Jerry Wexler died

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Author Message   Thumper Veteran Poster Username: Thumper Post Number: 601 Registered: 01-2004 Rating: N/A Votes: 0 (Vote!) Posted on Friday, August 15, 2008 - 06:14 pm:        Hello All, I am so sad about this but Jerry Wexler is dead, http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080815/ap_en_mu/obit_jerry_wexler; You all know of his work, but may not know that this man was partly responsible for some of our greatest music. I know him primarily as Aretha's producer during her Atlantic years. He produced almost all of her classics, starting with I Never Loved A Man, followed up with Respect, Chain of Fools, on and on. Of course Aretha was not the only artist he worked with or produced, but his work with her alone is enough to put him in the history books. He was a nice man. I remember years ago, almost 20 years, I wrote to him. This was in the infancy of the CD box set. At that time, there were no internet, so I haunted the Indy record shops and anything they did not have, I either special ordered it, or bought my music through catalogues. Those were the days! *smile* Anyway, I had bought a few box sets and were seeing a box set for everybody BUT Aretha. I was not a happy camper. So, one night my friend Steve and I got drunk. I'm still pissed about the no-Aretha box set situation, so what do I do...I got some notebook paper and wrote to Jerry Wexler telling him of my "displeasure". I mailed that sucker. About a month or two went by and I get this light borwn envelope in the mail FROM JERRY WEXLER! I thought who in the hell is Jerry Wexler and why is he writing me. It took me a second and it came to me. I was embarrassed. I could not believe that one, I had actually mailed my drunken rant; and two, he actually replied. Naw, maybe it was one of those form replies or something, you know one of those standard "we received your request..." yada, yada. I opened it and lo and behold he actually wrote me back. Told me that Aretha's box set was in the works because he had just finished up some work on it and that it would be out soon, and it was. A nice note. I still got it, after all these years.   Steve_s Veteran Poster Username: Steve_s Post Number: 368 Registered: 04-2004 Rating: N/A Votes: 0 (Vote!) Posted on Friday, August 15, 2008 - 07:37 pm:        Hi Thumper, That's a great story. Sorry to hear about his passing. I've been reading about Jerry Wexler and this era of popular music in a couple of books: "Hip: The History by John Leland," which has a chapter called "The World is a Ghetto: Blacks, Jews, and Blues," and now "Girls Like Us: Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon, and the Journey of a Generation" by Sheila Weller. Weller asserts that it was Wexler, then a Billboard writer and soon to be Ahmet Ertegun's partner, whose essay in The Saturday Review of Literature decrying the use of the term "race music," led to the term "rhythm and blues," or R&B, gaining traction in the 1950s. As you know, Wexler worked with Ahmet Ertegun at Atlantic Records. Ertegun had discovered the original Drifters lead singer, Clyde McPhatter, whom he and Wexler considered one the the best R&B singers ever. But the Drifters had fallen on hard times and so Ertegun and Wexler hired Jerry Lieber and Mike Stoller to produce and write songs for them. The Drifters now had a new, default lead singer (after the new intended lead, Charlie Thomas, froze up in the studio). The new lead singer's name was Benjamin Earl Nelson, better known as Ben E. King. Here's what I didn't realize, but it makes sense when you think about it. When West Side Story opened in 1957, "a startlingly high new bar was set -- musical theater could now romanticize issues (intergroup love affairs; the anger of disenfranchised populations) so fresh they were almost more incipient than current." I love that phrase! When Lieber and Stoller worked up the operatic string arrangement on "There Goes My Baby," it made Wexler so angry that "he wanted to hurl the tape recorder at the wall." But what he didn't get was the appeal of the new Drifters' sound to the young listeners who were moved by West Side Story. So I can see the West Story appeal in their later songs like [There is a Rose in] Spanish Harlem and maybe even Under the Boardwalk.   Chrishayden "Cyniquian" Level Poster Username: Chrishayden Post Number: 7305 Registered: 03-2004 Rating: N/A Votes: 0 (Vote!) Posted on Saturday, August 16, 2008 - 10:04 am:        He screwed a lot of people out of their money. His machinations led to the ultimate destruction of Stax records.