovered Ray Charles. Next thing I know, she’s taking me by the hand leading me to the stage. What could I do? This is Aretha Franklin, baby. She sits me at her electric piano and has me doing her ‘Spirit in the Dark.’ Never played the thing before. Didn’t know the words. But Aretha’s spirit was moving me and I got through it. She had me play a long solo on electric piano. Couple of months later, Wexler called and said he wanted my duet with her on the record. I messed up the words so bad, I said no. But then Aretha called and begged me and finally I said, ‘What the hell.’ Looking back, I see it was history in the making. Aretha and I did some Coca-Cola commercials together that turned out great, but in terms of real records, this is the only one. At the end she calls me ‘The Right Reverend Ray,’ a label I’m proud to say has stuck.”

  “I remember there was discussion about how she should end the concert,” said Cecil. “Aretha wanted to do ‘Reach Out and Touch (Somebody’s Hand),’ the Ashford and Simpson song that Diana Ross had turned into a megahit. Wexler thought it might be corny for the flower children. But Aretha argued that it was perfect because the hippies were all about handholding and love.”

  “We were all crying,” said Brenda Corbett, Aretha’s cousin, who was a member of the Sweethearts of Soul vocal trio. “It was one of those times when you thought, despite what was happening in the world, that peace and love might really prevail. Of the hundreds of concerts I did with Aretha, this was probably the most exciting.”

  “I saw it as a breakthrough,” said Wexler. “The crowd at the Fillmore was not only emotionally connected to Aretha but proved to be musically sophisticated. They were deep into every riff played by King Curtis and Billy Preston and Ray Charles. They followed Aretha’s every vocal nuance. If she had let them, they would have carried her from the stage and held her on their shoulders like a conquering monarch.”

  Before he left, Wexler encountered a reporter who questioned him about Aretha’s drinking problem. “That pissed me off,” said Wexler. “Here she had just sung
the concert of her life. She was at the absolute height of her artistic powers. And all this schmuck of a scribe wanted to know is was she smashed on booze. Well, who gives a fuck? Everyone at the Fillmore was high that night, me included. You had to be an idiot not to be high. If Aretha was a little tipsy, it didn’t make a shit. She sang her ass off and that’s all that mattered.”

  Wexler described himself as Aretha’s greatest defender, but a Jet article implied that he was seeking to control her nonmusical activities. The magazine reported that “Atlantic Records’ bigwigs moved relentlessly behind the scenes to quietly, but quickly put the kibosh on Soul Queen Aretha Franklin’s publicly announced plans to stage a benefit concert in Los Angeles for imprisoned Black activist Angela Davis. As a result, there’ll be no such benefit by Miss Franklin in Miss Davis’ behalf.”

  “That was absolutely bullshit,” said Wexler. “Aretha and I share a common politics. We are both fire-breathing liberal Democrats. We might have had different lefty causes, but not in a million years would Ahmet or I even hint that she suppress her point of view.”

  Aretha backed up Wexler, as indicated by a follow-up report in Jet on May 27: “Aretha Denies Being Told Not to Perform to Aid Angela Davis: Soul Queen Aretha Franklin told Jet that she is angry over reports that officials at Atlantic Records (her label) had stymied her plans to stage a concert for Angela Davis.” Aretha insisted that neither “Atlantic nor anyone else” dictated what she could or could not do. She explained that the cancellation was due to confusion over dates for the proposed concert at UCLA.

  “Aretha was always going off and scheduling benefits without checking with me,” said Ruth Bowen. “She drove both Cecil and myself absolutely crazy by willy-nilly arranging charity events. Her intentions were good. She has a big heart and a passion for genuine altruism, but when it comes to logistics, she’s not home. Supposedly she was committed to leaving the organizational piece of her professional life to her brother and me, but at least once a month I’d get a call from the head of some political or charitable organization telling me that Aretha had agreed to perform for free. Inevitably Aretha chose a date when I already booked her elsewhere. Massive confusion would result. I’d be left to clean up the mess. I usually did—but not always. There are some promoters as well as heads of nonprofit charities who will go to their graves furious at me.”

  That summer she joined Stevie Wonder, who had just turned twenty-one and released his first self-produced album, Where I’m Coming From, at a benefit charity at Fisk University in Nashville. Aretha had told Stevie how much she liked the hit song he had written for the Spinners, “It’s a Shame,” and she wondered when he’d write a song for her. He told her that he already had. Aretha wouldn’t record the song—“Until You Come Back to Me (That’s What I’m Gonna Do)”—for another two years.

  In May she played the Apollo, where, according to Billboard, she gave a stirring performance despite her tendency to cheapen her concerts with cheesy effects. Reviewer Ian Dove wrote, “ ‘She’s home’ ran the marquee billing. Aretha at the Apollo—the natural woman in a natural setting. There it was, the cohesion and knitting together of singer and audience and song… Aretha had King Curtis’ big band, her own chorus and it was more than enough without some attempt to dress up the evening with sets, curtains that dropped and rose throughout, and dancers.”

  “Aretha thought she had the capacity to arrange her shows in terms of dancers and props,” said Ruth Bowen. “I’d argue with her that she needed help. But she had little patience with my arguments. So I turned the matter over to Cecil.”

