Category Archives: Girls on Vinyl

Billie Holiday at 100

07 Tuesday Apr 2015

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Billie HolidayShe held court at Pod and Jerry’s on 133rd, The Ebony Club and Bop City on Broadway or The Alhambra Club up in Harlem. Much of it legend, memories lost in smoke and bourbon, lies that seemed fair enough, facts that were too hard to take.  If it seems like scene in a movie it was.

Out of total darkness she’d step into a small circle of light, tap out a beat in peek-toe stilettos only to be ignored by her own painted lips. Her trademark   stance, head cocked, eyes closed, she languishes half a beat, one beat, maybe five beats behind the band.  She’d “bend” a phrase like a rapper, clip an ending, draw-out syllables, on time, off time, studiously riding the melody then shaking it off when it failed to serve her message.  This was the house she owned and these were rules she made.

Before critical analysis became so dependent on the singer-songwriter, we celebrated vocal genius and Billie Holiday set the standard. She altered our sense of rhythm, took liberties with the melody and structured a phrase like no one ever had (save, perhaps, her hero Louis Armstrong).  If Armstrong was her patriarch, Sinatra was surely her prodigy. The term “standard” was virtually meaningless once Holiday worked a song into entirely new and personal entitiy.

And yet, her story remains as big as her sound, the story, important, irresistible and simplistic.  It’s a story of rape and abuse, poverty, racism, justice turned malignant, prosecution for sport, suffering, self-medicating and dying. It was best-selling book and a movie that earned 5 academy award nominations, more commercially successful than anything Holiday herself had ever done.

Stories though, in the pantheon American music, are made by men. Women are made by them. It’s hard to imagine anyone casting Hank Williams, Chet Baker, John Coltrane, Jimi Hendrix, or any of the legends who suffered, self-medicated and died in the process, as products of circumstance. Hardship, abject hardship, not withstanding, each demonstrated technique that was intentional, cultivated and crafted. No one looks beyond their own genius to explain their impact on American culture.

The Jazz Encyclopedia refers to the collision of art and tragedy in Holiday’s life as an immutable whole.  It goes to quote famous Jazz critics who, with the greatest affection, claim her failing pipes made her later recordings all more evocative. The long-standing take is that emotional authenticity more than cultivated technique solidified her status.  But this gives too much weight to circumstance and, for me, not enough respect to her true genius.

Cynthia Folio and Robert Weisberg at Temple University actually took on this issue a few years ago. In a complex destruction of Holiday’s timing and phrasing, they looked at multiple recordings of the same song.  In some cases, a song had been recorded five times including studio and live performances. They mapped out the timing, phrasing and melodic alterations from the earliest recordings (at her peak range and tone) through her final recordings.  The study demonstrated that very little was circumstantial in Holiday’s performances. Her technique was consistent and calculated throughout.

Today, on what would have been her 100th birthday, it’s worth considering that circumstance did not make Billie Holiday’s music important.  She did.

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Ode To Bobbie

15 Friday Aug 2014

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In August 1967, there was little disagreement about the sexiest, smartest, sultriest–and some would say–savviest, woman in country music.  Bobby Gentry seemed to come out of nowhere to dislodge the Beatles from their number one spot on Billboard Top 100 and held it for a month. But, that was just the beginning.  Her mastery of Southern Gothic themes, cinematic approach to song writing and compassionate insight resulted in the one the most recognizable and performed songs of her generation. With “Ode to Billie Joe,” she crafted one of country music’s most alluring mysteries, then she became one.

bobbiegentry1Bobby Gentry was formidable picker, a self taught pianist and vibes player, pioneer of the concept album, writer, painter, a daughter of the wayward South whose narrative arches and Gothic characters echoed the voices of Eudora Welty or Flannery O’Connor.

She wrote “Ode to Billy Joe” when she was 23 years-old and recorded it in a single take.  The record sold 750,000 copies the first week and secured her an opportunity rarely afforded women in the 1960’s.  She wrote nine of the ten songs on her debut album and began a body of work that would, decades later, be seen as the foundation for the concept album.

