Aretha Franklin (11 page)

“I'll be frank—my parents' memories of her are not very pleasant, for a variety of reasons,” says Maloney, whose mother and father were especially aggravated by the noise that emanated from Aretha's home, the throng of cars parked out front, and the fact that people came and went at all hours of the night. “That was bothersome to them,” she recalls. “My parents were very quiet people, and for entertainers and musicians, the middle of the night is just when they're getting groovin'. The houses were situated in such a way that Aretha's basement family room was
underneath my parents' bedroom window. She would have friends over, and as I recall, there was a piano there. In the summertime, when the windows were open, it was a burst of aggravation to my parents that she would come home from a job, and at three o'clock in the morning they would entertain.”

Describing the block that Aretha and Ted lived on, Maloney explains, “These were all nice brick Colonial-style homes: living room, dining room, and kitchen on the main floor, and the bedrooms upstairs. The particular house that she lived in was built some time after the majority of the houses on the block. I don't think that the house was built until after the war, because it was really like a house and a half. It was bigger than the rest of the houses on that street, and newer.

“Middle-class to upper-middle-class,” is how Cathy recalls the neighborhood's makeup. “There were several doctors that lived—maybe not on our street, but in the surrounding blocks. By that time there were many black families in the Northwest section of Detroit.”

Several people claim that Aretha and Ted's home life was less than perfect at the time. Aretha often found herself in the middle of conflicts, with her husband / manager on one side, and Columbia Records on the other. According to several accounts, Ted was less than pleasant to deal with, and consequently, Aretha usually lost her battles with him.

A stylistic conflict regarding her music also began to develop. Aretha longed to try other types of music, while Ted was in favor of keeping her rooted in the jazz mode. However, she was going to have to make a clean break away from jazz if she was ever going to reach the mainstream record-buying audience. Finally, everyone agreed with Bob Mersey's idea of having Clyde Otis move her into contemporary music.

After several requests from Mersey, Otis agreed to see what he could do to resolve Aretha's situation and help her find a wider audience with her next album. “He took Barbra,” Otis recalls, “and gave me Aretha.” In mid-1964, Aretha and Clyde—and Ted—went into the recording studio to produce the Columbia album that was designed to make her a pop and R&B singer:
Runnin' Out of Fools
.

The year 1964 was a milestone in the music business. There were exciting new sounds, and fresh new singing stars on the charts. The
stiffness of the Connie Francis and Steve Lawrence era was ending, and a new wave of creativity had taken over. It was the year of the Beatles and the “British Invasion.” Mary Wells hit Number One on the pop charts, and the whole Motown scene was exploding. The Supremes produced three consecutive Number One hits that year, and suddenly there was a hip, exciting, glamorous new standard for black female singers to emulate. Dionne Warwick produced her first two Top Ten hits that year, and the radio airwaves were filled with an assortment of dynamic new music.

The plan was obvious: Immerse Aretha in the compositions of the contemporary pop charts, get her into the mood by recording her own versions of the songs, and complete the album with a handful of originals cut from the same cloth. To introduce Aretha to the music that was selling at the time, Otis produced Franklin “covers” of no less than seven Top 20 smashes: Betty Everett's “The Shoop Shoop Song (It's in His Kiss)” (recorded in 1964 / peaked at Number Six), Mary Wells' “My Guy”, Barbara Lynn's “You'll Lose a Good Thing” (1962 / Number Eight), Brenda Holloway's “Every Little Bit Hurts” (1964 / Number Thirteen), Dionne Warwick's “Walk on By” (1964 / Number Six), Inez & Charlie Foxx's “Mockingbird” (1963 / Number Seven), and the one “oldie” in the batch—Brook Benton's “It's Just a Matter of Time” (1959 / Number Three).

“I think that was a moment of truth in her career,” Clyde Otis claims. “Knowing that she came from a gospel background, I knew that just doing the heavy soulful thing would not at all be appropriate. So she and I decided that these kinds of songs would be best suited for some degree of success. So it
was
planned to that degree.”

