In 1966, Jerry Wexler, age forty-nine, was a hungry man—hungry for even greater success in a field where he had already proven himself. The field—root righteous rhythm and blues—was his lifelong passion.
“I was born hungry,” he told me. “The hunger never went away. In fact, I believe that gnawing hunger is the driving force behind every great record man. And more than anything, I wanted to be a great record man.”
Wexler was a dynamo—personable, charismatic, opinionated, confident to the point of being cocky. Along with Ahmet and Nesuhi Ertegun, he was one of the owners of Atlantic Records. Children of the Turkish ambassador to the United States, the Erteguns were renegade and highly educated aristocrats who, like Wexler, had been consumed with black music since their childhood. This fanaticism for funk had driven the company since 1949, when, with its first hit, Stick McGhee’s “Drinkin’ Wine, Spo-Dee-O-Dee,” the label was established as a gutsy independent willing to go where the mainstreams were not. Corporate Columbia and mom-and-pop Atlantic were at opposite poles of the music business.
“When I came on board in the fifties,” said Wexler, “Ahmet had already signed Ray Charles. Before him, Ruth Brown was the big hit maker. I didn’t really earn my stripes in the studio until the sixties, when I hit with Solomon Burke and Wilson Pickett. While Motown specialized in soothing soul—which, by the way, was beautiful—I was more attracted to screaming soul. I like it raw. Fortunately, I signed on early to what was becoming the golden age of soul. At the same time the British Invasion was in full swing. But that attracted Ahmet, who is a natural-born internationalist, far more than me. While he was signing Cream, King Crimson, and the Bee Gees, I found myself deep in the Memphis–Muscle Shoals axis where a small army of blues-minded white boys were writing brilliant head charts—basically made-up-on-the-spot-in-the-studio arrangements. Their spontaneous methodology became one of the great epiphanies of my life.
“The more traditional way, of course, were orchestrations notated well in advance of the studio. In short, written music for the musicians to read. But the southern boys just liked to jam—and God, did they ever! Visionaries like Chips Moman, Tommy Cogbill, Roger Hawkins, Spooner Oldham, Jimmy Johnson, and David Hood might have looked like hillbillies, but they were secret geniuses of the good groove. They laid it down with neither preparation nor forethought. The shit just happened.
“Not only was the music magnificent, it sold like hotcakes. Pickett was burning up the charts. What’s more, I had cut a favorable distribution deal with Jim Stewart at Stax, where Sam and Dave and Otis Redding, backed by one of the most ferocious rhythm sections of all time—Booker T. Jones, Al Jackson, Steve Cropper, and Duck Dunn—had taken off like a rocket. The soul world was exploding around me. So while Ahmet had begun combing the Continent for rock talent, I was mining Memphis and Muscle Shoals, where, relatively late in life, I was getting a whole education about how to run a recording session.”
“We saw Wexler as a savior,” said Jimmy Johnson, the guitarist who would play on many Aretha records. “He said he was charmed by our easygoing southern ways, but, man, he was the one who charmed us. He had the thickest New York accent I’d ever heard. He had more energy than a hound dog chasing a rabbit. He was a hustler in the best sense of the word—a go-getter—and, best of all, he was big-time and we sure weren’t. Whatever he had—his connections, his promotional skills, his ability to get songs on the radio—we wanted. Plus he had the ears of a wolf. He wanted it down and dirty. He had all the best stories about Ray Charles and Professor Longhair and Clyde McPhatter and anyone else you could think of.”
“My history with Aretha began in the fall of 1966 when I was at Muscle Shoals recording Wilson Pickett,” Wexler told me. “Percy Sledge, another of our soul-singing artists, came by the studio and started giving Pickett a hard time, telling him he was sounding like Otis or James Brown. Well, Wilson hated James—they had once fought over a woman—and now Pickett, pissed as hell, went after Sledge. Literally. To protect my label’s interest—after all, both these singers were making us serious money—I stepped in between them. Pickett flung me out of the way and was ready to do battle with Percy, a former boxer, when suddenly the phone rang. ‘Calm the fuck down!’ I exhorted. The men backed off as I picked up the receiver. ‘Jerry,’ said a female voice. ‘It’s Louise Bishop. Aretha’s ready for you.’
