Aretha Franklin (13 page)

When the “real” Aretha Franklin finally did stand up on her own, the whole world was to take notice. After a decade of trying to become everyone else's vision of who she was, the moment had finally come when she could unleash her singing with all of the unrestrained passion that had been welling up inside her for all that time.

Unfortunately, throughout her life, Aretha has leaned too heavily on the men who surrounded her. In the 1950s she was her daddy's little girl—the favorite daughter of a preacher man, a prodigal child of New
Bethel Baptist Church. When she left for New York City, John Hammond temporarily took her under his wing, and became her father figure in the recording studio. When that relationship came to a swift conclusion, she found a new man to become her paternal decision-maker: Ted White. According to her co-workers, the emotional toll taken of her by her marriage eroded her own personal confidence.

Clyde Otis recalls the emotional difficulties she underwent: “Ted beat her down so unmercifully. This is a woman who is so insecure. She knows that she can sing well, but she's been so stepped upon and put upon by people who were close to her. She's never been able to stand and say, ‘This is what I will do, and this is why I want to do it.'”

Several people who worked with Aretha from 1966 to 1970 claim that the minute Ted was deposed as her central authority figure, she soared. Otis claims that, much to his disappointment, he never had the opportunity of working with Aretha without the oppressive Ted White to contend with. According to him, Aretha would defer to Ted for all of her decisions, and more often than not, his judgment would prove unwise.

Likewise, Billy Davis claims that Ted White was not pleasant to work with. In the mid-1960s, Davis had moved from Chess Records in Chicago, to a job in New York City, working for the advertising agency of McCann-Erickson. His most famous advertising campaign was as the producer of radio spots for Coca-Cola. In the late sixties, Aretha recorded a couple of Coke commercials for him. He too was shocked by the way Ted would treat Aretha in front of other people. “I recorded her several times,” Davis recalls. “One of the times she was married to Ted White—unfortunately.” On the subject of White's treatment of Aretha, Davis comments, “It was a shame, and it took its toll on her too. And fortunately, thanks to God, she recovered from it all, but it hindered her in her career for quite a few years.”

Was Ted holding Aretha back at Columbia? “He was doing that,” Davis admits. “He was her husband, her lover, her friend, her father, her manager, her agent, and anything else. But certainly, the demise of him certainly helped her in more ways than one.”

In other words, Aretha's big burst to the top of the charts was more complicated than simply changing record labels. Did Ted White have to be
grounded before Aretha could fly to new heights? Clyde Otis remembers when Aretha made her transition from Columbia to Atlantic. When asked about the breakup of Aretha and Ted, Clyde replied, “Look, I don't want to deal with that too much. All I can tell you is this: he [White] negotiated the deal [with Atlantic Records], and the moment the deal was signed— two days later he was on his way back to Detroit. Don't ask me what happened.”

Ted White tells a different story. According to him, “During the Columbia years we knew we weren't going to stay there. We were waiting the contract out, so meanwhile, I started reaching out in my area to get writers and we started writing. We would lock ourselves in for three or four days at a time, where we'd just write, write, write. And we came up with a lot of great stuff—and a lot of garbage. But we had a portfolio [of songs] that was dynamite—and we knew it.”

“We weren't just negotiating with Atlantic. In fact, Irv Steinberg from Mercury Records came over, and he brought me a couple of contracts and told me, ‘Just keep them in your briefcase, and whenever your contract's over, just sign it and bring it on in. You've got money, you've got the world.' But we thought Atlantic could do the job. They offered the right kind of numbers and the right type of situation. After they heard what we had, the door just jumped off the hinges, because we were ready,” Ted claims.

If the above statements from Ted White are to be taken literally, it would seem that Atlantic was more interested in his song compositions than in Aretha's singing talent. This is absurd. To his credit, Ted and Aretha did compose five songs together that were recorded at Atlantic— including “Think” and “Dr. Feelgood.” But to say that these compositions closed the deal at Atlantic stretches the imagination.

