Aretha Franklin (14 page)

“Now we had only one side completed, ‘I Never Loved a Man,' with the horns and everything. And also we had a three-piece track on another song that turned out to be ‘Do Right Woman—Do Right Man,' we had drums, bass, and rhythm guitar. That was all. I ran off some master tapes and sent them to the R&B deejays and I got this incredible reaction. They started playing it, but I couldn't put the record out, because I didn't have a ‘B' side! And I couldn't find Aretha! She'd split up with Ted—it was temporary, as it turned out—and nobody knew where she was.

“I couldn't locate Aretha, because she had been traumatized by this incident, and she was hiding someplace,” he remembers. “I finally caught up with her a couple of weeks later. I brought her to New York with her two sisters and finished ‘Do Right Woman.' We finished the record with just the three of them. She put piano and an organ on [it] herself, sang the lead, and then went and did the backups with her sisters, and then we had a record. Aretha came out to my house in Great Neck [Long Island, New York], and we prepared the first session there. She played me a lot of things and I played her some things. She had songs ready to go that she had written on the piano.” Some of the compositions she had written, which appeared on her debut Atlantic album, were “Don't Let Me Lose This Dream,” “Baby, Baby, Baby,” “Dr. Feelgood (Love Is a Serious Business),” and “Save Me.”

“We didn't go back to Muscle Shoals to finish the album,” Wexler continues. “Instead, I brought the band up—that same band. I took a big chance. I also used Wayne Jackson and the Memphis Horns, plus King Curtis. I used to work very closely with Curtis on all my sessions. He had a great nose for musicians. He always found fantastic people, including Jimi Hendrix. We kept recording singles, then put them together as the album. ‘Respect' was the next really important record after ‘I Never Loved a Man.' If you listen to the original Otis Redding version of ‘Respect,' there's no bridge in it. It's just straight ahead chorus, chorus, chorus.”

“Respect” was a song that Aretha had a real passion for. She had taken an apartment in New York City, and one night while there she and her sister Carolyn began playing around with the song, and together they came up with the idea of spelling out the word “R-E-S-P-E-C-T” in the song, and repeating the impromptu line “sock it to me.” According to
Aretha, “Otis Redding, as you know, cut that [originally]. And my sister Carolyn and I collaborated on that one evening, and came up with the ‘sock it to me' line, which became quite popular worldwide. We coined a phrase there.”

“Respect” was recorded on Valentine's Day, 1967, at the Atlantic Recording Studios in New York City. Aretha and her sisters amazed everyone present when they began singing the song in the studio, complete with the “sock it to me's” and the spelled out the title in the middle of the song. “When she started singing, all the parts became obvious—and it was just: ‘Boom! Here it is!'” recalls recording engineer Tom Dowd. “Her sister Carolyn was instrumental in the tempo aspect of it, the way they did the ‘R-E-S-P-E-C-T' lines and so forth. I fell off my chair when I heard that!”

“When we got serious about recording the song,” Wexler elaborates, “we took a look at it and realized there was no bridge. It's something you'd never notice with Otis because of his incredible projection and magnitude. We came up with using the chord changes of Sam & Dave's ‘When Something Is Wrong with My Baby.' They're very jazzy, a very advanced chord progression.”

When I asked Jerry Wexler if Ted White started any trouble during the recording session for “Respect,” Wexler stated quite clearly, “He was not with her.” With Ted White absent from the recording session, Aretha was able to blast the song out with newly unleashed passion and fire. The lyrics of the song, combined with Aretha's incredible delivery, spoke a universal language. “It could be a racial situation, it could be a political situation, it could be just a man-woman situation,” says Tom Dowd. “Anybody could identify with it. It cut a lot of ground.”

“Aretha added another dimension to the song,” Jerry Wexler claims. “This is almost a feminist clarion. Whenever women heard the record, it was like a tidal wave of sororal [sorority-like] unity. ‘A little respect when you come home' doesn't only connote respect in the sense of having concern for another's position; there's also a little lubricity in there— respect acquires the notion of being able to perform conjugally in optimum fashion. It was just a very interesting mix: an intuitive feminist outcry, a sexual statement, and an announcement of dignity. And a minority person making a statement of pride without sloganeering.”