“I’d been waiting to hear those words for a long time. Louise Bishop was a gospel DJ out of Philly. Back then, the best way to get to Aretha was through the gospel world. More than a year earlier, when I had learned Aretha was unhappy at Columbia, I’d tell Louise and others that I’d love to talk with her. The person who answered my call, though, wasn’t Aretha. It was Ted White. From John Hammond and Clyde Otis, I had heard Ted White stories—how he not only ran the show but wanted to run her recording sessions. From friends in Detroit, though, I also knew that White represented serious songwriters and had a sharp sense of music. From the first moment we spoke, I realized he was a slick cat.
“‘Mr. Wexler,’ he said.
“‘Call me Jerry.’
“‘Call me Ted.’
“‘I heard your artist is available, Ted.’
“‘I heard you were interested in my artist, Jerry.’
“‘Very interested. Intensely interested.’
“‘Then we should meet.’
“‘Right away,’ I said.
“‘Name the time and place.’
“‘Monday in New York. My office at noon.’
“‘We’re there.’
“And they were. Right on time. I was delighted to see that they came with neither a lawyer nor an agent. In our first meeting, Aretha dressed in a conservative brown suit. She gave me little eye contact and was closed-mouth in the extreme. I couldn’t get her to call me Jerry. It was ‘Mr. Wexler.’ Though it was against my nature, I had to reciprocate and call her ‘Miss Franklin.’ I couldn’t get her to say anything about the kind of music she wanted to make, other than ‘I want hits.’ When I asked her to discuss her experience at Columbia, all she said was ‘It was nice. I did some nice things. But now I want hits.’
“‘And money,’ added Ted.
“‘I can advance you twenty-five thousand dollars for your first album,’ I said. ‘The second we sign, you’ll have the check.’ I expected the arm wrestling to start. I was sure that Ted would ask for fifty thousand. Much to my shock, though, he didn’t.
“‘We’re going to accept the twenty-five,’ he said. ‘As important as front money is, what’s more important is that Atlantic establish Aretha as a superstar. No reason she shouldn’t be selling as many records as Otis and Sam and Dave.’
“‘Couldn’t agree with you more, Ted. That’s why I want to turn her over to Jim Stewart at Stax. We do their distribution and promotion. We’re their selling arm and they’re one of our production arms. She’ll love Jim.’
“‘Stax has had a lot of hits,’ said Aretha, not objecting to my suggestion.
“‘And they’re just getting warmed up.’”
When Wexler told me that he’d initially chosen not to produce Aretha himself, I was surprised. He said he had tracked her career from the start and considered her a major talent. Why would he want to hand her over to Jim Stewart?
“Aretha’s voice was always there, no doubt,” he said. “And I definitely saw her as part of our stable. At that point, though, I was into delegation. I was looking to free up my time. I had my eyes on winters in Florida. Because of our success, I started thinking of what it would mean to sell the company and cash out. Ahmet and Nesuhi were initially not enamored of the idea, but—because persistence is my middle name—I kept at them. Along with Motown, we were the indie label stars of the midsixties. The early sixties—especially after Ray Charles had left us for ABC Paramount—had not been easy for us. Now that we had a strong string of hits, who knew how long it would last? I didn’t want to take any chances. So at the very moment Aretha arrived, my mind wasn’t focused on producing; it was on finding a buyer. Besides, the Stax machine turned a raw rhythm-and-blues singer like Otis Redding into an international sensation. There’s no reason why they couldn’t do the same with Aretha. So you can imagine how surprised I was when Jim Stewart turned her down.
“‘You sure you want to pass on Aretha Franklin?’ I asked Jim.
“‘She’s great,’ said Jim. ‘I just don’t see her recording in this environment.’
“I couldn’t have disagreed more, but Jim was his own man. He didn’t sign her—I did—so now it was up to me to put my time and money where my mouth was. Looking back, I see that turning her over to Stewart would have been a colossal mistake. My atheism does not allow me to thank God for Jim’s decision to reject her. Instead I thank the good angels of R-and-B who were protecting Aretha and, by extension, me, her humble servant.”
As Wexler was firming up the contract with Aretha, word got back to Columbia.
