The big pop hits in 1964 ran an astounding gamut. Ethereal Brazilian jazz made it on the charts in the form of Stan Getz and Astrud Gilberto’s exquisite reading of Antonio Carlos Jobim’s “The Girl from Ipanema.” For the first time in his storied career, jazz giant Louis Armstrong had a number-one pop hit with “Hello, Dolly.” Beyond the initial successes of the Beatles and the Supremes, there were also hits from the Four Seasons (“Rag Doll”), the Dixie Cups (“The Chapel of Love”), the Beach Boys (“I Get Around”), the Shangri-Las (“Leader of the Pack”), Dean Martin (“Everybody Loves Somebody”), and Roy Orbison (“Pretty Woman”).
The pop landscape was, and I suspect always will be, littered with an eclectic mix of music, a smattering of jewels and junk. Aretha was right to think that she had crafted a jewel in singing Clyde Otis’s masterly “Take a Look,” the song that he and Lieberson were certain would raise Aretha to a higher commercial level. The melody soared. The lyrics, a self-confrontational examination into the dark heart of mankind, mirror “This Bitter Earth.” The movement is from despair to hope. Otis asks what has become of the precious dream. He sees it floating away in “bloody bloody stream.” We’re told that there’s no winner when the prize is hate; only love can change our fate.
Aretha attacks the first six words—“Take a look in the mirror”—with startling immediacy. It’s an order you can’t ignore. She wrings out the soul of the song with the kind of intensity that would convince the most skeptical record executive that the single would have to sell. It didn’t.
“I was miffed,” said Clyde Otis. “If you listen to something like Bobby Vinton’s ‘Mr. Lonely,’ a number-one hit that came out the same year as ‘Take a Look,’ you’ll hear a song about the solitude of war seen through the point of view of a soldier. There’s nothing wrong with the melody or the story. But I’d have to say it’s a cliché, a clichéd melody and clichéd lyrics. At the same time, it was a smash. Compare it to ‘Take a Look,’ though, and it’s night and day. Aretha is no cliché. She’s singing for all humanity. She’s singing about the deepest mystery out there—why evil is so strong. Remember—we were cutting this album during what they were calling the Freedom Summer. We were all shocked all those three young volunteers—Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman, and James Chaney—had been shot to death in cold blood by the Klan down in Mississippi. Their only crime was trying to register black voters. So when Aretha was singing ‘Take a look,’ that’s what we wanted people to look at.
“Aretha sang it so strong that we cut it two ways—with strings and then again with a close-harmony horns and girl backup singers. One version was better than the other, but we still didn’t get any chart action.
“Maybe we were ahead of our time. Maybe if I had waited a few years I would have been in sync with the Curtis Mayfields and the Marvin Gayes who had great success with message songs. There are record men who say they can read the tea leaves. They say they can predict hits. I was one of them—and I knew this was my biggest hit, until the marketplace told me otherwise. Aretha, though, couldn’t be deterred from her determination to beat Barbra Streisand at Barbra’s own game. I kept saying, ‘Ree, you can outsing Streisand any day of the week. That’s not the point. The point is to find a hit.’ But that summer she just wanted straight-up ballads. She insisted that she do ‘People,’ Streisand’s smash. Aretha sang the hell out of it, but no one’s gonna beat Barbra at her own game. She also insisted on singing ‘My Coloring Book,’ another song Streisand had cut. Bob Mersey had written a beautiful chart for Barbra. ‘Write a more beautiful chart,’ Aretha told my arranger Sinky Hendricks. I told Ted White that I thought it was a mistake to go head-to-head with Streisand. ‘She wants the world to hear that whatever material Streisand is handling, she can handle with even more polish,’ said Ted. ‘It’s more important for Aretha to mark out her own territory,’ I argued. The argument did no good. She and Ted also demanded that we include a bluesy thing that they wrote, called ‘I’ll Keep On Smiling.’ I considered it a throwaway. Of course I couldn’t tell her that. I couldn’t tell her that I thought the inclusion of ‘Jim’—an extremely subtle jazz ballad done by Sarah Vaughan she had heard on her brother’s phono when they were kids in Detroit—was not going to break the bank. The truth is that Aretha could and did sing all these things quite easily and quite wonderfully. But where was the continuity? My feeling was that she wanted to be all these people—Sarah and Streisand and Sinatra—but still didn’t know who she was. ‘She’s a hit maker,’ Ted White would tell me, ‘get her hits.’ ‘Then why are you making her sing standards?’ I asked. ‘She’s singing everything because she can sing everything,’ Ted said. ‘We throw it all against the wall and see what sticks. The more variety, the better.’
