by MARK GABRISH CONLAN
Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights
reserved
I watched last
night’s two-hour CBS-TV special Aretha! A Grammy Celebration of the Queen of
Soul. The name “Grammy” has become a brand
not only for the annual awards show that supposedly showcases the best in
recorded music (but has become woefully limited just to the kinds of music that
sell the most records today — the Grammy Awards shows used to acknowledge classical, jazz and other
non-mainstream musical genres,
but no more) but for various “tributes,” including ones to the Beatles and
Stevie Wonder. I’ve already written extensively about Aretha in a Zenger’s
Newsmagazine blog post, “R.I.P. Lady Soul”
(https://zengersmag.blogspot.com/2018/08/rip-lady-soul.html),
and as much as I love Aretha and her music I did get irritated at the “first-itis” (my term for
people paying tribute to someone who wrongly insist that the people they’re
paying tribute to were the first
people to do something) at the heart of this show, particularly the references
to Aretha as the “Queen of Soul.”
That she was,
but only the second Queen of Soul: she
ascended to the throne upon the death of Dinah Washington on December 14, 1963,
and the succession was confirmed in a “The Queen Is Dead, Long Live the Queen”
gesture when Columbia Records, for which Aretha then recorded, called her into
the studio in February 1964 to make an album called Unforgettable: A
Tribute to Dinah Washington. It doesn’t
take away from Aretha’s great achievement to note that just about everything
Aretha did, Dinah had done before her — Dinah’s 1955 Mercury record “I Just
Couldn’t Stand It No More” sounds uncannily like the sort of material that
catapulted Aretha to superstardom when she left Columbia and signed with
Atlantic Records in 1967 — or to wonder if Aretha would have become quite as big a star as she did if Dinah had survived a
decade longer, into the era of great rock songwriting which Aretha tapped into
as a way of bringing her pure Black soul to a white audience (the way Dinah had
done with white pop songs like the 1930’s hit “What a Difference a Day Made,”
which became Dinah’s first record to break big in the white charts in 1959).
Fortunately for
Aretha, Dinah took herself out early (at 39) with an overdose of prescription
drugs, while Aretha — like another great Black voice, Ella Fitzgerald — avoided
the temptations of the superstar lifestyle, remained rooted in the church
values she’d grown up with (her father, Rev. C. L. Franklin, was pastor of the
largest and most influential African-American church in Detroit), kept her
private life private and lived to be 76.
The Aretha! celebration began with an act that threatened to
render everything and everyone else anticlimactic: Jennifer Hudson came out on
stage (in her current incarnation, considerably slimmer than she was when she
“broke” commercially with her Academy Award-winning performance in the 2006
musical Dreamgirls) and tore
through three of Aretha’s songs, “Think,” “Ain’t No Way” (written for Aretha by
her sister Carolyn, a major musical talent in her own right — as was the third
Franklin sister, Erma, the first singer to record Janis Joplin’s star-making
hit “Piece of My Heart”) and “Respect,” a soul song originally written and
recorded by Otis Redding — but considerably rewritten by Aretha, who added the
“sock it to me, sock it to me” backing-vocal part (originally sung by the Sweet
Inspirations, a vocal trio that included Cissy Houston, Whitney Houston’s
mother) and the chorus that became an anthem to feminist pride:
“R-E-S-P-E-C-T/Find out what it means to me/ R-E-S-P-E-C-T/Take care, TCB.”
(The initials “TCB” — which stood for “Taking Care of Business” — were later
adopted by Elvis Presley, who hired the Sweet Inspirations away from Aretha,
and they appear on his tombstone along with a lightning bolt.)
Hudson’s
performances were so breathtaking — earlier the MC introducing her had said
that on her deathbed Aretha had told Hudson she should play the lead if they
make an Aretha biopic, and it’s hard to understand who could play it better —
it was hard to imagine that the motley crew of soul and gospel veterans and
modern-day baby divas assembled for the
rest of the program could reach her. The next voice we heard was Aretha’s own,
courtesy of a film clip of her performing at President Bill Clinton’s inaugural
gala in January 1993, singing a song called “I Had a Dream” that seemed like she
was reaching from beyond the grave to shame our current President, with his
out-front racism and willingness to shut down the government and build walls
between countries.
The next segment
was an odd one featuring singers Alicia Keys and Sza (pronounced “Sizzah”), who
oddly introduced themselves as “sisters” when they’re not — at least in the
biological way — though they have similar light-soul voices. Keys’ rendition of
“Spirit in the Dark” seemed limp compared to Aretha’s original — but then the
only person who ever lived who could
keep up with Aretha in that song was Ray Charles, who joined her in
mid-performance on her 1970 live album Aretha Live at Fillmore West. Then Sza joined Keys for the lead on a song I
didn’t recognize which was either called “Hey, Baby, Let’s Go Away” or
“Daydreamin’,” wisely showing off the deep Sade-like voice of Sza in a
low-keyed ballad rather than one of Aretha’s gospel-soul flagwavers, which
would have been beyond her. Then Keys and Sza did a formal duet on the song “You’re
All I Need to Get By,” actually a Motown song written by Nicholas Ashford and
Valerie Simpson for the Motown artists Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell in 1967,
and covered by Aretha four years after that.