“An internal memo came down from the top indicating that Aretha was talking to Atlantic and that their deal was all but consummated,” John Hammond told me. “Of course I was not pleased, but what could I do? She had been out of my hands for several years. And even though I admired the more recent material that Clyde Otis had developed for her, I realized that, with all Columbia’s enormous resources, we had not served her well. Of course, Ted White and Aretha didn’t always help. They had their own ideas that often conflicted with the Columbia producers’. The results were often confused. Our promotion and salespeople were also confused about how to sell Aretha. All this is a great pity because, at least on paper, a great record company like Columbia should have been able to make her an international star. At the same time, I was hopeful that Atlantic might provide her with the kind of culture that suited her personality. Atlantic was not a corporation but a small label specializing in R-and-B where the owners—Jerry, Ahmet, and Nesuhi—actually produced the artist themselves. They were passionate and highly skilled record men. Wexler was especially adept at promoting. When he had a product he liked, he’d go to the ends of the earth to make sure the right people heard it and played it on the radio.”
The Billboard article on December 3, 1966, made it official. Under a photo, the caption read: “Jerry Wexler, vice-president of Atlantic Records, signs blues singer Aretha Franklin to an exclusive contract while her manager, Ted White, looks on from above. Her first release with Atlantic is slated for January.”
“When I explained to Ted and Aretha that I, and not Jim Stewart, would be producing her,” said Wexler, “they had no objections and even seemed somewhat relieved. They liked the idea that one of the Atlantic bosses was going in the studio with them. Then came discussion about the studio. They wanted to record in New York. I argued long and hard for Muscle Shoals. I cited the fact that Percy Sledge had cut his monster hit ‘When a Man Loves a Woman’ at Fame—the studio I wanted to use—and that I had enjoyed several smashes with Pickett, all done at Fame. Ted said he had apprehensions about the South and had heard that Rick Hall, the Fame owner, was overbearing. I joked and said the only overbearing personality was me—and that I’d be running the sessions. Rick’s role would be minimal. He would not be producing. Ted said that Aretha was used to recording in New York. New York was her comfort zone. I argued that Muscle Shoals would be an even greater comfort zone because we were going to record in an entirely different way. We weren’t going to have prepared charts like they had at Columbia. Nothing would be written down. ‘That’s good,’ said Ted, ‘because she can’t read or write music.’ I told Ted my theory of preliterate geniuses—musicians who bypass mere notations because they hear it all in their heads. They can call out the parts. They can sing out the parts. They don’t need to write down notes. They just play them by ear. ‘That’s Aretha,’ said Ted. ‘She has the complete picture before she starts. We’ve been trying to tell producers that for years.’ ‘You don’t have to convince me,’ I said. ‘I’m sold.’
“At that point Ted said he had a few songs he wanted to sell me, songs by writers in his publishing company that were custom-composed for Aretha. I was all ears. The first was ‘I Never Loved a Man (the Way I Love You)’ written by Ronnie Shannon, one of Ted’s guys in Detroit. I loved it. ‘Good,’ said Ted, ‘she’s already figuring out how she wants to cut it.’ ‘Fine,’ I replied. ‘The boys in Muscle Shoals could not be more flexible. Flexibility is what this thing’s all about.’
“He had a tape recording of something he said Aretha had written, called ‘Dr. Feelgood.’ Just her and the piano. All I could do was smile and wave my hand like I was in church. ‘Fabulous,’ I said. I saw it straight in the Bessie Smith–Dinah tradition of a woman demanding her sexual satisfaction. ‘Don’t put it to Aretha like that,’ Ted said. ‘She doesn’t like to think she writes sexy songs.’ I suggested two covers—Henry Glover’s ‘Drown in My Own Tears’ that Ray Charles had made famous and Sam Cooke’s ‘A Change Is Gonna Come.’ ‘She loves both,’ said Ted. ‘We’re all on the same page. She has another cover she’s been doing live—Otis Redding’s ‘Respect.’ ‘Long as she changes it up from the original,’ I said. ‘You don’t gotta worry about that, Wex,’ said White. ‘She changes it up all right.’”
“Jerry Wexler deserves a ton of credit for producing Aretha right,” said Ruth Bowen, “but I think it should be clear that she was developing her own sound and style without anyone’s help before she met Wexler. I actually heard her do that version of ‘Respect’ live, the one that became the signature song of her career. She was singing ‘Respect’ before she ever signed with Atlantic. Jerry definitely put her with the right musicians, but she came to the party full prepared. She came with the goods.”