“Ted was giving the marching orders, so I reached out to other writers. I called Van McCoy, a bright up-and-coming composer. I knew Van had written ‘Abracadabra’ that Aretha’s sister Erma had recorded on Epic. I liked the song and I liked Van. I asked him if he had anything for Aretha. He gave me ‘Sweet Bitter Love,’ and I thought it was a perfect Aretha vehicle. She fractured it. She loved it so well that she kept singing it, even when she left Columbia. She was devoted to this song. She attached herself to the tune so closely, I believe, because it ran true. She and Ted were starting to have their problems. She was tired of taking his orders. She was living through a ‘Sweet Bitter Love.’ When she got to the bridge and sang, ‘My magic dreams have lost their spell,’ she turns it into grand opera. Was it a masterpiece? Hell, yes. Was it a hit? Hell, no.
“And talking about masterpieces, how about her version of ‘But Beautiful,’ cut during those same sessions? She had Nat Cole’s version in mind, but I told Sinky to listen to the orchestration Ray Ellis had written for Billie Holiday. I challenged him to improve upon that. That’s the only album that Billie had cut for Columbia, just before she died in the late fifties. I thought Billie’s ‘But Beautiful’ was the benchmark, but I didn’t play it for Aretha because she didn’t require inspiration or motivation. Every time Aretha sang, she was motivated to outdo every version that came before her. Sinky’s chart was gorgeous, and Aretha brought home the bacon. She’s not Billie, but Billie’s not Aretha. Billie bleeds. In every song she dies a slow death. She’s like the dying swan in that ballet. Aretha works through the pain and comes out on top of it. Billie died young. Working with Aretha, I knew that, no matter what, she wasn’t gonna die young. She was introverted on the outside but the lady had inner toughness. She had inner steel. For all her uncertainties about this or that, she had what it takes to survive this tough bloody music business.”
Otis understood Aretha on both a deeply personal and a creative level. Yet in spite of their rapport, their initial work together was far from a commercial success. When the summer sessions of 1964 failed to yield a single hit, Clyde Otis received word that it was time to change course entirely.
“Lieberson and Mersey got together and decided it was time to quit fooling around and go right at the teen market,” Otis told me. “By then, Ted and Aretha were frustrated enough to go along with the program. They knew they had to drop the throw-everything-against-the-wall-and-see-what-sticks shtick. And they were ready. Forget the standards. No more ‘That’s Entertainment,’ no more Judy Garland songs. We were going for the kids. I’d found her a song called ‘Runnin’ Out of Fools’ that I thought might get us some airplay. It was a little ditty that I worked up in an R-and-B vein. Ted didn’t like that. By then, Ted and I were practically at each other’s throats. He was sure I was the wrong producer and I was sure he was the wrong manager. Aretha was stuck with me because her contract with Columbia ran through 1966 and Columbia saw me as the guy to get her over. I was stuck with Ted because Aretha saw him as the guy to get her over. Anyway, we put out ‘Fools,’ and while you couldn’t call it a smash, they started playing it on the radio and you heard it all over Harlem. Turned out to be the only semi-hit she ever had on Columbia. To this day, people still remember it.
