From Jet, January 15, 1970:
“SAM COOKE’S BROTHER, CHARLES, IS SHOT IN DETROIT: Detroit police were investigating the early morning shooting of Charles Cooke, 42, brother of slain singer Sam Cooke. Police said Cooke, a guest at the house of Soul Queen Aretha Franklin, was shot in the groin following an altercation with Miss Franklin’s estranged husband, Theodore (Ted) White, 38.”
White told Jet, “I have a right to go to my home,” explaining that he had bought the house, which he had visited only twice in the past two years since separating from Aretha. When Ted asked Cooke to leave the room so he could speak privately to Aretha, Cooke refused to go. “Cooke felt he had to protect Aretha like I was some kind of gorilla or something,” said White, who admitted he pushed Cooke out of the room. “When Cooke returned,” Jet reported, “White shot him.” Cooke was rushed to New Grace Hospital, where he survived an emergency operation. Officers at Detroit’s Twelfth Precinct brought Aretha in and questioned her; she gave a statement and returned home.
“Aretha was infuriated that Jet would publish something like that,” said Ruth Bowen. “She said she felt disrespected. Well, Jet is the neighborhood newspaper for black America. Black folks have always been curious about Aretha. She’s our queen. Jet was merely getting out the news on our queen. They were reporting facts. Aretha couldn’t handle that. She said, ‘They make it sound like ghetto stuff.’ I said, ‘Well, it is ghetto stuff. You were the one who married this man.’ She didn’t want to hear it. ‘I’m pregnant,’ she said, ‘pregnant women shouldn’t be treated this way.’ ‘Pregnancy has nothing to do with it, Aretha. You’re still at war with Ted and until the war stops, the newspapers are going to report the battles.’”
“My second album for RCA, Chain Reaction, was dropping just about the time of all that hullabaloo about Ted shooting up the house,” said Carolyn. “I thought it was the best thing I’d done and was looking for some play in the press. When I let Aretha hear it, she was generous with her praise. She saw how this record could be my breakthrough. One reporter said he’d do a story on me if Aretha would also agree to be interviewed about her feelings for me and Erma, who also had some great songs out there. Aretha refused, saying that she couldn’t trust the press. She said that they’d wind up asking her questions about Ted shooting up the house. ‘Don’t answer those questions,’ I told her. ‘Just talk about music.’ She said it doesn’t work that way. She pointed to the title of my album. ‘It’s a chain reaction,’ she said. ‘They got my professional life chained up with my personal life. Well, I’m not going near any of it. I’ve had it with the press.’”
The next news item appearing on Aretha was a happy one: In March she gave birth to her fourth son, Kecalf (pronounced “Kalf”), his name an acronym formed from the initials of his father, Ken E. Cunningham, and his mom, Aretha Louise Franklin.
“Aretha always went home to Detroit to have her children,” said Erma. “She left her New York penthouse and all that glamour for the comfort of her father and grandmother and all her family. I believe she only stayed a few weeks, though. She dearly loves her children—as I love mine—but we were part of that generation of young female singers who definitely sacrificed time with our kids to attend to our careers. We did so knowingly. We did so with the support of Daddy and Big Mama and so many other caring relatives. But we also did so with heavy guilt. We were mothers who had made the decision to put our profession as entertainers first. I’m not sure Aretha will ever admit to that, but that’s the truth. As a result, we did a great deal of silent suffering.”
Five weeks after giving birth, Aretha was in Miami to complete what would be the album Spirit in the Dark, to be released in late summer.
“She was radiant,” said Wexler. “She was off the sauce and on the one. She came to the studio with an armful of songs she said she’d written during her pregnancy. I was elated. They were all good, but the killer was ‘Spirit in the Dark.’ It was one of those perfect R-and-B blends of the sacred and the secular whose lyrical ambiguity appealed to fans of every stripe. What is it, the spirit? Is it God? Or is it the god of the good orgasm? It’s Aretha conducting church right in the middle of the smoky nightclub. It’s everything to everyone. It helped that when she recorded it, I had the Dixie Flyers in place. That was my house band in Miami that included Jim Dickinson on keys, Charlie Freeman on guitar, Tommy McClure on bass, and Sammy Creason on drums.