The lasting impact of “Ode to Billy Joe,” is the economical narrative arch that would become her trademark.  Her ability to inflate a story’s complexity through carefully placed textual references, set the bar for Americana artist like Lucinda Williams and Rosanne Cash (who poses on the Tallahatchie Bridge for her latest album cover).

She could delight the press with occasional glimpses of her process, and her insightfulness.  Asked why Billy Joe McCallister jumped off the Tallahatchie Bridge,  she answered “Those questions are of secondary importance in my mind. The story of Billy Joe has two more interesting underlying themes. First, the illustration of a group of people’s reactions to the life and death of Billy Joe… .Second, the obvious gap between the girl and her mother is shown, when both women experience a common loss.”

She could also cause traffic accidents crossing La Cienega Blvd in a mini-skirt.  Forty years later,  arranger Jimmy Haskell still recalls his first impression of her and her legs. In fact, in a recent BBC documentary, every man interviewed for the special recalled her physicality with remarkable precision. Bobbie used Final Net, Maybelline and Betsey Johnson minis with the same adeptness she handled her Gibson five string.  “Bobbie made no bones about it,” says writer, Holly George-Warren, “she was hot and she wanted to look hot.”

Years before George-Warren and Rosanne Cash and Lucinda Williams reignited an interest in Gentry, before she’d become the subject of songs by Jill Sobule and Beth Orton, Bobby Gentry dropped from sight.  Her departure was sudden, deliberate and complete enough to make it ripe for legend.

Every once in while, her friend’s cousin or cousin’s friend or somebody who knows someone will turn up a tidbit: she paints in her antebellum home off the Savannah coast,  she lives reclusively off the vast dividends of her Vegas investments, she’s not really hiding, just living quietly in L.A.  Haskell says that she called him once, when Reba McIntire covered “Fancy.”  She chatted, wanted to know what he thought, said she had new material, then vanished, refusing to return his calls.

In 2011 the BBC broadcast, “What Happened to Bobbie Gentry?,” Cash posits a few plausible, but baseless, theories.  Was she just to much of a contradiction? an unclassifiable mix of sexy and smart? Maybe pop-music culture was just too much for so poetic a soul. Maybe she’s got other priorities or is just too tired, too old or never really cared for fame, or maybe she’s got a problem.  Any theory is fine: all are plausible when none are provable. That’s not a bad thing, it’s just what we do. Few of us can accept that silence is, sometimes, just silence or that nothing really means nothing.

After recording her song,  “Where’s Bobby Gentry?,” Jill Sobule said that she found an address from an ASCAP contact and wrote Gentry a letter. “Dear Miss Gentry, I just wanted to tell you what an inspiration you’ve been… You told me that girls could do it too.” There was, of course, no reply. A few years after the letter, Sobule  fantasized a response and posted it on her website.  Gentry comes across her blog, calls her and ends up recording a comeback duet, in her imaginary response.

I’ve also got an imaginary response.

See, the original version of this blog post was a crafted, pretty, yet thoroughly baseless theory of what happened to Bobby Gentry.  I covered all that stuff about being a sexy, smart girl in a world that demands easy categories in a time when women were so easily objectified and fought so hard to be heard. bobbiegentry2

In my Jill Sobule moment, Bobbie stumbles across my blog. She calls me up and, in that smoky Mississippi drawl, she says: “darlin’ you know that speculation is cheap, right?”

I answer, quicker than real life would allow,  “yes, Miss Gentry, but that’s all you left us.”  There’s a long pause and I can almost feel her smiling through the phone. “Baby,” she says, “bless your sweet heart.”… Click.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Girls on Vinyl

26 Saturday Apr 2014

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I suppose one could write a book about why baby-boom women represent the most extraordinary generation of female musicians we’ve ever seen, or ever will see. They were the first generation to experience rock and roll as a mass media phenomenon while being schooled in traditions of regional music.  A preacher’s daughter in the New Bethel Baptist Church Choir, a Texas teenager drawn to the pain of Southern Blues and a Mariachi princess serenaded by Lalo Guerrero, all swooned to the same Elvis or Chuck Berry numbers. But, what they filtered through their own experience, refined on the road and reflected back in legendary recordings, was rich enough to redefine the categories of American music.

