DAVID BIANCULLI, HOST:
This is FRESH AIR. We've got one more in today's lineup of R&B, rockabilly, and rock 'n' roll interviews. Some of the greatest soul and rhythm and blues recordings wouldn't have been made if not for Jerry Wexler. Wexler was a partner in Atlantic Records from the early 1950s through the mid-1970s. His specialty was finding great singers and matching them with the right band and backup singers to create a sound that was both artistically true and commercially successful. The short list of people with whom he's worked includes The Drifters, Ray Charles, Aretha Franklin, Bob Dylan, Wilson Pickett, Otis Redding and Solomon Burke. Terry spoke with Jerry Wexler live from the Public Radio Conference in Washington, D.C., in 1993. He died in 2008 at the age of 91. Here are just a few of the records for which we have Jerry Wexler to thank.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "I'VE BEEN LOVING YOU TOO LONG")
OTIS REDDING: (Singing) I've been loving you too long to stop now.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "WHAT I'D SAY")
RAY CHARLES: (Singing) See the girl with the diamond ring? She knows how to shake that thing, all right now, now, now. Hey, hey. Hey, hey.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "IN THE MIDNIGHT HOUR")
WILSON PICKETT: (Singing) I'm gonna wait till the midnight hour. That's when my love come tumbling down. I'm gonna wait till the midnight hour, when there's no one else around.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "UNDER THE BOARDWALK")
THE DRIFTERS: (Singing) Under the boardwalk, out of the sun. Under the boardwalk, we'll be having some fun. Under the boardwalk, people walking above. Under the boardwalk, we'll be making love. Under the boardwalk, boardwalk.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "RESPECT")
ARETHA FRANKLIN: (Singing) Ooh. What you want, baby, I got it. What you need, you know I got it. All I'm askin' is for a little respect when you come home (just a little bit). Hey baby (just a little bit) when you get home, (Just a little bit) mister (just a little bit). I ain't gonna do you wrong while you're gone.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED NPR CONTENT)
TERRY GROSS: I want to get started with your work with Aretha Franklin. I think that's a good place to start. Now, she had made about - oh, I don't know - 10 or so recordings on Columbia Records before coming...
JERRY WEXLER: Yes.
GROSS: ...To Atlantic. John Hammond produced her, and he was producing her like a jazz singer, kind of in the Dinah Washington tradition.
WEXLER: Yeah.
GROSS: You - when she came to Atlantic, you worked with her. You heard something completely different. What did you hear when you started producing her?
WEXLER: Well, I heard the Aretha Franklin who sang in church, who sang "Precious Lord" when she was 13 years old. And a man in the audience was so overcome he said, listen at her. Listen at her. And I listened, and it wasn't so much that I tried a new approach to her. It's that what she did fit very well in with what we were doing anyhow.
GROSS: Well, you sat her down at the piano.
WEXLER: Right.
GROSS: You had her play herself, which I don't think she'd done on the records before that.
WEXLER: Not very much. Yeah.
GROSS: And then you took her down to Muscle Shoals, to Alabama, to the same place, actually, that Arthur Alexander started before he became...
WEXLER: Exactly, and I want you to know that I'm not one of the people who didn't pay him.
(LAUGHTER)
GROSS: What was it like at Muscle Shoals? What did you hear there in that Southern sound that you wanted?
WEXLER: Well, it was the way they recorded, which was ad-lib recording, without written arrangements - building the song from the get-go, just from the chords. And the musicians made a fabulous contribution. So these were arrangements which we all did together. And they were just as much arrangements as anything that was ever done by Henry Mancini, in the sense of being an arranged piece of music.
GROSS: So you took Aretha down to Muscle Shoals, recorded, like, a track and a half with her, and there was this really big fight.
WEXLER: (Laughter).
GROSS: What was the fight about?
WEXLER: There was an explosion that went on because of too much Jack Daniels and not enough prudence.