Fortunately the
emotional temperature heated up again when the next artist, Janelle Monáe, came
out with a rock-steady verson of one of Aretha’s 1980’s hits, “Rock Steady,”
though unlike some of the other artists Monáe only got to sing that one song.
After an historical montage featuring highlights of Aretha’s career, the next
artist was Andra Day, doing an impassioned cover of another 1980’s Aretha hit,
“Freeway of Love” (and heightening the sexual double entendres of the song a lot more than Aretha did).
Kelly Clarkson
did a surprisingly soulful version of Aretha’s first Atlantic single, “I Never
Loved a Man (The Way I Love You)” and the vocal duo Chloe x Halle (that’s how
the name is officially spelled!), who unlike Alicia Keys and Sza really are biological sisters, did a nice version of the Aretha
Franklin-Annie Lennox collaboration “Sisters Are Doing It for Themselves” that,
like a lot of Ike and Tina Turner’s covers of white rock songs, started with a
soft and slow opening chorus and then sped up and got louder and more intense —
though I missed the sheer bravado of the Franklin-Lennox original and wished
they could have got Lennox to remake her original part and Tina Turner to take
Aretha’s.
Then there was
another montage sequence of Aretha herself, including clips of Otis Redding and
her singing their rival versions of “Respect” as well as Aretha singing the
gospel classic “Precious Lord” at the funeral of Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.
in 1968 (a bit of a surprise to me since I’d always thought it was gospel great
Mahalia Jackson who’d sung it at King’s funeral, and Aretha who had sung it at
Mahalia Jackson’s funeral in 1972) and “My Country, ’Tis of Thee” at the
inaugural of President Barack Obama in January 2009.
Then Céline
Dion, who came out with a severely butch haircut and a billowing yellow something-or-other
below the waist that looked like it could have been used as a floatation device
and kept the Titanic from sinking, did
Sam Cooke’s final record, the socially conscious “A Change Is Gonna Come,”
which Aretha had covered in 1973 (though quite frankly I know the song only
from Cooke’s version, one of those eerily appropriate-sounding songs recorded
by performers on the eve of early deaths — along with Buddy Holly’s “It Doesn’t
Matter Anymore,” Chuck Willis’s “Hang Up My Rock ’n’ Roll Shoes,” and Jim
Morrison’s “Riders on the Storm”). She was followed by a clip of Aretha doing
one of her most intense records, her cover of Ben E. King’s hit “Don’t Play
That Song” (she raised the temperature and overall intensity much the way Tina
Turner did when she covered Al Green’s “Let’s Stay Together”).
John Legend came
out to pay tribute to one of Aretha’s most beautiful and most frustrating
records, “Bridge Over Troubled Water.” The song began as a mock-gospel number
written by Paul Simon to showcase the haunting white choirboy voice of Art
Garfunkel. The good part of Aretha’s version was that she took it back to its
Black church roots and added a moving and haunting introduction, “Don’t trouble
the waters … still waters run deep … let it be,” for her backup singers. The
bad part was that for some reason she left out the song’s first verse (“When
you’re weary, feeling small/When tears are in your eyes I will dry them all”)
and only sang the second and third verses, probably to keep its overall length
closer to the usual three-minute limit of a pop single (though Simon and
Garfunkel’s 4 ½-minute version had already broken the length barrier and become
a major AM radio hit, as had the Beatles’ 7 ½-minute “Hey Jude”).
The bad thing
about Legend’s cover was that he truncated the song the same way Aretha had;
the good thing about it was that he sang
with a rare degree of emotional intensity and soul — an approach I’ve heard
from him before only in the duet he did with rapper Common on the theme song
from the movie Selma. Legend’s
other music has seemed to me to be appealing but dull — his performance as
Jesus in the live telecast of Jesus Christ Superstar seemed awfully bland for someone playing Jesus
Christ, even Andrew Lloyd Webber’s and Tim Rice’s bowdlerized Britpop-safe
version of Him — but this time he, like a lot of other artists on the Aretha! program, rose to the challenge of paying tribute to
one of the most openly emotional and committed singers who ever lived.
Next was Carrie
Underwood (I think) doing “Do Right Woman — Do Right Man” — the original flip
side of the “I Never Loved a Man” single and a far more appealing record
ideologically, at least, since “I Never Loved a Man” is a typical blues lament
about how much the woman loves the man even though he’s “a no-good heartbreaker
… a liar and a cheat,” while “Do Right Woman” is a demand for equality and
(dare I say it?) respect: “A woman’s only human/This you should
understand/She’s not a plaything/She’s flesh and blood, just like a man.” It’s
a song that’s thrown some other people who’ve attempted to cover it — even the
haunting-voiced 1970’s singer Phoebe Snow, who missed the enduring superstardom
that was her artistic due because she kept dropping out of music for long
periods because of both her own and her daughter’s health issues, couldn’t
either bring Aretha’s intensity to it or find her own way to project the song —
but Underwood’s was quite a good try.