As the musical elements of Aretha’s life were brought into harmony, the personal elements became more dissonant than ever.
“If Ted hadn’t helped put together that Atlantic deal,” said Erma, “I’m not sure their marriage would have lasted. Their relationship was on its last legs. Changing record companies only postponed the inevitable. It was the beginning of a strange but beautiful period in Aretha’s life when she leaned on her family more. She was putting together her sound—in her own way—and she realized that no one could augment that sound better than me and Carolyn. I don’t care what you say, but siblings who sing—especially siblings who began singing in church—have a certain built-in harmony you can’t find anywhere else. Think of the Clark Sisters and the Winans. Aretha knew that, and when she started envisioning churchier-sounding backgrounds to highlight her lead vocals, she turned to us. We were there with open arms. Whatever the past friction—and the past friction was serious—we remained sisters in Christ. Our father taught us that.”
“It took Aretha a while to leave Columbia for Atlantic,” said Carolyn, “because Columbia was the most prestigious label. I think she felt like she’d be giving up status. But Aretha was also aware of the current market, and she decided that Columbia wasn’t. Ironically, when she gave up the idea of ‘crossing over’ into the mainstream with jazzy standards à la Ella or Sarah and Dinah, that’s when she crossed over the most. That’s because she became more fully herself.”
As far as studios went, Wexler prevailed, convincing Ted and Aretha that Muscle Shoals was the place where magic was being made. They were set to meet there at the end of January 1967. Hopes, confidence, and expectations were all high.
“I didn’t see how anything could go wrong,” said Wexler.
And then everything did.
“Before we got to Muscle Shoals, Aretha had worked out the pattern for the songs on her Fender Rhodes at home,” Wexler explained. “She and her sisters worked out the background parts. The plan was to have her come into the studio, show that bad Muscle Shoals rhythm section her outline, and let them jam around her. I thought it was important not to have an all-Caucasian band so I made sure to get the Memphis Horns and Bowlegs Miller. I loved all the material Ted and Aretha brought—Sam Cooke’s ‘A Change Is Gonna Come’ and ‘Good Times,’ Otis’s ‘Respect,’ and the three Aretha tunes—‘Dr. Feelgood,’ ‘Don’t Let Me Lose This Dream,’ and ‘Baby, Baby, Baby,’ written with Carolyn.”
Wexler loved King Curtis, who, along with Motown’s Junior Walker, was the reigning king of R&B tenor saxophonists. Beyond his instrumental prowess, King was a prolific writer and arranger. He’d soon become Aretha’s musical director. For this first record, Wexler gave Aretha one of King’s best, “Soul Serenade,” a song Curtis had written with Luther Dixon, whose “Blue Holiday” Aretha had sung on Columbia.
“The first day started off fine,” Wexler remembered. “We had Chips Moman and Jimmy Johnson on guitar, Roger Hawkins on drums, and Tommy Cogbill on bass. Spooner Oldham knocked everyone out—including Aretha—with those opening chords on electric piano. Those were some mournfully funky riffs that became a permanent part of the song. Aretha was on acoustic piano, and because she had walked in the door with the groove in hand, it happened quickly.”
“She was a very shy and withdrawn woman,” Roger Hawkins told me. “She called everyone ‘Mister’ and we called her ‘Miss Franklin.’ There was no small talk. She was all business. That made me nervous because mostly we’d done sessions with singers who picked up our relaxed manner right away. Not Aretha. She stayed to herself. But when she sat down at the piano and began to hit those chords and that sound came out of her mouth, nothing mattered. I’ve heard a lot of soul singing in my time, but nothing like that.”
“Aretha sang it with the conviction of a saint,” said Dan Penn, who was at the session, where, on the spot, he and Chips Moman wrote “Do Right Woman—Do Right Man,” a song that would eventually be included on the record.
“Before she started playing we were worried she might have qualms about playing with a white rhythm section,” said Jimmy Johnson, “but when we all got to grooving, it was nothing but a party. She didn’t like the support we gave her—she loved it. She knew that, color be damned, we were all coming from the same place. The woman just sang—and sang—and sang some more. We were hysterically happy, giddy happy, like schoolchildren, running into the studio to hear the playback. To the last man, we realized we were watching the birth of a superstar. The experience gave joy new meaning.”