(LAUGHTER)
WEXLER: And it had to do with Ted White, who was Aretha's husband at the time, who got into dangerous, over-friendly drinking from the same jug with a gentleman who can best be described as a card-carrying redneck trumpet player. And it got into what we call the dozens, the Southern dozens, and then it got nasty.
GROSS: (Laughter).
WEXLER: And the session blew up, and we went back to New York with one song complete, which was "I Never Loved A Man." And a three-piece track on the other side, which was "Do Right Woman." And all we had there was rhythm guitar, bass and drums, which is not a whole lot to go on (laughter).
GROSS: Not even vocal.
WEXLER: No vocal. No piano. No background vocal. And then we finished by bringing Aretha and her sisters into the studio. And it was a pretty good piece of extemporization, in that starting with this very minimal track, Aretha laid down an organ part and a piano part. And then she sang the lead, and then she and her sisters got together and did the background. And it was a very full, finished record put together, I'd say, with spit and chewing gum.
GROSS: You produced "Respect." Is there a story behind how the sock it to me's landed on there?
WEXLER: Well, yeah, the story is that when Otis Redding did it, it was entirely a different song. The sock it to me's were Aretha Franklin's idea where she injected into the song, which connoted a certain idea of social respect, probably the notion of ethnic respect, combined with a little judicious lubricity on her part.
(LAUGHTER)
WEXLER: The respect that she was talking about was what you might call - very bluntly call proper sexual attention.
(LAUGHTER)
WEXLER: But it was her transmutation of Otis Redding's little Southern song. As a matter of fact, I was mixing the record in our studio on Broadway, and Otis walked in. He said, that little gal done took my song. But he meant that in a very kindly way 'cause he saw the cash registers ringing.
(LAUGHTER)
GROSS: Now, your first studio was actually the office...
WEXLER: That's right.
GROSS: ...Of Atlantic Records.
WEXLER: Right.
GROSS: Who did you - 'cause when Atlantic was young, you didn't have a studio. So what'd you do? You'd move out the chairs into the hallway...
WEXLER: Well...
GROSS: ...Whenever you want to record?
WEXLER: We did have a studio. It was our office, and it was a studio because we had equipment in it. And...
GROSS: Right.
WEXLER: My partner Ahmet Ertegun and I shared this big room. We had two desks that were catty-corner, canted toward each other. And what we would do is push them against the wall, stack them. And then our engineer Tom Dowd would set out camp chairs, a few microphones and one mic in the hall for echo.
GROSS: We're just going to adjust your mic a little bit there.
WEXLER: Yeah.
GROSS: There's so much that a record producer is up against, often the real unexpected. And I think a great example of that is when you were producing The Drifters' version of "Under The Boardwalk."
WEXLER: All right.
GROSS: Let's start with the beginning of that story. First of all, they didn't want to even record the song.
WEXLER: That's right.
GROSS: You gave them an ultimatum.
WEXLER: Right. I was not the line producer of that song. I was acting as a supervisor, you know, as an executive of the company. And The Drifters were always a concern of mine. And a great producer - deceased - Bert Berns, was producing the record, and neither he nor any of The Drifters could stand the song. They just couldn't buy it. And I didn't want to interfere 'cause Bert was the producer but - this sounds, like, very self-congratulatory (laughter). And I said, this song has to be done. And I said, you can pick all the rest. I said, or else ain't no session. Yeah.
GROSS: Why'd you like the song so much?
WEXLER: Because it sounded like a hit.
GROSS: OK. Good enough reason.
WEXLER: (Laughter).
GROSS: OK. So what happened to the lead singer the night before...
WEXLER: Oh, yeah.
GROSS: ...The session?
WEXLER: The lead singer at the time was a man named Rudy Lewis. You know, we had three fantastic lead singers in The Drifters. The first was Clyde McPhatter. The second was Rudy Lewis. His name is not as well known, but he did some great songs. And the third was Ben E. King, who's having a great resurgence with "Stand By Me." I mean, you can't turn around without hearing it anymore.
