Post by Diamond Girl on Apr 21, 2006 14:47:08 GMT -5
Late success is better than never to singer Bettye LaVette
Friday, April 21, 2006
By ED BEESON
HERALD NEWS
In her own words, Bettye LaVette has been rescued.
"Just three years ago, I thought I would die in total obscurity," the 60-year-old soul singer says. "I was trying to resign myself to that."
Trying but, thankfully for her, never succeeding. After decades of toiling far below the pop culture radar, LaVette has found a new generation of fans who prefer their music to dwell below the pop culture radar. They are the cultural connoisseurs of the day, young people who dig that old soul sound. It helps that she hasn't lost her zeal -- what she calls her "arrogance" -- for singing from that deep place in her heart.
"I haven't been given the lack of arrogance, which would make me act like a 60-year-old," says LaVette, who now lives in West Orange and is performing Sunday afternoon at the Ringwood public library. "When they came to rescue me, I was intact."
LaVette came up during the golden age of Motown, and even though she never found fame like some of her contemporaries -- headliners like Smokey Robinson, Aretha Franklin or Diana Ross -- she never stopped reaching for it.
It's the story that filled the first 40 years of LaVette's career: beautiful voice records a hit single at age 16, but a fruitful recording career fails to blossom. She gets juggled between record companies. Executives shelve her work. She claims they didn't know how to promote a woman who sang like Louis Armstrong but who was not "really, really black." She recorded more and hit less.
Hope might diminish, and then the phone would ring. "Somebody always called for another gig, another recording session. I never thought about anything else," she says.
Motown, like the rest of the music industry, is filled with stories like hers.
It is not, however, filled with stories like the one that occupies the last few years of LaVette's career: obscure fifty-something soul singer is still at it -- performing $50 gigs, running up $150 bar tabs, she says. Her voice is now craggy and weathered -- the texture of rapture and pain -- when suddenly audiences half her age discover her.
And her live performances are an explosion. "I can't come up on a walker," she says. "I have to come up there and start kicking people in the face."
That attitude is apparently what won LaVette what she has today. After seeing her perform once, the head of a fashionable record label called Anti- (whose logo reads "real artists creating great recordings on their own terms") signed her to a contract. She recorded an album and called it "I've Got My Own Hell to Raise." The album has a cavernous production that LaVette filled with howling interpretations of modern pop songs. She covered artists like Sinead O'Connor, Aimee Mann and Fiona Apple, whose lyrics inspired the album's title. Top critics call it one of the best albums of 2005. "My Own Hell" became a must-have for the most-hip crowd.
Forty-four years since she was discovered, LaVette has finally earned broader respect. But, of course, everyone was "discovered" in those days. "In Detroit in 1962, there was a producer every three feet. It was hard not to be discovered," she says.
Hers was Johnnie Mae Matthews, the veteran female songwriter who gave LaVette her first single, "My Man -- He's a Loving Man." The song was an instant hit when it was played on R&B radio and it set her down the long winding path to today.
Born Betty Haskins in Muskegon, Mich., LaVette grew up in Detroit during segregation. Unlike many of her Motown peers, she did not learn how to sing in church, but by the jukebox in her parents' living room, which became the center of the home on weekends. Her parents supplemented their income by selling corn whiskey, and that meant that parties were frequent at the house.
Such an upbringing surely helped make LaVette the woman she is today. In conversation, she is neither sorrowful nor self-pitying, but dominant, joyous and ebullient. She anticipates questions before they're asked, and before too long asks questions of her own. Sometimes she peppers her sentences with swear words, only to add, "Don't you go telling people I said this."
She speaks gleefully about her love of red wine before a concert, how she pouts when she doesn't get it. She talks about her love of mingling after the concert, dragging on a cigarette, sipping her champagne. Not only does Bettye LaVette prove that you can be 60 and still get discovered, she also proves it is never too late to act like a rock star.
But she knows her limitations. "If I get excited drinking champagne," she says, "I've got to make sure I drink the same amount of water."
To say her tongue is tart is an understatement. There is also a tinge of anger in her voice when she speaks words like "frustration" and "hostility." A bit of fatigue creeps in when she talks about her hectic schedule, which she says forced her to speak with a reporter by phone and not in person. She's about to commence a few months of touring in Europe and the United States. It's a tiresome job when you're 30, more so when you're 60. "My muscles, everything wants to go to south," she says.
But at least she's been rescued. That is relief more than anything else, she says.
"This is no longer exciting at all," LaVette says. "If I get a Grammy nomination or a Grammy -- that will be exciting because I've never gotten one.
"If I make some money, that will be extremely exciting," she continues, "because I've never made any."
