Respect: The Life of Aretha Franklin (45 page)

O
ne of the most attractive aspects of Aretha’s public persona was her unabashed nostalgia. She had passionate fondness for the music of her youth and deep regard for her contemporaries who performed that music with such singular style.

In 2003, Aretha agreed to cohost an installment of
American Soundtrack,
a PBS series of concert shows produced by WGED in Pittsburgh. It was basically an oldies show geared to the aging-baby-boomer market. Her cohost would be Lou Rawls and the other entertainers included her former boyfriend Dennis Edwards as well as Gloria Gaynor and Mary Wilson.

“Ree loves old school,” said Ruth Bowen. “She has great appreciation of her contemporaries and is rightfully proud of the rich lineage of rhythm and blues that she’s so much a part of. But she’s also said that she never wants to go out on the oldies circuit. She agreed to do it because the money was right and also because she wanted to sing with Lou.”

The Aretha/Lou Rawls duet, “At Last,” is a rereading of the classic long associated with Etta James. Excited by Lou’s ultra-relaxed presence and nuanced gospel shadings, Aretha tells the audience, “Sounds like the Pilgrim Travelers to me.” The reference
is to the fifties gospel group with whom Rawls originally sang. Aretha is in fine form, turning in one of her great performances of the 2000s.

“The show made her happy,” said Ruth. “It did her good to reconnect to so many of the soul stars she came up with. But the next day she was on the phone telling me that she had no intention of being typecast as an aging diva. In fact, she was going to do a hip-hop record. ‘Oh no, you’re not,’ I said. ‘Just watch me’ was her reply.”

That record—
So Damn Happy
—would more accurately be called hip-hop-influenced. Troy Taylor cowrote and produced three of the tracks, including the first single, “The Only Thing Missin’.”

“I had been writing songs with Mary J. Blige,” said Taylor, “originally designed for her reunion album with Puffy Combs. At the last minute, Mary thought Puffy was being too controlling, so she withdrew from the project. Around the same time L. A. Reid, looking for a cutting-edge R-and-B album for Aretha, called to see if I was willing. Was I! Mary was thrilled to have Aretha do the songs. In fact, Mary sings background on one of them—‘Holdin’ On.’ We recorded in Aretha’s living room, where she had set up a studio. I’ve produced a lot of legends, including Patti LaBelle and Ron Isley, and I like to think I come prepared and confident. But my preparation was nothing compared to Aretha’s. When I looked at the lyric sheet on the piano I saw that she had made all sorts of notations, where she would twist the melody this way or that. She had a complete vision of how to sing the song. So when it came time to lay down the vocals, she pulled it off in one or two takes. When I suggested that she scat, she jumped right into it. I’ve always considered Aretha one of the dopest scatters, and she proved me right. Later I learned that she had recently lost some dear family members, but you’d never know it by her demeanor at those sessions. She was the complete professional. And as far as critics claiming that her voice was off, I strongly disagree. She could—and did—reach any note she wanted to reach.”

Gordon Chambers, who cowrote “The Only Thing Missin’ ” and cowrote and produced “Ain’t No Way,” had much the same reaction.

“When I arrived at her home studio in Detroit,” said Chambers, “she was at the piano practicing. I discovered that she not only learns the song by listening to the tapes, but she actually works out the song on piano. That’s how she’s able to Aretha-ize it. In her golden era, she may have sung more full-out from her chest and was now singing more from her head, but she knew how to make that adjustment flawlessly. I was a little reluctant to make any suggestions whatsoever, but at one point I gathered my courage and said, ‘That last verse was great but I’d love to hear you sing it again.’ She looked me up and down in a school principal–diva way and said, ‘I don’t know what you think is wrong with that verse but I’ll do it again.’ The second time she sang it with more fire. ‘It was good before,’ she said, ‘but now it’s better.’ That was her way of saying I had good ears.

“She was also extremely gracious. I heard stories about eating collard greens with Aunt Ree Ree in the kitchen. But this was strictly gourmet. She had a beautiful spread of all sorts of exotic foods, including Middle Eastern fare. She made us all feel welcome. After the album came out, I went to see her at Radio City. My mother was with me that night, and when Aretha asked me to stand and introduced me to the audience, that meant the world to me. No other artist had treated me with such respect.”

