INTERVIEW: BETTYE LAVETTE
By: Jim Allen
Bettye Lavette, who began recording as a teenager in the early '60s, was the great lost Detroit soul queen until the winds of fortune finally blew her way at the turn of the millennium. She scored a couple of big singles at the beginning of her career, but the subsequent years were a torturous slog through one label after another, and periods where she abandoned recording altogether, sometimes for stage work, like the musical Bubbling Brown Sugar. Ironically, one of the greatest indignities she suffered would lead to Lavette's renaissance. Her 1972 sessions at Muscle Shoals, Alabama's Muscle Shoals Sound studio, unjustly shelved by Atlantic Records, were reissued on a European label in 2000.
A new generation became acquainted with the textured, throaty charm of Lavette's voice and the commanding power of her delivery, and her 2005 album I've Got My Own Hell to Raise, on hip iconoclastic label Anti Records, generated a full-fledged comeback. For the follow-up, appropriately entitled Scene of the Crime, the soul survivor recorded in Muscle Shoals once more (this time at the legendary Fame Studios), backed not only by old-school session men Spooner Oldham and David Hood, but by Southern indie rockers the Drive-By Truckers (led by Hood's son Patterson). The album is an emotional rollercoaster that moves through everything from Willie Nelson's “Somebody Pick Up My Pieces” to Elton John's “Talking Old Soldiers,” with Lavette's fiery-but-controlled voice narrating the trip. Stylus sat down with the sassy soul veteran to find out about the long road that led to her recent successes.
You began performing when you were still a teenager, how did you develop your sound?
The sound has always been there, I didn't like it for a long time because it's not very girlish sounding, and when you're young you want to be like all the rest of the girls. And then my records were not selling so well. My manager Jim Lewis told me "You can't sing, but I know that you're pretty good, so you can learn how" (laughs). I wanted to slap him! But he made me work on that. It was only because of the lack of success in my career that I was able to develop a style.
Where there artists you tried to emulate at the time?
If anything I tried to practice sounding like someone else because I wanted to sound like a girl, but my voice always came out like Louis Armstrong, so I had to learn how to make Louis Armstrong sound better [laughs]. I was like 18, 19, 20 years old, I wanted to sing whatever was popular, but [Jim] made me listen to Frank Sinatra and Tony Bennett. I said “Jim, nobody sings like that.” He said “You're right, but you need to learn how to.”
Would you agree that the style you ultimately developed employs a sense of drama and theatricality?
I think of it exactly that way, because I think like an entertainer, and I think of how it will look on the stage; because I only choose songs that will be absolutely believable. I try to draw my audience to me, and after going to the trouble of doing that I need to have something to say, and something for them to watch. It would really be impossible for me to sing a song that says “Though he treats me like a dog and beats me every day I cannot leave him,” I can't say that; I can't encourage young women to feel that way, I can't join them if they feel that way, I can't sing that. I can sing about “You hit me and I left you” [laughs].
There's a lot of pain and sadness evident in the new album, and in the last one, wouldn't you say?
They wouldn't let me work at this for a whole 40 years; they just made me suffer in it. There's a lot of pain in me. No man could have treated me worse, no love affair could have been worse than the 40 years that I struggled at this business. Because you're selling yourself; you're asking people to like you. And if you aren't selling...then they're theoretically saying “no.” So it's not like you're trying to sell brushes or something. I'm saying “I love you, I love you, I love you,” and they're saying “No, no, no!” [laughs]
How were you able to persevere and maintain your artistic spark through those tribulations?
I don't know how to do anything else. That's why I became so protective of my performance; if I break it then I won't have anything. This evening I'm going to a place [in Detroit] called The Locker Room, which is what the “Old Soldiers” song is really about [to me]. I was in there at least two nights a week, whenever I could get a ride. The Spinners hung out in there and sat at the big shot end of the bar, and I sat at the dirty end as they called it. But I would send all of my tabs up to the big shot end [laughs]. I hung there for 10 or 15 years...so often people would come in and say things like “Didn't you used to be Bettye Lavette?” or “Do you still sing” A lot of love happened there, a lot of drunk happened there, a lot of crying...but I know that I can always go there.
What are your memories of your 1972 session in Muscle Shoals?
The most memorable thing about it is that Atlantic never released it. Which is why we came up with the name Scene of the Crime [for the new album]. I think I'm probably angrier than anything that I never got a chance to confront [Atlantic head] Ahmet Ertegun and ask him why, other than that it just didn't pass quality control standards, of which he had the final say. It was Jerry Wexler who was my champion there, and he did not have as much power as Ahmet Ertegun, and that's the only thing I can imagine. All I was told is that "we decided not to go forward with the project." My only thought was to slit my wrists.