The “moment of truth” that came during the recording of the
Runnin' Out of Fools
album, was when Aretha found she could handle rock, pop, and R&B material. Clyde Otis' plan succeeded artistically, and commercially. The album showed Aretha off to the record-buying public in a whole new light. Her first recording sessions with Otis yielded Aretha's second-highest-charting album (at Number Eighty-four), and the second-highest-charting pop single with the album's title song “Runnin' Out of Fools” (at Number Fifty-seven). It didn't exactly set the charts on fire, but she was finally seen as a contemporary performer. When
Runnin' Out of Fools
was released, Columbia hoped Aretha would finally break through
to the same audience who purchased millions of Supremes and Dionne Warwick records. Unfortunately, that was not to be the case.

“It had nothing to do with the material,” says Clyde Otis, explaining why
Runnin' Out of Fools
fizzled. “There were a couple of major problems. One was a lack of promotion and merchandising for Aretha—that was on the part of the company. And on the part of Aretha—she refused to really blast vocally. But then she had been there four years, and knew that singing a song like she sang ‘(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman' was not the way to go, to get the support from CBS [Columbia's parent company]. Because they just weren't into that kind of soulful record, so she toned her style down. Between her toning her style down and CBS not promoting what she did give them—well, it was just very frustrating. Even with them [CBS executives at the time], we almost had a couple of real big hits.”

Ted White echoes Clyde Otis' frustration with Columbia's lack of promotion. “We went in and waged a campaign to let them know that we were there to really do some work, as opposed to the attitude that they had about Aretha at the time. And they kind of opened the door a bit for us. They were very cooperative from that time on, [but there was] very little money and very little outside support. In fact, I remember the first time we went to L.A. to work. I had to go down to Compton, in some very out-of-the-way record stores to buy old Aretha albums and singles, because I couldn't get product from the local Columbia PR person. I had to take a taxi down there and promote it myself. There just wasn't any product out there. They knew she was going out there. They weren't overly concerned. If you got a hit—great! If you didn't then, ‘We'll see you later.'”

After years of being locked into an older-than-her-years jazz mode, while she was touring to publicize
Runnin' Out of Fools
, for a brief time she was treated like an emerging pop artist—for the first time in her career. She appeared on shows with people her own age, and had the opportunity to meet some of her singing contemporaries. Looking back on this era in her career, she remembers the first time she met Dionne Warwick. “Dionne and I began our careers around about the same time,” says Aretha, “and we frequently were on the same shows together. I remember back in ‘64, we did one show where I was promoting
Runnin' Out of Fools
, and she was
promoting ‘Walk on By,' but we never really had a chance to talk with each other.” (Two decades later, both stars would be label mates together at Arista Records, where each of them would experience a huge career resurgence.)

In addition to their dissatisfaction with Columbia, Clyde Otis and Ted White also agreed on their mutual dislike of each other. According to Clyde, in the recording studio he would try to get Aretha to loosen up and have a good time with the material she was singing. This would infuriate Ted. Clyde was appalled to find that if Aretha smiled at anything, Ted's temper would flare—regardless of how many people were present. Clyde recalls, “He'd come in, and if she wanted to have a little bit of fun by cutting loose, he'd either look at her or slap the shit out of her, and that was it.”

According to Otis, Ted White was making a nice living, working with Aretha at the time. As her manager, he was paid for booking her in jazz clubs, and when she recorded his compositions on her albums, it provided him with music publishing money. Many people from this era of Aretha's life recall that whenever she opposed his authority, Ted would become abusive toward her.

Instead of continuing to build mainstream audience support by recording another R&B / pop album, at Ted White's insistence, Clyde Otis produced Aretha's next album as a live nightclub jazz LP, complete with an audience. The resulting album,
Yeah!!!,
was artistically successful, but the return to jazz killed all interest from contemporary record buyers. “The live album was something that she had discussed doing,” says Clyde, “and something that Ted White wanted done, because he was working her in jazz-type situations, and that's why he didn't want her to be too soulful in her singing. On the
Runnin' Out of Fools
album, or the subsequent sides that I recorded, I kept hoping that she would let go. As you can see, the moment she went over to Atlantic, and they got rid of Ted White, it all came together. Boom! The rest is history.”

