Ham (10 page)

I arrived in Cleveland the night before the shows and looked for the driver with the “Sam Harris” sign who was to meet me at the airport gate. No one there. I found a pay phone and called the promoter, Jim Welcome, at the hotel but there was no answer. No big deal. A little mix-up. I got my suitcase and box of orchestrations and went outside to find a taxi. I knew I'd be reimbursed later.

It was the dead of winter. As I walked out of the airport, I was accosted by a cruel wind that slapped my face like a jealous lover. My eyes teared and I feared they would freeze over and I would be blinded forever. Yes, I had fantasized about being blind, but not this way—not in Cleveland, at an airport. I ran to the taxi line in my thin coat, dragging my bag and box behind me, and an airport worker in a parka and a ski mask recognized me and threw me in a cab right away.

As we drove into the downtown area, I realized it was only seven o'clock and there was no one on the street. No one. The driver said there was an advisory to stay inside. It was below zero.

“You mean below freezing,” I corrected him.

“No. Below zero. Winds are fifty miles an hour off the lake. Add in the windchill factor and it's about twenty below.”

I didn't know this kind of cold was possible outside of Antarctica, where people wore body-length flannel underwear and beaver furs insulated with seal blubber.

I arrived at the hotel and checked in. No credit card had been put down for my room, so again I called the promoter, Jim Welcome, and again there was no answer. I was tired and cold and knew I needed to focus on my voice and health, so I put down my own credit card, confident it would be corrected before checkout, and went to my room to thaw and steam and drink tea. My rehearsal was set for 2:00 the next day and I would get a solid night's sleep and be prepared.

The following morning I woke with an excitement that couldn't be dulled by the spiritless, chalky sky. Outside my window, gusts of cutting snow whipped past, parallel to the desolate streets of downtown Cleveland. But it might as well have been spring.

The hotel was connected to the theater so I didn't have to brave the icy tempest and chance frostbite to get there. At 1:50 I grabbed my box of charts and was nearly out the door when the phone rang. It was Jim Welcome at last! He said rehearsal had been pushed to 3:00. Fine. I told him about the missing-driver-credit-card-hotel misunderstanding and he promised he would take care of it later.

At 2:45 he called again to say rehearsal had been pushed to 3:30.

I reminded him that I had all new charts that had never been played and we might have to make corrections. He said there would be plenty of time.

He called again a half hour later. Rehearsal would be at 4:00.

At 3:55 I waited for the phone to ring. It didn't, so I galloped through the hotel lobby and sprang to the theater, ready to sing and hang out with my new best friend, Aretha. I was already imagining harmonies for the possible duets we would sing.

The theater was empty.

There was not a musician, crew member, house manager, or single soul to be found. I walked to the stage for stability, knowing if I stood on the boards and looked out at the empty seats, I would assemble a sense of purpose.

At around 4:30, musicians began to amble to the stage with their instruments and a sound technician began to set up mics. At 5:00, H. B. Barnum arrived and was warm and sure and shook my hand enthusiastically. His assistant took the box of music books designated for each instrument and distributed them as the players unpacked and warmed up. Better late than never.

I was raring to go but alone in any sense of urgency. At 5:30 I asked when we could begin. Barnum said, “Oh, we need to do Aretha's music first.”

“But she's not here,” I replied.

“She will be. Afraid of planes, you know. Drives everywhere, and with the ice and snow . . .”

“Can't we start my rehearsal and stop when she gets here?”

“Better to keep it clean.”

Curtain was at 8:00 and I knew they'd be opening the house at 7:30, or more likely at 7:00 with this kind of weather. But I was new and just a kid and this was a legend and her conductor, so I politely took a seat in the house and waited. The musicians waited. Barnum waited.

We all waited.

A little after 6:00, the front of house door burst open and the Queen of Soul entered in a golden floor-length fur coat, a matching Russian hat, and a gigantic pair of sunglasses that I swear were the same ones she wore on the cover of her
Yeah!!!
record.