Burt Bacharach also produced one of the album cuts—“Falling Out of Love,” a song he wrote with Jed and Jerry Leiber.

“I actually wrote three or four songs that she recorded in that period,” Bacharach told me. “My idea was to write the arrangement in LA and cut the track before going to Detroit to produce the vocal. On ‘Falling Out of Love,’ the only song that made it on that record, I played the arrangement for her over the phone. I wrote it in G. ‘It’s too low, Burt,’ she said. ‘I think it’s right in your ballpark, Aretha.’ ‘Well, please try it a minor third higher.’ ‘I’m
afraid that’ll be too high,’ I gently pushed back. With that, she took the phone over to the piano and started playing it a minor third higher. She was absolutely right. It sounded better. When I arrived in Detroit, she invited me to her home studio and said, ‘The background singers are all set.’ ‘The arrangement doesn’t call for background singers,’ I said. ‘Oh, you’ll love the background parts.’ And I did. Aretha wrote extremely tasteful and beautifully harmonious backgrounds.

“The only minor disagreement we had involved interpretation. Because these were all new songs, I encouraged her to sing the melodies as written, at least in the opening verses and chorus. After that she could introduce whatever variations she liked. For the most part she was accommodating. But because Aretha is both a flawless singer and a brilliant interpretative artist, it’s difficult for her not to put on her own spin. In the end, her spins usually improved the original material.”

The first single, “The Only Thing Missin’,” released in the summer of 2003, was well received. “Aretha Franklin sounds more natural than she has in years,” Jon Pareles said in the
New York Times.

In
Billboard
, Fred Bronson wrote, “The four-year, nine-month gap between Aretha Franklin’s most recent hit (‘Here We Go Again’ in 1998) and… ‘The Only Thing Missin’ ’ is by far the longest break in her extensive r&b singles chart history.”

“I was still amazed that after Erma and Vaughn’s deaths,” said Ruth Bowen, “Aretha could call her record
So Damn Happy
. But that’s her way of coping—pretending that sadness and suffering don’t really exist. It works for her most of the time, but then, before the release of the record, when Luther Vandross fell so sick, she couldn’t keep up the façade. She couldn’t go around saying that she was still ‘so damn happy.’ Luther’s tragedy hit her really hard. For all their dueling-diva dramas, she was crazy about him.”

On April 16, 2003, Luther suffered a near-fatal stroke in his apartment in midtown Manhattan. A month later, Aretha held a
candlelight vigil and prayer service at the Little Rock Baptist Church in Detroit, recruiting the Four Tops and the Ebenezer Mass Choir. On several occasions, she held private prayer vigils in her home in Bloomfield Hills.

“Her intentions were all good,” said Ruth Bowen. “It was as though by praying long and hard, she could get God Himself to save Luther’s life. She figured that if God was gonna listen to anyone, He’d listen to Aretha. But unfortunately, Luther got worse. And despite all this ‘so damn happy’ business, no one was sadder than Aretha.”

Sadness briefly turned to delight in July when, during a concert in Atlanta, she was joined onstage by ex-boyfriend Dennis Edwards, who transposed the Temptations’ “My Girl” into “My Queen.”

On one of her favorite stages—New York City’s Radio City Music Hall—she gave an especially lackluster performance. It felt like the same-old-same-old to me. Only a medley of some of her earliest material on Columbia, including a stirring “Skylark” and “Try a Little Tenderness,” seemed to challenge her enormous interpretative gifts. She spent a great deal of time complaining about the sound system. After the concert she told me that she had regrets about missing that afternoon’s rehearsal. “My agents and publicists are pushing me in too many directions at once,” she said.

She had no regrets, though, about the laudatory profile in
Jet
in which she exclaimed that her new beau, whom she refused to name, “is making me so damn happy.” She also discussed, without details, the upbeat careers of her sons Kecalf, Eddie, and Teddy. “Eddie is going to be recording soon and I will record him on my own label.” She also mentioned plans to open her own booking agency, Crown Booking, to handle her own dates as well as other artists’, like her sons’.