Reach Ed Beeson at (973) 569-7042 or beeson@northjersey.com.
Friday, April 21, 2006
By ED BEESON
HERALD NEWS
In her own words, Bettye LaVette has been rescued.
"Just three years ago, I thought I would die in total obscurity," the 60-year-old soul singer says. "I was trying to resign myself to that."
Trying but, thankfully for her, never succeeding. After decades of toiling far below the pop culture radar, LaVette has found a new generation of fans who prefer their music to dwell below the pop culture radar. They are the cultural connoisseurs of the day, young people who dig that old soul sound. It helps that she hasn't lost her zeal -- what she calls her "arrogance" -- for singing from that deep place in her heart.
"I haven't been given the lack of arrogance, which would make me act like a 60-year-old," says LaVette, who now lives in West Orange and is performing Sunday afternoon at the Ringwood public library. "When they came to rescue me, I was intact."
LaVette came up during the golden age of Motown, and even though she never found fame like some of her contemporaries -- headliners like Smokey Robinson, Aretha Franklin or Diana Ross -- she never stopped reaching for it.
It's the story that filled the first 40 years of LaVette's career: beautiful voice records a hit single at age 16, but a fruitful recording career fails to blossom. She gets juggled between record companies. Executives shelve her work. She claims they didn't know how to promote a woman who sang like Louis Armstrong but who was not "really, really black." She recorded more and hit less.
Hope might diminish, and then the phone would ring. "Somebody always called for another gig, another recording session. I never thought about anything else," she says.
Motown, like the rest of the music industry, is filled with stories like hers.
It is not, however, filled with stories like the one that occupies the last few years of LaVette's career: obscure fifty-something soul singer is still at it -- performing $50 gigs, running up $150 bar tabs, she says. Her voice is now craggy and weathered -- the texture of rapture and pain -- when suddenly audiences half her age discover her.
And her live performances are an explosion. "I can't come up on a walker," she says. "I have to come up there and start kicking people in the face."
That attitude is apparently what won LaVette what she has today. After seeing her perform once, the head of a fashionable record label called Anti- (whose logo reads "real artists creating great recordings on their own terms") signed her to a contract. She recorded an album and called it "I've Got My Own Hell to Raise." The album has a cavernous production that LaVette filled with howling interpretations of modern pop songs. She covered artists like Sinead O'Connor, Aimee Mann and Fiona Apple, whose lyrics inspired the album's title. Top critics call it one of the best albums of 2005. "My Own Hell" became a must-have for the most-hip crowd.
Forty-four years since she was discovered, LaVette has finally earned broader respect. But, of course, everyone was "discovered" in those days. "In Detroit in 1962, there was a producer every three feet. It was hard not to be discovered," she says.
Hers was Johnnie Mae Matthews, the veteran female songwriter who gave LaVette her first single, "My Man -- He's a Loving Man." The song was an instant hit when it was played on R&B radio and it set her down the long winding path to today.
Born Betty Haskins in Muskegon, Mich., LaVette grew up in Detroit during segregation. Unlike many of her Motown peers, she did not learn how to sing in church, but by the jukebox in her parents' living room, which became the center of the home on weekends. Her parents supplemented their income by selling corn whiskey, and that meant that parties were frequent at the house.
Such an upbringing surely helped make LaVette the woman she is today. In conversation, she is neither sorrowful nor self-pitying, but dominant, joyous and ebullient. She anticipates questions before they're asked, and before too long asks questions of her own. Sometimes she peppers her sentences with swear words, only to add, "Don't you go telling people I said this."
She speaks gleefully about her love of red wine before a concert, how she pouts when she doesn't get it. She talks about her love of mingling after the concert, dragging on a cigarette, sipping her champagne. Not only does Bettye LaVette prove that you can be 60 and still get discovered, she also proves it is never too late to act like a rock star.
But she knows her limitations. "If I get excited drinking champagne," she says, "I've got to make sure I drink the same amount of water."
To say her tongue is tart is an understatement. There is also a tinge of anger in her voice when she speaks words like "frustration" and "hostility." A bit of fatigue creeps in when she talks about her hectic schedule, which she says forced her to speak with a reporter by phone and not in person. She's about to commence a few months of touring in Europe and the United States. It's a tiresome job when you're 30, more so when you're 60. "My muscles, everything wants to go to south," she says.
But at least she's been rescued. That is relief more than anything else, she says.
"This is no longer exciting at all," LaVette says. "If I get a Grammy nomination or a Grammy -- that will be exciting because I've never gotten one.
"If I make some money, that will be extremely exciting," she continues, "because I've never made any."
Reach Ed Beeson at (973) 569-7042 or beeson@northjersey.com.