“She also came in with B.B. King on her mind. She was set on covering his ‘The Thrill Is Gone,’ King’s first real pop hit, and his evergreen ‘Why I Sing the Blues.’ Listen to her deep-fried deep-funk piano solo on ‘Thrill’ and you’ll understand why I begged her to do an instrumental album, just as I begged her to do an all-gospel album. In between takes, she spoke of her father’s relationship with B.B. ‘My daddy is B.’s preacher and B. is my daddy’s bluesman,’ she said. ‘It’s a beautiful thing.’”
“If you go through the vaults,” said Cecil, “you’ll also see that Ree cut a version of ‘My Way,’ the song that Paul Anka wrote for Sinatra. If Anka would ever hear it, he’d be convinced that he subconsciously wrote it for Aretha, because she turned it sunny-side-up soul style. After she sang it, we were ecstatic. We thought it was going to be the new ‘Respect.’ It had that anthem feel. When Wexler decided not to release it as a single or even put it on the album, we were amazed. But there were so many hits coming out of Aretha, we couldn’t really complain.”
When I mentioned Aretha’s “My Way” to Wexler in 1992, he couldn’t remember her doing it. But in 2007, when we listened to it together for a reissue we were coproducing, Aretha Franklin: Rare and Unreleased Recordings from the Golden Reign of the Queen of Soul, his memory was jogged. He called it “a discovery of enormous value. Listening to it now, I forget about Paul and Frank and think only of Aretha, Aretha, Aretha. She builds her case and claims the victory. The song becomes a royal pronouncement of incontestable truth. It’s a masterpiece.”
“Spirit in the Dark” was the first single off the album. In May it entered the R&B charts, rose to number three, and stayed for nine weeks. The flip side, “The Thrill Is Gone,” was the second single and remained on the list for eight weeks. The third single, Aretha’s remake of Ahmet Ertegun’s “Don’t Play That Song,” a cover of Ben E. King’s 1962 hit, went number one R&B and number eleven pop.
On the home front, things were peaceful.
“We went to New York to visit Aretha practically every weekend,” said sister-in-law Earline. “She had furnished her high-rise apartment to where everything was sparkling. Ken also had her on a good personal program. She was slimming down and not drinking at all. She was wearing an Afro and spending less time fussing with makeup and such. Ken took this ‘natural woman’ thing seriously, and the change suited Aretha. She seemed more relaxed.”
“All her songs were hitting big,” said Carolyn, “and I was still having trouble getting on the charts. To be honest, I think that gave her some relief. Now that she saw that I was no competition, she began calling me. I think she felt a little guilty about not having written my liner notes. Anyway, I had begun working with Jimmy Radcliffe, the writer and producer, on a Broadway show based on gospel music. This was before the advent of hit musicals like Micki Grant’s Don’t Bother Me, I Can’t Cope or Professor Alex Bradford’s Your Arms Too Short to Box with God. Jimmy and I were ahead of the curve. Ree liked the idea. Barbra Streisand had been a star on Broadway and there wasn’t any reason my sister couldn’t be as well. Jimmy and I wrote the central role with her in mind. She even put some seed money into the project. But somehow she lost interest along the way. Aretha is easily distracted, and, though she means well, follow-through is a big challenge for her.”
“People were always coming to Aretha with investment ideas,” Cecil confirmed. “Because she’s an openhearted person, she’s an easy sell. And if you’re a relative, she’s doubly easy. She’s always wanted to help her family. But to tell you the truth, I didn’t even hear about the project that Carolyn and Jimmy Radcliffe were putting together until I read an item in Billboard. By then Ree had moved on to something else entirely. By then she had met Donny Hathaway.”
Hathaway, the most influential soul singer since Sam Cooke, had been a producer for Curtis Mayfield’s Curtom Records in Chicago. After hearing Hathaway at a music convention, King Curtis urged Jerry Wexler to sign him. Wexler needed little convincing. He described Hathaway’s voice as “plush-velvet, broad-stroked and big-bottomed. It’s a misty-blue pop-jazz church voice of tremendous power and conviction. He’s the third component to Atlantic’s Holy Trinity of Soul. First there was Ray Charles, then Aretha, now Donny.”
Hathaway’s first album, the self-produced Everything Is Everything, included “The Ghetto,” a critical sensation and an R&B hit.
“When I played Aretha ‘The Ghetto,’” said Wexler, “she was excited. The first thing she said was ‘I want to work with this guy. We come from the same place.’”
