Beth Hart
After a harrowing early life that would have broken anyone who didn’t possess real steel, with the help of “angels” Beth Hart has fought off her demons, dragged herself back from the brink and is now “having fun, fun, fun” as she embraces major success.
After a harrowing early life that would have broken most people, she dragged herself back from the brink and is now “having fun, fun, fun” as she embraces major success.
That’s a lot of seats in the Ziggo Dome, a plush new arena on the outskirts of Amsterdam. A daunting expanse of 17,000, to be precise, dark grey, all empty. Seeing the place like this in the middle of the afternoon, the scale of Beth Hart’s achievement becomes especially apparent. At the age of 46, and after a relentless sequence of traumas and addictions, here tonight she’s headlining her first arena show.
Three covers albums with Joe Bonamassa, the latest of which, this year’s Black Coffee, hit No.1 in the US, have helped raise Hart’s profile. Working with Deep Purple on 2003’s Bananas, Slash on his self-titled 2010 solo debut, and Jeff Beck on his 2006 US tour also proved her rock credentials. But Hart is more remarkable as a solo performer, her material ranging from rockabilly to grunge, with echoes of the great 70s singer-songwriters of her LA home town as she emotes at the piano.
Her mum, elder siblings and schoolmates turned her on early to jazz, blues, Bob Seger and Rickie Lee Jones, the Sex Pistols and Circle Jerks, Etta James and Otis Redding. These influences fed Hart’s ability to sing a battered, unbeaten woman’s blues that’s dredged, raw and bleeding, from her own life, which she pours out uncensored on stage. “Her honesty and vulnerability are her strengths,” her husband and road manager Scott Guetzkow says. “Sometimes she’ll burst out crying and she can’t stop. She wears her emotion on her sleeve.”
Reaching the arena heights in the Netherlands, where she recorded her 2005 album DVD Live At The Paradiso and where her 2015 album Better Than Home went to No.1, makes some kind of sense. The steepness of her recent ascent, wholly unremarked on by the general public, is perhaps more apparent in the UK. On December 14, 2015, she played to 900 at London’s Union Chapel. On May 4, 2018, eight days before Amsterdam, she filled the 5,200-capacity Royal Albert Hall.
At the sound-check at the Albert Hall, amid the gilt and candelabra, Hart, in her off-stage civvies, is in command but nervous. She’ll rip up 15 set-lists before show time. “Push that tempo,” she tells her three-piece band. Someone asks if she’s okay. “I’m fricking great, man. I’ve never been happier,” she raps back. “I’m just chompin’ at the bit.”
Hart pays particular attention to rehearsing her surprise entrance, from the side of the hall, in the dark, as a crackling gospel record plays. She sings As Long As I Have A Song a cappella, taking deep breaths as she roams the shadowy aisles. “Give ’em a second. Let ’em breathe,” she cautions her band as they crash in. “We need to leave space for the audience to do something. But then again, this is my life. And I’m always prepared [for no applause].”
Beth Hart’s early childhood in LA was blissful. Then her trust was betrayed. “My dad was cheating on mom, he gambled away our house, and then he went to prison,” she says. “And we went from this really beautiful family to everyone’s hearts being broken.”
There were multiple further betrayals, and her dad’s jailing coincided with further trauma. “There was a horrible robbery when I was a child,” she recalls, “when my mom and sister Sharon
[who later died of Aids] were held captive all day by robbers who were threatening to cut off my mom’s fingers. My doctors think that event triggered my bipolar. At ten I got into drugs, alcohol, then later sex addiction. I was trying to numb myself to feel better.”
Music, especially when she played alone at the piano, was the sanctuary that let her down least.
Hart got her first break when she won Best Female Vocalist on the US TV talent show Star Search in 1993, the year that an early version of Beyoncé’s band Destiny’s Child won Best Group and Justin Timberlake competed for Best Male. But while those stars soared, Hart crashed and burned. “I spent all of the hundred and thirty thousand dollars in six months,” she says. “So I went busking.”
This was where her current manager found her in 1994, already seemingly washed up at just 22. David Wolff had been Cyndi Lauper’s manager at the height of her fame. He’s in his late 60s now, with long, wispy white hair and a lean, lupine face. As he fixes me with his attention backstage at the Albert Hall, he has charisma to burn.
“I met her singing in the streets in Santa Monica,” he recalls. “She opens up her mouth and starts singing, and after twenty seconds I said to my friend: ‘I will be her manager.’ Two songs in, a guy walked up, listened for a couple of minutes and flipped a hundred-dollar bill in the guitar case.”
“I said: ‘I don’t trust you [music industry] guys, you’re all snakes,’” Hart recalls. “Finally I said: ‘I’ll have a meeting with you if you play cards. Because I think I love cards more than music, honestly. So I’m going to watch how you play cards, man, for a couple of hours at least.’”
Wolff passed the audition.
“Her first label dropped her,” he says, “because they didn’t think they could count on her. But I did. I never left her. I knew really early on that there’d be difficulties. I guess I’m geared to handle them without panic. Every emotion that a human being can have, I believe I’ve gone through with her. The only thing that was consistent, from drug addiction to hepatitis to bipolar, and then of course the ups and downs of a career, was that we never left each other, and we never quit. She’s conditioned for everybody to leave, by that sense of abandonment she carries with her. It’s a big part of her fear of life. Even to this day I would imagine she probably thinks: ‘Man, is he gonna leave?’ And the answer to that question is: no. I’m not going anywhere.”
