Review: Aretha Franklin - The Electrifying Aretha Franklin (1962)

Tracks: 1) You Made Me Love You; 2) I Told You So; 3) Rock-A-Bye Your Baby With A Dixie Melody; 4) Nobody Like You; 5) Exactly Like You; 6) It’s So Heartbreakin’; 7) Rough Lover; 8) Blue Holiday; 9) Just For You; 10) That Lucky Old Sun; 11) I Surrender, Dear; 12) Ac-cent-tchu-ate The Positive.

REVIEW

And by «electrifying», I suppose Columbia Records mean «capable of running 220 volts through any old tired chestnut from the Great American Songbook we throw at her, so why bother paying contemporary songwriters?». Because, really, it doesn’t take a whole lot of historical expertise to understand that Aretha’s second album was already a major step down from the first one — the tables have turned, and now young John Leslie McFarland, with only four (rather than six) of his songs accepted for the new record, finds himself vastly outnumbered by cover versions that hearken all the way back to the 1930s. Although, to be fair to all the cartoonish wielders of fat cigars, we have little evidence that Aretha herself was somehow loath to sing these selections, which she must have clearly loved from childhood and which she does give the full-service, no-holds-barred Aretha treatment.

And to be even fairer, there is nothing here that would, in any way, be specifically insulting to the future diva: in late 1961 / early 1962, everybody was singing standards. If even the formerly scary, leather-clad Gene Vincent recorded his own version of ‘Ac-Cent-Tchu-Ate The Positive’, who are we to protest against Lady Soul doing this, in a far more appropriate manner and all? Many people at the time seemed to sincerely believe that the age of the «modern pop songwriter» had run aground, and that it was time to return to the tried and true. Now that Ella Fitzgerald had «re-canonized» the Songbook by adapting it to the technical standards of the 1950s, younger singers were expected to do the same for the 1960s. In solid, sharp, stereophonic sound quality.

Come to think of it, perhaps it would have made more sense if Columbia simply gave Aretha the green light to record her own set of Aretha Sings The Harold Arlen Songbook-type albums. After all, she had her own singing style already worked out, and it wasn’t like anybody else’s — no other singer at the time, black or white, could so effortlessly merge pop sensibility with gospel power. By now, Aretha’s formula has become stable (but not stale) and predictable: she likes to start out slow and gentle, then gradually whip herself up into a melodically-screeching frenzy, pretty much regardless of the nature or message of the song she is singing — and somehow, most of the time it sounds natural and convincing. Whether such a style would have been tolerable on some massive 3-LP set à la Ella remains an open question, but in any case, it would have at least been a memorable historical event. Of course, given the massive budget requirements for such a purpose and the fact that Aretha, unlike Ella in the 1950s, was hardly an established star with a major reputation, such an idea probably never even crossed anybody’s mind.

So, instead, what we get is a short scattering of golden oldies from the crooner age, all of them acceptable but few of them particularly memorable. Bing Crosby’s ‘I Surrender, Dear’ was released as a single (to little impact), in a somewhat grim-sounding waltzy arrangement, with Aretha’s monumental delivery suggesting that while she may be formally surrendering, she’s still keeping all her guns. But the only one of these covers I’d recommend for a representative anthology would be her take on ‘That Lucky Old Sun’ — which, by the way, preceded, rather than followed, Ray Charles’ hit version from next year — as it is the only «oldie» on here with a social conscience, and that is precisely what works best with her gospel stylistics. The lady’s power approach often ends up mismatched with the source material, but while ‘That Lucky Old Sun’, too, can be sung in many different ways, from the weary’n’tired to the bitter-ironic, her turning it into a fervent church prayer here works perfectly. I think I actually like this one more than Aretha’s acclaimed recording of ‘A Change Is Gonna Come’ — the melody is just as good, the message is just as biting, and the youthful energy smells more of innocence and idealism than of the «self-assured diva factor» which is already a bit (only a bit) worrying in her 1967 early Atlantic era.

But let us spend a little more time discussing the new songs rather than the oldies. Although, as I already mentioned, McFarland’s role in this record has been drastically reduced, his songs are still the standouts — all except ‘Just For You’, a mushy ballad, not surprisingly, co-written with Joe Bailey, who was apparently a veteran of the scene, being credited as Louis Armstrong’s bass player already in the 1930s. The other three, for all of which McFarland takes sole credit, are good ones that seem specifically written for Aretha’s powerful personality — chances are that these numbers, more than anything else on here, will stick for a while in your head once the airwaves have quieted down. The big band jazz trimmings are still distracting (all the songs would have worked better with a small, tight R&B combo), but at least with this kind of writing they are more of a «ball and chain» factor than a straightahead march to the oldies’ cemetery.