“Aretha had the opposite reaction,” said Joel Dorn, another high-ranking Atlantic producer, “when she heard the first Roberta Flack things we did at the label. Although they are vastly different artists, Aretha saw Roberta as a threat. She actually got up and walked out while I was playing her that first Roberta album. She later complained to Ahmet that it wasn’t appropriate for Atlantic to be trying to break another female soul singer. Ahmet smoothed her feathers, as only Ahmet can, but she was never happy with Roberta as a label mate. On the other hand, she loved Donny—until Donny started having those duet hits with Roberta.”
King Curtis, Aretha’s musical director for the previous thirteen months, asked her to play along with Donny Hathaway on Sam Moore’s first solo album, a sensational record that sat in the vaults for over thirty years before it was released in 2002. Curtis was the main producer as well as the tenor sax player; the Sweet Inspirations did the background vocals, and Aretha and Donny played keyboards on several tracks.
“I never thought it would happen,” said Cecil. “Never thought Aretha would ever make a date strictly as a ‘sideman,’ without singing. But these were special circumstances. Sam was always fighting with his partner Dave Prater. They were harmony dynamite onstage but offstage couldn’t stand each other. Curtis wanted to make Sam a star on his own and he put together a great recording group to back him up. When he needed the icing on the cake, he looked to Donny and Aretha. Aretha loved Curtis and had great respect for Sam. Wexler had been telling her about Donny and she was curious to go in the studio with him. She wasn’t disappointed.”
“Don’t know why they held the album back except that Sam was having serious drug problems back then,” said Wexler. “Drug problems or not, the album was a monster.”
“Aretha hadn’t performed live in nearly a year,” said Ruth. “She had given birth to Kecalf, she had gone in the studio and cut Spirit in the Dark, and I thought she was ready to finally do the big Vegas gig. I couldn’t get her back at Caesar’s, where she had canceled, but I did convince the International Hotel to book her. The engagement came in June. She was not in great shape. I don’t know whether she had started drinking again, but I suspected as much. Her voice was not in top shape. Emotionally, she was extremely fragile. When I asked Cecil if there was anything I could do to help, he said, ‘We just need to leave her alone. She’ll get through this.’ She did, but just barely. When I learned what happened a few weeks later in St. Louis, I was not surprised.”
“Aretha Falls Ill in St. Louis; Treated in New York” read the Jet headline from July 16, 1970. In the article, WVON DJ and promoter Pervis Spann said, “I had to refund about $50,000 to fans. I’m the big money loser. And I want to say I was with Aretha, went to Detroit and got her for the show we were staging at St. Louis’s Kiel Auditorium. We had a 6,000-person audience and after she sang one song (‘Respect’) she couldn’t sing another. She broke down. She’s now in New York under special care. I want everyone to know there was no stimulants involved whatsoever. The woman just took sick. She had a nervous breakdown from extreme personal problems.”
“The sudden disappearance of Aretha was a frequent occurrence,” said Wexler. “Ruth Bowen or brother Cecil would call and simply say, ‘She needs to get away. It may take a while.’ No one used the word nervous breakdown, but we knew.”
“Sometimes she’d call me,” said Erma, “or sometimes she’d call Carolyn. She’d talk about getting away from it all. She’d say she was going too fast, that the demands were too great, that too many people were pulling her in too many different directions. There were times when Carolyn and I would go and simply sit with her. Cecil of course would do the same. ‘Please don’t tell Daddy what I’m going through,’ she’d tell me. ‘He doesn’t need to know.’ But of course he knew. He knew better than anyone. He knew that, for all her drive to keep making recordings and doing shows and increasing her status as a star, she was a mess inside. She had huge fears she was not willing to look at or even name. But when those fears got too big, she’d break down. Cecil would put her in a hospital somewhere in remote Connecticut so the press wouldn’t find out. Cecil called it ‘nervous exhaustion.’ She’d get her rest, she’d renew her strength, and she’d be back out there again. This is the pattern that continued for years.”
When I asked Carolyn what Aretha’s exact fears were, she said, “I think she was basically afraid that she wasn’t enough. Crazy as it sounds, she was afraid that she wasn’t good enough as a singer, pretty enough as a woman, or devoted enough as a mother. I don’t know what to call it except deep, deep insecurity. Psychoanalysts might have determined the source of the insecurity had she gone into therapy, but that’s not her style. Her style was to either drink away the anxiety or, when that stopped working, disappear for a while, find her bearings, and go right back onstage and wear the crown of the impervious diva.”
