Aretha Franklin (10 page)

Although this album had less of a central focus than her two subsequent albums with Mersey, this was her most successful Columbia LP from a sales standpoint. Her touching version of “Try a Little Tenderness” and her songwriting debut on “Without the One You Love” are amongst the album's high points. Aretha also tackled Billie Holiday's trademark
composition “God Bless the Child,” delivering a knockout version of the classic song that is both sensitive and soulful.

“Don't Cry Baby” was released as a single in July 1962, and spent one week on the pop chart at Number Ninety-two. In September, “Try a Little Tenderness” hit Number 100 for one week. A Mersey-produced version of Aretha singing the Dinah Washington hit “Trouble in Mind” was released as a single in December of that year, spent five weeks on the charts and made it to Number Eighty-six. This studio version of the song wasn't included on any of her subsequent albums.
The Tender, the Moving, the Swinging Aretha Franklin
proved quite popular, and peaked at Number Sixty-nine on the LP chart.

In an attempt to introduce Aretha to the teenage record-buying public, on August 2, 1962, she made her debut appearance on the TV show
American Bandstand
. This was years before she was dubbed the “Queen of Soul” by the American youth market. On the show that afternoon she sang both “Try a Little Tenderness” and “Don't Cry Baby.” Unfortunately, those songs were completely out of place with the sounds that were hitting the top of record charts in the United States. The three songs that hit Number One in
Billboard
magazine that month were “Roses are Red” by Bobby Vinton, “Breaking Up is Hard to Do” by Neil Sedaka, and “The Locomotion” by Little Eva. (Years later, the composers of “The Loco-motion,” Carole King and Gerry Goffin, were to write one of Aretha's biggest hits, “[You Make Me Feel Like] A Natural Woman,” with Jerry Wexler.)

Aretha's second album with Robert Mersey,
Laughing on the Outside
, was an all-ballad masterpiece. Her version of Johnny Mercer and Hoagy Carmichael's “Skylark” was one of her best performances of the entire decade, and Aretha's reading of the song is one of the vocal high points of her career. Although a brilliant performance, the song “Skylark” was never released as a single, and the album never even made the pop LP chart.

The material Aretha tackled on
Laughing on the Outside
was more in the “adult contemporary” mode than in a purely jazz framework. Among the songs that she sang on her fourth Columbia album were Lerner and Loewe's “If Ever I Would Leave You” from the Broadway show
Camelot
, Duke Ellington's “Solitude,” and Irving Berlin's “Say It Isn't So.” One of the songs included on this album was an expressive composition written
by Aretha and Ted White, entitled “I Wonder (Where You Are Tonight).” Although a technically beautiful album,
Laughing on the Outside
wasn't one of her biggest sellers when it was released, but it is now looked upon as one of the most underrated classics of her Columbia years.

Although Columbia executives were beginning to become perplexed with what direction to take Aretha—as far as material, market, and promotional outlets—other people in the music business were looking on with wonder. One person who was fascinated with Aretha at this point in her career was Jerry Wexler at Atlantic Records. “A lot of people missed the great licks* she did on Columbia,” he recalls. “It's become traditional to say, ‘Well, Atlantic is where she really broke out.' But people are negating some of the beautiful things she did on Columbia—some of the ballads, some of the show tunes. They tried everything with her. They tried Broadway show tunes, they tried jazz, everything from Nina Simone to Dinah Washington. They did make a couple of R&B records with her. They did other wonderful things, like the ballad from
Camelot
, ‘If Ever I Should Leave You.' Her rendition of that is just superb, like the way Ella Fitzgerald would do Gershwin. Her articulation and her lyric intelligence are other things that people don't realize … they just see her as a belter, a soul screamer.”

[*In musical terms, a “lick” is a trademark sound, note, expression, or vocal pattern that a singer or musician uses time and again to uniquely personalize his or her performance.]

