We all have our own ways of dealing with our depression, our mood swings, and our tough times,” said Erma shortly after Cecil’s death. “Aretha’s way is to give parties. Every year she throws herself a big birthday party. She’ll rent a ballroom in a swanky hotel and invite everybody who’s anybody in Detroit. The planning takes her mind off what’s bothering her. She takes it upon herself to get the entertainment, the caterers, the whole bit. She’ll spend weeks picking out her dress. If she’s on speaking terms with me, my kids, and our cousin Brenda, we’ll be invited and usually have a great time. Then during the year she has a number of smaller parties at her house. Some of those can be last-minute ideas on her part and don’t always come off so well. I think she throws them because she knows if she invites the press, she’ll get her picture in the papers. I don’t blame her for that. Stars need to remain highly visible.”
In the late eighties, photographer Paul Natkin was assigned by InStyle magazine to cover a Christmas party that Aretha was hosting at her Bloomfield Hills home. He was told that Aretha was doing the cooking herself and that the Detroit Pistons basketball team as well as the Temptations, the Motown singing group, would be on hand. When Natkin arrived, he saw two big catering trucks in the driveway. Aretha had changed her mind about cooking. It also turned out that the Pistons were in LA that night playing the Lakers, and the only entertainer was one of the lesser-known former Temptations, who sang to a karaoke machine. The biggest stars were a few local TV anchors. According to Natkin, Aretha spent the entire evening sitting in a chair, her purse on her lap, her hands on the purse, with a security guard standing directly behind her.
Still, there were extraordinarily happy moments for Aretha in the nineties. In a few years, the Democrats would be back in power, and invitations to the White House would be forthcoming. Unlike Ray Charles, who had unapologetically sung for Presidents Reagan and George H. Bush, Aretha, with her deep roots in the Democratic Party, declined such performances.
“At the start of the decade,” said her booking agent Dick Alen, “she was making anywhere from two to five million a year. She was still playing big theaters and could tour behind all her hits. The usual mix were, of course, all her Atlantic hits from the sixties and seventies and then her Arista hits—‘Freeway’ and ‘I Knew You Were Waiting’—from the eighties. She could have made three or four times that much had she flown. She wouldn’t play west of the Rockies. She didn’t want to drive that far, and a bus ride over the mountains made her uneasy. She continued to ignore her international markets—Europe, Asia, Latin America—where she could have earned a fortune. And of course, there were the ongoing cancellations, most of which went unexplained. Given all that, it’s a testimony to her staying power as an artist that she earned as much as she did.”
“In the early nineties she called me to discuss her new record,” said Arif Mardin. “I was always eager to work with Aretha and delighted to entertain whatever ideas she might have. We had a long and happy history together. I found her to be a positive person—the new album was always going to be her biggest—and I respected her determination to realize another top-ten hit. This time, though, I wasn’t sure she was on the right track. Her notion was to do all originals—an ‘Aretha Franklin sings Aretha Franklin.’ She sent me some songs, and several had some charm, but I’m afraid I didn’t hear any hits. In the most tactful terms possible, I told her what I knew Clive Davis had to be telling her—that it might be best to include songs by proven hit makers. There was silence on the other end of the phone. Then she thanked me for my time, and years passed before I heard from her again. Next year, when the album came out—the one with the unfortunate title What You See Is What You Sweat—I noted that Burt Bacharach had written and produced two of the songs; Pic Conley, a hot producer at that time, was responsible for another two; and of the ten or so Aretha originals she had sent me, only two were included. It was clear that Clive had prevailed.”
Clive also kept her on the charts, if just barely. One of the Bacharach songs, “Ever Changing Times,” with a shadow background vocal by Michael McDonald, crept into the top-twenty R&B listings. But neither it nor anything else on the album crossed over.
Oliver Leiber, who coproduced one of the tracks, “Mary Goes Round,” went to Detroit for the recording session.
“We were called in by Clive Davis,” said Oliver, “because my cowriter Elliot Wolff and I were the flavor of the month. We had both produced and written hits for Paula Abdul—Elliot did ‘Straight Up’ and ‘Cold Hearted’ and I did ‘The Way That You Love Me,’ ‘Forever Your Girl,’ and ‘Opposites Attract.’ So Elliot and I got together, turned out some demos, and sent them to Clive. My understanding was that he was basically telling Aretha what songs to sing. When he sent her our ‘Mary Goes Round,’ she had no objections, and, just like that, we were on our way. The other understanding, of course, was that working with Aretha meant doing so in her playground. Her playground was United Sound in Detroit, which was great because I knew that George Clinton had cut much of his Funkadelic stuff in that very studio. Elliot and I couldn’t have been any more excited.