“Aretha had a thing for covers. Occasionally she and Ted would bring me a song that they wrote, but it usually didn’t measure up. Later she told me she was the one who wrote it. He just put his name on it. Anyway, she was not what you call a prolific writer, but, as an interpreter, she always felt she could outdo the original. She usually did. On the Runnin’ Out of Fools album, she covered a couple of Motown things. She was always talking about her good friend Smokey Robinson and so she recorded the big hit he had on Mary Wells, ‘My Guy.’ We even followed the original Smokey chart. I thought the vibe was too kicked-back for Aretha, but Aretha did it anyway. She redid the other big Motown hit that season, Brenda Holloway’s ‘Every Little Bit Hurts.’ If she was going cover crazy, she might as well cover a song of mine. I could use the royalties. So I got her to do ‘It’s Just a Matter of Time,’ a tune Sinky and I had written with Brook Benton back in the fifties. Inez and Charlie Foxx had done ‘Mockingbird’ the year before and Ree wanted to do it again. Same goes for other teen-style hits, like ‘The Shoop Shoop Song.’ Dionne Warwick had started singing those Burt Bacharach/Hal David songs. Practically all of them went top ten. That’s why Aretha sang ‘Walk On By.’ She thought she could have a hit right behind Dionne’s. I didn’t. I said, ‘Dionne had this soft, subtler thing that works with Burt’s melodies. You’re too strong for his stuff.’ She sang it anyway. Later she proved me wrong on another Bacharach/Dionne combination—‘Say a Little Prayer’—but by then she had established her own identity on Atlantic and practically anything she did sold. This was years earlier, during her last days on Columbia, where, to my mind, she was sounding desperate. To me, Runnin’ Out of Fools is not prime-time Aretha. It’s Aretha and Ted feeling like they’re running out of time. I said they were fools to be chasing all these teeny hits. If they had given me more time, Sinky and I could have written her original hits in the R-and-B style, just like we’d done for Dinah Washington and Brook Benton. But Ted and Aretha, man, they were in a hurry. They thought the train was leaving without them.”
“The sad thing,” said Jerry Wexler, who would be the savior in the next chapter of Aretha’s musical story, “is that Clyde, for all his talent, was behind the curve. His string sessions and jazz sessions with Aretha were fine, but when he put her in an R-and-B bag, the bag was at least five years old. There just weren’t any hits in that bag. The sound he gave Dinah in the early sixties was fine, but it was passé. R-and-B is very street, very right-now, very immediate. His grooves were tired.”
“I had two distinct disadvantages,” Otis explained. “First, my relationship with Ted was going nowhere fast. We didn’t like each other. He thought I was old hat. He thought I took too long in the studio. I saw him as just another amateur throwing his weight around because he happened to be the artist’s husband. He kept telling me how for years he had supported Aretha’s career with his own money. He was saying that if it weren’t for his financial backing, she’d never have gotten this far. But I knew he was exaggerating like crazy. Ever since she came to Columbia, she had worked steadily—R-and-B shows, nightclubs, jazz festivals. I’m not saying she was getting rich, but she was booking good money—and I suspect he was living off her. Which brings me to my second disadvantage. Ted and Aretha were often at odds with each other. They did not present a united front. I think she was coming to the same conclusion as me—that Ted was living off her. She had problems with Ted but she also had problems of her own. She missed many sessions without ever telling me why. Just didn’t show. Some people said she was drinking, but I didn’t see any of that. I saw that she’d get down in the dumps sometimes and didn’t want to work. I saw how Ted would force her to work—and maybe she needed that push. But I also saw that sometimes that push became a shove. He didn’t hesitate slapping her around and didn’t care who saw him do it.
“Things got crazier when I got word from the boss upstairs, Goddard Lieberson, that she probably wouldn’t re-sign with Columbia when her contract ran out in a year or so. So they were eager to get as much inventory on her as possible before her commitment ran out. Because I had seen her live in the jazz clubs and knew how good she was in that setting, I suggested a live album. But in those days, portable equipment was expensive and sometimes unreliable so I was told to do a studio album with her jazz trio, the one led by Teddy Harris, and then sweet it with applause to make it sound like a club. We called the record Yeah!!! In Person with Her Quartet, and I thought it was one of her best. If you want to hear exactly who Aretha Franklin was at the period in her life—just before she switched labels—listen to Yeah!!!
