Respect: The Life of Aretha Franklin (25 page)

Aretha backed up Wexler, as indicated by a follow-up report in
Jet
on May 27: “Aretha Denies Being Told Not to Perform to Aid Angela Davis: Soul Queen Aretha Franklin told
Jet
that she is angry over reports that officials at Atlantic Records (her label) had stymied her plans to stage a concert for Angela Davis.” Aretha insisted that neither “Atlantic nor anyone else” dictated what she could or could not do. She explained that the cancellation was due to confusion over dates for the proposed concert at UCLA.

“Aretha was always going off and scheduling benefits without checking with me,” said Ruth Bowen. “She drove both Cecil and myself absolutely crazy by willy-nilly arranging charity events. Her intentions were good. She has a big heart and a passion for genuine altruism, but when it comes to logistics, she’s not home. Supposedly she was committed to leaving the organizational piece of her professional life to her brother and me, but at least once a month I’d get a call from the head of some political or charitable organization telling me that Aretha had agreed to perform for free. Inevitably Aretha chose a date when I already booked her elsewhere. Massive confusion would result. I’d be left to clean up the mess. I usually did—but not always. There are some promoters as well as heads of nonprofit charities who will go to their graves furious at me.”

That summer she joined Stevie Wonder, who had just turned twenty-one and released his first self-produced album,
Where I’m Coming From,
at a benefit charity at Fisk University in Nashville. Aretha had told Stevie how much she liked the hit song he had written for the Spinners, “It’s a Shame,” and she wondered when he’d write a song for her. He told her that he already had. Aretha wouldn’t record the song—“Until You Come Back to Me (That’s What I’m Gonna Do)”—for another two years.

In May she played the Apollo, where, according to
Billboard,
she gave a stirring performance despite her tendency to cheapen her concerts with cheesy effects. Reviewer Ian Dove wrote, “ ‘She’s home’ ran the marquee billing. Aretha at the Apollo—the natural woman in a natural setting. There it was, the cohesion and knitting together of singer and audience and song… Aretha had King Curtis’ big band, her own chorus and it was more than enough without some attempt to dress up the evening with sets, curtains that dropped and rose throughout, and dancers.”

“Aretha thought she had the capacity to arrange her shows in terms of dancers and props,” said Ruth Bowen. “I’d argue with her that she needed help. But she had little patience with my arguments. So I turned the matter over to Cecil.”

“I stopped arguing with Ree about her shows,” said Cecil. “It wasn’t worth it. People came to hear her sing. If she overdid the stage settings, well, no one really cared. Same thing is true of the elaborate gowns she began wearing in the early seventies. Some fans complained they were over the top and didn’t reflect a sense of refined taste. Well, Aretha had her own taste in clothes, refined or not. Far as I was concerned, it was her taste in music that brought out the crowds. Wasn’t the stage lighting, wasn’t her hats or her plumage, it was her voice that gave the thrills and had ’em shouting for more—her voice and nothing else.”

Her voice was still in great demand in Europe when she returned in June. Her performance in Montreux, Switzerland, was a triumph.

“This was Aretha in her absolute glory,” Montreux Jazz Festival founder and director Claude Nobs told me. “It was hell trying to arrange the date. She must have canceled four times. But I was determined. I’d come back to her and beg. Then she’d make another demand—a bigger dressing room, an extra hotel suite—and I’d cave every time. I sent her flowers, candies, and chocolates. She said it was the chocolates that won over her heart. She agreed to come! I was afraid she’d arrive with that terrible orchestra she had used before in Europe. When I learned that she’d be using King Curtis and the Kingpins, I wept with joy. Cornell Dupree was on guitar. We treated her like royalty and she was so grateful she asked did I have any favors she might grant me? Yes, I did. ‘Play piano, Aretha. Please play piano as much and as often as you like. I’ll have the world’s finest Steinway grand onstage just for you. Play it. Stay on it. Do me the favor of playing piano all night long! You see, Queen Aretha, I think you’re the funkiest piano player out there. I adore your singing, but I adore your piano playing just as much!’ She laughed and said that yes, she would play. And she did. If you look at the set, which I videotaped, it’s unusually keyboard heavy. It’s splendid. Her ‘Dr. Feelgood’ and ‘Spirit in the Dark’ are masterful. This happened when the festival was celebrating its sixth year. We had imported everyone from Bill Evans to Duke Ellington to Carlos Santana. But Aretha was the highlight.”