“I wish I could say the same for Aretha. She wasn’t hostile but she certainly wasn’t warm. She lived up to her diva reputation—haughty and cold. From the get-go she made it plain that she was there to do a job and wanted it done quickly. As she blew through her vocals, a process that probably took a couple of hours, she chain-smoked Kool cigarettes. Even as she sang, smoke billowed out of her mouth. As far as the song itself went, her heart wasn’t in it. She seemed far more interested in the fried chicken that her assistant was cooking up in the kitchen. We got the notion that once that chicken was fried, our session was over. So we worked in a hurry.
“She had learned the melody and knew the groove and could certainly sing the thing down, but there were certain runs and little licks that were sung in the demo that both Elliot and I thought would add flair. Elliot made the suggestion in the mildest manner possible. ‘No, baby,’ she said, ‘it’s okay the way it is,’ and never bothered to try it our way. Her only suggestion—well, really her demand—was that we use her son Teddy on guitar. We plugged him in. He was fine, but what he played didn’t match the mood of the song and ultimately was not used.
“At the end of the day, the chicken was cooked and so were we. Even though we were listed as producers, we really only produced the instrumental track. We didn’t produce her vocals; we were merely there to record her vocals. I’m not sure anyone really produces an Aretha vocal. She has a strong notion of what she will and will not sing—and God help the poor soul who tries to convince her otherwise. We certainly felt the honor of working with the great Aretha Franklin. But she remained a distant character, an imperious queen.”
In the winter of 1990, press reports about the Mahalia Jackson fiasco began to appear. A Jet headline read “New York Magistrate Rules Aretha Should Pay $230,000 for Backing Out on Play.” Producer Ashton Spring was quoted as saying that “the show had been scheduled to open in Cleveland in July 1984, but never got off the ground because Ms. Franklin failed to appear at rehearsals for the musical.”
That summer, Aretha did not fail to appear at a program in Detroit honoring Nelson Mandela, who had been released from his South African prison in February.
Aretha stayed home for the remainder of the summer, with the exception of a notable concert at New York’s Radio City Music Hall.
In the New York Times, Jon Pareles wrote, “Ms. Franklin managed a few sublime, cascading vocal phrases… But saddled with schlock ballads and gussied up with an unnecessary orchestra—does ‘Respect’ really need violins?—she remains as frustrating as she is matchless.” He wrote that “Ever Changing Times” sounded like “a Whitney Houston reject.” Sitting in that cavernous auditorium, I had the opposite reaction. I leaped to my feet at the end of her stirring rendition of the song, one of the best of Bacharach and Carole Bayer Sager’s collaborations.
That same summer of 1990 marked a major tragedy for American music. On August 13, during a freak windstorm, Curtis Mayfield was struck by a light tower at an outdoor concert at Wingate Field in Brooklyn, leaving him paralyzed from the waist down.
“Aretha and I were close to Curtis—all the Franklins were—and the news was just awful,” said Erma. “For some time, he and Aretha had been talking about doing a new record together. When you think of Aretha’s greatest producers, only two of them were singers—Luther and Curtis. That’s why I think the material she sang under the auspices of those two artists has such a special flavor. I was hoping that Curtis, in spite of the terrible blow, might be able to sing again. It took several years, but my hope came true, and he and my sister did work together again.”
The new year began on a happy note. In January 1991, Wayne State University, in Detroit, gave Aretha an honorary doctorate degree.
“Not having graduated high school, this was a tremendous day for her,” said Erma. “Because Carolyn, Cecil, and I all had higher educations, Aretha suffered with a bit of a complex. She was just as smart as the rest of us, and she was always an avid reader and astute student of the cultural and political scene. She had no reason to feel intellectually inferior, but quitting school in your teens does something to your attitude. I think she was always trying to compensate for feeling less-than. That’s why this degree from Wayne State was right on time. It gave her confidence a boost.”
In March, Reverend James Cleveland died in Los Angeles. He was fifty-nine. Aretha did not make it to his funeral at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles but released a statement that said, “He had the single greatest influence on gospel music to this date… James was my earliest musical influence and musical mentor in my formative years.”