“I got Kenny Burrell, the jazz guitarist from Detroit who’s one of the best who’s ever played, to sit in with the trio. Kenny added so much subtlety and class. Her regular guys—Beans Richardson was on bass and Hindel Butts on drums—they swing from start to finish. The sessions went smoothly. I don’t even remember Ted being there. I do remember, though, that Steve Allen dropped by to hear her sing two of his songs—‘This Could Be the Start of Something Big’ and ‘Impossible,’ the tune Nat Cole had recorded in the fifties. He was knocked out. I was knocked out how she did Erroll Garner’s ‘Misty.’ Erroll was a friend of mine, and a few months later I played him Aretha’s version. Sarah had sung ‘Misty’—everyone had sung ‘Misty’—but Erroll actually had tears in his eyes after hearing Aretha. ‘Goddamn,’ he said, ‘she makes it seem like she wrote it.’
“She also sang a song she’d written and Mersey had orchestrated a few years earlier, ‘Without the One You Love.’ I’m keenly competitive with other writers and don’t give out compliments easily, but I was certain she had written a standard. If you listen to the record, it’s her, not Teddy Harris, who’s on piano. When she anchors herself at the keyboard, you get an entirely different Aretha. She’s more centered and more powerful.
“The folk scene had started up and Aretha, who always wanted to be up-to-date, talked about singing ‘Puff the Magic Dragon’ by Peter, Paul, and Mary. I thought that was not a good idea. Instead I played her Sam Cooke’s version of Pete Seeger’s ‘If I Had a Hammer,’ another Peter, Paul, and Mary hit. Sam had done it on his live Copa date and that’s all Aretha needed to know. She was crazy for Sam. In fact, we were in the studio on some session when word came down that Sam had been killed by some woman in Los Angeles. Aretha got up and left and didn’t come back for a week. I certainly understood.”
At the end of January 1965, Aretha appeared on Shindig! promoting “Can’t You Just See Me,” another attempt at the teen market by the soon-to-be twenty-three-year-old.
“Sinky wrote the song,” Clyde Otis told me, “a little dance ditty that we thought might work. By then, though, nothing was working, at least not commercially. On the B side we did something called ‘Miss Raggedy Ann,’ a song about a doll. Aretha thought it was cute. She said it reminded her of her childhood. I thought it was beneath her, but my marching orders was to cut as many tunes on her as possible—so that’s what I did. Our last year in the studio together was the craziest. Ted wasn’t really talking to me and I was happy not to talk to him. Aretha was as remote as she could be. I felt like she needed counseling ’cause she kept missing gigs and kept taking all kinds of abuse from Ted. But no one appointed me her counselor and I simply shut up and supervised the session. It got bizarre.
“I was friends with Neal Hefti, the marvelous writer who did such fabulous songs and charts for Count Basie. Neal wrote a movie theme for a Jack Lemmon flick, How to Murder Your Wife. It wasn’t one of Neal’s best, but Columbia wanted me to produce it on Aretha. Turned out to be another snoozer. You can sum it all up with the opening lines of a tune she wanted to cut, called ‘A Little Bit of Soul.’ It talks about how she’s struggling to compose a song and, to quote the lyrics, ‘if I don’t get me a hit soon I won’t be here long.’ Well, it wasn’t long before Columbia and Aretha both decided they had had enough of each other.”
In March, a month after the assassination of Malcolm X at the Audubon Ballroom in New York City, Aretha appeared on Shindig! and sang “Can’t You Just See Me.” The tune entered the pop charts at number ninety-five and rose no higher. Meanwhile, Marvin Gaye’s “How Sweet It Is,” the Temptations’ “My Girl,” the Righteous Brothers’ “You’ve Lost that Lovin’ Feeling,” and Petula Clark’s “Downtown” became not only blockbuster hits but classics that would be played for decades to come.
In April, President Lyndon Johnson ordered ground troops into Vietnam.
In May, Aretha’s “One Step Ahead,” yet another single, was released, and while it never crossed, it did climb into the R&B top twenty.
