Respect: The Life of Aretha Franklin (12 page)

Shortly after returning from Chicago, Aretha went into the studio and recorded what could be considered her greatest performance on Columbia.

“I’d say it was her best performance ever,” said Etta James. “Everyone loves her shit on Atlantic, and no doubt they’re classics, but when I heard her sing ‘Skylark,’ I told Esther Phillips, my running buddy back then, ‘That girl pissed all over that song.’ It came at a time when we were all looking to cross over by singing standards. I had ‘Sunday Kind of Love’ and ‘Trust in Me,’ and Sam Cooke was doing ‘Tennessee Waltz’ and ‘When I Fall in Love’ at the Copa. We were all trying to be so middle class. It was the
beginning of the bougie black thing. I truly believe Aretha had a head start on us since she was the daughter of a rich preacher and grew up bougie. But, hell, the reasons don’t matter. She took ‘Skylark’ to a whole ’nother place. When she goes back and sings the chorus the second time and jumps an octave—I mean, she’s
screaming
—I had to scratch my head and ask myself,
How the fuck did that bitch do that?
I remember running into Sarah Vaughan, who always intimidated me. Sarah said, ‘Have you heard of this Aretha Franklin girl?’ I said, ‘You heard her do “Skylark,” didn’t you?’ Sarah said, ‘Yes, I did, and I’m never singing that song again.’ ”

The record on which “Skylark” appears,
Laughing on the Outside,
was recorded during the spring and summer of 1963 and is the most consistent and satisfying of the Robert Mersey/Aretha Franklin albums. It is among her most memorable interpretations of any song in any genre.

“When I heard ‘Skylark,’ ” said Jerry Wexler, “I called John Hammond to congratulate him. I thought he was still her main producer. It was stunningly good. But John told me he had nothing to do with it. Aretha was angry at him because she thought he had signed Erma, and Columbia was looking to put her with Bob Mersey, a mainstream pop guy. Say what you want about those guys, but sometimes even the corniest of them—like my good friend Mitch Miller—can do brilliant things. When it came to Aretha, Mersey served her well. Give the guy credit. His charts were gorgeous.

“Later in the sixties when I met Donny Hathaway and he started talking about singing standards, he pointed to that
Laughing on the Outside
album. He had it memorized. He wanted to do ‘For All We Know’ in the Aretha vein. If you listen to his version, which is bone-chillingly beautiful, you’ll hear him channeling Aretha.”

Aretha spoke often of her regard for Frank Sinatra and favorably compared her version of “Where Are You?” from her
Laughing
album to his.

“There are two sides to my sister,” said Cecil when I mentioned to him her bold comparison of herself to Sinatra. “She’s
always been confident about her singing. She always knew she had the gift—a gift that big can’t be denied, even by an insecure person. She’d been told by every blood-washed believer who’d heard her sing in church that she was phenomenal. But even though she knew just how good she was—that at age twenty-one, she could sing a ballad with the depth of a Frank Sinatra or a Billie Holiday—another part of her was super-insecure. Her insecurity wasn’t about her talent but about her ability to get over and be a star in show business. That’s why she was willing to try anything to get over—pop, blues, ballads, R-and-B, you name it. That’s also why she was willing to let a tough guy like Ted White lead the way. She thought she needed a bull to break down the doors for her. She never thought she could do it herself—and she was right.”

The songs say as much—Duke Ellington’s lonely “Solitude,” Lerner and Loewe’s “If Ever I Would Leave You,” Johnny Mercer’s “I Wanna Be Around.” The title track, “Laughing on the Outside,” makes the same point—that beneath the veneer, behind the klieg lights of the cover shot and the glamour of Aretha’s glittering gown, there is a reservoir of deep feelings that transcend time and space. She laughs on the outside and weeps on the inside.

She also sang a song Ray Charles had recorded in Los Angeles only months before. Aretha’s New York session took place on June 12. The song—Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “Ol’ Man River”—is one of the great warhorses of American music. It contains an essential metaphor: time is a river, time keeps rolling along, time is indifferent to pain, if only we could disappear into the anonymity of time and leave the burdens of this world behind. It is also a dramatic vehicle written by white men, designed to be sung by blacks. Paul Robeson’s version is perhaps the most iconic. Ray Charles sang it at the height of his addiction to heroin. His producer Sid Feller told me, “Ray nodded out at the keyboard. At first I was afraid he’d died of a heart attack but I soon saw it was the effects of drugs. When he awoke, as if nothing had happened, he began singing the most stirring version of the song that I have ever heard. It’s hard to fathom how deep he gets. He’s literally crying.”