  “I stopped arguing with Ree about her shows,” said Cecil. “It wasn’t worth it. People came to hear her sing. If she overdid the stage settings, well, no one really cared. Same thing is true of the elaborate gowns she began wearing in the early seventies. Some fans complained they were over the top and didn’t reflect a sense of refined taste. Well, Aretha had her own taste in clothes, refined or not. Far as I was concerned, it was her taste in music that brought out the crowds. Wasn’t the stage lighting, wasn’t her hats or her plumage, it was her voice that gave the thrills and had ’em shouting for more—her voice and nothing else.”

  Her voice was still in great demand in Europe when she returned in June. Her performance in Montreux, Switzerland, was a triumph.

  “This was Aretha in her absolute glory,” Montreux Jazz Festival founder and director Claude Nobs told me. “It was hell trying to arrange the date. She must have canceled four times. But I was determined. I’d come back to her and beg. Then she’d make another demand—a bigger dressing room, an extra hotel suite—and I’d cave every time. I sent her flowers, candies, and chocolates. She said it was the chocolates that won over her heart. She agreed to come! I was afraid she’d arrive with that terrible orchestra she had used before in Europe. When I learned that she’d be using King Curtis and the Kingpins, I wept with joy. Cornell Dupree was on guitar. We treated her like royalty and she was so grateful she asked did I have any favors she might grant me? Yes, I did. ‘Play piano, Aretha. Please play piano as much and as often as you like. I’ll have the world’s finest Steinway grand onstage just for you. Play it. Stay on it. Do me the favor of playing piano all night long! You see, Queen Aretha, I think you’re the funkiest piano player out there. I adore your singing, but I adore your piano playing just as much!’ She laughed and said that yes, she would play. And she did. If you look at the set, which I videotaped, it’s unusually keyboard heavy. It’s splendid. Her ‘Dr. Feelgood’ and ‘Spirit in the Dark’ are masterful. This happened when the festival was celebrating its sixth year. We had imported everyone from Bill Evans to Duke Ellington to Carlos Santana. But Aretha was the highlight.”

  In Italy, though, she ran into trouble. Jet told the story in its July 15 issue: “Soul Queen Fumes Over Treatment by Italian Cops.” Angry about an incident at the airport in Rome, Aretha vowed to call a conference of black men who would start, in her words, “to deal with how the Black woman specifically and Black people in general are treated around the world.”

  “I’m going to get Muhammad Ali, the Reverend Jesse Jackson, Huey Newton, Cong. Charles Diggs and we are going to have ourselves a conference and come up with a plan,” said Aretha after she described being “manhandled” by Roman law enforcement officers for no apparent reason. After a scuffle with the police, Aretha and two of her sons—Clarence and Eddie—were interrogated for four hours before being released. “The only reason I can think of why they did this,” she added, “was because I had to cancel my last concert in Rome but I played a series of nine one nighters and I was tired.”

  The next brouhaha erupted over South Africa. Ruth Bowen was in the middle of the controversy, doing her best to protect her client. In its July 29 issue, Jet reported that Aretha had canceled her upcoming trip to South Africa. Ruth Bowen told the magazine that the singer would reschedule the tour, despite criticisms from the American Committee on Africa, Chicago chapter. The ACA had rebuked Aretha for agreeing to play in Soweto. Bowen claimed, though, that the postponement of the tour had nothing to do with those criticisms. “We have other dates in the USA to fulfill first,” she said. “We are not politicians. That committee, which is headed by a white man, called me. I told them that I am black and explain to me why a black entertainer can’t entertain black people. We are going to entertain blacks only. They want it and that’s what we are going over there to do. I am opposed to black artists going over there to entertain black audiences, then white audiences. I would shoot any of my acts that did it. But we are not going to deny our black brothers over there from seeing our acts.”

  “The trip never happened,” said Cecil. “It got mired down in politics and confusion. We were hammered by both sides—left and right—and for no reason whatsoever. The left could have no beef with Aretha. The Franklins have always been a freedom-loving family with absolutely no tolerance for racial bigotry of any kind. Aretha would never have anything to do with a racist regime in any country. Our mi
ssion in South Africa was to point out the moral bankruptcy of apartheid, not endorse it. The right could not possibly claim that we had agreed to entertain all-white audiences, because nothing could be further from the truth. In the end, extremists on both sides polluted the waters, and South Africa was deprived of the chance to see one of their queens.”

  A tragedy befell the R&B world on August 13, 1971. Aretha’s musical director King Curtis was murdered on the streets of New York City.

  “When I got the call, I was dumbfounded,” said Wexler. “Couldn’t speak. Couldn’t move. Didn’t know what to do. Didn’t know how to process it because it came from out of nowhere. King was going home to the apartment building where he lived, on West Sixty-Eighth Street. King was at the top of his game—a healthy man, a vibrant man, a fabulous artist, a great guy. A couple of junkies were hanging out on the steps, shooting up and acting crazy. King told them to move on. They told King to get fucked. King made a move, but one of the junkies got to him first, stabbing him with a blade. The knife went through his heart. His life was over.”

  “It was a devastating loss,” said Cecil. “King Curtis had proven to be the best conductor Ree had ever known. He was fast to pick up her cues and keys. He was a dynamite musician himself, both in the studio and onstage. He gave her that snap that every great rhythm singer needs.

  “I’ll never forget the funeral. My father flew in from Detroit to officiate. Jesse Jackson spoke. Everyone was there—from Brook Benton to the Isley Brothers to Stevie Wonder to Dizzy Gillespie. Curtis’s band, the Kingpins, played ‘Soul Serenade.’ When Aretha sang ‘Never Grow Old,’ everyone lost it.