Columbia Records knew they had a masterpiece with
Laughing on the Outside
, and they tried to introduce it to a wider audience than that which had bought Aretha's previous blues and jazz albums. The way in which a hit record could be created was television exposure, and the one television show that was counted upon to reach the heartland of America was the Sunday-night institution,
The Ed Sullivan Show
. Aretha really knew her singing career was on the right track when she was booked to appear on the
Sullivan
show in 1963. She spent hours finding the right gown to wear, and working with choreographer Cholly Atkins, she came up with a complete routine to accompany the song. Unfortunately, that evening's show was running long: “I was booked once to go on
Ed Sullivan
, and I got bumped and ran out the back door crying,”
she recalls. “Of course, I had told everybody in the world, ‘I'm going to be on
The Ed Sullivan Show
! I had the most beautiful gowns, I was going to sing ‘Skylark.' I had worked with Cholly on that, and we had done the rehearsals [at the TV studio]. I remember one of my gowns was cut a little low, and a voice from up in the booth said, ‘We don't like the cut of the gown—change it.' So we brought out two others that were higher-cut, and they seemed to be satisfied with those, but then at the last minute they said, the show was overbooked, and somebody had to be bumped—and that was me.”

The third and last album Aretha recorded at Columbia with Robert Mersey is considered by many to be the greatest disc that she cut at that company. It was also the most inspired project, and her seriousness about the material shows brilliantly on every cut. The album is titled
Unforgettable
, and it was a complete tribute to Aretha's idol, Dinah Washington.

According to Clyde Otis, what Aretha and Dinah most closely shared was the pain in their lives. “Aretha ached in the same way that Dinah did,” he claims.

On December 14, 1963, Dinah Washington met a needlessly tragic end. Following her string of hit records at Mercury Records, in 1962 she moved to Roulette Records and placed several songs on the charts, including “You're Nobody ‘Til Somebody Loves You,” “For All We Know,” “You're a Sweetheart,” and the rousing “Soulville.” In July 1963 Dinah had gotten married for the seventh time. Husband number seven was Detroit Lions football pro Dick “Night Train” Lane, and they lived together in Detroit. Dinah's death resulted from a combination of sleeping pills and liquor, and was assumed to have been accidental and not an attempted suicide.

Aretha was crushed when she heard of the death of her idol. Even though Aretha was being sold as “The
New
Queen of the Blues,” she stated to the press, “
The
Queen of the Blues was—and still is—Dinah Washington!” Recording an album of Dinah's hits was a natural choice for Aretha. She had already recorded “Trouble in Mind” and “For All We Know,” and she loved evoking the moody expressiveness of her favorite star. Aretha's
Unforgettable
album is without a doubt her most artistically successful Columbia LP. Decades later, original vinyl copies of
it are considered prized collector's items, as well as a creative milestone in Aretha's career.

Said Aretha at the time, “I first heard Dinah when I was a kid, back around the time she made ‘Fat Daddy.' I never got to know her personally in those days, though she and my father were good friends. The idea of recording a tribute to her grew out of the way I've always felt about her. I didn't try to do the songs the same way she did them, necessarily—just the way I felt and will always feel about Dinah. I regretted not knowing her better; even just sitting around listening to people speaking about her makes me wish we had been close personal friends.”

In October 1963, just two months before Dinah's death, Aretha was performing at a Detroit jazz club, and one night during the engagement, Dinah showed up to catch her act. After the performance, Dinah was quoted as saying, “That girl has got soul!”

Aretha recalls, “Last time I saw her was in Chicago. She was walking across a parking lot on her way to the Roberts Hotel. I admired her outfit—she had this hip short jacket—and [I] noticed how her stylish hat broke so beautifully. That's the image of Dinah I like to keep.”

Stricken by the death of Dinah Washington, Aretha and Robert Mersey hurried into the recording studio to produce
Unforgettable
in a matter of weeks. The finished album was released in March 1964 to capitalize on the sudden public interest in Dinah's music. Aretha once stated that “all my songs are very personal to me. I always give everything I have to give to every song I sing. That's the only way I know how to sing.” That was never more true than on
Unforgettable
.

