The gospel according to Solomon Burke
The "King of Rock & Soul" treats Chicago to a rare performance of biblical proportions
He may well be the alpha and omega of the great soul singers, the smoothest andthe lovingest of all the smooth love daddies who transposed gospel's ecstatic yearning into rhythm-and-blues jukebox romance. He was there in the beginning, at the dawn of the 1960s, with hits like "Cry to Me" and "Got to Get You Off My Mind," and he's here, now, as strong of voice and as fervent of spirit, at a time when such classic, love-struck soliloquies seem like a lost art.
Maybe that's why 65-year-old Solomon Burke is once again actively touring and recording: to remind us all how's it's done. He comes to Millennium Park's Pritzker Pavilion Saturday 4 to headline the Chicago Gospel Music Festival, playing behind a stirring, new album with the more-than-apt title Make Do With What You Got (Shout Factory). The release, produced by session ace Don Was, is actually the second in a two-album comeback launched in 2002 with the Grammy-winning Don't Give Up on Me, which paired Burke's epic vocals with tunes by such latter-day disciples as Tom Waits and Bob Dylan.
The new CD doesn't mess with the formula: Burke covers songs by artists he inspired, including Dr. John, Van Morrison and the Rolling Stones. It's a popular ploy these days; indeed, Was has helmed so many similar endeavors that he's known as "the Re-Animator." But Burke—an ordained bishop in his own House of God for All People—makes you forget about any studio conceits with the simple yet profound power of his phrasing and authority of his message. He turns everything into a sermon, a parable, a prayer, a supplication.
"It's hard to follow up a record like that," says Burke, admitting that he wasn't sure he could outdo Don't Give Up. He speaks in a baritone as rich and sweet as cream, the same voice that caused Waits to call him "Solomon theResonator." The singer is on the phone from Los Angeles, where he presides over his ministry, his multiple business enterprises and a family of such impressively biblical size that you imagine his royalties spent as down payment on an ark: 21 children, 76 grandchildren and 13 great-grandchildren. When he talks about going back into the studio, he might as easily be discussing the arc of his career, which sparked before the Beatles and Motown took over the radio: "You linger into the memory and the miracle of what has happened," Burke says, "but you keep trying to get that flame going."
For the longest time, Burke was more memory than miracle—at least in the pop consciousness. Early on, he was lionized by a generation of rock musicians. Before the Rolling Stones wrote many of their own songs, Mick Jagger sang versions of Burke's hits "You Can Make It If You Try" and "Everybody Needs Somebody to Love" (later reprised by erstwhile soul men Jake and Elwood in the finale of The Blues Brothers). And, later, when the man acclaimed as the "King of Rock & Soul" was nearly forgotten, writers such as Peter Guralnick celebrated him as royalty in exile, bringing the singer's extravagant nature to vivid life in the 1986 R&B book Sweet Soul Music.
While Burke's more successful contemporaries, like Otis Redding (who covered the singer's "Down in the Valley") and Sam Cooke, faded into the pantheon of departed legends, he persisted as an icon of the true faith. His classic Atlantic recordings, kept in loose circulation on greatest-hits compilations and boxed sets and tucked away on the occasional movie soundtrack, became part of the R&B apocrypha—fragments of a lost gospel recounted by believers in times of woe and confusion. Witness the hapless, record-collecting protagonist of Nick Hornby's High Fidelity, who finds in the soul man's pronouncements a kind of oracular balm.
Burke is happy to acknowledge, and even encourage, such analogies. This, after all, is a man who not only is a legend in his own time but was a legend before he was born. His grandmother had a vision 12 years before Burke's birth instructing her to start a church in his name. His godfather was the fabled black minister Daddy Grace. And by age seven, Burke was known as the Boy Wonder Preacher, rocking the pulpit in his native Philadelphia, where he was raised in a notoriously poor neighborhood called the Black Bottom.