“We initiated the contract with Atlantic,” Ted White claims, “and we signed as the first black female million-dollar recording artist in the history of the world. So we feel that we've been praised enough in having done what we set out to do. We were paid well for what we did, and we're satisfied. You won't find any press on me [at that time]; you
will
find a chain of million-sellers during the time I was involved with Aretha's career.” He further asserts that he chose all of the material contained on
Aretha's first four albums for Atlantic Records. This version of the story seems a bit at variance with everyone else's memory of this era.

According to everyone who dealt with Ted at Columbia Records, they considered him a huge thorn in their side. Yet, when Aretha shifted to Atlantic Records, Jerry Wexler claims that with the exception of Aretha's first recording date, Ted was either absent from the sessions or as docile as a kitten. “I never had any problems with Ted,” he says, “in terms of interference or attempting to take control away or anything. He didn't always come to the studio, he would come sometimes. He didn't attempt to get involved in the production of the music. If she discussed material or ideas with him at home, I have no idea. If Ted White was interfering at CBS, maybe he saw that we had our hand on the tiller.” Was it that Ted realized who controlled the tiller … or the till?

What actually did happen? Aretha became a major-league star, and as she did, Ted White was eased out of the picture. Since Aretha flatly refuses to talk about her relationship with Ted, the only other person who can objectively discuss the chain of events that began Aretha's rise is Jerry Wexler of Atlantic Records.

Wexler's interest in Aretha Franklin began in the 1950s, when she recorded her first gospel album at the age of fourteen. “I heard her before I signed her,” Jerry explains. “I heard a record on the Chess label, called
Precious Lord
, that she made at her father's church. That was the record that made a big impact on me. Then, of course, all during her tenure at Columbia I tracked her. I had a tremendous sense that she was a superior singer.

“I heard her doing her various things on Columbia,” he recalls, “everything ranging from ‘Today I Sing the Blues,' which I thought was maybe one of her best records on Columbia, to the show tunes. The thing from
Camelot
[‘If Ever I Would Leave You'] I thought was beautiful. I thought she made a lot of great records on Columbia, except there were a lot of scattershots. They didn't focus their direction. They didn't focus on an idea—a sound in the studio. They went all over the map. That was it—they made a lot of great records because it's hard to make bad records with her. But they were not focused.

“I was the ‘body finder' for the label. I put my interest on the back burner, just waiting for her to be free.” Wexler explains of his role at Atlantic
Records at the time of Aretha's signing, “At the time, Louise Bishop was working in Philadelphia under the name Louise Williams. Louise knew I was interested in Aretha. I was in Muscle Shoals cutting Wilson Pickett, and I got a call from Louise and she said, ‘Call this number; it's Aretha and she's waiting for your call.' She had finished up at Columbia. I called her. She said, ‘Sounds good. I want you to talk to my husband.' They came to New York and made the deal; it was as simple as that—no lawyers, no nothing. People ask, ‘Did you know she was going to be that great?' Of course not, but I knew she was going to be good.”

It was Wexler's idea to take Aretha to Rick Hall's Fame Studio in Muscle Shoals, Alabama. Jerry had gotten bored with the sounds being produced in New York City, and he found that the Southern flavor of the rural Alabama setting enhanced his hit-making formula. He had recently produced Wilson Pickett's “Land of 1,000 Dances” and “Mustang Sally” in the South, and he felt the change of pace would be perfect for Aretha.

Wexler recalls, “Bringing Wilson Pickett to the Stax Studios in Memphis changed my whole approach to music, to the Southern style of recording. Just sitting around with the chord changes and building tracks from there. I had gotten very stale and burned out in New York, and I didn't know what way to turn. I don't think Aretha was clued in on Stax in Memphis or Muscle Shoals. I had to do a little convincing. Maybe I played her some Wilson Pickett things. Aretha and her then husband, Ted White, were ready to take some cues from me. They had tried a variety of approaches at Columbia and were ready for something different.”

“Jerry's one of the giants of R&B,” Aretha proclaims. “When I was a teenager buying records, I listened to Atlantic artists like Ruth Brown and Ray Charles. I knew Jerry's product, but I didn't know his name until we met in 1966 at the Atlantic offices in New York. The meeting was very brief, just a get-acquainted thing. We talked about some of the things I had done at Columbia that he especially liked. Mostly I was struck by how enthusiastic he was with having me on the label. I always felt Jerry had my interests at heart and always tried to obtain the best for me.”