Aretha_FranklinThink of how Aretha Franklin, Janis Joplin and Linda Ronstadt drew from the same well of classic soul, remaking the songs of Otis Redding (Respect), Garnett Mimms (Cry Baby) and Betty Everett (You’re No Good).  Yet, few would describe their recordings as “cover versions.”  In fact, they didn’t simply rework those songs, they transmogrified them into the foundations for categorically unique, widely imitated and distinctly female approaches to rock music.

Complex cultural and historical changes put these revolutionary women on collision courses with war-weary fathers, eager for normalcy, and, the ones we’ve heard of, were victorious.  But battles around the kitchen table got them nothing more than a ticket to the struggle.  None of these women were plucked off a Jamaican beach, decked in haut couture and sent into a studio with Jay-Z.   None won the most votes on a t.v. show.  As they set out for The Bitter End, The Bottom Line, CBGB’s, The Palomino Club or The Troubadour, the public voted either by walking out or staying through the set.  They were as unique as they were authentic.

None of this is to disparage the current crop of female artists.  No matter what the process is, the best have a wayjanisjoplin of making their way through it. But looking at these boomers, I’m reminded of the Sandra Bernhardt line: “Stevie Nicks, Linda Ronstadt, Ann Wilson, when they sang about something it was because they either ate it, drank it, smoked it or f**ked it.”  Their music, their stories, were actually theirs to tell.  Here’s to a few of the best…

I Never Loved A Man...(1967-Atlantic) is Aretha Franklin’s tenth studio album and everyone knows this story, break-up with Columbia, match up with Jerry Wexler, honeymoon in Muscle Shoals and the rebirth of soul.

Pearl (1971-Columbia) was Janis Joplin fourth turn in the studio and the gold standard.  But despite being more refined than Cheap Thrills, everything about it, new producer, new band, a sound taking shape, a singer taking command, pointed to a beginning rather than a culmination.  She made this one of rock’s finest hours, but fate made it hers.

Blue (1971-Reprise), Joni Mitchell’s fourth recording and the game changer, David Crosby says this record put songwriters on notice that superficiality no longer cut it. But, despite the tricky chords and grown-up lyrics, the singable “Carey” has always been my favorite.  More than few July mornings I’ve woken up with a burn on my shoulders, sand in my hair and that song in my head…”Let’s have a round for these freaks and these soldiers, a round for these friends of mine, let’s have another round for the bright red devil who keeps me in this tourist down.” Mitchell’s songs, so intricately personal, always feel like they have someone’s name and address attached.  Sometimes, though, it feels like yours.

Linda Ronstadt Portrait SessionHeart Like A Wheel (1974-Capitol) was Linda Ronstadt’s fifth solo project and ninth as principal vocalist. Widely considered the blueprint for a generation of female  country singers, it’s also what happens when a Mariachi kid grows on American Bandstand, then ends up in room with L.A.’s most accomplished session players, Nashville’s top fiddlers, Detroit’s finest background singers and Emmylou Harris.  HLAW has never been out of print in 40 years, but just in case, it’s permanently archived in the Library on Congress.

Easter (1978-Arista) was Patti Smith’s third album and not Horses. Horses is the one you’re supposed to say is your favorite cause that’s what all the lists say. But, seriously, if the place was on fire and you could only save one of them you’d be thinking “‘Til Victory,” “Rock ‘n Roll Nigger”  “25th Floor,” and admit it….“Because The Night.”  This was the one that broke through to mainstream, but that doesn’t mean anything was compromised. I’ve heard it said that the world has never seen a woman quite like her; the world has never seen a person quite like her.

Broken English (1979-Island) Depending on how you see things, this was either Marianne Faithfull’s seventh studio album or her first.  Because what rose up out of the ashes when this former pop princess, heroine addict and Weillian chanteuse got back on her feet sounded like complete reincarnation.  Every dirty word (and there are plenty), raw emotion and cracked vocal is delivered with such matter-of-factness.  She’s not trying to shock or impress you, just telling what she knows for you to take or leave as you will.  Whatever you decide, isn’t going to make any difference to her either way.