“God-DAMN” was the only thing that I could say when I first heard Bettye LaVette sing. It was her version of Sinead O’Connor’s “I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got,” and LaVette was barely into the second verse before my jaw hit the floor. That particular recording was from LaVette’s I’ve Got My Own Hell to Raise [Anti Records], a disarming album of covers by female writers. But if her choice in material was stellar (from the likes of Joan Armatrading, Aimee Mann, Dolly Parton and Fiona Apple), what she did with it was on an entirely different plane. Gritty, knowing, wise, spiritual and brutal, LaVette curls emotions in a lyric like smoke languidly curling around an ignored cigarette.
In an era where we have an abundance of stunning Black female voices (Patti, Whitney, Tina, Chaka, Alicia, Aretha), LaVette stands apart from the pack; her voice—with all its worn timbres, rough accents and effortless dexterity—approaches soul but has the gravity of life-experienced blues. My Own Hell to Raise benefited from Joe Henry’s subdued and sparse production which made it all the more personal and intimate. I haven’t heard a “soul” album yet that comes straight from the gut and has such nakedness and risk. So after performing for nearly 50 years you wonder why all the recent hype is happening now and why you’ve never heard of her. Well, that’s a story in itself…
Starting at the age of 16 LaVette recorded her first hit, “My Man (He’s a Loving Man),” and seemed poised for a promising career. Then a flood of setbacks appeared after she recorded her full-length debut for Atlantic Records at the legendary ’60s-era Muscle Shoals Recording studio—where the output at the time included Aretha Franklin’s “I Never Loved A Man (The Way I Love You),” Wilson Pickett’s “Mustang Sall,” and Etta James’ “Tell Mama.” Later in the decade the Rolling Stones cut “Brown Sugar” and “Wild Horses” there while en route to Altamont and even David Bowie turned up in the mid-’70s to record his Young Americans album. Inexplicably, Atlantic shelved the album, and it stayed in the vaults for decades, not only accumulating dust but a near-legendary reputation. With her shot at widespread recognition seemingly gone she did the only thing she knew how to do: keep singing. After all, she had kids to feed and a life to live.
LaVette had a right to be bitter since many of her contemporaries from the early ’60s whom she had befriended and nurtured through the bumpy dawns of their own careers (the Supremes, David Ruffin of the Temptations) hit it big while she eked out a living playing bars and hotels. The twist in the story came with the involvement of a French specialty label that focused on lost and rare soul recordings; they got hold of the forgotten album and, finally, LaVette got the hearing that she deserved.
Now, at 65, LaVette is a new face with an uppity attitude, but you’re forced to give her her due because she puts her money where her mouth is. With three albums in three years on Anti Records she’s just released Interpretations: The British Rock Songbook, an ironic cover album that’s anything but merely that. The irony is that LaVette felt that the Brits who wrote and performed these songs had the effect of crowding Black music and, specifically, Black performers like LaVette off the radio dial.
Still, the idea of a seasoned performer doing a “covers” album is barely quaint and beyond a cliche, but Interpretations is a cover album in the same way that a $1,000 bill is a piece of paper. To say that she reinvents the music is putting it mildly. When Pete Townshend first heard LaVette’s reading of his “Love Reign O’er Me” at a Kennedy Center tribute to the Who, he was simultaneously shocked and enraptured. (His hilarious reaction is captured on Facebook.) But Townshend and Roger Daltrey only got a taste of what she was about. To hear LaVette challenge Ringo Starr’s “It Don’t Come Easy” put the song in such a bracing context that it became her personal blues rather than some catchy ditty on AM radio. I never understood the co-dependent angst of Elton John’s “Don’t Let the Sun Go Down On Me” until I heard her naked searing take. Unlike Sir Elton, who disdained his own version and sang it with a forced mush-mouthed sense of faked drama, LaVette gave it conviction and bite. And Led Zeppelin’s “All of My Love,” shorn of Robert Plant’s built-in histrionics, became authentic straight-up delta blues rather than blues fed through a rich young Brit’s approximation of the blues.
All of this came crashing down on the stage of the Old Town School of Folk Music recently in a lean and dramatic show that had the SRO crowd whipped and exasperated. Strutting out to the Beatles forgotten “The Word” and a funky “I Still Want to be Your Baby,” LaVette was slinky, playful, naughty and full of brio. Grabbing the spotlight that eluded her before—and she never let anyone in the room forget it either—she laced her most searing choices with humor and embraceable charm. “A Woman Like Me,” a rollicking rocker about the ultimate in romantic revenge, came with a saucy flirt-strut with her twentysomething fresh-faced guitarist Matt Lucas while “You Don’t Know Me at All” and Ray Charles’ “They Call It Love” had bite to spare. The Rolling Stones’ “Salt of the Earth,” the Animals’ “Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood,” George Harrison’s “Isn’t It A Pity” and “Don’t Let the Sun Go Down On Me” (where she plopped on the stage floor in a lotus position and got lost in the lyrics) shot for the cosmos and hit the mark.
Her finish was even better. Left alone after her band had left the stage, she sang a personal, precise and tactful “I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got.” After exiting the stage and after it looked unlikely that all the screaming and applauding from the audience would bring an encore, LaVette and Co. came back and finished with a rollicking “Before the Money Came (The Battle of Bettye LaVette).” The song is an autobiographical essay on her struggle and finally hitting the big time, and it was her last laugh. After going out into the audience and shaking hands the last we saw of her was her sailing through the exit still wailing in the lobby. Let’s see Aretha do that.