"I was born over the top of the church," Burke says, beginning to recount what, for a moment, sounds like an anecdote from a magic-realist novel, the kind where the boy-hero comes into the world through some mysterious form of divine intervention. But, no, he means this literally: Some churches are storefronts, particularly in the ecstatic African-American tradition. And Burke's mother gave birth in the room upstairs. "Nobody ever heard me crying because downstairs was tubas and trombones and a big bass drum and people shoutin' and geetars twangin,'" Burke says. "I don't even know what key I came here in. That was my beginning. You can feel the spirit of what's inside of me, that's natural for me. I wake up with a bass line, going [Sings]: 'Boom-boom-boom. Get up and go-go-go-go.'"
His precocious ministry makes for some irresistible riffs. "I did get the opportunity to tell people, 'Yes, I was your grandmother's bishop.' And they say, 'But she's been dead for 70 years! You look good for 120!'" Burke quips. "In your mind, when you say bishop, you think of an older person. How in the world can a kid come into the world and be a bishop? God has given me that gift."
Burke, known for singing from a throne in which his generous 300-pound frame is draped in flowing robes (though sometimes a three-piece pinstripe suit will do), promises a different sort of show for Gospel Fest. He's not worried that the gospel show he's planning will turn off a crowd expecting the soul hits. "When you see Solomon Burke, that's one story, but if you're coming to see Bishop Solomon Burke, that's another story," he declares. "They may look like the same guy, but believe me, they're not. I believe that people will come to this service and be blessed: physically, mentally, spiritually and financially. This is my job. This is what God has given me to do. It's like that grain of sand, that little messenger...Go forth!"
As befits such a natural storyteller, Burke is, himself, the subject of dozens of shaggy-dog sagas, many retold by Guralnick in his valentine to R&B, and which form the spine of nearly every profile written about the singer since his return to the spotlight. Unlike many of his peers, Burke was able to thrive in the decades after his last chart hits because of his entrepreneurial wiles. Besides his ministry (which, he emphasizes, doesn't accept tithes), he was invested in the mortuary business. Funeral-home directors, he observed at an early age, were the only black people in the community who drove a new Cadillac every year. This cued one of the great lines about Burke, from the soul singer Joe Tex, who joked that "Solomon Burke knock you dead from the bandstand, then he gift wrap you for the ride home."
As far as Burke is concerned, all the stories are true. And he'll gladly embellish them for you. One of the most memorable concerns along bus ride in 1961 with black and white performers on a tour through the Deep South. Burke, who knew the route, had stockpiled a cooler full of sandwiches and sodas, and offered to sell them to his tourmates for $2.50 apiece. But no one wants to pay that for cheese and baloney. As the bus plunges further into no-man's-land, though, the price continues to go up.
"I'm on the bus with Dionne Warwick and Dion, who had just left that group, the Belmonts—his first time being on tour with black singers—and Gladys Knight and the Pips," Burke begins, his voice turning gleeful and high-pitched as he mimics conversation. They shun his sandwiches, and Dion (being the white guy) hops out at a roadhouse to pick up sacks of hamburgers for everyone. "He's coming back and he's got two guys carrying the food, and poor Charlie from the Drifters, he's so courteous he gets off the bus and—man!—those guys saw there were black people on the bus, and they threw those sandwiches at him!"
Burke roars. "Okay, it was not a time to laugh." Roars again. The bus squeals out of the parking lot, and after awhile everyone calms down. They're saying when they get to the first pay phone they're gonna call their momma, who knows somebody who works for the NAACP. And I'm sitting in the back. [Clears throat]:'Mmmm-hmmm! Sandwiches, $7.50! Sodas and potato chips free. If you don't have money, you can owe me.'" He sold out, pronto.
Burke's belly rumbles at the thought. "Tothis day," he says, relishing the punchline, "when I've seen some of these folks, they look at me and bust out laughing. They'll say, 'Remember what you charged for those sandwiches? Now baloney sandwiches really are $7!'"
Solomon Burke performs Saturday 4 at the Pritzker Pavilion in Millennium Park.