So how did you wind up returning to Muscle Shoals for the new album?
It was [Anti Records President] Andrew Kaulkin's idea to do the pairing of myself and the Drive-By Truckers. The studio that I recorded at [originally], Muscle Shoals Sound, was owned by Patterson Hood's father David, and that one is no longer open. But Fame is open and running, and a beautiful studio. It was very exciting, seeing Spooner, all the guys came back there. But just going back, and still fitting into a size six with a strong voice is very revengeful! [laughs]
Patterson subsequently wrote something about the sessions that implied there was some friction in the studio.
Patterson claims he sent me 50 tunes and I threw them at him, but he did not; it was only about 40 tunes [laughs]. It wasn't that I didn't like them, it was just that I didn't want to sing them. You just don't want to go to bed with everybody you meet; you may like them, but...[laughs] singing is a very personal and intimate thing for me; and I don't just sing it because it's good, I sing it because I feel I can sing it good. There is no friction, any problem I had with him is the same problem I have with my grandkids; I was the oldest one there, and it's just like being in any other older-and-younger situation. I don't act like a young person and they don't act like old people. So any friction that may have been there—and I don't cause friction, I cause shit—anything that happened, I started it and I finished it [laughs].
How was the experience of recording with the Drive-By Truckers?
We do completely different kinds of things, but I wasn't gonna do what they do, period. So they did more adjusting than I did. It took me 46 years to sound like I sound now, I wasn't gonna sound any other way. They figured it out on their own...and they are good musicians, so they just had to figure out where I was coming from, and when they did, they played it. I really didn't know that much about them, but I've had to do so many things over this 46-year period...so I learned how to do a lot of things with a lot of different kind of people. You know, I know how to tap dance; most rhythm and blues singers don't. But I had a chance to do a starring role in a Tony Award-winning Broadway play, so that taught me how to tap dance. Everything that I've learned now, this is character. But if I had been in the same band all the time, and our records had been back to back, and I had developed a following, I wouldn't know half of what I know, because I would be in that same vein all the time. After you do so many different kinds of things you become a broader person, and I frankly think that if my records had been successful over the years I wouldn't have had the opportunity to learn all of the things that I know now, and I don't think I'd be as talented. I might be richer, but I don't think I'd be as talented [laughs].
Was there a déjà vu feeling in having old-school Muscle Shoals musicians like Spooner Oldham and David Hood on the album?
I hadn't worked with Spooner [in '72] but I had worked with David. They've heard so much, they could identify more immediately with most anything I did, because even if they hadn't played it, they've been around so long they've heard it in something else. This becomes much more easy as you go along, and as you do so many different strains of it. The whole thing is just completely different with people who record behind people all the time and people who are in a band together. When Patterson and Spooner and I did “Old Soldiers,” everybody did their own part. Patterson and [his band] are used to having one single idea together. They found a part within my arrangement to play.
Patterson's approach is very different from his father's, but in general, do you feel like younger musicians have picked up on what your generation has done?
A lot of young music, unless it's really deliberate, like these Dap-King people [NY retro-R&B band the Dap-Kings], they deliberately try to sound like James Brown's band, I think that's a good band to replicate if you're gonna replicate one. Everybody hasn't heard it. I feel like they're going in the right direction. We have a little difficulty too now with finding just musicians. Everybody wants to be a star, nobody wants to be a sideman, which is a much more difficult thing to be.
As a veteran soul singer, how do you feel about the current state of R&B?
What they're calling R&B today is not R&B. It's like they're taking anyone who's black and does not rap and calling them an R&B singer. Aretha Franklin, Gladys Knight, those are real rhythm and blues singers, as I am. And I don't understand why they don't want these [younger] girls to be called pop singers, that's what they are. And the rap situation, I'm very glad that now they are trying to put actual chords together to go with the awful lyrics. And they lyrics are getting better. They're [the rappers] getting older; I was telling my grandson, he was listening to some [hip-hop] song, with just terrible lyrics, and I said “Do you really think you're gonna turn over in the bed when you're 45 and say any of those words to whoever's lying next to you?'” [laughs]
How has the audience for your music changed over the years?
The music that I've done in the past, those people have remained faithful to me, and now these last two CD's, they will bring yet another kind of people. If I can get them all together, I'll have the perfect audience! [laughs]