On ‘I Told You So’, a slow, but starkly resolute bluesy shuffle, Aretha teaches a lesson to her unfaithful hubby: "you can’t win when you’re a jumping jack" — gloating over the cheating bastard’s catastrophe as she refuses to let him in again, triumphantly spinning the song title over and over. A little ironic given the allegedly manipulative nature of her own marriage with her manager Ted White at the time, but then I guess our artistic persona more often paints us as the person we want to be than the person we actually are, and Aretha’s delivery of the tune already hints at a certain amount of painful experience that gives her extra strength to imbue the performance with. Gotta love how she rolls over each word of that "now... you’re... begging me... to take you back!" line, with an almost just-you-wait-Henry-Higgins kind of hatred but making it clear that the triumph is a real one in the present, not an imaginary one in the future.

‘It’s So Heartbreaking’ has more of a pure pop flavor and a more tasteful arrangement, with (presumably) Aretha’s own piano playing and spritely pastoral woodwinds drawing more attention than the brass section. McFarland resorts here to a rather common trope of imbuing old nursery rhymes with «grown-up content» ("John is so lonesome, don’t know what he’ll do / Since Jane went over the hill"), and Aretha joins his game by combining childish playfulness and a touch of bitter melancholy. A nice example of a song that could easily be framed as a joyful celebration of life on a warm summer day, but instead subtly mourns over the issue of unfaithfulness — again.

The only song, however, that approaches the tough, rocking power of ‘Won’t Be Long’ from the debut LP is ‘Rough Lover’, a firey little ass-kicker on which Aretha declares that her ideal man got to "if I get sassy, be a man who dares to shut me up and kiss me so I know he cares" — yeah, who knows, maybe Ted White actually did fulfill that fantasy at the time. Regard­less of how you feel about this particular brand of feminism, the performance is fantastic: this is finally a song that requires all flames to be lit to be efficient, and Aretha’s barking, roaring, and growling delivery of the words is fully adequate to the content, unlike some of the oldies that she covers on the LP. Her guttural "I want a MAN!" outbursts clearly suggest a nod back to Muddy Waters with his "no child... a MA-A-AN!" mating calls, and although formally there is no gender-bending here as such, the song gives Aretha herself an aura of toughness every bit as strong as, say, the one around Etta James, even despite Aretha’s overtones usually remaining quite «lady-like».

Unfortunately, ‘Rough Lover’ — unquestionably the best song on the entire album — was relegated to the B-side of the far more boring ‘I Surrender, Dear’, never got any decent amount of airplay, and stalled in the lower regions of the charts, much lower even than the previously issued ‘Rock-A Bye Your Baby With A Dixie Melody’, which rose to #37, as if to triumphantly prove the world of popular music that in 1961, Al Jolson was still as much king as he was back in 1921. It’s an absolute shame and a classic example of creative confusion and artistic mismanagement; I am absolutely sure that with a better strategy — giving McFarland and his songwriting an upper hand, finding a backing band to better suit Aretha’s style, more consistently branding her as a modern-day, cutting-edge performer rather than getting her saddled with all those bearded oldies — Aretha could have become a national, if not worldwide, star much earlier than 1967. Instead, The Electrifying Aretha Franklin marks the start of a downward journey that almost literally took her out of the top roster of the American stars of R&B until the beginning of a new chapter in the life of Atlantic Records.

Still, one factor that you simply cannot write out of history is youth: there is that subtle something in a 20-year old Aretha Franklin that already was not quite there in the 25-year old Aretha Franklin of I Never Loved A Man The Way I Love You. Perhaps... a little less confident professionalism, a little more idealistic exuberance? I’m sure there’s a better way to phrase this, but the bottomline is that, at the very least, a compilation of the best early tracks from Aretha is absolutely essential for any serious admirer of her talent, in fact, for anybody who wants to go a little farther than ‘Respect’ or ‘Chain Of Fools’. From this album in particular, I’d grab the three McFarland compositions and ‘Lucky Old Sun’ for such a noble purpose — though I couldn’t seriously argue that I «hated» any of the other tracks; at least the cornball arrangements circa 1961–1962 do not detract from the experience as much as the cornball disco arrangements of the late 1970s or the cornball electro-pop ones in the Eighties.

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