Until the joy stopped and the heavy drama started.
“My plan was to do everything live,” said Wexler. “Have Aretha and the musicians playing together in real time. Of course, Rick Hall was there because we were using his studio. There had been tension between me and Rick earlier about Clarence Carter, a big-selling R-and-B artist with hits like ‘Slip Away’ and ‘Patches.’ Hall stole him from us. But I put that aside for the sake of having a smooth Aretha session. The euphoria of these first takes of ‘I Never Loved a Man’ led to some celebratory drinking that night. I had left the studio before it got bad, but apparently it got ugly between Ted and Rick Hall.”
“I confess that I’d been doing some drinking,” Hall told me, “but so had Ted. And so had Aretha. No one was in his or her right mind. It began when one of the white horn players, who had also been drinking, got into some argument with Ted. Whether the racial stuff started with Ted or the trumpet player, I don’t know. But it was there. So Ted stormed out of the session and took Aretha with him. That was a crying shame ’cause the session had gone so well. I knew Wexler, who was my client, would be pissed out of his mind. So I went to Ted and Aretha’s room to try and make it right. I made it worse. Ted didn’t wanna hear any explanations but I gave ’em anyway. That just led to a bunch more yelling with Ted telling me how he never should have brought his wife down to Alabama to play with these rednecks.
“‘Who you calling a redneck?’ I said.
“‘Who you calling a nigger?’
“‘I’d never use that word.’
“‘But you were thinking it, weren’t you?’
“‘I was just thinking that you should go fuck yourself.’ That led to Ted taking a swing at me and I swung back and we both landed a couple of good blows and before I knew it, I was in a full-blown fistfight with Ted White.”
“The very thing I had worked so hard to avoid was racial animus,” said Wexler, “and that’s exactly what the night session had excited. Everyone was playing the race card. At the motel there was screaming and yelling and doors slamming. At six in the morning I was in Ted and Aretha’s room trying to undo what Rick had done. Ted, though, could not be consoled. ‘You were the one who said Muscle Shoals was soul paradise,’ he said. ‘Far as I can see, Muscle Shoals is soul shit. These honkies down here are some nasty motherfuckers. I will never submit my wife to circumstances like these. We’re outta here.’
“‘But what about the schedule?’ I asked. ‘We were going to do all her vocals this week and the sweetening next week. All we have in the can is one completed song—“I Never Loved”—and the beginning of “Do Right Man.” That’s all I got.’
“‘What you really got, Wexler,’ said Ted, ‘is one big fuckin’ mess on your hands. I’m not sure this lady is ever gonna record for Atlantic again.’ And with that, he showed me the door.”
When Aretha wrote about the incident, it was entirely different. She said she couldn’t recall any details and wasn’t in the room where Hall and White came to blows. She knew there had been discord and arguments intense enough to make her want to leave. But in Aretha’s account, she left on her own, not with Ted. She packed up and headed out to the airport.
“I’ve never been so frustrated in my life,” said Wexler. “In all my years in the record business, I had never experienced a better session. I knew we had a goddamn smash and now it looked like it was all in vain. The singer’s husband/manager gave indications that he wanted out of the deal. He had physically fought the studio owner. He and Aretha had run out of Muscle Shoals after the very first day. I was crushed.
“When I got back to New York, Ahmet said I looked like I was on the verge of a nervous breakdown. I said I was on the verge of what I was convinced could be one of the most important and successful records in Atlantic history and suddenly it had all fallen apart. I couldn’t let that happen. I called Ted but couldn’t get through. Through the grapevine I’d heard that [Aretha] was back in Detroit—without Ted. I got a number. Carolyn answered. She said she couldn’t tell me anything—that her sister needed some time alone.”
“After that Muscle Shoals incident,” said Carolyn, “I was sure that Aretha and Ted were splitsville. She felt that he had undermined the session. She said he was drunk half the time and belligerent as hell. She said she didn’t want to see him again.”
“I was going crazy,” said Wexler. “I had disc jockeys calling her, I had preachers calling her, I was on the verge of calling out the FBI and Canadian Mounties. At the same time, I had a completed song—‘I Never Loved a Man’—but only half of another. We’d only begun to cut the song that Dan and Chips wrote in the studio, ‘Do Right Woman—Do Right Man.’ There was no vocal. Where was my artist? Where was her manager? Were they really leaving the label before we even got started?