In Italy, though, she ran into trouble.
Jet
told the story in its July 15 issue: “Soul Queen Fumes Over Treatment by Italian Cops.” Angry about an incident at the airport in Rome, Aretha vowed to call a conference of black men who would start, in her words, “to deal with how the Black woman specifically and Black people in general are treated around the world.”

“I’m going to get Muhammad Ali, the Reverend Jesse Jackson, Huey Newton, Cong. Charles Diggs and we are going to have ourselves a conference and come up with a plan,” said Aretha after she described being “manhandled” by Roman law enforcement officers for no apparent reason. After a scuffle with the police,
Aretha and two of her sons—Clarence and Eddie—were interrogated for four hours before being released. “The only reason I can think of why they did this,” she added, “was because I had to cancel my last concert in Rome but I played a series of nine one nighters and I was tired.”

The next brouhaha erupted over South Africa. Ruth Bowen was in the middle of the controversy, doing her best to protect her client. In its July 29 issue,
Jet
reported that Aretha had canceled her upcoming trip to South Africa. Ruth Bowen told the magazine that the singer would reschedule the tour, despite criticisms from the American Committee on Africa, Chicago chapter. The ACA had rebuked Aretha for agreeing to play in Soweto. Bowen claimed, though, that the postponement of the tour had nothing to do with those criticisms. “We have other dates in the USA to fulfill first,” she said. “We are not politicians. That committee, which is headed by a white man, called me. I told them that I am black and explain to me why a black entertainer can’t entertain black people. We are going to entertain blacks only. They want it and that’s what we are going over there to do. I am opposed to black artists going over there to entertain black audiences, then white audiences. I would shoot any of my acts that did it. But we are not going to deny our black brothers over there from seeing our acts.”

“The trip never happened,” said Cecil. “It got mired down in politics and confusion. We were hammered by both sides—left and right—and for no reason whatsoever. The left could have no beef with Aretha. The Franklins have always been a freedom-loving family with absolutely no tolerance for racial bigotry of any kind. Aretha would never have anything to do with a racist regime in any country. Our mission in South Africa was to point out the moral bankruptcy of apartheid, not endorse it. The right could not possibly claim that we had agreed to entertain all-white audiences, because nothing could be further from the truth. In the end, extremists on both sides polluted the waters, and South Africa was deprived of the chance to see one of their queens.”

A tragedy befell the R&B world on August 13, 1971. Aretha’s musical director King Curtis was murdered on the streets of New York City.

“When I got the call, I was dumbfounded,” said Wexler. “Couldn’t speak. Couldn’t move. Didn’t know what to do. Didn’t know how to process it because it came from out of nowhere. King was going home to the apartment building where he lived, on West Sixty-Eighth Street. King was at the top of his game—a healthy man, a vibrant man, a fabulous artist, a great guy. A couple of junkies were hanging out on the steps, shooting up and acting crazy. King told them to move on. They told King to get fucked. King made a move, but one of the junkies got to him first, stabbing him with a blade. The knife went through his heart. His life was over.”

“It was a devastating loss,” said Cecil. “King Curtis had proven to be the best conductor Ree had ever known. He was fast to pick up her cues and keys. He was a dynamite musician himself, both in the studio and onstage. He gave her that snap that every great rhythm singer needs.

“I’ll never forget the funeral. My father flew in from Detroit to officiate. Jesse Jackson spoke. Everyone was there—from Brook Benton to the Isley Brothers to Stevie Wonder to Dizzy Gillespie. Curtis’s band, the Kingpins, played ‘Soul Serenade.’ When Aretha sang ‘Never Grow Old,’ everyone lost it.

“The fact that King was killed in cold blood made it that more shocking and tragic. Like so many people, Aretha had a fear of sudden violence, and Curtis’s death added to that fear a hundredfold.”

Bernard Purdie, the great drummer who had been recording and touring with Aretha for years, took over King’s job.

“He was our leader,” Purdie told me, “and it was a sad, sad time. And the strange part is that Aretha didn’t even want his name mentioned. It was like she couldn’t take the sadness. If someone happened to say something about King, she went into her shell. I
understood. She couldn’t handle it. When Aretha was around, it was better to act like it had never happened.”

In the summer of 1971, Aretha’s take on “Spanish Harlem,” written by Jerry Leiber and Phil Spector, shot up the charts and proved to be one of her biggest smashes, outselling Ben E. King’s original version recorded ten years earlier. At the same time, Atlantic scored another hit, the Donny Hathaway/Roberta Flack cover of Carole King’s “You’ve Got a Friend,” a song Aretha would sing five months later in a radically different context.