The album starts out with a slow and dreamy version of “Unforgettable,” and ends with a rousing version of the bawdy “Soulville.” Every one of Aretha's performances on this album is searingly emotional—from the teasing “Evil Gal Blues” to the pleading “This Bitter Earth,” to the poignant “If I Should Lose You.” However, the most effective song on the album is the melancholy “Drinking Again.” To get the mood just right, Robert Mersey dimmed the lights in the recording studio to give it an “after midnight” feeling. Listening to Aretha singing the song, it is easy to imagine her at a small table in a jazz club, smoking a cigarette, with a glass, and the bottle of Seagram's whiskey that she mentions at the end of the song.

Taking her time on her delivery of the first half of “What a Diff'rence a Day Makes,” she shows off the different colorings of her versatile voice. The song then builds to a dramatic close that finds Aretha confidently in her element. This album is the height of her blues-and-jazz phase at Columbia. Received well by critics at the time,
Unforgettable
is still considered an outstanding album, even though it never appeared on the album charts, or contained a hit single. The songs on
Unforgettable
were originally Dinah's, but on this album Aretha redefines them and makes them all her own.

According to Bette Midler, Aretha's
Unforgettable
album was responsible for shaping her own singing style. Midler refers to the first time she played the album as “a real awakening. It was like I had no idea what music was all about until I heard her sing. It opened up the whole world.”

Not only does Aretha sound great on the
Unforgettable
album, but the music and production are also exquisite. It is easy to see how Robert Mersey went from
Unforgettable
directly to the top of the charts on his next project. As he had defined, distilled, and directed Aretha to perfection on the Dinah Washington tribute, he did the same for his next subject— Barbra Streisand. The album that Streisand and Mersey came up with was
People
, Barbra's first Number One LP, and her fifth consecutive certified Gold album in a year-and-a-half.

In the spring of 1964, Aretha Franklin was a guest star on a couple of episodes of the late-night network TV program,
The Steve Allen Show
. She was seen on millions of television screens, singing and playing her own piano accompaniment on the popular variety program. Aretha's performances on the show included: “Lover Come Back to Me,” “Rock-A-Bye Your Baby with a Dixie Melody,” “Won't Be Long,” and “Skylark.” It was one of America's first chances to witness Franklin in the era in which she was a fresh-faced, pert, focused, and fashionably coiffed twenty-one-year-old. Playing her own piano accompaniment, Franklin was seen on the black & white TV screen dressed in a sequin spangled shoulder-strapped dress, singing her heart out on a track from her latest album: Dinah Washington's “Evil Gal Blues.”

Meanwhile, time was marching on for Aretha, and some decisions had to be made about the direction that her career should take. There is a
logical progression to the subsequent chain of events. Aretha had hit her creative peak on the Dinah Washington album. Dinah was a respected blues singer in the 1950s, but she had not been a big seller until she hooked up with Clyde Otis and he converted her into a hit-making star. Why not put Aretha in the studio with Clyde Otis, and let him turn her into a contemporary singing star? This idea occurred to Robert Mersey.

“It came about because of Bob Mersey, who was the head of A&R [artists & repertoire] at Columbia—reporting to Clive Davis—was my neighbor,” Otis recalls. “We lived just a few doors from each other, here in Englewood, New Jersey. He kept stopping by and asking me if I wouldn't come over [to Columbia] and help him salvage a few situations—especially the Aretha Franklin one. Finally I consented. I went over there, I worked for less than a year, and I cut five albums with Aretha.”

Her career wasn't the only thing on her mind at the time. Aretha had recorded her first five albums at Columbia before she was twenty-one years old. Since she had married Ted White, and handed him the reins of her career, she had also given birth to another son, Ted, Jr. In addition to her responsibilities as an entertainer, she also recalls the pressures of “getting up at four o'clock in the morning to change diapers.” She felt overworked and unhappy.

At this point, Aretha and Ted moved to a quiet, middle-class neighborhood on the West Side of Detroit. The Colonial-style house they lived in was located on a street called Sorrento, and the neighbors still talk about the loud all-night parties that Aretha and her husband gave. Cathy Maloney married and moved out of her parents' house in 1960, but she remembers her parents complaining about the noise emanating from Ted and Aretha White's home next door.