Queen of Soul back after pause
Aretha Franklin has become more visible in 2015 than she has in decades. She’s done seven concerts so far this year, not counting the multi-artist gospel program she headlined at the White House in April. She has five more concerts to go, including one Monday, Aug. 10, at Oracle Arena in Oakland.
It’s her first Bay Area engagement since she appeared in 1978 at the now-defunct Circle Star Theater in San Carlos. Her current schedule compares with nine concerts last year, five in 2013 and 14 during the entire first decade of this century.
Brought to tears
The soul queen, who was born 73 years ago in Memphis and raised in Detroit, where she lives, also sang at Attorney General Eric Holder’s retirement ceremony in March, bringing both Holder and President Obama to tears with her spirit-filled rendition of “America the Beautiful.” A few weeks later, she served as a mentor to contestants on “American Idol.”
The singer, who has long battled being overweight, attributes her resurgence of activity to “the shape that I’m in.”
“My physical fitness is at peak, and so it’s just easy,” Franklin explains via cell phone while traveling across Missouri in her tour bus en route from St. Louis to Los Angeles. “I do a lot of walking. I’m working with exercise videos. And my diet, water, walking — the whole nine yards.”
Franklin began touring as a piano-playing gospel singer when she was 15 with her famous father, the Rev. C.L. Franklin. While performing in concert with him at the now dormant Oakland Auditorium Arena, in either 1957 or early ’58, she recorded her second-ever single, the two-part “Precious Lord,” originally released on the JVB label in Detroit before being picked up for national distribution by Chess Records in Chicago.
“The people got very emotional on the stage and stepped on my dad’s hat,” she says. “I absolutely remember that.”
That recording reflected the influences of gospel-singing star Clara Ward and pianist James Cleveland, who had served as choir director at her father’s New Bethel Baptist Church in Detroit in the mid-’50s.
“Clara Ward was an influence, yes,” Franklin says. “She was one of my mentors. My father was the other.”
Sam Cooke was also an early influence. Franklin admits to having had a crush on the handsome singer when he was performing gospel music with the Soul Stirrers, sometimes on the same programs as the Franklins. He would switch from gospel to secular music in 1957, three years before she followed the same path.
“My dad encouraged me not to try and sing like Sam because I admired him so much,” she reflects. “He said, ‘Do your own thing and sing yourself. Don’t try to sing Sam or anyone else.’ ”
Huge hits
Franklin returned to the Oakland Auditorium as the headliner in 1967, when her career skyrocketed on the strength of the massive R&B and pop hits “I Never Loved a Man (The Way I Love You)” and “Respect.”
Her radical “sock-it-tome” rearrangement of “Respect,” a tune written by and originally recorded by Otis Redding, today serves as the encore tune on her tour dates. Other numbers in her 14-song set include her hits “Baby I Love You,” “(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural
Woman,” “Think,” “Chain of Fools,” “Jump to It” and “I Never Loved a Man (The Way I Love You),” as well as the gospel hymn “Old Landmark” and the Jackie Wilson classic “(Your Love Keeps Lifting Me) Higher and Higher.” Some of her recent shows also have including her version of Adele’s “Rolling in the Deep,” which appeared on her 2014 album “Aretha Franklin Sings the Great Diva Classics.”
The CD, her first for RCA Records, reunited her with Clive Davis, who had overseen her recordings between 1980 and 2000 at Arista Records and placed her in the hands of such hitmaking producers as Arif Mardin, Luther Vandross, Narada Michael Walden and Lauryn Hill.
‘Babyface’ Edmonds
Davis currently serves as chief creative director of Sony Music Entertainment, of which RCA is a part. He and Franklin co-produced the disc, with help from several hands-on producers, including singer-songwriter Kenny “Babyface” Edmonds, who will open the Oracle Arena show.
“It’s always fabulous working with Mr. Davis,” she says. “He’s very easy to work with and very knowledgeable and extremely on top of everything.
“He’s going to meet me in Las Vegas on the 14th (of August) to discuss ‘Aretha on Broadway,’ the play, the musical drama. It’s in its conception right now. We have just begun to talk about it.”
“Someone else is going to play me,” Franklin adds. “It could be any one of three or four people. It could be a relatively unknown who simply can play the role, who has the dramatic experience and the voice. It could be Audra McDonald. ... It could be Jennifer Hudson, who is experienced.”
Franklin’s current band is made up of 21 instrumentalists and vocalists. Veteran Southern California arranger H.B. Barnum is her musical director, and onetime Vandross associate Fonzi Thornton leads the backup singers.
‘Freeway of love’
Some of her musicians fly from engagement to engagement. Others ride with her in her Prevost bus “on the freeway of love,” as she puts it, referencing her 1986 hit of that title.
The singer has not traveled by air since experiencing an especially harrowing flight in a twin-engine plane in 1984.
“I was in a hurry to get home,” she recalls. “No one told me that I shouldn’t get on the two-engine, that I should take a jet. I said, ‘Well, what’s the difference between a two-engine and a jet?’
“I found out. It was just a-dipping up and down, dipping up and down, all the way from Atlanta to Detroit.”
“I’m branging the best to Oakland,” she adds, then spells out the word: “B-R-A-N-G-I-N-G.”