Interview: Natalie Cole

“Yet,” says Hunter, “for her, the evolution was fantastic. It was creating a musical personality that evolved into what she is today. It was a very natural growth, to the point where she met her producers [a year later, in October 1974].” Chuck Jackson (not to be confused with the singer) and Marvin Yancy were producers in Chicago; they are best known for their work with the Independents. Jackson and Yancy had met Cole in New York, and had a tentative audition one day. Very tentative, in fact: she was late for the first appointment, and they didn’t show up at all.

“They were acting like they weren’t interested–’Who’s this girl, Natalie Cole? Never heard of her.’ And the next day they did show up and they walked in with the kind of attitude, ‘Oh, this isn’t gonna be nothing,’ and neither of us had any music with us, so Marvin just sat down at the piano and started playing something and told me to sing–and Chuck would give me some lyrics and I’d sing it–and Marvin and I just went to another zone completely. As soon as he started playing I was into it–I fell in love with the way he played that piano the first day, and something just happened to me. And he was like challenging me with the chords and I was right behind him. It was immediate.”

The two men then saw her at Mister Kelly’s in Chicago. Because of a problem getting music charts together, she reverted to some standards, such as “On a Clear Day” and “Mona Lisa,” which she had eased out of her set. “They loved it. That’s what made them write stuff like ‘Inseparable,’ when they heard me do ‘Mona Lisa.’

“Beyond cliché ballads like “Inseparable,” however, “I found a category that I had never done before. They just saw something in me that made them start writing differently. When they sang ‘This Will Be’ to me I told them they were crazy. I said I’d never do that. This R&B stuff was new to me, honey!”

Now, Cole is content–she methodically defines her music as “a level of sophistication, with an undercurrent of funk”–and she has found, through Yancy, personal contentment as well. She has found the heavy stuff. However happy she was with the music in the studio, “my life at that point, mentally I was depressed. I wasn’t really taking care of myself.”

Her manager had encouraged and helped her to move from Springfield to New York. Now, Yancy invited Cole to visit his church in Chicago. “That’s when I found out he was a Baptist minister. I didn’t know he was a minister when I first met him. That completely blew my mind, when I walked into church and he was up there preaching, in his robes, and he was a completely different person and I was really impressed, and I was also listening to what he said because at that time I had no particular feeling for him, so I was able to get into the message, and that led me to be baptized.

“When I went into that church, it was like the Lord saying to me, ‘There’s something for you to do. And this is just going to be the beginning, if you will accept me in your life, and just let me control it.’ When you’re in control of your own life, things get messed up. I learned right then how to start living day to day, how to forget about planning so far ahead and just making the most of it every day. And that’s what started me on the road, and that’s what happened to me in the studio, ’cause we went in to record, and we were hot.”

They decided to stick together as a team as part of any recording deal they might make; because of that demand, and, according to Kevin Hunter, because many labels weren’t interested in another female R&B singer, some ten labels, including Columbia, Arista, RCA and Private Stock, passed on Natalie Cole. They didn’t want Warner Bros, (not enough marketing success with soul music); Motown (too much soul music there already); Atlantic (home of Aretha Franklin).

“And we ended up–Capitol took the shot,” says Cole. “I think it’s really ironic that it should turn out to be Capitol Records, I tell you.” Capitol, after all, was Nat “King” Cole’s label, and Natalie wanted to avoid any hint of the company taking her on because her father had sold 50 million records there. “Capitol was the last label we approached,” says Hunter. “The last.”

While in Chicago to attend Yancy’s church, Natalie was also reunited with cousin Janice Williams, 40, whom she had talked with only once, briefly, in 14 years. Williams was a featured soloist and organist at the Third Baptist Church in Chicago–and worked as a taxicab dispatcher in Chicago for 14 years, 12 hours a day (“The hours fitted in with my church thing”). Now she is Cole’s “spiritual adviser.”

“She just keeps me together. She’s like a traveling companion,” says Natalie. “She’s very old-fashioned and I think that’s what really has helped, that her old-fashionedness has kept me from doing a lot of things that I might have done. She believes in roots, that everyone should have roots, and her roots are the Bible.”

Williams doesn’t know why she’s considered a spiritual adviser. “Sometimes, on the road, the pressure is on her head and rather than let her get angry, I’m there–I kinda give her the eye and cool her out,” she says. Mostly, Williams offers advice based on her own experiences, “miracles I have had happen to my life,” messages from God–in short, dispatches from the Head Hack.

One piece of advice Williams gave was for Natalie to marry Marvin Yancy, which she did last fall, shortly after splitting from a musician to whom she was engaged.

Now, Natalie is pregnant and will wind down her work schedule in anticipation of a fall delivery.

***

Cole is a full-circle woman. It may have taken some time, but she is back to blackness, church and the family way. She is home and free at last. Behind her desk at her Sunset Boulevard office, she maintains that she is not bored with all this mellowness, and she laughs at her admission that she is a “square” today, and at the thought of her hippie girlfriend in San Francisco.

“She’s superstraight now,” she says. “I can’t believe it. She works as a secretary for her father, who owns a buffalo ranch.” Cole thinks about her friends and her times back East, how she left depressed, dazed and half-crazed, and how she must be shocking them now with her “Sophisticated Lady” routine on TV with Sinatra, Anka, and on all the talk-show couches.

But this is the real Natalie Cole–for today, anyway. She is a woman who seems to have been led by impulses and accident. That’s how she got into music, into drugs, into church, into love and, eventually, into quick success. It is too early to tell where she is headed next, and whether she’ll indeed be the “New Queen of Soul.”

Of course, she hasn’t done too badly in two years. Especially for someone born rich and white. But to hear Natalie Cole talk, it hasn’t been no overnight trip to the top. She’s not exactly singing the blues, but oh, Lawd, has she paid her dues.

Or, as she puts it: “I’m really glad I haven’t done anything really bad to anybody but myself. Now I feel like there’s nothing that I have that I don’t deserve. I used to feel guilty when I started becoming successful. I said, ‘Why is this happening to me? I really don’t deserve it.’ But then I had to say to myself, ‘Hell, yes I do.’ I haven’t been out there all these years eating strawberries and cream.”