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Saturday, Nov 28, 2009
In 1967, at Wexler's prompting, the Erteguns agreed to sell Atlantic. The partners continued to run the company, but for $17.5 million, a sum that even at the time was considered ludicrously small, they handed over Atlantic and its priceless catalog to Warner Bros.-Seven Arts. The sale gave Wexler -- the window washer's son from Bennett Avenue -- the security he had always craved, but laid the seeds for his eventual departure.
Meanwhile, Wexler split with Rick Hall at Muscle Shoals, just as he had several years before with Jim Stewart at Stax. Perhaps the success of Hall's studio added to the perpetual tension between the two aggressive personalities, but as a result, Wexler found himself without a rhythm section. The split led to predictable accusations of carpetbagging and exploitation, which would resurface again when Jim Stewart discovered that he had signed over all the Stax masters to Atlantic as part of their distribution agreement. Somewhat incredibly, both Stewart and Wexler claim they were unaware of the provision. Not surprisingly, Atlantic's corporate parent, Gulf & Western, was not particularly sympathetic to Stewart's predicament.
After the break with Hall, in a move reminiscent of King Lear, Wexler moved to Florida, leaving his former company to be run by others and devoting himself to the full-time creation of records. He set up Atlantic South at Criteria Studios in Miami, and when the Muscle Shoals musicians cannily declined his offer to relocate, he recruited the Dixie Flyers, a band of Memphis musicians featuring Jim Dickinson on keyboards.
In Miami, the hits gradually started to slow down. Wexler continued to create superb records with new artists like Bonnie and Delaney, Tony Joe White, Doug Sahm and Donny Hathaway, while continuing to record proven stars like Aretha Franklin and Wilson Pickett. With Dr. John he created "Gumbo," a brilliant pastiche of antique New Orleans funk, and during Atlantic's short-lived Nashville operation, he recorded "Phases and Stages" with Willie Nelson, a musical makeover that presaged Nelson's multiplatinum records with Columbia. Most enduringly, he conceived and produced Aretha's "Amazing Grace," a gospel masterpiece recorded during a church service in Los Angeles. But the forces of entropy that had caused Wexler to leave Memphis and Muscle Shoals came into play in Miami: Wexler and his wife, Shirley, divorced in 1972, and the fragmented Dixie Flyers joined Kris Kristofferson.
When Wexler returned to New York, he discovered that in his absence the Warner Bros. corporate culture had closed in on him. He was a stranger at the label, and a mid-'70s clash with Ahmet Ertegun's protigi David Geffen served to demonstrate his alienation from the status quo. ("You'd jump in a pool of pus just to come up with a nickel in between your teeth," screamed Wexler at a corporate luncheon as his former partners and Warner chairman Steve Ross looked on.) In 1975, after receiving little support from Ahmet, Wexler left the company he had helped build.
As it turned out, the demand for the Wexler sound was far from spent. In the '80s he produced "Saved" for the born-again Bob Dylan, and subsequently worked with Santana, Dire Straits, Etta James and even George Michael. He also continued to pursue the revisionist concept albums he always enjoyed making. In 1982, he paired Linda Ronstadt with a small jazz ensemble for a session of jazz standards. Ronstadt decided not to release the album, but eventually recorded a similar album with the Nelson Riddle Orchestra. Willie Nelson loved Wexler's idea of doing a Western Swing session, but Wexler's heart attack consigned it to oblivion.
Even in his dealings with rock bands and pop idols, Wexler has remained true to the authentic vernacular sounds he has loved since childhood. Even as the music business that left him behind moves toward ever-greater corporate consolidation, Wexler remains an uncomfortable reminder of an individual's -- and an organization's -- ability to champion the most vulnerable and profound expressions of our culture, and in the process reconfigure the society around it. Along with Sam Phillips, he remains the epitome of that potential. "A lot of contemporary production tries to homogenize the music," says Jim Dickinson. "They take away the element that's alien. Jerry Wexler always turned that element up."
As for the mysterious profession of record production, its infuriatingly subjective workings may remain locked in the grooves of the records and in the minds of the participants. Phillips, who has been known to indulge in instructive obfuscation and plain old hubris, sums it up thus: "Producing? I don't know anything about producing records. But if you want to make some rock 'n' roll music, I can reach down and pull it out of your asshole."
Dickinson recalls Wexler once telling him: "You never know who's really going to produce the session. It could be the guy who brings the coffee." "For a long time, I didn't understand what that meant," says Dickinson. "Producers whom I've worked with seemed to not do much of anything. I realized later that production is all in how you go about doing nothing."
Speaking from his home in Long Island, where he lives with his wife, novelist Jean Arnold, Wexler seems simultaneously content and restless. As if chastened by past indiscretions, he is diplomatic and incommunicative on the subject of the music industry he once led. Instead he prefers to talk about the music he's perpetually discovering and rediscovering -- Kay Starr, Bob Wills, Dan Penn, the new Dr. John. He professes impatience with listening to his own records: "I know them so well." But one suspects that for Wexler, playback pales in comparison with the moment of creation, the hours in the studio that still elicit his most animated responses.
"Jerry is a deeply spiritual guy," says Stanley Booth, "but his religion is making music." For Wexler, memories of recording Solomon Burke do seem to elicit far more joy than the notion of an afterlife, a subject on which Wexler remains doggedly pessimistic. "I'm so damn atheistic that I know there will be nothing to enjoy afterwards. Even if you've made an impact on world culture, you're gone, baby."
