Aretha Franklin by Mark Bego Page A

Ted White’s insistence, Clyde Otis produced Aretha’s next album as a live nightclub jazz LP, complete with an audience. The resulting album, Yeah!!!, was artistically successful, but the return to jazz killed all interest from contemporary record buyers. “The live album was something that she had discussed doing,” says Clyde, “and something that Ted White wanted done, because he was working her in jazz-type situations, and that’s why he didn’t want her to be too soulful in her singing. On the Runnin’ Out of Fools album, or the subsequent sides that I recorded, I kept hoping that she would let go. As you can see, the moment she went over to Atlantic, and they got rid of Ted White, it all came together. Boom! The rest is history.”
    According to White, the motivation was quite different. With regard to going pop with Runnin’ Out of Fools , he says, “We all [Aretha, Clyde, Columbia, and Ted] agreed that we would try this direction and see what happened. So we called in some various arrangers and writers, and came up with some what-was-happening-then type product. We were pretty happy with it.”

    On the subject of shifting back to jazz on Yeah!!!, White explains that, “Aretha was so multitalented, we didn’t want her to get bottlenecked into one particular idiom at that time. We thought she was broad enough to attract people from all audiences. So we felt that was the best way to present something that they would accept, and that’s what we tried to do. We wanted a little of the jazz, a little of the pop, and a little of the so-called rock & roll. And we just touched on all bases. There are few artists that can do it, because most of them are limited.”
    Arguably, Aretha is talented enough to sing all sorts of music, but Ted’s scattershot tactics confused record buyers, retailers, and disc jockeys alike. Instead of becoming a star in every musical market, she was missing the boat altogether. No one knew how to categorize her, so she ended up ignored.
    â€œClyde Otis was a ‘star,’” Ted complains. “He wasn’t a producer, he wasn’t a support for Aretha, he wanted to overwhelm everything, he was rigid, and it just didn’t work. There were a lot of things that could have been done a lot better had he had a little more flexibility, and he was kind of a dictator.”
    Ted found that Clyde was trying to force Aretha to go in musical directions that were more appropriate for Dinah Washington. “There was a whole difference there,” says Ted. “Dinah was an old-line, hard-core singer and a twenty-year professional. And there is a difference in how you would handle people of that stature at that time, and he just wasn’t geared for it at that particular time. He did a decent job, but I wasn’t totally overwhelmed with his work. It really didn’t come off 100-percent—it came off 80-percent, I’d say, or 70-percent.”
    In reality, Aretha was being pulled in several different directions when Ted was her manager / husband. On one hand, he wanted her to be revered as being a classy jazz singer like Dinah Washington, yet he wanted her to have huge pop and soul hits like Dionne Warwick and Mary Wells were producing at the time. While Ted wanted her to have jazz appeal so that he could book her in jazz clubs like The Flame Show Bar, he also wanted her to produce mainstream hits. It seemed that whatever Clyde Otis had her record, Ted was dissatisfied.
    In the meantime, while everyone was arguing back and forth about what she should be singing, what was Aretha’s opinion? What directiondid she think she should be taken in? “I don’t think she ever even thought about it,” Ted White claims, “because she knew she had that gift. There was no question in her mind as to ‘how high.’ I guess it was just a matter of when. She had experienced it to from the age of twelve or