Two weeks later, she sang at the Detroit funeral of Anthony Riggs, who was murdered after returning home from the Persian Gulf War.
“My sister was always engaged in acts of kindness and charity that went unreported,” said Erma. “She and I would be watching the late news. There’d be a story about a woman who lost her home in a fire, and the next thing you know, Aretha was on the phone to the news station getting the woman’s number. The next day she’d send her a check for thirty thousand dollars.”
In June, she was back in her father’s church singing at the funeral of David Ruffin, dead at fifty. She spoke of David with the same admiration with which she spoke of Sam Cooke, Marvin Gaye, Smokey Robinson, Levi Stubbs, and Dennis Edwards, placing him in the highest category of soul singer.
“This was a lonely period for Aretha,” said Ruth Bowen. “Mentors and friends were dying all around her. Romantically, she and Willie Wilkerson were always off and on, but more off than on. She was definitely on the prowl for a man, something of a lifelong preoccupation of Aretha’s. Unlike other women, though, Aretha didn’t have to worry about letting the world know that she was in the market for a new man. All she had to do was call Jet, and they put the announcement on the cover.”
In fact, the August 19 cover story on Aretha declared that “Aretha Franklin, who says she’s ripe for romance, is wealthy, willing and waiting for Mr. Right who won’t ‘take me for granted.’ ‘I love men,’ she said, stressing she is interested in only one relationship at a time. ‘The kind of men I am talking about don’t have to come from the entertainment world. They don’t have to be celebrities, either. They just have to be men who are not intimidated by my success. I engage in girl talk with other celebrated women and they all agree that the intimidating factor keeps men from making romantic overtures.’”
Aretha went on to explicate the lyrics from a song she wrote for her upcoming album, What You See Is What You Sweat, called “You Can’t Take Me for Granted.”
“It’s a personal testimony, a song I wrote with someone in mind, a six foot bronze brother with multi-charms—but no names, please. The lyric is saying ‘Your picture’s in my locket but I’m not in your back pocket.’ So, yes, there’s definitely a story there.”
It’s not a story, though, that Aretha has ever shared with her public.
“There’s only one real story about Aretha and men after she and Glynn divorced, and that’s Willie Wilkerson,” said Ruth Bowen. “Willie proved to be a good and loyal friend to the lady. He became the escort she could count on. All her other fantasy love affairs never amounted to anything.”
“Because Willie’s a secure guy,” said Erma, “he didn’t mind if Aretha went off on her side trips. He didn’t care what she said in the press. It wasn’t that Aretha was his only lady friend. But because I believe he truly loves her and didn’t have an image to maintain, he allowed her to give the public whatever impression she wanted to give. He couldn’t have cared less, and I’m not sure the public cared either. They certainly didn’t care as much as Aretha thought they did.”
The public didn’t seem to care much for What You See Is What You Sweat—it was her weakest-selling album for Arista. Even her duet with Luther Vandross, “Doctor’s Orders,” their final collaboration, failed to make a dent in the marketplace.
“By then I had lost track of all the times Aretha had promised never to speak to me again,” said Luther. “She was always imagining insults that I had inflicted on her. If I came to perform in Detroit, she would demand tickets for twenty-four of her best friends, and if I provided twelve, I was suddenly in the doghouse. It was a draining friendship, to say the least. In the end, though, I couldn’t stay mad at Aretha because she is, after all, Aretha. So when she asked for another ‘Jump to It’–style jam, ‘Doctor’s Orders’ was what I came up with. It isn’t among the favorite things I’ve done. I consider it trifling. And of course it wasn’t helped by the fact that Aretha refused to leave Detroit to let me produce her vocal where I wanted to produce it—in a studio in LA or New York, where I could do the best job. Her voice was beginning to show signs of age. All voices fray. Recording older voices requires extra-special care. With Aretha, though, that care can’t be applied because she won’t recognize that there’s been even the slightest bit of deterioration.”
In 1991, the careers of Aretha and Luther were moving in different directions. His latest album, Power of Love, maintained his bestselling status, while Aretha hadn’t enjoyed a number-one hit since she had recorded with George Michael, five years before.
When she played Radio City again in September, New York Times critic Stephen Holden wrote, “The singer has long aspired to a Las Vegas style of showmanship that seriously undermines what she does best, which is to perform unadorned, gospel-flavored pop with the passion and spontaneity of a church singer. Echoes of that passion invariably find their way onto her records, even a scattershot concoction like her newest album, ‘What You See Is What You Sweat.’”