“It was our answer to the Dionne Warwick phenomenon,” said Clyde. “It wasn’t a cover or a Bacharach song, but it tried to create that refined and relaxed feel. Of course, Aretha is twice the singer Dionne will ever be, but Dionne had this defined personality—this very appealing musical persona—and it’s my contention that Aretha still lacked an identity.”
On May 29, Billboard reported that Columbia had recruited one of their A&R men, Bob Johnston, to bring Aretha to Nashville “with the hope of duplicating his Patti Page ‘Hush, Hush, Sweet Charlotte’ success.” Those sessions, in May and October of 1965, actually took place in New York and proved to be Aretha’s last for the label.
“Was I hurt that I was being dumped as Ree’s producer?” said Clyde Otis. “Well, I wasn’t thrilled. I still saw myself as the guy who could turn her into a superstar. Deep in my heart I did believe she was as great as Dinah. No other woman out there could touch her, and yet I also had to admit that our work together had really gone nowhere. Aside from five or six superb cuts, I hadn’t captured her greatness. I hadn’t been able to give her an identity. Sure, I could say that desperation did us in. Both she and Ted were so desperate to have hits they lost their judgment and were going in five different directions at the same time. The big brass at Columbia was also desperate to recoup the advances they gave her. But lots of great music has been created in a mood of desperation. In our case, the stars simply weren’t aligned.
“I’d known Bob Johnston for years. In fact, I produced Bob back in the fifties when he wanted to be a singer. I cut one of his songs—‘Born to Love One Woman’—and brought him from Texas to New York. I knew Bob was a real talent. I wished him good luck with Aretha but also told him that he’d be lucky if she showed up half the time. From what I understand, my predictions turned out to be optimistic. For a long time she went into a cocoon and no one knew where to find her, not even her husband. Strange woman. Brilliant woman. A woman blessed with inordinate talent. And yet, for all our time together, a woman I never really understood or even got to know. I saw her as a woman holding in secret pain—and I wasn’t let in on those secrets.”
The first Bob Johnston/Aretha session, on May 25 at Columbia Studios, produced four songs, including a misguided, string-laden, horn-heavy attempt to reinvent Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein’s “Why Was I Born” as a gospel lament. The second session, at first scheduled for later in the summer, was postponed till October.
“I was asked to locate Aretha,” said Clyde Otis, “who was said to have disappeared. But I had no more knowledge of her whereabouts than the CBS brass. I wished them luck and went my merry way. My hope was that the ‘live’ quartet session I produced—Yeah!!!—that came out that summer would do some business. When it bombed, I knew I was permanently out of the Aretha Franklin business.”
In a parallel universe, on June 15 and 16, 1965, Aretha’s label mate Bob Dylan entered the same Seventh Avenue Columbia Studios and cut the first session for what would become his landmark Highway 61 Revisited. His producer was Tom Wilson. In July, Dylan shook up the folk world by going electric at Newport. Days afterward, he was back in the studio, this time with a new producer—the same Bob Johnston who had been working with Aretha. It was Johnston who supervised the recording of, among other songs, “Desolation Row.”
Two months later, Johnston was back with Aretha, who, after an extended stay in Detroit, finally showed up at the midtown studio, where she cut her last three Columbia sides. It seems fitting that two of them—“Swanee” and “You Made Me Love You”—represented a return to the mainstream showbiz style she had adopted four years earlier with “Rock-a-Bye Your Baby with a Dixie Melody.”
“It was disheartening,” said John Hammond. “Bob Johnston is a great producer. Look at what he did with Dylan. He also did great work with Simon and Garfunkel, Johnny Cash, and Leonard Cohen. Don’t fault Bob. At that point, the confusion surrounding Aretha and her camp was enough to undermine any project.”
That same summer of 1965, between the two Johnston sessions, Aretha had flown home to Detroit to help her brother and sister celebrate C.L.’s nineteenth year as pastor at New Bethel.
