Aretha Franklin by Mark Bego Page B

thirteen—the raw power—and that’s a great weapon to be equipped with at an early age. Things don’t worry her. She’d never been hungry. She was born with a Cadillac in the driveway, you know, so it was just a matter of time. So she let other people worry about the semantics, and when it came her time, she did her job.”
    As mentioned earlier, in less than a year, Clyde Otis cut enough material for more than five albums. He recalls that his assignment was to record as many songs with Aretha as possible because her contract was going to lapse in 1966 and CBS knew that she was going to go elsewhere and ultimately become successful.
    â€œIt was a Catch-22 situation,” he says of his position at the time. “CBS didn’t want her to go, but they could not reverse themselves to help her become a star. So they said to me, ‘Well, look—cut as much stuff on her as you can,’ because they felt that they might lose her—and in fact they did lose her. The way they talked about it was, ‘Look we’ve only got one more year left on her contract, and we’d like to have as much product on her in the can as possible.’ So that’s why I was given free reign to cut all that product. Normally you wouldn’t cut that much product with anybody.”
    In December 1964, a month after the release of Runnin’ Out of Fools , another one of Aretha’s idols met with a tragic end. Under somewhat seamy circumstances, Sam Cooke was shot and killed at a Los Angeles motel after picking up a young girl at a party. In his hotel room, Cooke had taken off his clothes and gone to the bathroom. When he returned to the bedroom, he discovered that the girl had left—dressed in most of his clothes. Clad only in his sports jacket and shoes, Cooke began pounding on doors, looking for the girl. When he went to the door of the motel manager, ranting and half naked, the woman who managed the motel shot him three times and finished him off by beating him with a club. His death set off a wave of mass mourning among his fans in the black community, that was paralleled by the effect of the death of Elvis Presley on that star’s mostly white fans.

    Sam Cooke’s passing was especially unfortunate in that he died at the peak of his creative popularity. During the years that Aretha had been singing the blues—literally and figuratively—Sam had been enjoying extreme pop and R&B success on the charts. Earlier that year he had a huge hit with his song “Good News,” and his career in the early sixties was one smash after another. When she moved to Atlantic Records in the late sixties, Aretha cut several of Sam’s songs in remembrance of their friendship.
    Yeah!!! was released in May 1964. Although the finished product is a wonderfully produced jazz album, it found her back in the “standards” and “show tunes” mode. The cuts on the album included “If I Had a Hammer,” “More,” “Misty,” and “Once in a Lifetime” (from Stop the World—I Want to Get Off ). Her versions of the jazz classics “Muddy Water” and “Trouble in Mind” sound wonderful in the “live” nightclub atmosphere in which they were recorded. Along with the Unforgettable album, Yeah!!! is considered a real prize by album collectors. It is a great opportunity to hear Aretha sing jazz without the heavy string arrangements that were ever-present in her studio recordings at the time. Unfortunately, Yeah!!! peaked at Number 101 on the LP charts in 1965, when it was released. The disappointing sales figures at that time prove that her return to jazz eradicated the gains in popularity that she had made with Runnin’ Out of Fools .
    During the months that Clyde Otis worked for Columbia Records, he cut dozens of songs with Aretha, but he wasn’t happy with the whole situation, nor did he care for Ted White. “The