“I finally got Ted White on the phone. He was still mad as a motherfucker. I wanted to know what was happening. He had nothing but scorn. He was still seething about Rick Hall and Muscle Shoals and my insistence that we record there. I apologized for Hall for the twentieth time but that made no difference. I told him that the past was the past and we had a hit on our hands but I needed Aretha back in the studio. He said something that surprised me: ‘I’m not even sure I’m her manager. I can’t control her. No one can.’
“So with the artist missing and management in doubt, what was I supposed to do? I decided, in my typical way, to leap before looking. I decided to act. I had this one song that I knew was cooking. I made a couple of dozen acetate copies of ‘I Never Loved a Man’ for DJs in key markets. These were guys I could count on. They’d let me know if I had a smash or whether I was simply jerking off. Within hours, I got the response I needed—they loved it, their listeners loved it, the phone lines started burning up. Airplay was immediate, but what about sales?
“Well, there are two sides on a forty-five single, and I had only one. I needed another song. Our distributors, who had heard ‘I Never Loved’ on the radio, started screaming for product. They knew me as an aggressive marketer and wanted to know what the fuck was wrong. I wasn’t about to tell them that I had lost control of my artist. All I could say was ‘Stand by.’ Meanwhile, every minute the record was being played on the radio but was unavailable in stores, we were losing money. To be perfectly honest, the other thought I had was this—if I could get Aretha Franklin on the pop charts and establish her as a bestselling act, the value of Atlantic would jump considerably and my own dream of selling more easily realized. In every possible way, I was motivated.
“Ten days passed, ten of the most difficult days of my life, before I finally got the call.
“‘Mr. Wexler, it’s Miss Franklin calling. I’m ready to record. However, I won’t be recording in Muscle Shoals. I will be recording in New York. I know you have studios in New York.’
“‘Yes, we do. What about the band?’
“‘Bring up the boys from Muscle Shoals. They understood me. As far as the backgrounds go, I’ll be with my sisters.’
“I remember arriving in New York with Aretha,” said Carolyn, “and feeling like we were all on a mission. We realized that our sister was on the brink of letting the world know what we had always known—that she was hands-down the scariest singer in the world. When she was in her element, no one could touch her. Well, we were her element. We arrived in New York as a family united, realizing that her problems with Ted had her on edge. Both in and out of the studio, she needed our support.”
“I think of Aretha as Our Lady of Mysterious Sorrows,” Wexler wrote in his memoir, Rhythm and the Blues. “Her eyes are incredible, luminous eyes covering inexplicable pain. Her depressions could be as deep as the dark sea. I don’t pretend to know the sources of her anguish, but anguish surrounds Aretha as surely as the glory of her musical aura.”
According to Wexler, when Aretha resurfaced and showed up at the Atlantic studios at 1841 Broadway in midtown Manhattan, Ted was not with her, only her sisters. She gave no apologies or explanations about where she had been.
“She came loaded for bear,” said Tommy Dowd, the Atlantic engineer who was at the controls. “She went right for the piano, where, without a word, she played piano over the existing ‘Do Right’ track. She and Erma and Carolyn laid down the vocal harmonies, an arrangement from heaven. All that was left was Aretha’s vocal. She ran it down once. Thank God I had pressed that Record button, because the rundown was unworldly. There was a calmness about her delivery, an attitude that said, Brother, I own this song, I’m gonna take my time, and I’m gonna drill it into your soul. When she was through, there was nothing to do but shake your head in wonder.”
“When it came to producing Aretha’s vocals,” said Wexler, “it was the same as Ray Charles. I didn’t say a word. She didn’t need my critique. She didn’t need anyone’s critique. Her taste in vocal riffs and licks was absolutely flawless. She was only twenty-four and yet had the poise, authority, and confidence of someone who had been singing for sixty years. Her voice was young and vital, but it also came from a place of ancient secret wisdom.”
