A month or so ago I was going through the jazz vinyl in the music annex of Green Apple as a stereotypical modern era hipster—skinny (check), bearded (check), tight-fitting garb (check)—was holding forth in windbag fashion to his cute girlfriend/date about how In Rainbows is his favorite Radiohead album (to each his own, man). Meanwhile the patient young woman was studying the gatefold of Aretha Franklin’s Live at the Fillmore West album. I wanted to interrupt at that moment and say, “Will you shut up for a second, and behold the coolness before you?” But he just kept flapping his gums.
I know one thing for sure, Jerry Wexler, the producer of that Aretha album, and so many others by her and Ray Charles, Otis Redding, Wilson Pickett, Donny Hathaway, Dr. John, Willie Nelson, Bob Dylan, etc , would have gotten in that fella’s mug for his squaresville taste, complimented the girl on HER taste and then would have walked them over to the Fiction section and bought them some Faulkner. I believe this scenario to be possible after reading Rhythm and the Blues, Wexler’s 1993 memoir (co-written with the master of the R&B biographies, David Ritz).
I assume that Ritz assisted with the shaping and focusing of Wexler’s narrative, but Wex, a former wordsmith and world class yakker, must have laid down the stories without much (if any) prompting. The voices of family, friends, colleagues, ex-friends, ex-wives chime in to fill in the gaps and the less sterling examples of Wexler’s behavior (not the most faithful of husbands; not above screwing over his artists; a stubborn hothead) which makes this feel like a real biography and not just a hagiography.
So who was Jerry Wexler? Raised in Washington Heights, the son of a beaten down window washer father and an ambitious, spirited mother, Elsa, who pushed, pushed, pushed her recalcitrant young son to succeed (“Decades later, when someone joked about the oedipal implications of our relationship, Elsa smiled and said, ‘Freud, shmeud, I loved Gerald, but I never wanted to fuck him’”). Wexler came from a Jewish family, but was an avowed atheist for whom disbelief was a source of strength (“Yet I see myself as deeply spiritual. My feelings for literature, art, movies, food, and wine are all invested with spirit. Above all, it’s in my feeling for music. Music has brought me joy; it has given me a beat and a groove, sent me down righteous roads”).
Wexler’s “righteous road” takes the teenage wiseass into the record shops, where with a group of like-minded fiends, he searches the bins for old jazz discs. Next, he goes to college in Kansas where he realizes he has a flair for journalism and discovers the works of William Faulkner and a love for country music.
After a stint in the Army (“The Army set me straight and made something of my capricious Jewish ass”), a now-married Wexler finishes up school, hangs out at jazz clubs and eventually gets into the music biz. In time he ends up at Billboard magazine where he coins the term “Rhythm and Blues” to describe the Billboard chart for black records (replacing the term, “Race Records”). Rhythm and blues is where Wexler makes his mark when he teams up with the debonair, jazz-loving Ahmet Ertegun (to whom the book is dedicated) at Atlantic Records.
Wexler’s portrait of the upstart independent label is riveting reading. The creative excitement of those days (1950′s) is palpable as Wexler has a run of hits with Ruth Brown, Big Joe Turner (Wexler and Ertegun sing background vocals on “Shake, Rattle, and Roll”), The Drifters, and most notably, Ray Charles (Wexler steps back and lets the Genius go to work). Perhaps Wexler’s most vivid anecdote from these days considers a lesser known figure, the New Orleans bluesman, Guitar Slim. A recording date is set up for Slim in New Orleans. Wexler and the backing musicians wait hours for him to show up. Finally, a three red Cadillacs arrive, “and here’s the man himself, emerging in a bower of red-robed beauties, dressed to match the Caddies, plus a retinue of courtiers, janissaries, mountebanks, and tumblers. ‘Need to change into my singing pants, gents,’ says Slim.”
And that’s not even getting into the colorful gang of record execs, producers, engineers and hustlers that Wexler encounters along the way.
After the initial R&B days come to an end (although not Wexler’s pop adventures: he finds “Tennessee Waltz” for Patti Page; he’s on the scene when Bobby Darin has his big hits with “Splish, Splash” and “Mack the Knife), Wexler is an instrumental (pun intended) figure in the 1960′s Soul era. Solomon Burke, Otis Redding, Aretha Franklin, Wilson Pickett, to name a few, pass through Wexler’s life. He hooks Atlantic Records up with Stax in Memphis (and then is stunned to learn some years later that Atlantic owned the Stax masters; he feels bad about this) and when this scene dries up, forms an alliance with the funky crackers from Mussel Shoals aka “The Dixie Flyers” (named after, I was amused to learn, Flannery O’Connor’s description of William Faulkner). Wexler has a fraught but fruitful run with the complex Aretha, sometimes making musical magic, sometimes butting heads with her, and at least once rushing her to the hospital when she has a medical crisis.
Aretha isn’t the only musician that Wexler creatively wrangles with. He honestly describes his intense relationship with Dr. John that is inspired and warm, as well as cold, paranoid and exploitative.
And that’s not even getting into Wexler’s honest admission that he was hardly the world’s greatest father; he ignored his children in favor of his musical children. Only when a couple of them got into the music business did he significantly bond with them. Unfortunately, one of his daughters develops a heroin addiction that he enables for far too many years. Her subsequent death from AIDS is honestly and movingly told.
Despite that downer and the warts and all descriptions of Wex’s failed marriages and feuds with Ertegun (and others), Rhythm and the Blues is a well-told, engaging account of one of the most interesting and passionate figures in 20th century popular music. At the moment, it’s out of print, but if you’re like me and believe that Atlantic recorded some of the deepest music ever, you’d do well to hunt down this outta sight memoir.
