Payback time for soul singer
Nearing age 60, Bettye LaVette is on her first tour in more than 40 years
Singer Bettye LaVette is nearing the end of her first exhaustive tour in more than 40 years. And the veteran soul stylist is starting to feel it.
“It’s the travelling that’s so wearying,” says LaVette, on the phone from a hotel room in Minneapolis. “ I haven’t been on a promotional swing since I was 17 years old. And at this point I’m looking for a 17- year- old to complete this one.” The hearty laugh that follows this self-deprecating observation suggests that LaVette, who will turn 60 in January, is not about to throw in the towel just yet — which will come as welcome news to Toronto fans awaiting the singer’s performance tonight at Lee’s Palace.
It isn’t that she has been a stranger to these parts. LaVette gigged at Harbourfront a couple of years back and was to have performed at the 2004 Toronto Bluesfest, before it was cancelled at the 11th hour.
It also isn’t as if the Michigan native, who made her recording debut as 16- year- old Bettye Jo Haskins with the single “My Man — He’s a Loving Man,” has ever stopped performing, hence her aversion to that dreaded word “ comeback.” But things are definitely different this time around, thanks largely to a widely praised new disc, I’ve Got My Own Hell to Raise, released by Anti-, a subsidiary of the punk label Epitaph.
It is perfectly understandable if her name doesn’t ring a bell. “Who is Bettye LaVette you ask?” writes Rob Bowman, the Toronto- based, Grammy Award- winning musicologist, in his characteristically authoritative liner notes for the new disc. “The simple answer is that ( she) is one of the greatest soul singers in American music history, possessed of an incredibly expressive voice that one moment will exude a formidable level of strength and intensity and the next will appear vulnerable, reflective, reeking of heartbreak. Unfortunately, it says much about the vagaries of the popular music industry that . . . up to this point she has remained criminally unknown.”
Although LaVette has recorded enough singles to fill several albums, her first full-length wasn’t released until 1982. A previous album recorded a decade earlier was shelved by Atlantic, finally emerging on a French label in 2000.
LaVette’s current run of good fortune started after Anti- president Andrew Kaulkin caught one of her performances in San Francisco last year. “He came into the dressing room after the show and said, ‘ I’d like to do a record with you.’ Which didn’t impress me at all. He had no socks on, he had a huge Afro even though he wasn’t black, and he was wearing a T-shirt and some torn jeans.
“ But when I got to know him better, I realized he’s one of the smartest young men I’ve ever met in my life.”
Kaulkin’s idea was to produce an album of songs written entirely by women. Joe Henry, a singer/ songwriter and producer who has worked with Elvis Costello, was brought in to oversee the recording, which features covers of tunes by Lucinda Williams, Dolly Parton, Sinead O’Connor, Aimee Mann, Rosanne Cash, Fiona Apple and other singers largely unfamiliar to LaVette.
“ I knew Dolly Parton and Rosanne Cash, but that was it,” she concedes.
Given the material, I’ve Got My Own Hell to Raise
isn’t, strictly speaking, a soul album; though that fine distinction is contradicted by LaVette’s soulful transformation of Mann’s “ How Am I Different” and Parton’s “Little Sparrow.” LaVette tinkered with Williams’s “Joy,” which enumerates places where the songwriter has unsuccessfully sought happiness, to reflect her personal geography.
LaVette is accustomed to being sold a false bill of goods by the music industry. But Kaulkin has delivered on the promise that his label would introduce her to a new generation of listeners. Beyond appearing on the Late Show with David Letterman, the tour, including a 10- day, eightcity European hop, has been booked into rock clubs catering to younger fans, some of whom have required a little schooling.
“ I tell them, ‘ I don’t want you to do anything in the next hour and a half that you would not do when you visit your grandmother,’ ” says LaVette, a grandmother herself. “ I had one table of young people who actually sent a letter apologizing for the noise they made.”
For LaVette right now, it’s all about validation — and a measure of vindication, as well.
“ Yes, I’m bitter,” she says. “ But I’m not bitter with the people. Every time they see me they like me. They just haven’t seen me because of the industry. It’s the industry that has treated me very badly. And I am very bitter about it. I feel they owe me. And I want every damn thing they got.”