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Wednesday, Nov 25, 2009
In turn, the young Memphis musicians were certainly aware of his reputation, and impressed by Wexlers New York-accented hipsterisms and his ability to make everyone in the studio focus on the matter at hand. More important, the musical rapport proved uncanny. "He wanted to play the kind of music we wanted to play," says Chips Moman. "The guys didn't mind staying late to help Jerry out, because he always kept the session interesting."
At the first Pickett session at Stax, Pickett and Steve Cropper approached Wexler with an original composition entitled "In the Midnight Hour." Wexler objected to the rhythm track, suggesting that the beat from a recent dance hit by the Larks would improve the tune. Unable to explain what he wanted musically, Wexler started doing the jerk in front the dumbfounded band. The result became Pickett's breakthrough smash, and in short order Sam & Dave and Don Covay charted hits recorded with the Stax sound.
Almost as soon as the productive partnership had begun, Pickett's abrasiveness and a growing sense of confidence in the future of Stax cooled Stewart to the idea of outside production. But Wexler wasn't about to return to the status quo in New York. "Southern recording had changed my life," he says, "and I wanted to record that way forever." He had been tipped that an equally talented group of musicians was working out of a small studio in Muscle Shoals, Ala., called Fame Studios, and when Fame's Rick Hall sent him an acetate made by an orderly named Percy Sledge -- "When a Man Loves a Woman" -- Wexler was sold. The song went on to become the first soul record to reach No. 1 on the pop charts, and Wexler, again with Pickett in tow, headed to Alabama.
In Muscle Shoals, Wexler discovered an even more empathetic group of musicians -- ironically, all were Caucasian -- who enabled him to crystallize the sound that would become most closely associated with '60s soul. The building blocks were identical to those used at Stax -- a tight rhythm section, keyboards, horns and massed background vocals -- but Wexler, perhaps because he felt more at ease in the new studio, was free to use them more creatively, referring to them as "lines and patterns." In the process, he transformed Muscle Shoals from a provincial outpost to one of the South's major recording centers, a place that would eventually attract musicians as diverse as the Rolling Stones, Etta James and Simon and Garfunkel.
The first beneficiary of Wexler's new headquarters was again Pickett, who recorded another parcel of hits with "Mustang Sally," "Funky Broadway" and "Land of a Thousand Dances." But it was Aretha Franklin's arrival that marked the high point of the Muscle Shoals experiment and Wexler's career. Ever since hearing a 14-year-old Aretha sing "Precious Lord" on a Chess Records recording made at her father's (the Rev. C.L. Franklin) church, Wexler was determined to sign her to Atlantic. His chance came in 1967, with Franklin languishing at Columbia, where she had spent six years enduring misguided attempts to package her as a pop singer. For her first session at Fame, Franklin brought a Ronnie Shannon song entitled "I Never Loved a Man (the Way I Love You)."
Sitting at the piano in a studio filled with white musicians -- most of whom knew little or nothing about her -- Franklin struck the first chord of what would become one of the most remarkable acts of self-reinvention in popular music. The musicians were thunderstruck. "I've never heard so much emotion come from one human being," drummer Roger Hawkins told Wexler, and Franklin's tenure at Atlantic marked one of the most brilliant and commercially lucrative associations between an artist and a record company.
When asked about those first pivotal sessions with Aretha Franklin, Wexler replies: "I was cutting basic R&B and blues. All I had to do was drop her into the context." While not inaccurate, the explanation does little to explain his M.O. in the studio, and doesn't factor in the taste, intuition and imagination that Wexler had honed over the course of 20 years and injected into the proceedings with increasing skill. "Jerry will get up in the bass player's face, so you could smell his breath, and sing a bass part," says Jim Dickinson. "He may not necessarily want the bass player to play what he's singing, he just wants him to play something different."
Nevertheless, that "context" became much sought after, and Franklin's phenomenal success cemented Wexler's reputation as a master of rejuvenating careers in midstream, a testament to his ability to alternately use charm, force and diplomacy in coaxing the best from an artist. When he brought British pop singer Dusty Springfield to Chips Moman's Memphis studio to make an album in 1968, he came away with nothing but instrumentals. Intimidated and insecure, Springfield had refused to sing. It took several agonizing sessions in New York -- at one Springfield reportedly hurled an ashtray at Wexler's head -- to record the vocals. The result -- the definitive "Dusty in Memphis" -- revealed no evidence of struggle.
