Amazing Grace by Cohen Aaron

Author:Cohen, Aaron.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2011-12-21T08:27:00+00:00

A A r o n C o h e n

Aretha Franklin (from left), Jerry Wexler, Atlantic executive Henry Allen, and Ken Cunningham assess the cover art to Amazing Grace, May 1972.

Credit: Photo by William “PoPsie” Randolph (© 2010

Michael Randolph)

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Chapter Ten

A couple of months after Aretha Franklin spent

two nights recording Amazing Grace, she showed up at Atlantic studios to see Arif Mardin for remixing

and editing. Mardin’s son Joe recalls that she trusted

his father’s musical judgment, and with good reason.

Of all the higher-ups at Atlantic, he had the most

extensive background and training as a composer

and arranger. Mardin (alongside Tommy Dowd) was

also one of the first to delve into recording up to

eight tracks back in the late ’50s. All of which became important when Franklin asked him to help her

re-record “You’ll Never Walk Alone.”

“She didn’t like one part of the song, so she came

to the studio and played it and sang and said, ‘Make

your edit there,’” Mardin told Tom Doyle for the

British magazine Sound on Sound in 2004. “I said,

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A A r o n C o h e n

‘How are we gonna make an edit into the live church

sound?’ So I assembled a lot of people and they would

talk and hum and clap and everything to create that

atmosphere. Then I took a room murmur of the

church and made a long loop out of it. On the splice,

I put a cymbal and things like that and it worked out

fine.”

Along with reworking the song order, a few other

tweaks were made in the studio: a common practice

for concert albums. Assisting engineer Jimmy

Douglass said that Franklin’s frequent backing

group, The Sweet Inspirations, may have added

some overdubbed harmonies, but he’s not certain

(he was a teenager at the time). It’s also possible

that the backing vocalists were her sisters, Erma and

Carolyn, and cousin, Brenda Corbett. More strings

were added to “Wholy Holy,” which was one of the

album’s few misguided aesthetic choices — Dupree’s

guitar part was more than sufficient. Overall,

though, engineer Gene Paul (then in his early 20s)

said that the generally loose, hands-off, attitude

toward mixing Amazing Grace exemplified what

made the overall sound of these Atlantic LPs stand

out from Franklin’s earlier label. This approach

contrasted to eight years earlier when Atlantic heads

considered the idea of recording and selling a Dr.

Martin Luther King, Jr. sermon, but dismissed it as

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A m A z i n g g r A c e

the live response from his church audience would

mar the sound quality.1 As Paul said:

Mixes have a lot to do with the calling of how it was

performed. That’s the first thing. Second thing is how

it was recorded. All of these things together multiply

themselves and come out to what the mix is, unless

you force it. And those mixes were not forced. Those

mixes were as comfortable as if the Lord shined down

and said, “This is how we do it. You got one mic,

do your act.” Nothing was done technically perfect

because the minute you make it do something it wasn’t

supposed to do, you change the whole scope of it. And

they were all such professionals, or novices, whatever

they were, that’s the only place they played because

they owned it.

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