Ever mindful of maintaining a high public profile, in November Aretha appeared on the TV sitcom Murphy Brown, looking considerably heavier than she did in the photos accompanying her current album. At the piano, she sang “Natural Woman” while Candice Bergen sang the background parts.
Aretha’s tradition of throwing herself birthday parties continued in March 1992, when she turned fifty. In a Detroit hotel ballroom, the Duke Ellington Orchestra, led by Duke’s son Mercer, entertained. Among the two hundred guests were members of the Detroit Pistons, several local broadcasters, and her older half brother Vaughn.
“Aretha and I became much closer after Cecil died,” said Vaughn. “I’d come to Detroit for certain parties and was always grateful to be included. Aretha might get blue sometimes, but these social occasions never failed to perk her up. She also began calling me to help her arrange her travel and keep her business affairs in order. The calls became more frequent in the nineties when she was having some problems with the IRS. I had retired from a long military career in 1974, when I was forty. Afterwards I had lived in the South, where I worked for the postal service. When Aretha asked me to help her I was already in my sixties and contemplating a calm retirement. Show business held no appeal for me. At the same time, because of the great love I had for the mother that Aretha and I shared, I saw my duty. Because I’m basically a trained soldier used to regimentation, it wasn’t easy. The soldier’s life is about discipline. The artist’s life is about mood. Mood determines whether you’re going to play a concert or cancel it. Mood determines whether you’re going to stick to your recording schedule or ignore it. This was a new world for me, with new rules. I had to learn to bend with the breeze and go with the flow. This was not my style, and for many years I found myself in an uncomfortable position. I found it unpleasant to be put in a position where I had to apologize for Aretha’s mercurial moods. The money part was also not easily understood. My sister made a great deal but always needed a great deal more. I understood her relationship to money when I noticed that when she left her dressing room for the stage, she always took her purse with her. That purse stayed with her onstage for as long as she sang. She carried the cash to pay those who worked for her. I tried to get her to do this by check so she could have a receipt. But there were no receipts. She paid cash on the barrelhead.”
“Nearly every Aretha gig that I booked,” said Dick Alen of the William Morris Agency, “required that of her total fee, she had to have twenty-five thousand in cash before she went onstage. That was the money she used to make her payroll. She deducted no taxes and made no records. I’d beg her to implement some system of documentation, but she refused. I knew that eventually there’d be hell to pay from the IRS.”
“For all the money complications,” said Vaughn, “her mood changed the minute that Bill Clinton came on the scene. It was more than the fact that, like us, he was a Democrat. He was also a music man, a saxophonist himself, and someone who loved rhythm and blues. Aretha figured she’d be hearing from him in no time. And she did. She worked for [his campaign], and once he was elected, he never forgot her. He put her back on that throne. He helped keep her in the newspapers. He gave her the props she deserved.”
In the summer of 1992, fifty-year-old Aretha Franklin sang the national anthem at the Democratic National Convention that nominated Bill Clinton. That same summer, while her Arista album sales sagged, Amazing Grace, cut on Atlantic twenty-one years earlier, was certified double platinum.
“I remember calling her with that wonderful news,” said Jerry Wexler. “I knew that she was increasingly having a hard time selling records and that piece of news would warm her heart. Of course she was happy. We reminisced for a while and I was feeling good vibes coming my way. That gave me the courage to suggest that maybe we should go back in the studio and cut a classic album, either all blues or all jazz, something for the ages. That suggestion killed our conversation. ‘Oh, no,’ she said, ‘Clive has Babyface and L. A. Reid writing for me. You know who they are, don’t you, Jerry?’ Of course I knew. They’d just done Whitney’s ‘I’m Your Baby Tonight.’ But when, in the most diplomatic way possible, I asked Aretha whether she thought their material might be a bit young for her, she took great offense. That set off another long period of silence when, in her view, I became persona non grata.”
That summer she traveled to New York to perform at the Friars Club roast of Clive Davis at the Waldorf Astoria. Among the performers were Dionne Warwick, Kenny G, and Barry Manilow. Aretha insisted that she go last. Then came the shocker: She came out wearing a tutu and started twirling about with a troupe from the City Center Ballet Company.