She was accompanied by an absolutely enormous man who, despite the cold he'd just escaped, was sweating profusely. He was also the whitest black man I'd ever seen—whiter even than me. He spotted me and lumbered in my direction.

“I'm Jim Welcome . . . Welcome.”

“Nice to meet you,” I said, not able to shake my gaze from Aretha, who was sauntering down the aisle toward us, puffing on a cigarette and flinging her ashes on the carpeted floor. She seemed tired. And fat. Very tired and very fat. But I knew the coat added at least a hundred pounds and I was in awe.

As she was about to pass us, Jim gently took her arm and said, “This is Sam Harris.” All of my angst evaporated as I clutched her hand.

“Miss Franklin, this is an honor. I am such a big fan and I can't believe I'm meeting you and get to open for you. Thank you for asking me.”

She lifted her sunglasses and peered at me with dull eyes and flatly said, “You sing like a black woman.”

I presumed it was a compliment and laughed, but her expression remained frozen. She took a long draw from her cigarette and yawned, exhaling a thick, slow-moving cloud of smoke into my face. For the first time in my life, I wanted to smell like someone's smoke. It was Aretha smoke. I decided right then that I would not shower before the show, or perhaps ever again. I'd been anointed.

“H. B.!” she yelled as she walked past me and to the stage. “I want to start with the overture. I need to practice my entrance.”

The band pulled out the chart and the music started. I sat in the second row and I could see Aretha waiting just offstage right in the wings. She lit another cigarette. The overture was a medley of her incredible history of hits: “Chain of Fools,” “Do Right Woman, Do Right Man” “Ain't No Way,” “Think,” “Natural Woman,” “Spanish Harlem,” “Respect”—it went on and on—electrifying and intimidating. And long. I knew it had to end at some point but it kept going for what I guessed was ten minutes. Enough time for Aretha to smoke two more cigarettes and finish off a bag of donuts.

Finally, a series of Vegasy horn riffs built and built, changing keys for what surely would lead to the grandest entrance of all time. “Ladies and gentlemen—the Queen of Soul!” boomed over the system. Aretha crushed her cigarette with a twisted stomp, tossed her hat into the air behind her, and let her fur fall to the floor as she walked from the wings, grabbing the mic from a stagehand who'd been standing the entire time, holding it until she was ready.

Aretha arrived center stage and looked out to the empty theater and said, “I feel. You feel. The important thing is we feel together,” as her opening line. The band launched into the iconic introduction to “Respect” but she waved for them to stop. “I want to do that again.”

“From your entrance?” Barnum asked.

“From the top,” she answered.

They played the overture again. All ten minutes.

“I feel. You feel. The important thing is we feel together . . . Wait a minute. I need to do that one more time.”

I shifted in my seat, appearing composed and unconcerned, all the while thinking,
You're kidding, right? Okay, you're Aretha Franklin, the greatest voice in the world, but seriously??!
It was nearly 7:00, the doors were supposed to open in half an hour, and she'd not rehearsed a single song. More important, neither had I. She ran the overture two more times, always followed by “I feel. You feel. The important thing is we feel together.”

I was feeling a lot.

Finally, Aretha moved on to “Respect” and in an instant, I was once again transported. I couldn't help but revere her. She was singing to an audience of one. Me. And in a little while, I would sing to her.

Her voice was coarse and smoke-worn. She gave nothing. There was no sense of performance, but it was just a sound check, and I knew she was saving it for the real thing. On her darkest day, Aretha would still be better than anyone else. After the one song, she announced she'd had enough and told Barnum the band could rehearse the rest without her. Jim Welcome hoisted her fur onto her shoulders, and they disappeared behind a veil of smoke before you could say “Rescue Me.”

For the next forty-five minutes the band played through the Franklin songbook with a backup singer doing Aretha's part. I looked at my watch every seven seconds. Jim Welcome returned and announced from the back of the house that it was nearly 8:30 and he had to open the doors. People had been dangerously waiting in the freezing cold for hours.