“I don’t remember Ted being at the event,” said Carolyn. “I do remember feeling relieved that we wouldn’t have to deal with the tension that was always there between Ted and Daddy. We wanted to have Aretha to ourselves—back in the bosom of her family. I had just turned twenty-one and had begun feeling my oats. Like Erma, I had my own R-and-B record out and was determined to have my own career as a writer and a singer. One of the beautiful things about singing for our father was that—at least for a night—we could put behind whatever little jealousies that had been brewing with Ree. Erma had always encouraged my career and later Aretha did too. But during that time when she still hadn’t broken through to the big time, I think she secretly worried that we’d get there before her. Personally, I didn’t have that worry. Erma and I were good—very good—but Aretha was great.”
“In some ways,” Erma told me, “you could compare us to the Jacksons. Jermaine could sing, Jackie could sing, and so could Marlon. All the brothers have tremendous talent. But then here comes Michael, a once-in-a-generation talent. He took it to another level—the genius level. I think that’s how we viewed Aretha. Her ability was not of this world. At the same time, Carolyn and I knew that our strengths were not inconsiderable. We also shared Aretha’s drive to be noticed, appreciated, and paid. By that time I had cut a couple of dozen songs for Epic—not hits, but all solid stuff. I felt that Ree continued to resent my presence in the business. I only wish that we all could have sat down and discussed these issues—Carolyn and I were certainly eager to do just that—but Aretha was not one to verbally express her feelings. She kept everything inside until it was time to sing. Then she put her every last emotion smack in your face. This served her art but it did not serve our sisterhood. Except for these wonderful occasions when our focus was on our beloved father, we tended to fall into misunderstanding. This sisterly strain, together with the sisterly love and concern, went on forever.”
After her father’s anniversary celebration, Aretha went into hiding. Erma remembered visiting her once or twice in the midtown apartment that she and Ted shared. Carolyn recalled her visiting Detroit every few weeks to check in on her three sons. Cecil looked back on it as a time when Aretha and Ted were often separated.
“He had different women and she knew it,” said Cecil. “Everyone knew it. She was not only frustrated with that, but also the fact that Columbia had not marketed her correctly. She was seriously thinking about leaving Ted, leaving Columbia, and making a fresh start.”
For the rest of 1965 and all of 1966, Aretha would not make another record.
“I know many of the producers did lots of things to try and lure her back into the studio,” Hammond told me, “but she stopped answering anyone’s call. I had an idea that she might want to go back to our original plan of five years earlier and record a pure blues album. Someone else had the notion of having her do a Mahalia-style gospel album with modern orchestrations of sacred hymns. At that point, though, she had closed the door. I assumed she was simply waiting for our contract to run out. I assumed her management was shopping her to other labels.”
Years later Aretha looked back at her Columbia experience in a positive light. She had been introduced to the world as a major artist. She had proven she could sing jazz, pop, blues, and rhythm and blues with uncanny emotional strength. Her vocal technique was beyond reproach. From “Today I Sing the Blues” to “That Lucky Old Sun” to “Just for a Thrill” to “Skylark” to “This Bitter Earth” to “Take a Look” to “Impossible,” she had recorded a series of masterpieces. For all her missed recording and performing dates, she had nonetheless demonstrated that, year in and year out, she was capable of showing up and turning out a steady flow of brilliant performances. In five years, she had cut some eight albums. She appeared on television as a well-groomed figure, an appealing singer whose interpretations of songs in any number of genres were, more often than not, thrilling.
And yet no one was thrilled—not Aretha, not her husband, Ted, and certainly not the executives at Columbia Records. Everyone wanted more. Everyone wanted hits. After all, Aretha had not crossed over from gospel to pop for mere critical acclaim. She had crossed over in search of the American dreams—glory and gold.
“She definitely fell into a depression,” said Erma. “I remember being in her New York apartment watching her looking out her window at the gray sky and falling snow. ‘What are you thinking about, Ree?’ I asked her. ‘I’m not thinking,’ she said. ‘I’m just dreaming.’ ‘Dreaming about what?’ ‘That things will get better.’”
Some things did get better—spectacularly better—but some things got spectacularly worse.