The song went on to become Aretha's lifelong trademark. Decades later, it still holds up with all of the sizzle and excitement that it had when it was released in 1967. When
Rolling Stone
magazine tallied its choices of “The 100 Best Singles of the Last 25 Years” in 1988, “Respect” ranked in the publication's all-time Top Ten.

When Aretha teamed up with Jerry Wexler, they created a magical chemistry. Between her raw emotions and his proven taste in popular music, they proceeded to write several pages of musical history. Once she saw what Wexler had planned for her career, she had implicit trust in his taste. When she began following his creative intuition, instead of Ted's shortsighted judgments, she saw immediate results. In a business sense, Aretha's trust in Ted was being dismantled piece by piece.

Aretha's association with Jerry Wexler spanned nine years and eighteen albums. From a musical standpoint, Wexler became the most important person in her career from 1966 to 1975. Like John Hammond in the black jazz scene, Jerry Wexler has always been a champion in the arena of rhythm & blues. Both white businessmen, Hammond and Wexler dedicated their time and their know-how to promoting black music and to developing black recording artists. Hammond had been born into a wealthy Manhattan family, but Wexler was the offspring of working-class immigrant parents. During the Depression he worked with his father as a window washer, delivered liquor, and hung out at a local pool hall in New York City.

After graduating from high school in 1932, Jerry studied journalism at the City College of New York, at New York University, and at Kansas State. He became fascinated with jazz and blues in Kansas City when he visited the bars and nightclubs on Twelfth Street. When he returned to Manhattan, his new haunts became the jazz clubs on West 52nd Street and the famed nightspots in Harlem. He wrote for a publication called
Story Magazine
, and was eventually hired as a copywriter for Broadcast Music Incorporated (BMI). Later he accepted a job at
Billboard
. When he joined the staff of that magazine, the “Soul” music charts were labeled “Race Music.” Wexler is credited with being instrumental in changing that designation to “Rhythm & Blues.”

In 1953, Jerry Wexler began his music-making career with Atlantic Records. Not only was he a record producer, A&R director, and a member
of the promotion department, but he was also a senior partner in the whole operation. At the time he joined Atlantic, the company was so small that during the day Wexler shared an office with company founder Ahmet Ertegun, and after five o'clock they would stack the desks on top of each other, haul out the microphones, and that was the recording studio. If they needed an echo effect, they would simply take a microphone onto the fire stairs and let the sound reverberate off the brick walls surrounding the staircase.

Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, Jerry Wexler worked with several of the most influential R&B singers ever to hit the charts: Wilson Pickett, Otis Redding, Clyde McPhatter, the Drifters, Joe Tex, Ray Charles, Ruth Brown, The Clovers, Joe Turner, and LaVern Baker, to name a few.
Rolling Stone
has gone so far as to christen him “The Godfather of Rhythm & Blues.” In view of his musical accomplishments, the honor seems quite apt.

When Jerry Wexler and Aretha Franklin connected in the recording studio, something very special happened. Together they were to create the most enduring music of both of their careers.

Of her recordings with Wexler, Aretha recalls, “In the studio he was very relaxed, which I liked a lot. I guess you could describe him as a creative perfectionist. He always tried for really tight, clean tracks, and his input was especially good. My sessions with Jerry Wexler are among my favorite sessions. I feel the things we did together were dynamite, and I would also say that they were some of the finest records of the sixties, and early seventies. I enjoyed everything I did with him.”

Wexler also remembers those sessions with special fondness. “With Aretha it always went like cream,” he claims. “If I had something to say that she didn't agree with, we worked it out. There was never an impasse or any ridicule or abrasiveness. She had superb musicality, this gift—so unsophisticated, like a natural child, a natural woman. There was no gloss, there was no attempt at gloss.”