After a brief
tribute to Aretha’s own duet recordings and the people who partnered her on
them, Fantasia and Rob Thomas came on for a version of the duet Aretha recorded
with George Michael, “I Knew You Were Waiting for Me,” which uncannily
reproduced the original: a nice little white British boy with a nice little
white British-boy voice got totally blown off the stage by a Black singer with
incredible reserves of power and soul. Then there was a brief segment in which
Motown great Smokey Robinson paid tribute to Aretha and lamented that clashing
recording contracts prevented them from making a record together, though they did jam together and appear jointly on TV shows — the
tribute included a clip of the two of them on a TV appearance singing “Just to
See You Again” and making the listener (this listener, anyway), lament for what
might have been …
Then came
Alessia Cara, one of my favorite current singers (especially for her shattering
lament against the beauty industry, “Scars to Your Beautiful,” even though she
contradicted the message by licensing the song for a beauty-products
commercial), doing Aretha’s ballad “(Until You Come Back to Me) That’s What I’m
Gonna Do” and Yolanda Adams and Common came out for a workout of Aretha’s cover
of Nina Simone’s “Young, Gifted and Black.” While I don’t think Aretha’s
version was as good as Simone’s (Aretha’s soul screaming was no match, in this
case, for Simone’s dark introspection), Adams gave a good account of the song
and Common added a rap that paid tribute to the Black community and its talent
pool, past and present. It’s the sort of racial-pride rap that I wish we could
hear more of instead of the garbage spewed forth by unaccountably popular and
highly regarded crap merchants like Kendrick Lamar, and it had the advantage
over Lamar’s sleazy productions that you could actually understand what
Common was saying — which would seem to me
to be the sine qua non of a rap
song.
Then came
H.E.R., who seems to me to be one of the most amazing recent singers, who was
wisely given the assignment to do the Burt Bacharach-Hal David song “I Say a
Little Prayer,” originally recorded by Dionne Warwick and later covered by
Aretha. H.E.R. understands her own voice and its limits well enough that the
version she came up with, though excellent, would have fitted better on a
tribute to Warwick than it did on one to Aretha. Then one of Aretha’s surviving
contemporaries, Patti Labelle, came on and did a cover of a song called “Call
Me” and showed off (as she had on the Grammy Awards a few years ago when a
whole gaggle of baby divas tried to
cover her song “Lady Marmalade” — and then she walked in and blew them all off
the stage as if they were troublesome mosquitoes).
The next-to-last
selection was a tribute to Aretha’s roots in the Black church as a gospel
singer — not only was she the daughter of Detroit’s leading Black minister but
Rev. C. L. Franklin was Chess Records’ best-selling artist (even though his
albums were simply recordings of his sermons) and so when Rev. Franklin served
notice on Leonard and Phil Chess in 1956 that his 14-year-old daughter Aretha
wanted to record a gospel album, they weren’t about to say no. (As things
turned out, the album — which I finally scored a copy of as part of a three-CD
set of Aretha’s early recordings on the Spanish New Continent label — was a
disappointment: instead of having Aretha do a dedicated studio recording they
merely took it down during Rev. Franklin’s church services and clipped Aretha’s
songs from the singing she’d done in his services with the tape machines they’d
set up to make his best-selling sermon records.)
The gospel
tribute included Yolanda Adams singing “Never Grow Old” (a song Aretha sang on
that early 1956 Chess gospel album), Shirley Caesar singing “Oh, Mary, Don’t
You Weep,” Be Be Winans doing “What a Friend We Have in Jesus” (and doing to it
what Blind Willie Johnson, Mahalia Jackson and other Black gospel artists did
when they had to record white hymns: raising the temperature, intensity,
ecstasy and overall power, commitment and soul) and all three belting out the
gospel classic “How I Got Over.”
It was hard to
imagine what could top that, but the
finale wasn’t half bad: Fantasia, Brandi Carlile (another of my modern-day
faves), Alessia Cara and Andra Day taking turns on “(You Make Me Feel Like) A
Natural Woman.” This was the song the Grammy Awards producers had chosen for
the Aretha tribute on the last Grammy show (a similar group-sing with Day,
Fantasia and Yolanda Adams), and though I could have wished they could have got
this song’s writer, Carole King, to perform it (a reverse of the legendary December
2015 Kennedy Center Awards in which Aretha performed it as a tribute to King
and revealed a set of vocal chops in incredible order — as I’ve said before,
it’s the solid vocal training and technique they learned from Black church
choir directors that enabled Aretha Franklin, Tina Turner, Patti Labelle and
other Black soul divas to retain their voices into their 70’s while white
singers like Bonnie Tyler and Stevie Nicks blew theirs out well before that),
the four singers acquitted themselves well even though Day, as is her weakness,
overdid the “worrying,” the soul singer’s ornamentation of a basic melody.
Fortunately, the other three singers were there to keep her honest and keep the
overall effect from being overdone, though it also underscored Aretha’s relative
tastefulness, her skill at doing just the right amount of ornamenting to add
emotional intensity to a song without going so far afield of the melody as to
destroy it in the process.