“When she told me what she was going to do,” said Ruth Bowen, “I couldn’t believe it. I wanted to tell her that she’d look ridiculous—and she did. But it was another one of those times when Aretha’s sense of reality was off. In her mind, she looked graceful and demure. But to the world, she looked like a dancing hippo. And the thing that killed me most was her reasoning for doing it. She said it was out of respect for Clive!”
In The Soundtrack of My Life, Davis’s autobiography, he wrote, diplomatically, “She went through pirouettes and dancing with very impressive agility.”
“Mr. Davis was the one man she seemed to respect above all others,” said Vaughn. “She felt that because he had knowledge of and access to all the current hit writers and hit producers, she couldn’t afford to alienate him. At the same time, I often heard her tell him that she was also going to record her own compositions. She didn’t need his approval for that. That was a given.”
“Including songs she had written on each album was a way to guarantee extra income,” said Dick Alen. “You could hardly blame her for that.”
“I think if she had focused more or been open to collaborate more, Aretha might have added to that short list of hit songs that she wrote,” said Billy Preston. “But if I ask the average Aretha fan to name one song she wrote after leaving Atlantic in the seventies, I’ll get a blank stare. Same with Ray Charles. What did he write after ‘What’d I Say’? You can’t tell me because that was his last self-penned hit.”
“I wouldn’t call my sister lazy,” said Vaughn, “because every year she does travel and play a certain amount of dates. But when she’s home she can lack a certain discipline. Coming out of the military, discipline is my second nature. With Aretha, though, she has to fight the tendency to just hang around the house for weeks at a time, sitting on the couch and doing nothing but watching TV and eating. A couple of times I tried to say something about how those habits can be debilitating, but she bit my head off—so I never opened my mouth again.”
The idea of singing a duet with the great Teddy Pendergrass, then in a wheelchair, was enough to get Aretha off the couch and onto the stage at the Mann Music Center in Philadelphia.
For decades Erma Franklin had lived with the notion that her musical gifts were largely underappreciated. So it was particularly cheering when, in November of 1992, her career was briefly revived: her version of “Piece of My Heart,” featured in a new European commercial for Levi’s jeans, was released in England. It sold 100,000 in the UK alone and was played on the Continent as well. Due to its widespread popularity, Erma was asked to shoot a video.
“I loved it all,” she told me, “and was excited to be back in the public eye—even if the public was Great Britain rather than America. The English have such a deep appreciation of our music that I couldn’t help but be flattered by the attention. I received a couple of lucrative offers to appear in London. They requested that Aretha and I do a concert together. Millions were being offered. I had long ago accepted and empathized with my sister’s fear of flying and told the promoters that she would never agree. The promoters countered with a half dozen first-class tickets on a luxury liner. For a while Aretha considered it but never made the commitment. Then the deadline passed and so did the opportunity. I had no illusions that it would have resuscitated my long-dormant public profile. I just thought it would have been fun. Basically, though, I continued to derive great satisfaction from my work at Boysville, then the largest child-care agency in Michigan. To see the rehabilitation of children who had been neglected, delinquent, and often abused was a beautiful thing. At this point in my life, even if I could have had a recording or concert career, I’m not sure I would have chosen to do so. I was so grateful to God that I had survived the crazy emotions of an earlier life in show business and continued to pray that my sister could keep surviving as well.”
The survival of Aretha’s career, both artistically and commercially, was indeed nothing short of remarkable. Just when you suspected that she was on an irreversible downward slide, she seemed to find a way to get back up. Given her status as one of the great singers of the century, opportunities came her way. When filmmaker Spike Lee sought a grand conclusion to his 1992 film Malcolm X, he turned to Aretha. Aretha reached out to Arif Mardin, and his arrangement of Donny Hathaway’s “Someday We’ll All Be Free” put her back in the same down-home churchy mode of Amazing Grace, her classic gospel album. As she sang the song over the credits of Spike Lee’s film, the irony was inescapable: the story of one of Islam’s most famous converts is set to a Christian-sounding anthem.
As her vocal interpretations continued to soar, her financial situation hit rock bottom. At the end of the year, the IRS put a $225,000 tax lien on Aretha’s home in Bloomfield Hills due to a dispute over her 1991 taxes. “While she hasn’t been accused of a crime,” wrote Jet, “the lien represents the amount the legendary singer would have to pay the government if she sold the property.”