Nineteen-sixty-seven was another landmark year in the music business. Just as 1964 had witnessed a complete change in the music that was played on the radio and had ushered in a new roster of stars, 1967 also represented a whole new scene. It was the year that the Beatles released
Sgt.
Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band
, and in San Francisco it was the “Summer of Love.” By contrast, in Detroit and Newark it was the summer of race riots and vast social change. At the top of the pop charts in America, the year began with the Monkees' “I'm a Believer,” and ended with the Beatles' “Hello Goodbye.” The biggest hit-makers of the year were the Supremes, the Beatles, and the Monkees. However, in the first week of June, dead-center in the middle of the year, Aretha Franklin's “Respect” topped the charts. Somewhere amid the bubble-gum sound of Lulu's “To Sir with Love,” the effervescent pop stylings of the Seekers' “Georgy Girl,” and the psychedelia of the Strawberry Alarm Clock's “Incense and Peppermints” there came another sound wafting its way through the airwaves. Like the sassy fragrance of a side of barbecued spareribs amid the sweetness of the bubble gum, Aretha Franklin arrived on the scene—and redefined the sound of R&B music.

While the Supremes were celebrating “The Happening,” Martha Reeves & the Vandellas were singing the praises of “Jimmy Mack,” and Gladys Knight & the Pips were announcing “I Heard It Through the Grapevine,” another Motor City girl had a different story to tell. While Dionne Warwick was trying to find what it was all about with “Alfie,” and white country singer Bobbie Gentry was telling her “Ode to Billy Joe,” Aretha released five consecutive Top Ten singles that really laid it on the line. With her unique singing style she announced that she was “A Natural Woman” who demanded “Respect” in spite of the “Chain of Fools” she had been hanging around with. Although her man had done her wrong, she wailed shamelessly that “I Never Loved a Man (The Way I Love You),” in a way that everyone—black or white—could understand.

During her years at Columbia Records, Aretha's clothes and makeup were decidedly conservative. However, in 1967 she began to radically change her image, and to show off a flashier side of herself. She began wearing high-teased Dynel wigs, and developed a Supremes-like penchant for sequin-spangled gowns. She had missed so much of the decade by trying to become the new-age Dinah Washington that she had some catching up to do. While the cover photos on her first couple of Atlantic albums found her made up à la Diana Ross, the way she sang was a decidedly different story. Her music was raw, forceful, and earthy in a
way that no one who came before her had ever expressed. Lady Soul had hit the airwaves, and all of a sudden everyone knew who Aretha Franklin was.

Between the gutsy and emotional confidence of her singing and the sharp freshness of her music, she turned heads. When she sang “Do Right Woman—Do Right Man,” you knew that this woman was speaking from experience. When she proclaimed that she wanted some “Respect,” you immediately recognized that her life up until then had clearly lacked just that.

Comparing her recordings at Atlantic with those from her previous incarnation at Columbia, Aretha concluded, “It wasn't selling, but I liked very much what I did at Columbia. When I went to Atlantic, they just sat me down at the piano and let me do my thing. The hits started coming.”

She refers, of course, to Wexler's famous line, “I took her to church, sat her down, and let her be herself.” He was later to elaborate, “To say we took her back to church, that merely means we were trying the same recording context as we already were recording with Ruth Brown and LaVern Baker, and of course I also realized the value of her piano playing. Atlantic Records was like the West Point for rhythm & blues. It was our main focus. We just applied what we knew about rhythm & blues to a rhythm & blues artist, instead of trying to make her a pop artist like Judy Garland or Peggy Lee.

“Atlantic Records had already earned its spurs as a temple of rhythm & blues, so she came to the right place. And we put her in church. We used what we knew how to do. CBS was a pop record company with an R&B department—it's a different story. Also, there's a lot of luck. We lucked up on the right thing. We lucked up on the right approach and with the very first record and we had our direction focused. I didn't go in there saying, ‘There's no way we can miss'—I've never gone into a session like that—or that we were in on the beginning of a fabulous roll and in on the genesis of a great star. I didn't know any of that. All I knew was that I had a great, great artist who thrilled me to death. And if I could help to provide the right context for her, we could make some good music.”

When her first hit single on Atlantic Records leaped onto the charts, there was no question that Aretha Franklin was in a totally different
category from Judy Garland or Peggy Lee. In her first year at Atlantic, she broke as many records as she recorded. Wherever that emotional sound came from, it cut through every musical barrier.