Aretha took the song in another direction—lighthearted and whimsical, with a jazz rhythm section swinging behind her. She declined to seek out the dark suffering but instead kept it on the surface.

“They said it was supposed to be sung by a man,” she said, “but I sang it anyway. It was written for a Broadway musical and I wanted to give it a jazzy Broadway feeling.”

Not so with Irving Berlin’s “Say It Isn’t So.”

“That’s the other item I remember from that record,” said Etta James. “My mother used to play the tune by Billie and Dinah, but it wasn’t until I heard Aretha sing ‘Say It Isn’t So’ that I understood it as a sure-enough soul song. After she’s sung it through once, she comes back and bites the song in the ass. She spits out that ‘Say everything is still okay’ in a way that you know she’s been listening to Ray. We were all listening to Ray, but Aretha was every bit as bad as he was. She could fuck up a standard so completely, with such funk and fire, you’d never want to hear it straight again. It took me forty years to approach that song—that’s how much I revered Aretha’s version. And when I finally did do it, on an album called
Heart of a Woman
, I put a Latin beat behind it and sped up the tempo and damned if I wasn’t still singing those same Aretha licks that had been buried inside my head for all those years.”

On Sunday, June 23, 1963, ten days after Aretha’s final session for
Laughing on the Outside,
over a hundred thousand people took to the streets of Detroit in the freedom march led by Reverends C. L. Franklin and Martin Luther King. The start time was 4:00 p.m., but as soon as the church services ended, the crowd began to swell. C.L. was certain two hundred thousand people participated; more conservative estimates said one hundred and twenty-five thousand. Either way, it would prove to be a landmark event in the history of the great industrial city, and it would never have happened were it not for the tenacity and power of C. L. Franklin. A reporter for the
Michigan Chronicle
wrote, “Negroes of all classes—street walkers,
doctors, senior citizens, drunks, clergymen and their congregations, etc.—came from near and far to ‘walk for freedom.’ ” Biographer Nick Salvatore wrote, “The joyous marchers took possession of the streets in the city’s main shopping and entertainment district where, until recently, they had been denied equal service. Significantly, the march was a black affair. White marchers never appeared in appreciable numbers… Some black unionists expressed disappointment at the noticeable absence of most of their white coworkers.”

The march ended at Cobo Hall, where C.L. had arranged for Dr. King to speak. Before the address, though, there was entertainment—jazz pianist Ramsey Lewis; C.L.’s close friend and Queen of the Blues, Dinah Washington; jazz organist Jimmy McGriff; the Four Tops; and Erma Franklin. Aretha did not attend.

“I believe I sang a gospel song,” said Erma, “but I can’t say for sure. What I do remember is the excitement. It was one of those moments when, as Daddy would say, ‘The presence of God was everywhere.’ There was a unity among our people I had never felt before—a pride, and a sense of purpose. Given the open-minded attitude of my dad and Dr. King, it was perfectly appropriate that there were jazz artists and blues artists along with a mass choir that sang ‘Lift Every Voice and Sing.’ President Kennedy sent his congratulations and so did Walter Reuther, the union leader. I can’t tell you how proud I was of my father and what he had accomplished. Dr. King called him ‘his good friend’ and gave a stirring speech. We left Cobo Hall believing that the tide had turned and that a brighter new world was around the bend. For me it was the brightest moment of the sixties.”

The occasion is also notable for Dr. King’s famous line in his address: “This afternoon I have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream.” King was, in fact, previewing the speech that two months later he would deliver at the Lincoln Memorial, a seminal moment in the long fight for civil rights. Berry Gordy issued the speech in LP form and called it
The Great March to Freedom.

In September, Aretha went back into the Columbia studios in New York, where she met Bobby Scott, the brilliant pianist/arranger/composer who had been hired by Bob Mersey to do a number of jazz-oriented sessions.

“My first memory of Aretha is that she wouldn’t look at me when I spoke,” Scott told me. “She withdrew from the encounter in a way that intrigued me. At first I thought she was just shy—and she was—but I also felt her reading me. I wasn’t shy about telling her my accomplishments, and it wasn’t until I rattled off my credits that I felt like I had caught her attention. What knocked me out the most, though, was when I told her I’d been Lester Young’s accompanist. ‘You play for the President?’ Only the hippest jazz aficionados knew that Lester was nicknamed ‘Pres,’ for President. That told me that she was much more than a church girl. Of course, I’d heard the stuff she’d done with Mersey. ‘Skylark’ floored me. Having done that, Mersey looked to me to put her more in a jazz bag. The truth, though, is that Aretha’s musicality knew no boundaries. The only other singer I worked with who had her feeling was Marvin Gaye.”