“Actually the IRS might have been doing us a favor by initiating those actions,” said Vaughn, “because, in response, Aretha would go to work. If she were inactive a long period of time, only something scary like a letter from the government would get her going. That made her realize that, win or lose, she needed to be out there earning money. I wasn’t privy to the details about her tax problems, and maybe she was being unfairly singled out, but I do know that weeks after she got the IRS bill, she was on the phone with Ruth Bowen or Dick Alen looking for some bookings.”
For all her money problems, Aretha did not hesitate to work for free if it involved honoring an artist she respected. In December, for example, she appeared at the Kennedy Center Honors in tribute to jazz vibraphonist Lionel Hampton.
“I have a rule about supporting Republicans,” Aretha explained, “and Lionel was a lifelong Republican. But when it came to Hamp, I broke my rule, because my dad loved him. We all did. Hamp had worshipped at New Bethel, and during a concert in Detroit, where Daddy had taken me and Erma, Hamp asked us onstage to do a little dance while he played behind us. Outside of church, that was probably my first time on a public stage. So I had to break party lines and honor the great Lionel Hampton and forgive the fact that he voted for the wrong party.”
A month later, Aretha was back with the right party, performing at several of Bill Clinton’s inaugural events.
“I saw how my sister is in her element when she appears at these galas with presidents and princes,” said Vaughn. “She really does become a queen and relates to them on an equal level. It was fascinating to see these foreign dignitaries responding to her like she was just as important and impressive as them. That’s when I first understood that Aretha is genuine royalty.”
Her singing in the nation’s capital garnered positive reviews, but her wardrobe did not. Animal rights activists complained about her full-length Russian sable coat.
Time magazine titled the article “Respect? Fur-get It.” Reportedly, PETA sympathizers Alec Baldwin and Chrissie Hynde were outraged that Aretha had worn fur. A small furor followed.
“Aretha heard about the controversy and asked me to find the articles criticizing her,” said Vaughn. “I didn’t want to do it. You know what the queen does when the messenger brings [bad] news. I pretended like I couldn’t find the clippings but she wouldn’t accept the explanation. So I did what was asked of me. Fortunately, she didn’t take it out on me—but she did carry on for a good thirty minutes about who the hell are they to criticize what she wears. She wanted to know how many cows were slaughtered to make their leather shoes and what about the diamonds they wore—didn’t they come from those South African mines where workers were treated like slaves? She was livid.”
Aretha wrote a brief defense in Vanity Fair. “We’re all using a lot of leather with respect to our shoes and handbags and things like that, so come on, let’s be for real.”
In April of 1993, her public relations were lifted somewhat by her Fox television special Aretha Franklin: Duets. The concert, a benefit for the Gay Men’s Health Crisis, took place at New York City’s Nederlander Theater. Bonnie Raitt, Elton John, Rod Stewart, and Gloria Estefan performed. Dustin Hoffman and Robert De Niro gave spoken tributes. Other than a warm and winsome duet with Smokey Robinson on his hit song “Just to See Her,” I found it a dull and schmaltzy show-business affair.
Jon Pareles in the New York Times saw it differently: “Perhaps by adding competition, ‘Duets’ brought out Ms. Franklin’s improvisational genius. She can summon the agility of jazz, the pain of the blues, the sultriness of pop and the fervor of gospel, and while her voice is smokier now than it was in her 1960s heyday, she has all the range she needs.”
In Vanity Fair, James T. Jones IV, describing the unfortunate dance sequence in which the singer’s voluminous breasts were on the very edge of full exposure, wrote, “Others were left speechless by a surreal ballet sequence in which Aretha, in a tutu, attempted pirouettes.”
The next morning, nationally syndicated columnist Liz Smith went on the attack, writing, “She [Aretha] must know she’s too bosomy to wear such clothing, but clearly she just doesn’t care what we think, and that attitude is what separates mere stars from true divas.”
Deeply wounded, Aretha fired back in a statement to Smith that she issued to the press: “How dare you be so presumptuous as to presume you could know my attitude with respect to anything other than music… Obviously I have enough of what it takes to wear a bustier and I haven’t had any complaints; I’m sure if you could you would… When you get to be a noted and respected fashion editor please let us all know.”
“Like all women, Aretha is highly sensitive to insensitive criticism,” said Erma. “Also like many women, when she looks in the mirror, she sees what she wants to see. She wants to see someone who’s a lot thinner than she is, and she wants to see someone—herself thirty years ago—who had a dream of being a ballet dancer. She also had a dream of being an opera singer. Aretha’s not one to give up dreams, and for that I have to admire her. We don’t always make the best choices, but when we stop dreaming, all those choices go away.”