“So,” Wexler explains, “I took her to Muscle Shoals. I had planned to be there for a week, which would have been enough in those days.
We were supposed to do a whole album. We wound up with one night's recording.”

What ended up happening that night was a drunken argument between Ted White and one of the white trumpet players at the studio. The date was January 27, 1967, and it was a night that Jerry Wexler will never forget. It was the recording session that yielded the single song that would make Aretha Franklin an international singing star. Ironically, the song was “I Never Loved a Man (The Way I Love You).” In the lyrics of the song, Aretha sings about being in love with a man who lies and hurts her emotionally. How odd that she was to record that particular song on the night of one of Ted White's most talked-about conflicts. Several people have theorized that the song could have been about her relationship with Ted.

“There was a big ruckus because a couple of guys in the band got drunk,” Wexler recalls. “I had asked Rick Hall to hire a certain brass section, either Wayne Jackson and the Memphis Horns, or a horn section led by Bowlegs Miller. I wanted a black horn section because it was an all-white rhythm section. I didn't want to present Aretha and her husband, Ted White, with the spectacle of a wall-to-wall white band. And second, I wanted the sonority of a certain brass section. But Rick didn't bother to get ‘em, so the whole thing was white, including Charlie Chalmers on saxophone, who was great.”

At first, things went quite smoothly in the studio. Unfortunately, it wasn't long before a conflict arose between Ted and one of the white trumpet players—whom Jerry described as “real obnoxious trash.” According to Wexler, Ted and the trumpet player were drinking, and getting drunk, out of the same bottle. However, as time passed their camaraderie turned ugly. As the trumpet player got more inebriated, he began using racist slang words, to which Ted took instant offense. It wasn't long before an irrational argument broke out between them which ended up ruining the recording session.

“That night, I got to sleep early,” recalls Wexler, “but the guys were drinking and carrying on and I heard footsteps, doors slamming, I thought I heard shots going off; it was a nightmare. At six in the morning, Aretha called from a diner and told me that she and Ted had had a fight and
she ran away. This big brouhaha had developed, and Ted got into [an argument] with Rick Hall. So I wound up in Ted and Aretha's room at seven in the morning. Ted laid me out,* said, ‘Man, why did you bring her down here with these rednecks?!' It was pretty heavy. So they [Aretha and Ted] split, and I went back to New York.”

[*Slang for “berated.”]

Who started the fight—was it Ted or was it the musician? Whether Wexler actually heard guns going off, or merely the sounds of a drunken brawl, no one has ever explained. If there were shots fired, “who shot them?” and “at whom?” has never been revealed. “I have never attempted to assess the blame, because what good is it?” says Jerry Wexler. With regard to the fight that Aretha had with Ted—was that the reason for their suddenly fleeing Alabama? “This was not a Ted White-versus-Aretha situation, it was jus a general ‘rat-fuck' going on,” says Wexler. “There was some drinking, and there were some problems between the band and Ted White.” When asked for more specific details about the night of fighting and racial bickering, Wexler declined to comment. According to him, when the morning came, “they were back on the plane for Detroit.”

When the incident is brought up in conversation, Ted White explains, “Well, it was some racial overtones, so we decided that it would be better to just not do the sessions [there], and they [Atlantic] didn't like that too well. So I told Jerry we would pay for their air transportation to New York to continue the sessions—or we couldn't do it. At that time, if you will recall, that was during the Freedom Riders [the civil rights movement of the 1960s], and there was a lot of racial tension in the country. So we just left. We brought the key musicians into New York. We finished the album—no problem.”

Although Wexler remembers the completion of the album a little differently, the one thing everybody agreed on was the success of the song from that Muscle Shoals session. The resulting recording was well worth all the trouble. According to Wexler, “The very first record, ‘I Never Loved a Man (The Way I Love You),' I couldn't believe it was that good. I said, ‘That's my first record with her, and it can't be
this
good. I'll cool out in the morning. It will sound different in daylight.' I had to get used to that kind of greatness!”