I ran to him and asked about my songs. My rehearsal. My orchestrations. He said there was no time and the band would have to read my charts cold. I was young and vulnerable but not stupid. “There is no way I am going onstage without rehearsing new charts and no one who knows my music,” I bargained. “They don't even know tempos!”

Suddenly Jim Welcome began to panic, nervously shaking. In an instant, sweat poured off him as if his skin were a thousand-prick sprinkler hose turned on at full pressure. What little color he possessed drained from his shiny head and dripping face, like some sort of morphing, melanin-free superhero trick.

“You have to go on!” he begged. “More than half the tickets sold are for you!”

“Yeah, right,” I countered.

“It's true. It's why we chose you. You're fresh, man. The people want to see
you
!”

I didn't know what to believe. I had no one to step in. No one to stand up for me or insist on rehearsal or see the impending doom that had begun when the driver had failed to pick me up at the airport. All of this was new to me—the fame, the demand—all of which I lapped up hungrily. But I didn't yet understand the power or need for self-preservation that comes with the fame and demand. At the bottom of it all, I didn't want to disappoint the people who were there to see me. Or even just there. An audience in a theater expecting a show.

“Okay,” I said. “Here's what's going to happen.”

Jim Welcome's eyes popped in desperation, knowing he was on the verge of a deal.

“I will go on—
for fifteen minutes.
I'll make up a story about how my music was lost by the airline and I will sing three songs, a cappella, and make the best of it.”

Jim Welcome wept. He hugged me with his three-hundred-pound clammy, colorless body and told me I was a true star.

The capacity crowd had been standing in subzero Siberian winds for much too long. Amputations of frostbitten digits would surely be necessary. I ran backstage as the house was opened and I heard the wretched mob charge into the warm theater. I suddenly remembered that I was still in my rehearsal clothes and had not brought show clothes from the hotel. I rushed back to my room and returned with only minutes to spare.

Once in my dressing room, I breathed deeply and planned my strategy. Under normal circumstances I would have had time to get nervous, worrying about my voice cracking, the dry radiator heat, Aretha's impression of me, the band, the sound, the lighting . . . just failing. But there was no time to do anything but dress for battle and plunge into the front lines.

I could hear the audience on the dressing room monitor. It wasn't the sound of excitement and anticipation. It was the sound of anger. Grumbling, justifiably hostile people whom I would momentarily face to sing a few songs with no band—a meager payoff for the rabble. A riot could break out and I would be the first casualty.

Jim Welcome knocked on my dressing room door. It was time. I walked down the hall silently as if on my way to the gallows. We arrived at the wings and I was handed a microphone. A voice came over the loudspeaker. There was no welcome, no apology, no transition, no explanation or attempt to unite the crowd or create focus. Just: “Ladies and gentlemen—Sam Harris.”

A little voice popped into my head that said,
What the hell do you think you're doing? Who the hell do you think you are?
 
. . .
And then I remembered. I marched onto the stage to the accompaniment of nothing, smiled broadly, and yelled, “Pretty pissed off, huh?!”

The mostly African-American crowd answered with a laugh. “I know I would be!” I continued. “Are you numb? Can you feel your feet?” They cheered and howled and stomped on the floor like they were at a national election convention. We were bonded.

“Do you see a band here? Do you even see a piano player? My charts got lost on the plane and I got no music! They made you wait outside in the freezing cold and for what? A little white guy with no music! Don't you worry, the Queen of Soul will be out here soon with a band and backup singers and everything.”

“We love you, Sam!” came a voice from the mezzanine.

“Sing ‘Over the Rainbow'!”

The crowd reignited in the request.

“You want me to sing?” I hollered. “With no music? You got it! I will do anything you want. I'll sing, dance, tell jokes, make cookies. Hot chocolate. Hot toddies. I am your servant.”

I sat on the edge of the stage with my legs crossed, Indian style.

I sang “God Bless the Child.”

I sang “I Am Changing.”

I sang “Over the Rainbow.”

With my voice the only sound, the great hall became an intimate room. Just me and a spotlight and them. It was pin-drop quiet during each song and then an eruption at the end. They were mine and I was theirs. And, shockingly, I was having an amazing time.