Respect Quotes

“I don’t care what they say about Aretha,” said Billy Preston. “She can be hiding out in her house in Detroit for years. She can go decades without taking a plane or flying off to Europe. She can cancel half her gigs and infuriate every producer and promoter in the country. She can sing all kinds of jive-ass songs that are beneath her. She can go into her diva act and turn off the world. But on any given night, when that lady sits down at the piano and gets her body and soul all over some righteous song, she’ll scare the shit out of you. And you’ll know—you’ll swear—that she’s still the best fuckin’ singer this fucked-up country has ever produced.”
― David Ritz, Respect: The Life of Aretha Franklin

“Besides, she likes Judy Garland and knows that if she sings a Judy Garland song, she’s gonna sing it better than Judy ever could. That gives Aretha great satisfaction.”
― David Ritz, Respect: The Life of Aretha Franklin

“In 1996 the Queen traveled to Toronto to catch Diahann Carroll playing the lead in a new staging of Sunset Boulevard. “She didn’t realize it wasn’t going to be freezing,” said Erma, “so she ordered up a mink coat from one of the better department stores. Because the coat was so enormous, she decided it required a ticket of its own. She and her coat sat together on the front row. It was hysterical.”
― David Ritz, Respect: The Life of Aretha Franklin

“You have to admire her for trying,” said Ruth Bowen. “She’s always trying. She’s always trying to get back on planes, always trying to lose weight, always trying to manage her money and figure out how to manage a relationship with a man. It’s good to try. But if you’re gonna succeed, you have to understand yourself. You have to look deep into yourself and figure out what makes you fail. Why do I have so many fears? Why am I a compulsive eater? Why do I wind up chasing off all these men? Aretha does not want to look at herself. She doesn’t want to critique herself. She doesn’t know how to do that. She can’t take criticism either from without or from within. The result is that nothing changes for her. The world keeps knocking on her door because the world wants to hear her sing. That will never change.”
― David Ritz, Respect: The Life of Aretha Franklin

“Nearly every Aretha gig that I booked,” said Dick Alen of the William Morris Agency, “required that of her total fee, she had to have twenty-five thousand in cash before she went onstage. That was the money she used to make her payroll. She deducted no taxes and made no records. I’d beg her to implement some system of documentation, but she refused. I knew that eventually there’d be hell to pay from the IRS.”
― David Ritz, Respect: The Life of Aretha Franklin

“The public didn’t seem to care much for What You See Is What You Sweat—it was her weakest-selling album for Arista. Even her duet with Luther Vandross, “Doctor’s Orders,” their final collaboration, failed to make a dent in the marketplace. “By then I had lost track of all the times Aretha had promised never to speak to me again,” said Luther. “She was always imagining insults that I had inflicted on her. If I came to perform in Detroit, she would demand tickets for twenty-four of her best friends, and if I provided twelve, I was suddenly in the doghouse. It was a draining friendship, to say the least. In the end, though, I couldn’t stay mad at Aretha because she is, after all, Aretha. So when she asked for another ‘Jump to It’–style jam, ‘Doctor’s Orders’ was what I came up with. It isn’t among the favorite things I’ve done. I consider it trifling. And of course it wasn’t helped by the fact that Aretha refused to leave Detroit to let me produce her vocal where I wanted to produce it—in a studio in LA or New York, where I could do the best job. Her voice was beginning to show signs of age. All voices fray. Recording older voices requires extra-special care. With Aretha, though, that care can’t be applied because she won’t recognize that there’s been even the slightest bit of deterioration.”
― David Ritz, Respect: The Life of Aretha Franklin

“As we worked on From These Roots together, she struggled to voice her feelings about the passing of her siblings and grandmother. For long periods, she could do little more than wipe the tears from her eyes. I offered sympathy, and together we sat in silence. Finally came the day when she began to speak of the ordeals. In her mind, though, she had reversed the chronology; she had Big Mama dying after Cecil when, in fact, Rachel Franklin had died in late 1988, a year before her grandson. When I gently pointed this out, Aretha grew furious. She informed me that in the matter of the deaths of her loved ones, she hardly needed correction. I checked again with Erma and Earline, my original sources for the information. I also obtained the death certificate. The facts confirmed what I had told Aretha, yet Aretha remained adamant. In her published book, she has Cecil dying before her grandmother, mistakenly stating that Big Mama passed in 1990.”
― David Ritz, Respect: The Life of Aretha Franklin

“Self-reflection was never Aretha’s strong suit, and yet in the late eighties, she began discussing the idea of writing her memoirs. Before she hired an agent to shop a deal, though, she spoke about her life to reporter Ed Bradley for a 60 Minutes segment. The resulting profile was little more than a puff piece. Yet Aretha was extremely unhappy with the interview because of one particular question. Bradley wanted to know about the sexual content in so many of her songs. “I mean, it’s in a lot of your songs,” he said. “Lust. A feeling—good feeling.” “You got me mixed with somebody else, Ed,” said Aretha indignantly. A few months after the interview aired, I spoke with Bradley. “I’ve done some tough celebrity interviews,” he told me, “but Aretha ranks among the toughest. When it came to personal revelations, she was completely shut down. Given the openness in her music, that shocked me. There was no introspection whatsoever. So when I learned that she was planning to write her autobiography, I was surprised. I couldn’t imagine her making any emotional disclosures.”
― David Ritz, Respect: The Life of Aretha Franklin

“Everyone loves her shit on Atlantic, and no doubt they’re classics, but when I heard her sing ‘Skylark,’ I told Esther Phillips, my running buddy back then, ‘That girl pissed all over that song.’ It came at a time when we were all looking to cross over by singing standards. I had ‘Sunday Kind of Love’ and ‘Trust in Me,’ and Sam Cooke was doing ‘Tennessee Waltz’ and ‘When I Fall in Love’ at the Copa. We were all trying to be so middle class. It was the beginning of the bougie black thing. I truly believe Aretha had a head start on us since she was the daughter of a rich preacher and grew up bougie. But, hell, the reasons don’t matter. She took ‘Skylark’ to a whole ’nother place. When she goes back and sings the chorus the second time and jumps an octave—I mean, she’s screaming—I had to scratch my head and ask myself, How the fuck did that bitch do that? I remember running into Sarah Vaughan, who always intimidated me. Sarah said, ‘Have you heard of this Aretha Franklin girl?’ I said, ‘You heard her do “Skylark,” didn’t you?’ Sarah said, ‘Yes, I did, and I’m never singing that song again.”
― David Ritz, Respect: The Life of Aretha Franklin

“she was the shyest thing I’ve ever met. Would hardly look me in the eye. Didn’t say more than two words. I mean, this bitch gave bashful a new meaning. Anyway, I didn’t give her any advice because she didn’t ask for any, but I knew goddamn well that, no matter how good she was—and she was absolutely wonderful—she’d have to make up her mind whether she wanted to be Della Reese, Dinah Washington, or Sarah Vaughan. I also had a feeling she wouldn’t have minded being Leslie Uggams or Diahann Carroll. I remember thinking that if she didn’t figure out who she was—and quick—she was gonna get lost in the weeds of the music biz. And I can testify that those weeds are awfully fuckin’ dense.”
― David Ritz, Respect: The Life of Aretha Franklin