Later in the sixties, Scott did a remarkable ballad session with Marvin, released posthumously, titled
Vulnerable.
I asked Bobby what he saw as the common link between Marvin and Aretha.

“They each sculpted and improved any song they sang. They each came out of that holy place that breeds genius. Strange, but when I started working with Marvin, he had enjoyed a string of hits and didn’t care about commerce. He was going for art. But in that first meeting in which she called me Mr. Scott and asked that I call her Miss Franklin, Aretha did say something I’ll never forget. For all her deference to my experience and her reluctance to speak up, when she did look me in the eye, she did so with a quiet intensity before saying, ‘I like all your ideas, Mr. Scott, but please remember I do want hits.’ ”

The Aretha/Scott sessions took place over three days in October 1963. Instead of the jazz-oriented sessions that Mersey had originally envisioned, the final repertoire, like most everything Aretha sang on Columbia, seemed to be moving in many directions at once. “Aretha wanted to sing ‘Harbor Lights,’ a song she knew from the Platters,” said Scott. “She said she thought that, in the post-doo-wop era of the early sixties, it could be a hit again. I’d been listening to the song ever since I was a kid. Everyone from Guy Lombardo to Bing Crosby had covered it. I saw the possibility of its reinvention, especially in the hands of a great blues balladeer. So we went all out. Aretha helped me arrange the female backup vocal arrangements—she was great at that—I worked up a horn chart, found a righteous groove, and thought we’d hit the charts. We didn’t.

“As a songwriter, I’m always hustling singers to do my stuff, and I was no different with Aretha. I presented her with a lot of jazz tunes, but she wasn’t partial to any of them. Instead she was drawn to ballads—‘Tiny Sparrow,’ one of the more spiritual-metaphorical things I wrote. She said it reminded her of church. She sang my ‘Johnny,’ a motif I wrote in a Rodgers and Hammerstein vein. When I played her ‘Looking Through a Tear,’ something I also wrote in a Broadway bag, she went for it. Suddenly the notion of a jazz album went out the window. She brought in something by Sam Cooke’s brother L.C. called ‘Once in a While.’ She thought it could be an R-and-B hit; I didn’t; we cut it, and it wasn’t. Felt lame to me. I had the same reaction to ‘Bill Bailey, Won’t You Please Come Home.’ I love Jimmy Durante doing it, but Aretha Franklin? ‘I hear it with a Count Basie big-band sound behind it,’ she told me. ‘I can do that,’ I said. ‘I can write an Ernie Wilkins–Count Basie chart.’ I do admit that she sang it soulfully, but it felt like a nightclub routine to me, not suitable for an artist of Aretha’s caliber.

“By then, in terms of theme or cohesion of style, we had lost our way. But Aretha and her husband, Ted, didn’t seem concerned.
They were both so knocked out by her singing that they were certain that every song we cut—even ‘Moon River’ or ‘I May Never Get to Heaven’—was gonna be a hit. I understood their enthusiasm, and I shared it, but there was no communication between the studio and sales forces. When the sales guys heard what we’d done, they said, ‘What are we supposed to do with this stuff?’ It was great, but it was neither fish nor fowl. Listening to it decades later, it still sounds strong. Aretha is always Aretha. She got on top of the chart I wrote for ‘I Won’t Cry Anymore’ and absolutely crushed it. Tony Bennett had sung it. So had Charles Brown and Big Maybelle and Dinah Washington and Joe Williams. But Aretha owned it in a way I never thought anyone could approach it again. It wasn’t until I rewrote the chart, added strings, and gave it to Marvin Gaye that I saw I was wrong. When it came to melodic reinvention and fearless interpretation, Marvin and Aretha were locked in a dead heat. It killed me that they never sang together.”

On November 22, 1963, Aretha was seven months pregnant with her third son and in the Broadway Market in Detroit, a gourmet-food outlet, when she heard news of the assassination of John F. Kennedy. In her book, she recalls that among her strongest memories of that day were the powerful smells of hanging hams, salamis, and cheeses. On other occasions, she reflected that, in the aftermath of the president’s death, she found comfort in the presence of her father.