In the Groove

For more than four decades, record producer Jerry Wexler took pride in his ability to coax full life stories out of the mouths of his impassioned singers within the confines of a three-minute recording.

His production of Aretha Franklin’s tumultuous and soulful “I Never Loved a Man (The Way I Loved You)” not only captured the thrill of stormy romance, it spoke volumes about her rocky marriage to then-manager Ted White and, decades later, a string of doomed liaisons.

So when it came time for Wexler to sing about his own life, naturally he sought a collaborator who was not merely a recorder of anecdotes but a real producer--someone who could help him communicate the joy and the tragedy of stories he always wanted to tell but was afraid to expose.

For Wexler, like fellow Rock and Roll Hall of Famers Ray Charles, Marvin Gaye, Smokey Robinson, Etta James and B.B. King, there was only one writer who filled the bill: biographer David Ritz of Los Angeles.

Ritz, 53, who also writes novels, liner notes and lyrics and occasionally contributes profiles to Rolling Stone and Essence, specializes not only in the history of modern R & B and jazz, but in capturing the spoken words of black music’s greatest creators. His are “as told to” books, but not the kiss-and-tell quickies that have cheapened the genre. His are intimate works that, like the songs of the musicians he profiles, are cinematically visual, remarkably candid and often reveal sides of the artists even they didn’t know existed.

“R & B is intimate music,” says Ritz, whose most recent book is the widely acclaimed B.B. King autobiography “Blues All Around Me” (Avon, 1996).

“When B.B. King and others are the purveyors of such intimate music, it would be an enormous waste for the book not to be. If you’re telling the story of Aretha Franklin,” Ritz says about the subject of his next book, “the book needs to be intimate or else you feel cheated.”

Wexler, who coined the phrase “rhythm and blues” while writing for Billboard in 1949 and later helped guide Atlantic Records into a powerhouse of black music, says, “David has a knowledge of rhythm and blues that put even me to shame.” The two collaborated on Wexler’s “Rhythm and the Blues: A Life in American Music” (Knopf), which won the Ralph J. Gleason Prize as best music book of 1993.

“David knew how to push all of the right buttons, to get the positive and the negative out of me,” Wexler says. “People that have known B.B. King for years haven’t heard the stories that David helps him tell in that book. He’s a natural producer.”

Reclining in a comfortable reading chair, David Ritz pushes a button on the remote control in his right hand. Instantly, Sarah Vaughan’s sultry whisper emerges from hidden speakers in the Wilshire-area garage he’s transformed into a plush writing office, sashaying around drummer Roy Haynes’ hypnotizing polyrhythms.

Ritz, eyes closed behind circular John Lennon glasses, abandons his sentence and surrenders to the musical moment, his sneakered feet tapping on the light gray carpet.

For a few brief minutes, his mind departs the enclosed sanctum lined with books about music, rare vinyl, Grammy Awards he’s won for his liner notes and his lyrics to Marvin Gaye’s “Sexual Healing,” and personal pictures with everyone from Aretha to Janet Jackson, and sails in the heavens with Vaughan’s angelic voice.

He’s feeling it deep.

“I believe in the spirituality of the groove,” Ritz finally says, opening his eyes after the song ends.

His voice has a gentle, musical quality--if he sang, he’d be a tenor. Occasionally, with words that have an “s” or “ph” sound, he’ll fall into a long stutter (like the word ssssppppporadically, for example), but when you get used to it, it has its own groove--you just have to lie back in the cut and wait for the word to finish.

“In my writing, the groove is the moment that I’m trying to capture,” he continues. “The groove is a locking moment, the joy of life, the realization in the creation of art and trusting the notion that there is a universal rhythm that will comfort you, nourish you, and enable you to swing. It’s always there.”

Black music has always hypnotized Ritz, who is Jewish and was born in Manhattan in 1943, the eldest son of a hat salesman turned stockbroker and a drapery seller, and surrounded by older and younger sisters. Growing up in an intellectual household where jazz reigned, Ritz was the kind of kid who, instead of collecting stamps, memorized jazz personnel, to the extent that his parents wanted to put him on the infamous quiz show “The $64,000 Question.”

When he moved to North Dallas, Texas, at 13, he often found himself attracted to black neighborhoods. His mission? To see traveling gospel shows and R & B revues featuring Ray Charles, Jimmy Reed and others. While others went crazy over Elvis, Ritz worshiped the root of rock ‘n’ roll: the blues.

One memory he often uses to explain the emotional power of black music is of the time he saw Mahalia Jackson singing in a Texas baseball park. When her sound system broke down, the legendary gospel singer dropped her microphone and filled the arena with only the bravura force of her voice.