Emboldened by her Liz Smith counterattack, Aretha renewed her vow to conquer her fear of flying. She was actually on the verge of boarding a plane for the short flight from Toronto to Detroit when, at the last minute, she panicked and chartered a bus to drive her home.
“I really thought that this time Ree was going to do it,” said Erma. “She was so determined. And, God bless her, she really tried, but fear got the best of her. My opinion is that she never got to the bottom of that fear. It’s all about control. Aretha needs to feel in control. Riding on her bus, she can tell the driver to go faster or slow down. She can tell him to change routes or to pull over at a rest stop. On the plane she feels completely out of control—and that’s the one feeling she can’t tolerate.”
Aretha felt that she could exert control over one vitally important thing—her career. Having influenced the latest crop of hit makers, she saw no reason why she herself couldn’t realize more commercial success.
The fall of 1993 marked her thirteenth year at Arista, which was roughly the same amount of time she had spent at Atlantic. Going back to her signing at Columbia, thirty-three years earlier, the goal had never changed: cut a hit. At age fifty-one, she was convinced that she could be as popular as hot stars like Madonna, Janet Jackson, Mariah Carey, and Paula Abdul.
“Aretha used to say that it’s all about getting the right track and the right producer,” said Erma. “She’d hear Janet Jackson do that ‘Rhythm Nation’ or Madonna do her ‘Vogue’ and say, ‘Hey, I invented this rhythm nation. I started this vogue. If I had gotten those songs, I could have turned them into even bigger hits.’ It was my sister’s competitive side that sustained her and gave her the strength to get back out there and trade blows with this new young crop. The only problem was this concept they called imaging. After MTV, you had to have videos—and your look was almost as important as your song. Tina Turner excelled at imaging because, even though she’s actually a couple of years older than Aretha, Tina stayed in shape. Aretha didn’t, and she paid the price.”
“My sister told me she was just too tired to cut an entire new album,” said Vaughn. “But she was willing to record three new singles that would be part of a greatest-hits package.”
Those singles and their producers were, as usual, picked by Clive Davis. His first choice was a production group called the C + C Music Factory. In 1990, its members had released an album of their own, Gonna Make You Sweat, which sold over five million copies and contained four singles that got to number one on the dance charts, including the title cut, “Gonna Make You Sweat (Everybody Dance Now),” and “Things That Make You Go Hmmm.” The style was an unapologetic and infectious throwback to straight-up seventies disco. Despite her previous lamentations about the restrictions of disco, Aretha went with Clive’s recommendation and put her vocals atop a C + C dance track called “A Deeper Love.” Aretha gave it a shot, singing with what feels like determined—as opposed to natural—effort. The single was played in the clubs but didn’t make a dent on the charts. It came and went quickly.
She had a far more comfortable rapport with the team of Babyface, L. A. Reid, and Daryl Simmons, who wrote in the kicked-back R&B groove that echoed old-school masters Marvin Gaye and Curtis Mayfield.
“Willing to Forgive,” a Babyface/Simmons song, allowed Aretha room to breathe and time to tell the story. It lopes along with the kind of sassy strut that’s far more suitable to Aretha’s persona than the frantic dance demands of “A Deeper Love.” The same is true of “Honey,” a sultry ballad that Aretha could have sung in the sixties. “Willing to Forgive” proved popular, a top-five R&B hit.
With these three new songs attached to Aretha’s first greatest-hits package, the album wound up going platinum, a testimony to the strength of her previous hits on the label—from “Jump to It” to “Freeway of Love” to “I Knew You Were Waiting (for Me)”—and to Clive Davis’s phenomenal ability to keep an aging classic artist current.
“If you put Aretha’s Atlantic material next to her Arista stuff, there’s no comparison,” said Jerry Wexler. “Artistically, Atlantic wins, hands down. But if you count up the money we made with Aretha as opposed to Clive, Clive is the clear winner. What makes his victory even more remarkable is the fact that he had to market her when she was clearly past her prime. And yet he still found a way to present and package her in products that sold big-time. Incredible.”