“The method she’d begun in Muscle Shoals was continued in New York,” Dowd explained. “She played the instrumentals with the band while singing a scratch vocal to help the musicians understand exactly how she was going to tell the story. We’d then throw away the scratch vocal, and, with an instrumental take that was acceptable to her, she went into the studio to sing the lead to track. That was the moment of truth. She was out there alone on the other side of the glass; I was behind the board in the control booth with Wexler hovering over me and all the musicians gathered around. After a couple of takes, she nailed ‘Do Right’ for all time. We were speechless. We were stunned. We knew we were in the presence of rare and immortal greatness.”
“Do Right Woman—Do Right Man” was cut on February 8, 1967. Two days later Wexler released it as the B side to “I Never Loved a Man (the Way I Love You).” The response was immediate. “I Never Loved” flew to the top of the R&B charts and quickly crossed over, where it went top-ten pop and competed successfully with the Beatles’ “Penny Lane,” the Supremes’ “Love Is Here and Now You’re Gone,” the Rolling Stones’ “Ruby Tuesday,” and the Turtles’ “Happy Together.” It took Atlantic two weeks to do what Columbia had not been able to do in five years—turn Aretha Franklin into a superstar. “I Never Loved” became the first million-seller record of her career.
Cecil thought that the success of the first single helped heal Ted and Aretha’s marriage. “After all, it was Ted’s writer, Ronnie Shannon, who wrote the song, and it was Ted who brought the song to Aretha. That was the song that blew open the door. Aretha was always cognizant of that fact. It made her think that maybe, despite everything, she needed Ted to get where she was going. But that was just the beginning. That first single—‘I Never Loved’ and ‘Do Right’—was nothing compared to the next one with ‘Respect’ and ‘Dr. Feelgood.’ The second single put her into orbit. Things went crazy after those songs hit. Everyone in the world wanted her, and she required help.”
“Atlantic was very different than Motown,” said Wexler, “where the record company also managed and booked their acts. We were careful to make sure our artists had outside management, outside advisers, and outside booking agents. Aretha was not an especially trustful person—and with good reason—and it was important for her to have her own counsel. I saw that her relationship with White was rough, to say the least, and I could have tried to influence her to leave him. I could have persuaded her to hire management more sympathetic to Atlantic, but I knew that’d be a mistake. I had to separate church and state. The producer/record exec is one animal. The manager/agent is quite another. Plus, her manager/agent was also her husband.”
According to Aretha’s siblings, White was not only a savvy manager, but someone who recognized her talents as a composer.
“For all you might say about Ted,” said Cecil, “it was Ted who got Aretha to write. That was partly because he had a thriving song-publishing concern and wanted to build up his inventory of copyrights, but it was also because he saw that her talent as a writer rivaled her talent as a singer.”
In 1990, discussing Aretha’s first Atlantic album, Luther Vandross commented first on her writing, not her singing. “I’m not saying that the lady didn’t sing her behind off,” Luther explained. “She did. She turned it out, but what impressed me even more was that she wrote or cowrote the four best songs on the record—‘Don’t Let Me Lose This Dream,’ ‘Baby, Baby, Baby,’ ‘Dr. Feelgood,’ and ‘Save Me.’ As much as I adore Diana Ross and Dionne Warwick, the same can’t be said of them. Beautiful singers, but hardly writers.
“When I produced Aretha in the eighties, the first thing I told her was how much I loved ‘Don’t Let Me Lose This Dream.’ It had this bossa nova–ish silky groove that was pure heaven. I asked her where the song came from. She said she’d been listening to Astrud Gilberto, the girl who sang with Stan Getz, and she wanted to write something with the feeling of Latin soul. You go from there to ‘Dr. Feelgood,’ which is basically nothing more than a twelve-bar blues. But the lyrics! And her piano playing! It’s like something my mama’s mama listened to—one of those original ladies, like Bessie Smith or Ma Rainey. I believe it’s one of the greatest blues ever written. Same is true of ‘Baby, Baby, Baby’ that she wrote with her sister Carolyn, another major talent. It’s another brilliant blues variation with a line that I wish I had written myself—‘I’m bewildered, I’m lonely, and I’m loveless.’”
Aretha wrote about composing “Save Me” with King Curtis. She called him a gentleman because, even though she described the musical contribution by her and Carolyn as minor, King gave them full credit as collaborators. She also sang King’s blistering “Soul Serenade,” another testimony to the great horn man’s pivotal role in helping Aretha become Aretha.
