Wexler: To my mind there's no greater phenomenon in popular culture in music than the impact of Motown on generations of people, the Motown music because Berry Gordy, his spirit, the founder of Motown, whether he did it on purpose or it was an accident or he lucked up, he found something that we didn't or couldn't do or didn't think about doing and probably couldn't of if we tried, he went with his version of black music directly to the white teenage buyer.
Wexler: Motown music has left its impact on people, I would say, let's say between maybe 30 and 50 or 55 in a way that no other music has done.
Wexler: He made his records and as far as I know still does, although I don't know how active he is in the studio, in a method that bore some relationship to the Stax and Muscle Shoals records which was having house musicians or studio bands play rhythm patterns and rhythm tracks into shape and then maybe turning them over to various lyric writers or maybe they had a prepared lyric doing the music first and then actually writing the song to the music, which is one method.
Wexler: I shouldn't presume to pontificate on how Motown made its records, that's only my understanding.
Wexler: And only the similarity, that's only between Stax which is having a house rhythm section to build these records from scratch.
Wexler: And of course the greatest bass player in all popular music, James Jamison from whom every other bass player took note, lessons and licks.
Wexler: But the impact of Motown on pop culture was much wider than let's say an impact of my record company, Atlantic Records, because our records from the very beginning were designed by black musicians and black songwriters for black buyers.
Wexler: Later on when Atlantic widened into the pop field with some of the most significant groups of all time of course, Led Zeppelin, Rolling Stones, Yes, King Crimson, all those wonderful groups and of course the Bobby Darin that start it.
Wexler: But they didn't have the peculiar magic, peculiar ethos, cultural ethos of Motown because many people who maybe don't know any better, are not fully informed, they used the word Motown as a generic term for all rhythm and blues music.
Wexler: Oh, that's Motown music.
Wexler: It just shows you the impact that it had.
Interviewer: And they lyric, etc..
Wexler: And of course the Motown songs, each one was like a little true confession vignette written from the sensibility of a teenager who's hormones were just starting to circulate and rage.
Wexler: And they would, these nice little stories about meeting the right boy or the wrong boy and falling in love, falling out of love.
Wexler: And, let's put it this way, the classic Motown song was not a gritty, funky, lowdown kind of a Ray Charles or Joe Turner or Solomon Burke preachment or rhythm and blues songs, there was a little true confession story which again was part of the magic because when you take this little type of story which appeals to adolescents and put it with superb music, forget the Motown music was really, you know, nonparallel, it was just great.
Wexler: It made the most wonderful kind of music to fit the kind of stories they were telling but it was with a few exceptions, you know I'm not talking about Junior Walker but the main Motown thing was about a kind of nice teenage music.
Wexler: And like I say there are people today who may be, you know, beauty operators, college professors, accountants - Motown is their imprint.
Interviewer: Tell us the Stax stories, etc.,
Wexler: This, ah, little vignette is about when I produced "Midnight Hour" at the Memphis studios with the Memphis rhythm section and how I worked with the rhythm.
Wexler: Now this story has been told by Youngman and Rolling Stone and other people so like Casey Stengle says, you could look it up.
Wexler: I felt that the beat that Al Jackson and the boys were working on out in the studio needed a little bit of variation.
Wexler: So there was a, a kind of a dance at that time called the jerk.
Wexler: And the idea, now this is getting technical, since there were four beats in the measure and rock and roll depended on these beats being very even with accents on the second and the fourth beat which is called the back beat, I had a feeling that the jerk kind of rhythm would apply here whereby you pushed second beat a little bit and laid back on the fourth beat a little bit.
Wexler: It really changed the character of the rhythm and put an incredible swing into the records.
Wexler: And as Al Jackson and Duck Dunn, Steve Cropper says to this day they incorporated that beat into their music from then on.
Wexler: When I went to see the Commitments which was sort of a review of many of the records that I made I thought they did a wonderful job but I wish they had called me in to do "Midnight Hour" so they could have gotten the rhythm a little bit more authentic.
Wexler: They didn't quite get it right.
Wexler: Otherwise, much kudos to them.
Interviewer: The story goes that you actually got up and danced, etc...
Wexler: Oh I did, you know, oh I, you know, I, well when I, ah, I've always considered myself and my partners to be what we call, in on a pass because we're not musicians, we really don't read music, ah, we don't know the names of the chords and so on.
Wexler: So we work by ear to find, to hear where the pocket is and personally when I feel that there's a certain pocket or groove that we're looking for, I would get up and dance it.
Wexler: It took several year maybe a decade before I could risk making a fool out of myself in front of some great musicians.
Wexler: I mean you don't get up in front of somebody like Grady Taylor, Ron Carter and with impunity show them the rhythm that you want unless you're damn certain that it's not going to come down on you.
Interviewer: Tell me about Stax, did you go on the Stax tour to Europe:
Wexler: One of them.
Interviewer: Help us understand what was going on, why that music was so popular even in Europe and did it have something to do with what was going on in this country in the civil rights movement.
Wexler: No, no, no.
Wexler: I mean, ah, Europe… are we rolling?.
Wexler: Europe has always been very receptive toward American jazz.
Wexler: And of course later on to American rock and roll, not so much to American blues and rhythm and blues except for a small cult.
Wexler: Now this cult, small though it was, is much more intense than any fans, than any American fans could ever hope to be 'cause these people really devoted their lives to it.
Wexler: They knew every master number, they knew every B side.
Wexler: They knew the personnel of every old session.
Wexler: But when Otis Redding and the Stax Review hit Europe it transcended this cult interest, it transcended just being a little specialty thing the way jazz always was.