“I’ll go to my grave longing for the great Aretha Franklin albums she could have made,” said Carmen McRae, “instead of the schlock she kept turning out. I remember talking to Shirley Horn about this very thing. Sarah Vaughan had just died and I was recording a tribute to her. Shirley, a great jazz singer herself, was playing piano. ‘You know who should really be doing this tribute to Sarah, Shirley?’ I asked. ‘You’re thinking of Aretha, aren’t you?’ said Shirley. I was. ‘Well, forget about it, Carmen, because she’ll be chasing after hit songs long after you and I are dead and gone.’ ‘Well, ain’t that a shame,’ I said. ‘Not really,’ said Shirley, ‘not if she finds something as good as “Dr. Feelgood.” ’”
Aretha also participated in what some considered a less than stellar marketing trend meant to keep older singers on the charts—a full duets album. This time, the artist was seventy-eight-year-old Frank Sinatra. The first of his two Duets albums was a crafty exercise in musical salesmanship. It was an enormous success—the only Sinatra album to sell over three million copies—but artistically, it was nothing more than a curiosity. His pairing with Aretha, “What Now My Love,” serves as a case in point.
They’re singing in different studios at different times and, unsurprisingly, sometimes sound like they’re singing different songs. After Aretha’s grandiose introduction, the band breaks into a straight-ahead jazz groove with Aretha shadowing Sinatra. The shadow doesn’t match the master, and both masters—Aretha and Frank—sound relieved when the song is finally sung.
Phil Ramone, the record’s producer, saw the pairing as a triumph.
“I took the completed track to Detroit,” he told me. “Frank’s vocal was already on there, and Aretha was excited about singing the song with Sinatra. She got to the studio early and was completely prepared. She knew that I had worked with Frank many times before and wanted me to know how much she admired his artistry. ‘Why don’t you tell him?’ I said. ‘How?’ she asked. ‘Before you start singing, just put a message on tape.’ She hesitated briefly and then did just that, openly and sincerely telling Frank how much he meant to her and how much he had taught her about phrasing, intonation, and dynamics. Of course we didn’t include it on the record itself, but Frank got to hear Aretha’s beautiful spoken tribute. Then we went to work on her vocals. She already had all her ideas mapped out, and, needless to say, they were brilliant.”
In 1994, Aretha returned to form and classic rhythm and blues by participating in the album A Tribute to Curtis Mayfield. She hired her longtime associate Arif Mardin to arrange and produce Mayfield’s magnificent “The Makings of You.”
“She wanted me to leave lots of space at the end for a long vamp,” said Mardin. “Because she so deeply admired Curtis’s genius for infusing R-and-B motifs with jazz flavoring and jazz voicings, she wanted to conclude her interpretation with a sequence of scat singing. Aretha is justifiably celebrated for the fusing of gospel and R-and-B, but I think her scatting has been overlooked. To my mind, she’s the first and best singer to execute what I call soul scatting. That’s where you hear her uncanny ability to improvise over the chord changes as a jazz musician but one rooted in the great soul blues tradition of Sam Cooke and Little Willie John.”
The recording that appeared on the album—along with contributions by, among others, Steve Winwood, Bruce Springsteen, Lenny Kravitz, Whitney Houston, and Eric Clapton—is memorable for Aretha’s relaxed approach. Her rapport with Curtis’s material, so evident in Sparkle, is as strong as ever. But it is her remarkable appearance on Donnie Simpson’s Video Soul television program that demands repeated viewing on YouTube.
Simpson traveled to her home in Detroit, where he sat beside her. Aretha was at the grand piano. When he begged her to sing “The Makings of You,” she wasn’t sure whether she knew the chords. She asked him to sing the first few notes. That was all she needed. After a few seconds spent searching for the right voicing, she found the song on piano and, accompanying herself, gave the definitive reading. The casualness of the moment made it that much more moving. Soaring high and moaning low, she located the sweet spot that defines Curtis’s genius for merging the optimism of divine faith with the poignancy of earthy love. In her divine earthiness, Aretha was the perfect instrument of Curtis’s song.
“I don’t care what they say about Aretha,” said Billy Preston. “She can be hiding out in her house in Detroit for years. She can go decades without taking a plane or flying off to Europe. She can cancel half her gigs and infuriate every producer and promoter in the country. She can sing all kinds of jive-ass songs that are beneath her. She can go into her diva act and turn off the world. But on any given night, when that lady sits down at the piano and gets her body and soul all over some righteous song, she’ll scare the shit out of you. And you’ll know—you’ll swear—that she’s still the best fuckin’ singer this fucked-up country has ever produced.”