The centerpiece of the first Aretha album is, of course, her cover of Otis Redding’s “Respect.” Wexler told me that he personally played her version for Otis. “He broke out into this wide smile,” Wexler remembered, “and said, ‘The girl has taken that song from me. Ain’t no longer my song. From now on, it belongs to her.’ And then he asked me [to] play it again, and then a third time. The smile never left his face.
“If you listen to Otis’s original and then Aretha’s cover, the first thing you notice is that her groove is more dramatic. That stop-and-stutter syncopation was something she invented. She showed the rhythm section I had shipped up from Alabama—Jimmy Johnson, Tommy Cogbill, and Roger Hawkins—how to do it. I knew she’d been intrigued with the song for a couple of years and had tried it out onstage. She had already come up with this new beat. But the creation of the background vocals and ingenious wordplay was done on the spot in the studio. The backgrounds were more than wonderful aural augmentations. They gave the song a strong sexual flavor. The call for respect went from a request to a demand. And then, given the civil rights and feminist fervor that was building in the sixties, respect—especially as Aretha articulated it with such force—took on new meaning. ‘Respect’ started off as a soul song and wound up as a kind of national anthem. It virtually defined American culture at that moment in history.”
“The sock-it-to-me line helped shape the song for sure,” said Carolyn. “I had heard the expression on the streets and thought it might work in a call-and-response call with ‘Respect.’ Obviously, Otis wrote the song from a man’s point of view, but when Erma and Aretha and I worked it over, we had to rearrange the perspective. We saw it as something earthier, a woman having no problem discussing her needs. It turned out that it was interpreted in many different ways—having to do with sexual or racial politics. Far as I’m concerned, all those interpretations are correct because everyone needs respect on every level.”
The sock-it-to-me line gained further fame as a running gag on Laugh-In, the television comedy show that hit the airwaves the following year. Even Richard Nixon had a cameo in which he weirdly demanded, “Sock it to me.”
Spelling out the title—“R-E-S-P-E-C-T”—and juxtaposing it with the demands “Find out what it means to me” and “take care of TCB” were additional lyrical augmentations. “TCB” echoed Aretha’s own lyrics from “Dr. Feelgood,” in which she proclaimed that “taking care of business is really this man’s game.” In the fade of the song, she also referred to her recent past by singing, “I get tired, keep on trying, runnin’ out of fools and I ain’t lying.” “Runnin’ Out of Fools” was her biggest R&B single on Columbia. By calling out its title, she honored the soul-music tradition of self-referencing previous successes. She also sealed the deal on personalizing the song so that, in its composer’s own words, “it belongs to her.”
“I also heard ‘Respect’ as part of her ongoing fight with Ted,” said Cecil. “He might have respected her talent, but he didn’t respect her as a human being. He was a violent cat whose violence only got worse. I felt like Aretha was singing ‘Respect’ to Ted, but it hardly made any difference. He kept slapping her around and didn’t care who saw him do it.”
In April, in the first cover story on Aretha in a national magazine, Jet quoted White about his wife’s success: “We are getting calls from all over the country for her appearances… the European scene is throbbing for her. We have had to cancel a scheduled May European tour until fall because we can’t fit it into the present schedule.” He went on to say that he expected his wife to jump from making a hundred thousand in 1966 to a quarter million in 1967.
“Respect” hit the pop charts on April 29, 1967, a day after Muhammad Ali was stripped of his heavyweight-champion title for refusing to be drafted into the United States Army. It would go to number one on both the R&B and pop charts and become the song that would both define and forever change Aretha’s career. As a result of it, a few months later at the start of her show at Chicago’s Regal Theater, she would be crowned Queen of Soul by DJ Pervis “the Blues Man” Spann. Aretha took the ceremony seriously, noting the beauty of the “bejeweled crown” placed on her head, where it would remain, metaphorically, for the next five decades.
There was Bessie, there was Dinah, and now there was Aretha.
Her dream was coming true—the fairy-tale dream of a little girl whose father had promised her the moon. The dream, though, was rooted in a storybook sensibility where everyone lives happily ever after. Aretha bought into that fairy tale as a child and clung to that fairy tale despite harsh reality. In 1967, the year of her dazzling breakthrough, she was in the throes of emotional chaos. Even though it was her husband/manager who was controlling a career that, in a matter of a few months, had taken off like a rocket, her marriage had officially become a misery.