According to White, the motivation was quite different. With regard to going pop with
Runnin' Out of Fools
, he says, “We all [Aretha, Clyde, Columbia, and Ted] agreed that we would try this direction and see what happened. So we called in some various arrangers and writers, and came up with some what-was-happening-then type product. We were pretty happy with it.”

On the subject of shifting back to jazz on
Yeah!!!,
White explains that, “Aretha was so multitalented, we didn't want her to get bottlenecked into one particular idiom at that time. We thought she was broad enough to attract people from all audiences. So we felt that was the best way to present something that they would accept, and that's what we tried to do. We wanted a little of the jazz, a little of the pop, and a little of the so-called rock & roll. And we just touched on all bases. There are few artists that can do it, because most of them are limited.”

Arguably, Aretha
is
talented enough to sing all sorts of music, but Ted's scattershot tactics confused record buyers, retailers, and disc jockeys alike. Instead of becoming a star in every musical market, she was missing the boat altogether. No one knew how to categorize her, so she ended up ignored.

“Clyde Otis was a ‘star,'” Ted complains. “He wasn't a producer, he wasn't a support for Aretha, he wanted to overwhelm everything, he was rigid, and it just didn't work. There were a lot of things that could have been done a lot better had he had a little more flexibility, and he was kind of a dictator.”

Ted found that Clyde was trying to force Aretha to go in musical directions that were more appropriate for Dinah Washington. “There was a whole difference there,” says Ted. “Dinah was an old-line, hard-core singer and a twenty-year professional. And there is a difference in how you would handle people of that stature at that time, and he just wasn't geared for it at that particular time. He did a decent job, but I wasn't totally overwhelmed with his work. It really didn't come off 100-percent—it came off 80-percent, I'd say, or 70-percent.”

In reality, Aretha was being pulled in several different directions when Ted was her manager / husband. On one hand, he wanted her to be revered as being a classy jazz singer like Dinah Washington, yet he wanted her to have huge pop and soul hits like Dionne Warwick and Mary Wells were producing at the time. While Ted wanted her to have jazz appeal so that he could book her in jazz clubs like The Flame Show Bar, he also wanted her to produce mainstream hits. It seemed that whatever Clyde Otis had her record, Ted was dissatisfied.

In the meantime, while everyone was arguing back and forth about what she should be singing, what was Aretha's opinion? What direction
did she think she should be taken in? “I don't think she ever even thought about it,” Ted White claims, “because she knew she had that gift. There was no question in her mind as to ‘how high.' I guess it was just a matter of when. She had experienced it to from the age of twelve or thirteen—the raw power—and that's a great weapon to be equipped with at an early age. Things don't worry her. She'd never been hungry. She was born with a Cadillac in the driveway, you know, so it was just a matter of time. So she let other people worry about the semantics, and when it came her time, she did her job.”

As mentioned earlier, in less than a year, Clyde Otis cut enough material for more than five albums. He recalls that his assignment was to record as many songs with Aretha as possible because her contract was going to lapse in 1966 and CBS knew that she was going to go elsewhere and ultimately become successful.

“It was a Catch-22 situation,” he says of his position at the time. “CBS didn't want her to go, but they could not reverse themselves to help her become a star. So they said to me, ‘Well, look—cut as much stuff on her as you can,' because they felt that they might lose her—and in fact they did lose her. The way they talked about it was, ‘Look we've only got one more year left on her contract, and we'd like to have as much product on her in the can as possible.' So that's why I was given free reign to cut all that product. Normally you wouldn't cut that much product with anybody.”

In December 1964, a month after the release of
Runnin' Out of Fools
, another one of Aretha's idols met with a tragic end. Under somewhat seamy circumstances, Sam Cooke was shot and killed at a Los Angeles motel after picking up a young girl at a party. In his hotel room, Cooke had taken off his clothes and gone to the bathroom. When he returned to the bedroom, he discovered that the girl had left—dressed in most of
his
clothes. Clad only in his sports jacket and shoes, Cooke began pounding on doors, looking for the girl. When he went to the door of the motel manager, ranting and half naked, the woman who managed the motel shot him three times and finished him off by beating him with a club. His death set off a wave of mass mourning among his fans in the black community, that was paralleled by the effect of the death of Elvis Presley on that star's mostly white fans.