I Never Loved a Man the Way I Love You
Aretha Franklin, Respect, and the Making of a Soul Music Masterpiece
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
I Never Loved a Man the Way I Loved You: Aretha Franklin, Respect, and the Making of a Soul Music Masterpiece presents the remarkable story of how The Queen of Soul created what Rolling Stone called “the greatest soul album ever made.”
The album she recorded that earned soul legend Aretha Franklin her first major hits after eleven previous efforts, I Never Loved A Man the Way I Loved You was a pop and soul music milestone. Apart from its status as a #1 hit record, the album also had a much wider cultural impact. By early 1967, when the album was released, the Civil Rights Movement was well underway; Aretha’s music gave it its theme song. And the #1 Billboard pop chart single “Respect”—written by Otis Redding—not only won two Grammys for best R&B recording and best R&B solo female vocal performance, it became a passionate call to arms for the burgeoning feminist movement.
Matt Dobkin has unearthed a wonderful story of the creation of an album that goes far beyond anything that’s been written about Aretha before. With scores of interviews—including ones with Atlantic Records’ famed producer Jerry Wexler, and the Muscle Shoals session musicians who recorded with Aretha—I Never Loved A Man the Way I Love You is the story of a great artistic achievement. It’s also the story of a star who is both more complex and determined than her modern image as a diva indicates.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This study of the making of Franklin's acclaimed 1967 album, which included the eponymous song and the all-purpose empowerment anthem "Respect," is an obsessive, intermittently engaging example of the minute reconstruction of recording-session ephemera that has become central to pop music criticism. Dobkin (Getting Opera) spends a couple of pages on the very first, unrecorded, warm-up chords Franklin played on the piano, which apparently galvanized her back-up musicians and crew into making music history. He proceeds to chronicle the assembly of the rhythm track and the horn parts, and gives a Rashomon-like blow-by-blow of a fight that almost derailed the project. Although Dobkin acknowledges that "words tend to fail" to convey Franklin's transcendent genius, that never inhibits his own effusive writing "Aretha... verily becomes the concept she's singing about. It's a kind of R&B quasi-syllogism: Aretha is respect is Aretha" about her sublime musicianship and the impact of her songs on feminism and the Civil Rights movement. Fortunately, whenever the narrative hyperventilates less and focuses on the basics of how musicians perform their craft, it opens an enlightening window on the creative process. Photos.
