Eclectic Company: Now I Can Die Happy

Over more than 42 years of concert-going, I’ve pretty much seen everyone I’ve wanted to see, as often as I’ve wanted to see them, except for two women I’ve followed with affection and admiration since my teens. You might be surprised to read their names in the same sentence, and especially here, in The Jambalaya News, where I’ve laid my tastes bare for the past 30 months, but never mentioned either woman once. They are Yoko Ono and Aretha Franklin. Surprised? These two have inspired and intimidated those who would imitate their music and their personalities for more than five decades; I’m here to testify that they’ve alternately charmed and maddened me. But on deeper reflection, I’ve realized that Yoko and Aretha have set the standards by which I’ve measured almost every other female performer all these many years.

I wrote admiringly about Yoko years ago for The Village Voice, when I reviewed Season of Glass, her album of anger, grief and longing following John Lennon’s death, which touched me in ways no other marital epistle had done before. I’d loved her work since the first time I heard her 1971 album Fly, especially her song “Will You Touch Me.” For me, she was the first real feminist I’d understood more than viscerally; Yoko and John sang their proto-feminist anthem “Woman is the Nigger of the World,” stating my beliefs, and making not a few men rethink societal values, to mine and their benefit. On that song as on others, Yoko’s voice is not pretty, but it’s evocative — she uses it effectively as both a blunted hatchet and a finely-honed Ginsu knife — and she puts across what she needs to when she wants you to cry, or yelp, or laugh.

Aretha’s is a different feminist story altogether. So sassy, so frankly sexual, so straight up in her demands, the soulful singer’s voice trumpets, croons, shivers and whispers, and makes clear that she knows what she wants, and that she’s not settling for less. That’s Ms. Aretha Franklin, the undisputed Queen, now and forevermore, of Soul. Yes, ma’am. Yes, ma’am. I’ve never before had a reason to write about Aretha, and I’ve seen her so rarely that I never expected to, but when my friend Jill invited me to join a group of her friends at a free outdoor Aretha Franklin concert in Coney Island, Brooklyn, as part of the Borough’s Seaside Concert series, I could barely contain myself. “Sure, I’ll go,“ I said, casually, while inside my heart was pounding and a dozen sweetly painful memories of childhood crushes on inappropriate boys popped into my head. “Daydreaming and I’m thinking of you/daydreaming and I’m thinking of you,” I sang to myself. (Later, so did Ms. Franklin. Yeah.) But I digress.

So we drove the Belt Parkway from Queens to Coney Island. Got there hours early enough to buy Nathan’s Famous hot dogs from their location down the road, and then wait in line, shuffling forward with chairs, and hampers full of food and drink, umbrellas to ward off sun and rain, and all the other waiting around paraphernalia at the concert site. We made it to seats around 6 pm, and Brooklyn’s Borough President, Marty Markowitz, started emceeing the show more than 90 minutes before the overture started at 8:15 or so: “What does Brooklyn want?” he shouted, pumping his free hand into an overhead fist. “R E S P E C T” we shouted back, with only a second’s lag between question and answer.

The sultry summer afternoon faded into an easy breezy twilight, as we sat on our increasingly uncomfortable plastic folding chairs, not daring to get up even for a brief bathroom run, for fear of losing our 10th row seats, and having to spend the concert back on the boardwalk a good 300 feet away, which was also over capacity long before the show was scheduled to start. Ten thousand of us, I read in the local papers the next day, but I think it was probably 15,000 or more. No one had bothered to do the aerial photo count, because even though there was politicking aplenty — with introductions to many attending politicos, including questionably disgraced? longtime Dem Representative Charlie Rangel and Dem Senator Chuck Schumer — this night was not about being seen, it was all about seeing and hearing, about shared moments with Aretha fans of all stripes, sizes and persuasions, about singing along and knowing ALL the words to even her most obscure old songs, and smiling with shared delight at our neighbors singing with us.

And then the band came on — conductor Fred Nelson, piano, drums, two keyboards and a percussionist, three female backup singers including Aretha's cousin Brenda Corbett, guitar (her son Teddy), bass, and eight horns — launching into an overture of Miss Thang’s greatest hits, and we all hummed or sang along as hit morphed into megahit. And then, to a ripple of hand claps building to a rumble of applause, onstage she sailed, resplendent in a purple sleeveless satin gown with a long matching silk shawl that floated on the breeze, a string of white pearls and pearl bracelet, a mammoth pearl ring on one hand and a smaller diamond ring on the other, both setting off her long, aristocratic pianist's fingers. And then, without further fanfare, Aretha started rocking and clapping, and oh, praise be, it’s Jackie Wilson’s “Higher and Higher,” and “oh Brooklyn, your love keeps lifting me/higher and higher” as we pounded and clapped and shouted out like we were in church. And of course, for the rest of the show, we were.

She sang, with a voice thinned and strained by age, but nevertheless as emotionally powerful as ever, and we sang along with the Aretha who was the first woman inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, the Aretha who wouldn’t have missed singing at President Barack Obama’s inauguration no matter how she was feeling, the Aretha who demanded and earned our respect. And the band plied its arrangements over familiar territory, and we snapped Aretha’s photo, watching her shake her money maker, pirouetting across the stage despite a broken toe, and in gigantic close-ups on the video screens on either side of the stage as the sun set and the night grew dark with twinkling stars. The show with intermission covered a lot of ground from “(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman” to “Think,” “Jump To It,” “Freeway of Love,” “Chain of Fools,” “Moody’s Mood For Love,” and a new song, “How Long I've Waited” from her recent album, A Woman Falling Out Of Love, released on her own label, and available only from Wal-Mart. But the highlights of the show came in two spots: Aretha bashing away at the piano, turning “Bridge Over Troubled Water” into a gospel medley that began slowly with “Don’t Trouble The Water,” and ended with shouting and ululations and amens, and you can see it yourself on youtube, so why should I give you any further inadequate words? And to end the night, as the last encore, of course, Ms. Aretha Franklin sang “Respect,” and we shook our fingers at imaginary lovers, and stood our ground, feeling our power, just as, off to our right, fireworks lit up the sky, bursting throughout the outro vamp and Mayor Markowitz’s string of breathlessly repeated thank you and good nights until we were truly replete. Unbelievable. I swear, I can now die happy.