“I knew that Crown Booking was a dig at Queen Booking, my agency that for so many years had been helping Aretha get more and more money,” said Ruth Bowen. “She was mad at me because I couldn’t get her the astronomical fees she was asking for. She thought she could get Janet Jackson or Michael Jackson or
Madonna money. But of course that was ridiculous. As for starting her own booking agency, that was more of her delusional thinking. She couldn’t even balance her own checking account. How the hell was she gonna run a booking business? Naturally it never happened. She wound up going back to Dick Alen at William Morris, the only man in America patient enough to put up with her bullshit.”

“This is a big breakthrough,” Aretha told me when we spoke in early 2004. “I’ve made up my mind to come to California this summer! Do you realize that I haven’t sung on the West Coast for over twenty years?”

“Are you flying?”

“I wish,” she said. “We’re going on my bus, and we’re going to take our time getting there.”

After our pleasant conversation, I called Ruth Bowen for a reality check. Was Aretha really riding across the country? “She’s been wanting to play LA for years,” said Ruth, “but she always winds up canceling. The thought of that long bus ride is too much for her. She also hates the idea of riding through the Rockies. One time she agreed to go the southern route, through Texas and New Mexico, but then she heard weather reports about impending storms and changed her mind. But this time she sounds like she’s sticking to her guns. She’s booked for two nights at the Greek Theater. But that’s way off in September. I wouldn’t be surprised if she cancels.”

That spring, Aretha spoke to
Ebony
about breaking up with her boyfriend, but, as usual, she would not name him. “I cannot believe that I was this naïve and gullible at this point in my life,” she said. “When you love somebody, it’s sometimes kind of hard to see everything that you need to see. It’s a lot easier when you’re not emotionally involved.” She went on to make three vows: “I’m going to lose weight, get more organized, and I’m going to leave these bullshit men alone.”

In this same period she was treated for an allergic reaction to antibiotics at Detroit’s Sinai-Grace Hospital. She made a point of telling the press that Clive Davis had sent flowers.

“I can’t tell you all the times that Aretha had broken off communication with Clive,” said Ruth Bowen. “It was always about money demands. She wanted crazy advances that he wouldn’t pay. But ultimately, they’d always get back together because she’s got the prestige and he’s got the clout. To be frank, they’re like two aging queens basking in each other’s glory. Aretha is the Queen of Soul and Clive is the Queen of Pop Radio. They fawn over each other to where it’s sickening. They never get tired of kissing each other’s behind. If you read what Aretha says about Clive in her album acknowledgments it’s always, ‘The epitome of a great record man, the very urbane and esteemed Clive Davis.’ Clive eats that shit up. And she just loves how he escorts her to his fancy-shmancy Grammy parties.”

The death of another old friend affected her mightily. Knowing I was close to Ray Charles, Aretha called me after he passed, on June 10, 2004. She wanted to know where to send flowers. She talked lovingly of the time she brought him to the stage of the Fillmore West to sing “Spirit in the Dark.” In her statement to the press she spoke of his courage and confidence:

“He had a broad scope of music and could deliver it with savoir faire, no matter what genre it was in. His courage also stands out to me as much as his musicology, how he had the courage to go on after his mother died by the time he was fifteen. I’ll also remember his level of confidence. He was confident on every level as a writer, as a producer, as a singer. He also had a charitable soul.”

Aretha’s own charitable soul was evident when she sang a benefit for the Southwest Women Working Together in Chicago, an organization formed to help women and children victimized by domestic violence.

She also made good on the promise to take that long bus trip to
California. She sold out the Greek Theater in Los Angeles on September 17 and 18. In attendance were both Clive Davis and Tavis Smiley, who the day before had interviewed her for his television show. This encounter perpetuated Aretha’s one-sided infatuation with Smiley.

“She went around saying how they were an item,” said Earline. “She even implied that they’d get married. But everyone who knew the real story understood that Tavis respected her as an artist and that was it. He wasn’t about to be Aretha’s boy toy. He’s just not that guy. But she went on for years acting like—or, better yet,
pretending
like it was this torrid affair. Believe me, it wasn’t.”

The opening-night concert itself was a disappointment. She started strong, reaching back to her Columbia days for a soaring “Try a Little Tenderness.” But from there it was downhill. There was a perfunctory medley of her hits and strangely ineffective hip-hop-ish choreography from a dance troupe. Her great weight had her looking sluggish, and the once glorious top range of her voice was gone. Teddy Richards, her talented son with Ted White, was, as he had been since 1984, her featured guitarist.