She was, in fact, back onstage that summer when she played the Antibes Jazz Festival on the French Riviera. Also on the bill were Archie Shepp, Grant Green, Erroll Garner, Lionel Hampton, the Clara Ward Singers, and Stan Getz.
“I had been told that she looked at Clara Ward the way I looked at Lester Young,” Getz told me. “Clara was the original. Clara was the template. And Clara was terrific, an inspired gospel singer who knew how to entertain. But Aretha went so much deeper. She cried with pain that was almost too intense to consider. I was deeply moved and artistically inspired. But I felt afraid for her. She was channeling more emotion than one human being could bear. I remember approaching her, just to say a few words of appreciation. Her brother was a jazz fan and knew who I was. Aretha knew my work as well. She said something like ‘Oh, yes, Mr. Getz, I enjoy your recordings,’ and then looked away. She couldn’t look me in the eye. She wouldn’t allow any discussion whatsoever. She was too troubled to deal with me, a stranger eager to offer words of comfort and encouragement.”
She returned to the United States in mid-August and showed up at the Atlantic studios in New York, ready to record.
“They were all covers,” said Wexler, “but what’s fascinating is which covers emerged as hits and which didn’t. She sang Elton John and Bernie Taupin’s ‘Border Song (Holy Moses)’ with great passion, and it did all right, but it languished on the R-and-B charts and never got anywhere on the pop charts. That’s significant because our sales strategy with Aretha never changed. It was the same sales strategy that had been in place with black artists for decades. They hit on the R-and-B charts and then you hope the success crosses over to the white charts, the pop charts. The R-and-B audience, though, didn’t relate to the opaque lyrics of the ‘Border Song.’ The flower children were into ambiguous stories with disconnected imagery, but not Aretha’s core fans. Those fans did relate, though, to Paul Simon’s ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water,’ which can be read as straight-up gospel. It’s a magnificent hymn, a song of hope and redemption, the kind of message Aretha and her audience love. It shot to number one on the R-and-B charts before going top-ten pop.”
After the sessions, Aretha traveled to California to fulfill several professional obligations. There were indications of her fear of flying, a phobia that would build over the next decade.
In September 1970, Jet reported on the cross-country train trip Aretha would be making with “warm friend Ken Cunningham.” The article spoke about her European tour, where “the demand for her appearance had been building to a deafening crescendo,” as well as her upcoming TV appearance. It also noted that she was taking the train from New York to Hollywood because of her trepidation about flying. “The slow trip will be kinda romantic,” said Aretha.
In October she recorded the This Is Tom Jones television variety show in Los Angeles and was brilliant. She appears healthy, vibrant, and happy. In the first sequence, she wears a glittery silver turban and, with ferocious confidence and subtle aplomb, tears up “Say a Little Prayer.” From then on, she shares duties with Tom, who is obviously inspired and at his blue-eyed soul-singing best. The second sequence has Aretha in a black-and-gold African headdress giving a delicious reading of Tom’s “It’s Not Unusual,” a further demonstration of her rare ability to turn the superficial into the profound. Together she, Tom, and a gang of go-go dancers rock through “See Saw” and find the beating heart of “Spirit in the Dark.” In the third sequence, seated at the piano—no headgear this time, just a perfectly coiffed Afro—Aretha sings “The Party’s Over” with exquisite restraint and unerring taste. Tom has some trouble making the switch from soul to straight-up jazz, but Aretha shows him the way.
“The show was wonderful,” said Ruth Bowen, “and I congratulated her on her success, but I couldn’t allow her to stay in California. She wanted to hang around and just bask in the sun. Aretha has a strong lazy streak. But I wasn’t about to cancel the New York date I had booked. Philharmonic Hall was sold out. I can’t tell you how many previous New York gigs she had canceled. I just couldn’t go through it again. But she kept putting off the return trip until there was no time to take the train. So I had Cecil, Erma, and Carolyn fly to LA and fly back with her to New York. That’s how Erma and Carolyn wound up singing with her that night.”
“Erma opened the show,” remembered Carolyn, “and broke it up with ‘Little Piece of My Heart.’ I followed and sang ‘Chain Reaction.’ We each had fifteen or twenty minutes, and we were grateful for the chance. We had helped Ree get through a couple of very difficult months and now she was helping us get the exposure we had both been seeking. She also had dancers and percussionists from Olatunji’s school. When she came out after intermission, there was a symphony orchestra, an eighteen-piece jazz band, and the Sweet Inspirations behind her. It was among her greatest performances. Not that many weeks earlier she’d been in the throes of a breakdown, yet here she was, commanding the stage and thrilling the audience. I realized that, in fact, the truest healing Aretha receives happens when she sings. That’s when she’s able to purge her demons, find her center, and connect with the creative power of a loving God.”
