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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
The great Atlantic Records producer gave us rhythm and blues -- as well as just about every R&B legend -- and retooled the very foundations of music producing.
Sep 5, 2000 | "Put your sweet lips a little closer to the phone, oh whoa whoa," Jerry Wexler sings into the receiver, enunciating the doo-wop embellishments that soul singer Solomon Burke grafted onto the Jim Reeves country hit. Hearing Wexler describe the early-'60s session in his unique mix of New York Jewish jive and high-flown diction is at once disarming and disconcerting. At 84, he speaks about the musicians he has known with the easy mix of affection and familiarity one might use in talking about a childhood friend or an alcoholic uncle. And while the trepidation that one might feel is quickly deflected by his charm and humor, it is difficult to reconcile Wexler's casual magnanimity with either the fantasy of the intimidating and brilliant producer or the factual enormity of his achievement. "Solomon was beautiful, baby. He sounded just like Dean Martin."
As a partner at Atlantic Records, and later as an independent producer, Wexler worked with Ray Charles, Joe Turner, Ruth Brown, Professor Longhair, LaVerne Baker, Ivory Joe Hunter, the Drifters, Solomon Burke, Wilson Pickett, Otis Redding, Joe Tex, Sam and Dave, Aretha Franklin, Dusty Springfield, Dr. John, Etta James, Linda Ronstadt, Donny Hathaway, Willie Nelson, Bob Dylan and many others. He did much more, however, than preside over the creation of great music. As much as any of the artists he produced, Wexler helped establish the direction of '50s rhythm and blues and later came to define the sound of soul, a moment that for many remains the creative zenith of postwar popular music.
The key was Wexler's belief not only in the commercial possibilities of rhythm and blues but in its potential to be art, a notion he brought with him from the world of jazz. A radical conviction in the early '50s, it enabled black music to permeate the white mainstream almost as persuasively as the advent of rock 'n' roll. "Wexler was cutting records as if they were short stories," says Jim Dickinson, the Memphis, Tenn., musician and producer. "He brought the depth of literature to a music that was basically treated as if it was primitive."
Among modern record men, only Sam Phillips casts a longer shadow than Wexler. While Phillips pioneered an explosive combination of country and R&B by recording white Southern artists such as Elvis Presley and Jerry Lee Lewis, Wexler remained focused on his first love -- jazz, the blues and their antecedents. Nevertheless, he helped develop a music that was no less audacious and racially iconoclastic. Borrowing from gospel, jazz, pop and even classical music, soul was an amalgam of the tutored and the instinctive, its history a collaboration of white and black musicians creating what Wexler calls "immaculate funk," a music that, in the words of Atlantic arranger and producer Arif Mardin, "churned, but with precision."
More perplexing -- though equally crucial -- was Wexler's ability to imagine artists as they had not yet imagined themselves, to repeatedly capture on tape what they had only previously suspected. Unlike Phillips, the supreme talent scout, Wexler was not a discoverer of raw talent. The artists he worked with were rarely strangers to the studio, but frequently came away from the encounter with career-altering recordings, somehow more fully realized. Often they came away stars. That Wexler could help reinvent musicians as diverse as Turner, Springfield and Nelson in three separate decades is a feat that borders on the mysterious.
Getting a square look at the mystery, however, can be surprisingly difficult. Neither "Rhythm and the Blues," Wexler's 1993 memoir, nor conversations with the man himself provide a completely satisfying answer. Articulate to a fault, he can be by turns scintillating and opaque, hilarious and evasive. Perhaps that is not surprising, considering that Wexler has been described in various quarters as a musical innovator, a brilliant producer, a shrewd businessman, a master manipulator and a shameless carpetbagger. What everyone seems to agree on, however, is that the story of soul cannot be told without him.