One of Aretha’s most vivid memories of this summer was Freda Payne’s “Bring the Boys Home,” a Vietnam protest song that Aretha told Wexler she would have gladly recorded had it been brought to her first. (The songwriting/production team, Motown’s Holland-Dozier-Holland, had sued Berry Gordy, left Motown, and signed Payne to its own label, Invictus.)

The warm months in the city were not without diversion.
Jet
reported that Aretha dropped by the Roman Pub in the Hilton Hotel to hear jazz/gospel/cabaret singer-pianist Emme Kemp, an artist she had long admired. Aretha stayed for only a tune or two, then left a bottle of champagne for Emme with a note that said, “After a day’s shopping, my feet hurt, stopped in for a delightful rest, thanks so much for the lift. Your sister in soul, Aretha.”

Returning to concerts, she played Madison Square Garden in October. In the
New York Times,
Don Heckman wrote, “The feeling Miss Franklin radiates to her listeners, the feeling that makes virtually every muscle in one’s body vibrate with an independent life of its own, was omnipresent.”

The arrival of winter saw another Franklin song soar to the top—“Rock Steady.” In November, she returned to Madison Square Garden to headline a tribute concert for her father. The audience included Coretta Scott King, Jesse Jackson, Ralph Abernathy, and Stevie Wonder.

Ever since the
Time
cover story in 1968 exposed her troubled
relationship with Ted White and detailed her dark side, Aretha had scrupulously avoided in-depth interviews. But in the winter of 1970, she began to soften. She agreed, for example, to do
The David Frost Show.
At the end of the awkward interview, she was briefly joined by her dad before going to the piano and singing “Precious Lord.”

“That show was my coup,” said Ruth Bowen, “and it almost blew up in my face. Frost wanted it but Aretha was reluctant. So I arranged for the show to do a pre-interview with Aretha in my office. If she didn’t like the way it went, she could pull the plug. I’m glad to say that it went beautifully. Aretha was charming and had lots to say about everything. The questions were respectful, and her answers were right on point. The topics weren’t too personal, but personal enough for Aretha to display her confidence. At the same time, she and Ken were doing great, and she was happy to report on her romantic bliss. She agreed to do the show. At the actual taping, though, another Aretha showed up. This was timid-little-girl Aretha, the shyer-than-shy Aretha, the Aretha who would rather hide in the corner than be interviewed on TV. She sat there frozen. When Frost asked his questions, she gave one-word answers. She wouldn’t elaborate on anything. In the middle of the taping, she said, ‘Excuse me,’ got up, walked to her dressing room to get a cigarette, and came back on set smoking. Frost was stunned. He finally got her to open up a little, but not much. When Aretha decides to close down, the door stays shut.”

“As my career in child care developed,” Erma told me, “I worked with many psychologists and learned a great deal about mental health. I finally had a way of understanding Aretha’s volatile personality. I knew she was often depressed, and I knew that she had used drinking as an antidepressant. When she was drinking much less—and later in the seventies, when she stopped drinking altogether—her depression emerged unexpectedly. In between there were moods of hyperactivity when, in a manic state, she’d switch into overdrive. This is when she’d start planning to take over the world. She was going to buy her own restaurant. She and
Ken were going to open their own clothing store in Harlem and call it Do It to Me. She was going to fire Ruth Bowen and open her own booking agency. But none of these grandiose plans ever happened.”

In
Ebony
’s cover story on her that December—“Aretha: A Close-Up Look at Sister Superstar”—she mentions the record label and booking agency and claims to have already signed her protégé, sixteen-year-old gospel singer Billy Always, the godson of Mahalia Jackson and the son of one of her dad’s former girlfriends. These business ventures, however, never made it off the ground.

The profile by Charles L. Sanders is a seven-page feature that follows the singer from her New York apartment to concerts on the road. We learn of her interest in all things African. She’s depicted as kindly, sympathetic, even-tempered, and abstemious. She says she no longer drinks. Despite having a cold in Greensboro, North Carolina, she visits seventeen-year-old fan Luther Williams. Still, she’s reticent because, according to the reporter, “she considers interviews in about the same light as she does, say, splinters under the fingernails: painful indeed. She has always been a very private, extraordinarily shy person.” The article goes on to say that her problems with Ted White “actually weren’t any more special than the problems that a whole flock of women wrestle with and try to solve. Aretha says that she’s feeling more confident in herself, how she used to want to appear more glamorous, but the Black Revolution, as she calls it, helped her attitude. ‘I suppose the Revolution influenced me a great deal, but I must say that mine was a very personal evolution—an evolution of the me in myself.’ ”