Wexler: It just was irresistible; Otis Redding on stage with that band and Sam and Dave tearing it up was, they, they just swept through Europe.
Wexler: You might ask, how did Louis Armstrong do it when he went to Europe, when he went to Africa? It's just the irresistible power of great music.
Wexler: The first time I saw the real impact, the crossover of Otis Redding was at the Monterey Festival in 1967 and Phil Walden and I brought Stax band out there and Otis at the request of Lou Adler and John Phillips, they called me up and say, can you get Otis there and so on? And I was very leery about bringing Otis Redding and Booker T.
Wexler: and the MGs to play outdoors in front of, you know, thousands, thousands of San Francisco flower children who to me, you know, they were locked into the Grateful Dead and the Jefferson Airplane stuff…
Interviewer: Otis at Monterey.
Wexler: Unfortunately Otis Redding had to die in order to cross over "Sitting On The Dock Of The Bay" was the only record of Otis Redding which really swept the pop charts and turned the whole pop world on to him - but of course he was gone.
Wexler: But the impact came at the Monterey Pop Festival which was organized by Lou Adler and John Phillips and they had sort of snatched it away from a friend of mine named Alan Peresa, Alan how are you? Ah, and they asked me to bring Otis Redding and, ah, well Otis, to bring Otis Redding to Monterey and then naturally we needed a band so we brought Booker T.
Wexler: and the MGs to back him up.
Wexler: I was apprehensive, very leery of exposing Otis Redding to the thousands of flower children, you know, ah the odor of patchouli and, and good Sensimilla was pervasive throughout the park and here were the Jefferson Airplane they looked like they were playing with 20 foot martial amps and the Grateful Dead doing their long boogies.
Wexler: And here comes Booker T.
Wexler: and the MGs and they've got their little Sears Roebuck amps and this tiny sound.
Wexler: And Phil Walden and I, Otis's manager, we looked at each other after this so the, here's the way it worked Booker, Booker T.
Wexler: and the MGs, the band, the little rhythm section came out and warmed up and gradually the park qui., quieted down and suddenly now you could hear the little rhythm section.
Wexler: Well then Otis came on and his, he was so charismatic, he was so strong he said, I hear you all are the love children.
Wexler: He said, well I'm going to sing a love song.
Wexler: And he sang "I'm Loving, - "I've Been Loving You Too Long To Stop Now" and he just swept them.
Wexler: It was tumultuous.
Wexler: They just went crazy for him.
Wexler: I do have to say that it was the second time I was fooled.
Wexler: The other time was when I brought Aretha Franklin to play at the Fillmore West again for, for this crowd of flower children and I thought how are these kids, you know, who have been imprinted and impressed with so-called psychedelic rock which I didn't hold in high esteem by the way, how are they going to respond to this? But it was amazing.
Wexler: They made incredibly correct intelligent responses to all the right things in the music and it was a huge triumph for Aretha.
Wexler: Of course Ray Charles came on as a walk on and that was the whip cream on the cakes.
Interviewer: Tell us a bit about the first session with Aretha, what you'd know about her and etc..
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.
Wexler: I wasn't exactly hoping that she wouldn't have any hits on Columbia thereby engendering, you know, their picking up her option.
Wexler: 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.
Wexler: I called her up.
Wexler: 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.
Wexler: Well, she had not problem with that.
Wexler: 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.
Wexler: But we cut it live with the horns live and all.
Wexler: And there was a ruckus.
Wexler: There was, ah, one of the horn players and Aretha's then husband, Ted White, got into it.
Wexler: 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.
Wexler: 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.
Wexler: I had this wonderful record.
Wexler: It was finished "And I Never Loved A Man" and I had a three piece track on the B side called "Do Right Woman".
Wexler: The three pieces were: bass, rhythm guitar and drums.
Wexler: Had no piano, no lead guitar, no horns, no nothing.
Wexler: 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.
Wexler: And our distributors and the stores said, let's have the record.
Wexler: No record.
Wexler: We had no B side.
Wexler: And it took me quite a while, a couple of weeks to find Aretha.
Wexler: Well we found her, she came to New York with her sisters.
Wexler: She and her sisters finished this record with no other help.
Wexler: What did they do? Aretha sat down and to the tracks played an organ background, then an acoustic piano background.
Wexler: Now we had a track with two keyboards, bass, drums and rhythm guitar.
Wexler: There's no lead guitar on that record.
Wexler: The Aretha went out and sang the lead then she joined her sisters in the background parts.
Wexler: 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.
Wexler: And, ah, like the fella says, you never look back.
Wexler: 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.
Wexler: 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.
Wexler: All in the soul category, Wilson Pickett, Solomon Burke, Aretha Franklin, the Sweet Inspirations.
Wexler: Ben E.
Wexler: 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.
Wexler: 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.
Wexler: I felt new things happening.
Wexler: 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.
Wexler: There was a new spirit, it was more secular.
Wexler: But of course the thing that really seem to cap it was the assassination of Dr. King.
Wexler: 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.
Wexler: 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.
Interviewer: Right into the lens.
Wexler: My name is Jerry Wexler and what I do is produce phonograph records.
Wexler: What has come to be known as the soul era which was merely another form of rhythm and blues at the time because of its emphasis on so-called spiritual feeling and gospel music and hopeful and positive messages and which had been initiated by Ray Charles and Aretha Franklin and developed by people like Ben E.
Wexler: King, Solomon Burke, Wilson Pickett, the Sweet Inspirations, Arthur Connolly, Otis Redding and so on, there's an incredible roster but I had a hunch that it was grinding to a shuddering halt because of changes in the cities, changes in interrelationships and most of all the assassination of Dr. King everything ground to a really shuddering halt and that was the end of it.