“It was like she was connected to God. Her voice was so clear, and so powerful, it was like her joy to the world.”

Reading Billie Holiday’s 1956 autobiography, “Lady Sings the Blues,” convinced Ritz that he didn’t want to be a musician but a writer.

“The book was like an epiphany,” he says. “This, in my hand, was what I wanted to do. To be that guy sitting in the corner, to get someone like Billie to tell me what it was all about, the life behind the music. That was my life.”

Ritz was 32, married, a father of twin daughters, had advanced English degrees from the University of Texas and State University of New York, and had opened an advertising agency by the time he built up enough courage to pursue his lifelong dream.

“I was scared, man,” he says in retrospect. “It took me about five years of having a firm to realize that I really didn’t care about the advertising world. I wanted to write.”

Ritz’s first subject was someone who fascinated him as a child: Ray Charles. Charles, like Ritz, had made the transition from Dallas and finally settled down in Los Angeles. When Ritz began courting his subject in 1976, nothing seemed to work.

A major obstacle was Charles’ overprotective manager, Joe Adams, who wasn’t quick about conveying Ritz’s messages to the blind soul singer.

“I started sending Ray telegrams in Braille,” Ritz says with a mischievous laugh. “He was the only person who read them, so there was no Joe Adams to deal with. My advertising taught me how to make an effective pitch. It worked.”

During the year in the recording studio that he spent around Charles while researching the 1978 book “Brother Ray” (Dial Press), Ritz learned the most important lessons of his career. Soul musicians are, by nature, nocturnal, so many of his interviews would take place in the wee hours. The other lesson was to allow the conversations, like the music, to flow whatever course they may, not unlike an improvised solo in the middle of a composition. Patience, and giving over complete control to the artist, set the environment for true candor--and soul.

“It’s like a jam session,” Ritz explains. “You have to feel them out, to figure out when and where they want to talk. I try to suspend expectations of time and try to be a loving presence.

“Aretha Franklin likes to talk in the kitchen. Ray Charles liked to talk in the recording studio, cause his hands could feel the knobs on the mixing board and he felt like he was in control. Marvin Gaye liked to kick back and smoke a joint. Smokey liked to talk on his golf cart, driving between holes. You just kind of blend in as best you can. If you have to wait for months, or in Marvin’s case, even years between conversations, that’s how it is.

“If Ray feels like talking about his daddy one day, you’d better throw out your list of questions and that college research sensibility. You’ve got to be quiet. As much as there’s an art to writing, there’s an art to listening and truly connecting with your subject.”

*

If Ritz connected more deeply with one subject than any other, it was Marvin Gaye. The book “Divided Soul” (McGraw Hill, 1985) would become exactly that--a project that, over the course of four years, would bring two souls remarkably close and then, in a dispute over songwriting credits, push them apart.

Before the two had a chance to reconcile, Gaye was shot to death by his father on April 1, 1984, the day before his 45th birthday. Ritz was devastated for many months.

But as he tried to recover from Gaye’s death, Ritz realized that the book was something that he was destined to write.

“I was the only person he told the story to--his story,” Ritz says. “I felt as if he wouldn’t have told me if he didn’t want it told. He knew that I loved him, and that I would tell the story in a loving way that explained the complexity of his art.”

Ritz ultimately enjoys being a professional ghost--someone his subjects speak through, not a biographer who makes observations and summarizes other people’s lives.

“The longer I do it, the more I allow another spirit to move through me,” he says. “To sit down at a computer and become B.B. King or Etta James is incredible. I listen to the tapes, I read the transcripts, and what I do is I try to capture their voices, to move along with them in this journey.”

He pauses as another Sarah Vaughan song drifts from the speakers. He slowly shakes his head.

“It hurts me that Sarah never got to do a book,” he says. “Biographies have been written about her, but she ain’t in them. I miss her. Her music has literally been part of thousands of hours of my life, and it would be wonderful to have the kind of book where she snuggles up to you in a cozy kind of way and says, ‘Hey, this is how it all happened.’

“That’s all these books are really about,” Ritz says, his eyes scanning the back wall of his office, which is lined with his framed covers.

“Real black voices, telling their stories in their own words. Why do a book about B.B King where you just analyze his link to Robert Johnson, and the fact that the blues stretches back to the plantation? They’ve been writing books like that for 80 years.

“What interests me is: What did B.B King see and feel as a black man growing up in the South, picking cotton and traveling to Memphis to be a deejay and eventually a rich, world-famous ambassador of the blues? People care less about what I have to say about B.B. King than what B.B. King has to say about B.B. King. That’s all.”