The incomparable Nina Simone
The late, great singer was ‘an absolutely unreliable narrator of her own story’ says her biographer, Alan Light, so he stepped in to write that story instead. Grant Smithies finds out more.
He was nothing if not persistent. ‘‘Ah, c’mon!’’ Vincent said, for the 20th time that week. ‘‘It’ll be amazing! You will regret it for the rest of your life if you don’t come along.’’
He was right. I didn’t go to see Nina Simone, and regret is with me still whenever I play one of her records, which is often.
What stopped me, in the end, was lust. I had designs on a woman, you see. Yet again ‘‘between houses’’, I was sleeping on the couch at my mate Vincent’s place in Dublin during the mid 80s.
In two days’ time, Vincent was heading across to London for a rare live show by Nina Simone, and he had a spare ticket. But to stay home meant having the house to myself, and a woman called Bernadette was putting out signals that I was in with a chance. So I stayed. Three days later, Vincent arrived back, and Bernadette answered the door. It was suddenly clear to my old mate what my greater plan had been, but the last laugh was his.
‘‘Most amazing gig I’ve ever seen,’’ he said at every opportunity for months afterwards. ‘‘Extraordinary! Life changing!’’
That is how I’d always found Ms Simone’s records, and still do. Extraordinary. Life changing.
To hear her sing Pirate Jenny is to feel a molten rage made into music, while her devastating cover of Gershwin’s I Loves You, Porgy is the last word in plantation-era melancholia.
When the departing lover leaves her wedding ring on the dresser beside her sleeping husband and shoots through in Don’t Smoke In Bed, that sound you hear halfway through the chorus is the wet rip of your own heart breaking.
Simone was as pervy as Prince on I Want a Little Sugar In My Bowl, as political as her beloved Black Panthers on Mississippi Goddam and Four Women.
What can I tell you? In a country that worships athletes above all others, I genuflect before Nina.
Born Eunice Waymon in North Carolina in 1933, the sixth child of a preacher’s family, she played piano in church from the age of 6 and died in France in 2003, aged 70. Between those poles, Simone made some of the most affecting music of our times, and also lived one hell of a life. Documentarymaker Liz Garbus did her best to give a measure of that life last year with her Netflix-funded documentary, What Happened, Miss Simone?
And now, a written biography hoves into view. What Happened, Miss Simone? by Alan Light (Canongate, RRP$36.99) was inspired by the doco, using Garbus’ existing research as a launching pad. A regular writer for the New York Times, Light has previously knocked out bios on Leonard Cohen, Jeff Buckley, Prince. What made Simone a good fit with that diverse little crowd?
‘‘Oh, I was fascinated by her, first and foremost,’’ says Light, who’s backstage in Cincinnati when I call, interviewing the Dixie Chicks for a magazine feature.
‘‘The music she made erupted out of a personal life that was turbulent and troubling, beset by loneliness, violence and mental illness. And the deeper you go into her music, the more you realise that there’s been no one like her, before or since. This was somebody who would sing an Israeli folk song, then a jazz standard, followed by a Bob Dylan song and then play a classical instrumental in the middle of an African slave song.’’
And as Light’s book outlines, Simone only discovered her voice by accident. Her goal was to become ‘‘the world’s first great black classical pianist’’, and she only started singing in a dive bar in Atlantic City to pay the rent while waiting for that dream to become a reality.
‘‘The first half of her life was devoted to becoming this classical piano player, and when that didn’t pan out, she saw that as a huge injustice, based around her race. She channelled that feeling into the Civil Rights movement, and when that started to fall apart, it broke her in such a way that she never really recovered.’’
At no stage in her career was Simone ‘‘just an entertainer’’, Light says.
‘‘She never did things in order to simply sell records, and she put her political consciousness front and centre in her music regardless of whether that might alienate people. If the crowd weren’t quiet and thoughtful at her live shows, she would stop and bawl them out. A lot of the erratic behaviour people talk about can really be traced to her definition of herself as an important artist deserving of a high level of respect.’’
Light’s writing style is clean, direct, unembellished. Rather than wrapping a singular life in poetic language, his primary goal seems to be clearing away decades of misinformation.
Nonetheless, the book has no shortage of vivid images. You can picture the decorous white ladies fundraising for this piano prodigy’s music lessons in her North Carolina home town, their houses scented with vases of gardenias. And you can also see the young Eunice Waymon buying snacks after her lessons and eating them on the pavement outside a segregated diner.
We’re treated to visions of Simone striding around Liberia in a bikini and boots, threatening an over-zealous fan with a knife, firing a gun at a record exec she suspects of stealing royalties, experimenting with LSD, shooting a neighbour’s kid with an air rifle for laughing too loud.
She plays a Civil Rights benefit show in Alabama, singing Mississippi Goddam for Martin Luther King on a ramshackle stage built atop piles of coffins from local black-owned funeral parlours.
A friendship springs up with David Bowie during his most cokeaddled phase in the mid 70s, two lonely eccentrics talking by phone for hours each night. ‘‘He’s got more sense than anyone I know’’, says Simone. ‘‘It’s not human – David ain’t from here.’’
You will find none of this stuff in Simone’s own 1992 memoir, I Put A Spell On You, a book Light believes should be filed in the fiction section of the local library.
‘‘Nina was an absolutely unreliable narrator of her own story. That memoir’s fascinating because you can hear her voice in it, but it’s 98 per cent inaccurate.
‘It was a time when people didn’t understand bipolar disorder as well as they do today. I had to find a way to tell that story without being gratuitous, or gossipy just for the sake of it.’ Alan Light on Nina Simone
She makes things up, gets the timeline wrong, and leaves crucial stuff out if it makes her look bad. Whatever someone might think of my own writing, it’s at least comprehensive in terms of how this fascinating story unfolded.’’
The material uncovered by the previous film project was gold, he says. Light had access to Simone’s letters, and transcripts of lengthy interviews with her friends, band, and only daughter, Lisa.
Many of these sources have their own axes to grind, of course. Lisa Simone Stroud has called her mother ‘‘a monster’’ and told of being beaten by her with tree branches and a money belt filled with coins.
But Light seeks multiple viewpoints on key events, such as the time Simone was tied up, beaten for hours and raped at gunpoint by her fiance´e, a portly NYPD vice squad detective named Andrew Stroud, on the night of their engagement party.
They married nonetheless, finally parting ways 11 years later