In November, Aretha and Wexler were back in the Atlantic studios in New York where she recorded two songs. The first, “Oh Me Oh My (I’m a Fool for You, Baby),” would be released on the flip side of the single “Rock Steady” a year later. The second, “Young, Gifted, and Black,” would wind up on her 1972 album of the same name.
“Wexler had me come in and play organ that day,” Billy Preston told me. “Naturally, I was honored. I’d known Aretha forever. We’d come up in church together. We were both students of James Cleveland and made in the same musical mold. I love this lady. I remember feeling the way I felt when I first got to play behind Ray Charles. The electrical charge was almost too strong to be contained. I also remember that she and Jerry Wexler were discussing whether she should sing ‘Young, Gifted, and Black.’ Wexler was trying to be diplomatic. He said that Nina Simone had not only written it but nailed it so strong that maybe Aretha should leave it alone. Wexler told Aretha the story of how Ray Charles had told him that he’d never sing ‘The Christmas Song (Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire)’ ’cause Nat Cole had nailed it so strong. While this discussion was going on, I kept quiet. I was just there as a sideman. But when Aretha turned to me and said, ‘What do you think, Billy?’ I had to say, ‘I think you’ll crush it, Ree. I think you’ll make them forget about Nina.’ And that’s just what she did.”
After the session, Aretha flew to Las Vegas, where, Jet reported, Sammy Davis Jr. had promised the International Hotel that if she did not show, he would perform in her place.
“Sammy was a client and a dear friend,” Ruth Bowen said. “He made this guarantee for Aretha as a favor to me. Sammy has had his share of emotional breakdowns so he’s especially sensitive to fragile artists. Besides, given the dozens of cancellations that had marred her history, this was the only way I got the International to book her for two weeks.”
In addressing rumors of a nervous breakdown, Aretha told Jet, “I was all fouled up.” The article goes on to say, “Today, apparently at ease with the world, she credits her triumph over her ‘hangups’ to a Detroit doctor and ‘mindreader’ who, she says, ‘straightened me out.’ When the subject gets around to her these days, she confides: ‘I’m together now. Everything’s groovy.’ And she adds, ‘I want to get into acting. And I’m not talking about acting in musicals. I’m talking about dramatic acting.’”
A month later, in its December 3 issue, Jet caught her in an unusually political mood.
“There was a period when, like many of us, she expressed a degree of militancy,” said Cecil. “We’d come from this highly charged political background and were raised by a father unafraid to speak his mind. And though it might not have been anything the mainstream wanted to hear, Aretha wasn’t about to hold back. Why should she?”
The Jet headline read: “Aretha Says She’ll Go Angela’s Bond If Permitted.” The article stated that Angela Davis, the twenty-six-year-old former UCLA philosophy instructor, was being held in New York without bond pending extradition to San Rafael, California, where she faced kidnapping and conspiracy indictments in connection with a courtroom escape attempt that took four lives. “My daddy says I don’t know what I’m doing,” Aretha told Jet. “Well, I respect him, of course, but I’m going to stick to my beliefs. Angela Davis must go free. Black people will be free… I know you got to disturb the peace when you can’t get no peace. Jail is hell to be in. I’m going to see her free if there is any justice in our courts, not because I believe in communism, but because she’s a Black woman and she wants freedom for Black people. I have the money; I got it from Black people—they’ve made me financially able to have it—and I want to use it in ways that will help our people.”
Two weeks later, Jet reported that Franklin and her family were forming a charitable foundation into which funds from “at least five concerts a year” would be funneled. Aretha said she wanted the money to be used primarily to help welfare mothers.
“I encouraged my sister’s political stances,” said Cecil. “I think they helped her. When she was politically engaged, she regained a stronger sense of herself. Political involvement took the concentration off herself and her personal problems. It got her out of herself. When her emotional fragility was at its greatest, I’d often give her an article about what was happening in politics—just to bring her back to earth. Some say that her ‘Spirit in the Dark’ was about sex. Some say it was about God. But there was also a powerful political spirit that was sweeping through the country in the early seventies. Aretha was part of that spirit. She contributed to it and, in many ways, gave it a voice.”