But Rudy Lewis, unfortunately, the night before the session was found dead in the hotel room with a hypodermic needle in his arm. And the - I think that was the - yeah, the night before the session. And we tried to call off the session, but it was a big date. And we had hired a lot of union musicians, and the union wasn't cutting us any slack at all. They gave us 24 hours. So we moved the session ahead one more day, but then we couldn't even change the charts. So we had to use Johnny Moore to sing the lead and without even the key change, and he managed to sing it in the key that was put to him. And the interesting thing about the record was we promoted it all along the Eastern Seaboard in Atlantic City and so on. And it just - it evokes summer all the time.
GROSS: And you actually did a lot of that yourself, didn't you? Packed up the car and drove around promoting the record.
WEXLER: Oh, yeah.
GROSS: 'Cause you wanted it to break so bad. Yeah.
WEXLER: That's right. And we did a lot of that in those days.
GROSS: Now, you worked with Otis Redding a lot during...
WEXLER: Yeah.
GROSS: ...His career.
WEXLER: I was not Otis' producer. I want you to realize that. Otis was produced at Stax Records in Memphis by that great team who - Jim Stewart and Booker T. & the M.G.'s with - especially Steve Cropper.
GROSS: Now, you saw him change a lot as he became bigger.
WEXLER: Oh, yes.
GROSS: Now, what was he like in the beginning before he was very famous? What was he like on stage?
WEXLER: Otis was very simple, very unaffected, but he had the magic. And when he came to New York after his first hit record, I picked him up at the airport. No roadies, nobody, no nothing, just sole Otis. And he opened at the Apollo, and he just stood there, just straight on with his arms at his side, didn't move. Another one who started like that was Marvin Gaye. But they learned some stagecraft. But what really kicked Otis into moving was having to follow Sam & Dave...
GROSS: (Laughter).
WEXLER: ...Who used to be described as a stage full of Jackie Wilsons.
(LAUGHTER)
GROSS: That's really great. No, you know, we were talking before how you brought Aretha Franklin down to Muscle Shoals, Alabama. You brought Wilson Pickett down to Memphis to record.
WEXLER: Right.
GROSS: You really loved that Southern sound that was coming out of...
WEXLER: Right.
GROSS: ...Some of the bands there. Why'd you think of bringing him there?
WEXLER: Well, 'cause everything was winding down in New York. I mean, it was entropy. We just couldn't get out of our own way. We had been very successful year after year. But our style of recording was a regular old-time standard style using arrangers with written arrangements. Now, when you have to change an arrangement, and you almost always do to accommodate the vicissitudes of the song and where you're going, it's total agony for the entrepreneur to see that clock going around...
GROSS: (Laughter).
WEXLER: ...While a man is going around with an eraser, erasing little notes on 13 charts.
(LAUGHTER)
WEXLER: And this Southern style of recording, where it's just - all you have is chord indications. You go out. You sing a lick. Do it like this, fellas. Bang. Here's the new chord, you know. But maybe that's overstating it. But actually, there's a spontaneity and a fantastic new element that comes in because the musicians are organic to the idea.
GROSS: So you heard that it would work...
WEXLER: I heard the sound.
GROSS: ...With Wilson Pickett.
WEXLER: I heard the sound, and I brought Pickett to Memphis, and we cut "Midnight Hour" and a lot of other things there all in a hurry. It was great.
BIANCULLI: Jerry Wexler speaking to Terry Gross in 1993 live from the Public Radio Conference in Washington, D.C.
On Monday's show, we conclude our archive series R&B, rockabilly and early rock 'n' roll with Dion, who brought his guitar and sang some songs. Also, songwriter, pianist, arranger and producer Allen Toussaint, who was at the piano for our 1988 interview and sang some of his early songs, including "Lipstick Traces." I hope you can join us.
(SOUNDBITE OF ALLEN TOUSSAINT'S "ROSETTA")
BIANCULLI: FRESH AIR's executive producer is Danny Miller. Sam Briger is our managing producer. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham, with additional engineering support by Joyce Lieberman, Julian Herzfeld and Diana Martinez.
(SOUNDBITE OF ALLEN TOUSSAINT'S "ROSETTA") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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