Wexler:
Ah, I had hawking Aretha Franklin for many years
hoping that her contract would run out at CBS at Columbia Records and that I
then might be in a position to sign her. I wasn't exactly hoping that she
wouldn't have any hits on Columbia thereby engendering, you know, their
picking up her option. But the way it went, they dropped her after five
years and a friend of mine from Philadelphia, Louise Williams who is there
to this day as a gospel disc jockey called me at Muscle Shoals and said,
here's Aretha's phone number, call her, she's waiting for the call. I called
her up. A week later we were in my office in New York we signed her up and
since Muscle Shoals was now my prevailing passion I was so hipped on these
player, the, this rhythm section and the horn players that I said, let's go
to Muscle Shoals and make a record. Well, she had not problem with that. And
we went down there and we cut "I Never Loved A Man" all live in one, it was,
I guess we had three track, yes, we didn't even have four track, we had
three track. But we cut it live with the horns live and all. And there was a
ruckus. There was, ah, one of the horn players and Aretha's then husband,
Ted White, got into it. They had been drinking from the same jug and now
this real, you know, camaraderie and great palship turned into some kind of
alcoholic hostility. Well the session blew up and instead of staying there
for a week to complete the whole album everybody went back where they came
from, Ted and Aretha went to Detroit, I went to New York. I had this
wonderful record. It was finished "And I Never Loved A Man" and I had a
three piece track on the B side called "Do Right Woman". The three pieces
were: bass, rhythm guitar and drums. Had no piano, no lead guitar, no horns,
no nothing. Now we cut the acetates on "I Never Loved A Man" and sent it out
to disc jockeys and it was a tidal wave response. And our distributors and
the stores said, let's have the record. No record. We had no B side. And it
took me quite a while, a couple of weeks to find Aretha. Well we found her,
she came to New York with her sisters. She and her sisters finished this
record with no other help. What did they do? Aretha sat down and to the
tracks played an organ background, then an acoustic piano background. Now we
had a track with two keyboards, bass, drums and rhythm guitar. There's no
lead guitar on that record. The Aretha went out and sang the lead then she
joined her sisters in the background parts. Of course the song writers, Chip
Momen, Chips Momen and, ah, ah, Dan Penn were just amazed that we were able
to finish this record when all we had was spit and chewing gum. And, ah,
like the fella says, you never look back.
The soul
music which had sort of, you know, originated somewhere in the early sixties
and kept building through the sixties till very early in the seventies it
produced an incredible roster of artist for us.
The soul era of the sixties which of course had been, the way had been
prepared by Ray Charles and Aretha Franklin resulted in an incredible roster
of soul artists on Atlantic Records when you think of it. All in the soul
category, Wilson Pickett, Solomon Burke, Aretha Franklin, the Sweet
Inspirations. Ben E. King and the great Stax roster: Otis Redding, Sam and
Dave, Rufus and Carla, Johnnie Taylor, they, it looked as though soul was
now the imprint, was now the rubric forever. But I had a hunch and I even
told my partner I think it was maybe '68 or '69 I said I have a feeling this
is going to grind to a shuddering halt. I felt new things happening. One
thing is what you call the rise, rising aspirations of the inner-city, that
they were looking toward other things than this kind of so-called religious
church based music. There was a new spirit, it was more secular. But of
course the thing that really seem to cap it was the assassination of Dr.
King. That changed feelings, attitudes, it changed a lot of relations, a lot
of those things have been healed now but a lot haven't been healed. And
somehow soul was replace maybe not immediately but eventually by hip hop
which projects a whole other kind of story, a whole other kind of emotion
and whole other kind of statement from the black point of view.