Mojo - The Music Magazine

JERRY WEXLER, WHO DIED last Friday aged 91, was a true innovator. It’s a term used too often in music, but his thinking outside the box really did change not only the way soul music was made but the way it was received as well.

He helped shape Atlantic records, introduced the term “rhythm and blues” into common vernacular and – working with Ray Charles, Solomon Burke, Wilson Pickett and Aretha Franklin – helped bring about the big bang of soul music: nurturing a collision of jazz, R&B pop and gospel to create something entirely new.

But when I spoke to him back in 2006, he was incredibly modest about such achievements. “I just happened to be there, at the right place, at the right time,” he said. “I was lucky because Ahmet Ertegun and I shared the same view. We knew what we wanted. It was just a case of finding artists and musicians who wanted the same thing.”

What they wanted was to put artists totally at ease so they could reach their fullest potential. “I tried to leave them to work on their own as much as possible,” he said. “They knew themselves best and how they worked.”

But again that’s Wexler playing down his part. After all, it was his idea to take Wilson Pickett to Stax studios in Memphis to work with the MG’s. The results were seismic: In The Midnight Hour, Don’t Fight It, Ninety Nine And A Half (Won’t Do) and 634- 5789. “Pickett just went mad in the studio,” Wexler told me. “It was fiery!”

Repeating the same setup with Don Covay yielded the US R&B hits See-Saw and Sookie Sookie but it was when Wexler persuaded a problematic ex-gospel singer called Aretha Franklin to record at Fame Studios in Muscle Shoals that he really shook things up. After 10 flop albums at Columbia, she would define the very essence of soul with her Atlantic debut, I Never Loved A Man The way I Love You.

“I just reminded her of what she was good at,” Wexler shrugged. “Sing from the heart, I told her, and she did.”

After Aretha’s success, other labels followed suit. Chess sent their failing divas – Etta James, Irma Thomas and Laura Lee – to work at Fame Studios and they garnered hits too.

Meanwhile Wexler was producing Dusty Springfield’s 1968 masterpiece, Dusty In Memphis. “I still have vivid memories of that one,” he laughed. “We didn’t hit it off at all. She thought I was a tyrant, threw an ashtray at me, called [the engineer] Tom Dowd a prima donna. I said, The only prima donna here, Miss Springfield, is you.” Dusty never actually sang a note in Memphis; the album sessions were eventually completed in New York, Wexler’s hometown.

“You expect artists to behave badly sometimes,” he said. “It goes with the creativity. We all blow our top.”

Wexler lived music from an early age. Born to a Jewish German window-cleaning father called Harry who “taught me about loyalty, and committing to something you believe in” and Elsa, his socialist mother who sold the Daily Worker in Harlem, Wexler lapped up his surroundings: “I’d scour everywhere for jazz 78s, annoy anyone I thought might have some I could rummage through” At nights, he would stalk the clubs in search of big band music: “I couldn’t get enough of it, that sound, it was so alive.”

Academically inclined, he graduated in journalism after a spell in the army, and started work on Billboard magazine in 1947, his major achievement being to persuade his publishers that calling a chart of best-selling black music the “Race Records” chart was insulting. From then on it would be referred to as “Rhythm & Blues”.

Joining Atlantic Records in 1953, he had an immediate hand in the birth of rock’n’roll, handling Big Joe Turner’s Shake, Rattle and Roll (1954) and Flip Flop And Fly (1955), Laverne Baker’s Jim Dandy from the same year and Ruth Brown’s Lucky Lips (1956). From there it was but a bagatelle to invent soul music with Ray Charles, Aretha and Solomon Burke (he co-wrote Everybody Needs Somebody To Love) and by the time he left in 1975 he’d overseen the transformation of the label into the industry’s most influential, and seen rock iconoclasts Led Zeppelin and the Rolling Stones flock to its door.

Post Atlantic, Wexler was just as busy. He worked with Tony Joe White and Willie Nelson and, most notably, took Bob Dylan to Muscle Shoals in 1979 to record Slow Train Coming.

“I’ve been lucky,” he said. “I’ve worked with everybody that mattered and I’ve been present at every important signpost. I wouldn’t change anything at all.”

It was much more than luck, and Jerry Wexler will be sorely missed.

Lois Wilson