“If I couldn’t work any more, and I went back to busking, he would still manage me,” Hart says of their bond. “And if suddenly I couldn’t make the payments on the house I just bought with Scott, David would mortgage his house, just so I didn’t lose mine. There was a kid he went to high school with. He hadn’t seen him in forty years, and the kid contacted him because he’d got cancer. David helped him to stay alive for six years. David is an angel. I’m just surrounded by angels.”
Husband Scott Guetzkow is the other necessary foundation shoring up Hart’s rise. “I met Scott when I was twentyseven. I was losing my hair, and down to my bones. I didn’t have the balls to take myself out. I was hoping my heart would just stop.” She was saved, she says, “by this handsome man with the kindest eyes”. They met in 1999 and married in 2000.
Guetzkow, who previously worked for Ozzy and Jeff Beck, is a giant Midwesterner in his mid-50s who looks like a Viking Sean Bean as he wanders the venues, watching for problems.
“I’m the road manager and anything she needs,” he says in a gravelly, easy-going voice. “If she’s stressed out, I try to calm her down. Whatever it takes, I do.”
Hart’s seemingly sudden leap to arena status was in fact carefully plotted by Wolff. “We discuss the markets. I don’t want her to be a London artist, I want her to be a UK artist. What cool places can we go in the suburbs, to get to the people? And we do it in Denmark [where Hart has had two No.1 singles], and in all these territories.” The Bonamassa collaborations are “a wonderful bonus”, he says.
The Albert Hall show is another unpredictable, tear-jerking Hart roller coaster, with flashes of rock’n’roll abandon. When she clutches fans’ hands as she makes her surprise entry and walks to the stage, one middle-aged woman clings on as if to a saint. The audience is skewed middle-aged and up, with a very healthy percentage of women for what is basically a blues-rock show.
She needn’t have worried about the applause. The first standing ovation comes after Sister Heroine, which she dedicates to her late sister Sharon, and makes her shake with her deepest feelings. For the encore she’s on her knees, before rising up with a primal scream.
Backstage afterwards, Hart’s nerves haven’t gone. It’s odd that people with fragile self-esteem and confidence are sometimes the ones who most need to be on stage, and give the most up there, I suggest.
“It is a need,” she says. “If I felt really good about myself all the time, I think I would still try to make music, but I don’t think I’d be a performer. But there is that need, to feel like people in the audience are telling you that you’re not a total loser. I never think of them as fans. I think that’s a terrible word. I feel like they’re our friends and they come to support what we’re doing. The best time of the whole night wasn’t even being on stage. It was going outside to smoke, and seeing everyone who was coming to the show hanging out, and hugging them and hearing their stories.”
“At ten I got into drugs, alcohol, then later sex addiction. I was trying to numb myself to feel better.” Beth Hart
During the show, when she seemed to be at her most emotionally racked, strangely Hart also looked uplifted.
“Thank you,” she says. “You know that old saying: the truth’ll set you free? Whenever I get into those real songs – nothing showbiz, just about whatever you’re afraid of, or you’re ashamed of, whatever it is you long for – all that just makes me feel like I’m standing in the energy of angels.
It’s weird. I almost feel more comfortable to be vulnerable. I guess because I really believe in my core that the more honest and open I am, the more chance I have of not only being sober, but also staying close to the light, to God.”
And the more honest she is, the more she’s accepted. “It’s a trip, isn’t it?
All the things you’re afraid to do are the things that get you there.”
Just before show time at the Ziggo Dome, everyone’s calmer than they were in London. “I wanna rock’n’roll all night,” Hart sings in the dressing room, amid upbeat banter. “Now, what if this underwear comes down?” she muses, as she totters into the lift in heels, fishnets and another tight black dress. “They don’t when I wear ’em,” someone, possibly Scott, replies, laughing. Then all is silent backstage.
On stage, Hart addresses a noticeably up-for-it audience: “Can you believe this?,” she enthuses. “This is a big friggin’ deal for us!” Minutes later she’s prowling the edge of one of the two ramps built especially for this biggest solo gig of her life when, as she starts to run down, she tumbles over. There are worried screams from the audience. “These fucking shoes,” she grouses, barely missing a beat. Then she sits on the edge of the stage, holding the heels that betrayed her, which glint like curved daggers.
It’s a battle up there for a few minutes as she fights to regain control, until the ballads again become the gig’s still centre. You Belong To Me, with an Etta James-like vocal pulled straight from her healing heart, is dedicated to her forgiven dad. LA Song
(Out Of This Town), from 1999, when most things in her life were bad, is a piano blues worthy of Tom Waits. The footwear comes off for the fishnet-footed encore, and the conspiratorial good feeling in the audience is contagious.
Backstage afterwards, Hart is vastly more relaxed than after the Albert Hall show a week ago. She’s already written off the heels incident. “You know they say it happens in slow motion?” she says. “Oh my God! I think that’s hysterical. It’s got to be in the DVD we’re filming.”
I tell her that tonight’s show still seemed stronger than in London. “It was freer, wasn’t it?” she agrees. “Maybe it brought up that feeling like-a-fool
“There is that need to feel like people in the audience are telling you that you’re not a total loser.” Beth Hart
anger,” she says of her fall. “Bianca, our European tour manager, cried for three songs after that, because she felt she screwed me all up. But the beauty of art is that no one dies. It’s not like I’m a brain surgeon – there’d be a lot of dead mother friggers if I was. We’re just musicians. It reminds you not to take it too seriously.”
Her loyal husband looks in to chide her for smoking and to wind things up. Looking back on what’s been the biggest week of her career so far, Hart feels she has come full circle.
“I did that show Star Search when I was twenty,” she says, “and I had nothing but happiness and gratitude. I wasn’t sick. I wasn’t messed up. I was in remission from bipolar, and I was very focused and disciplined. And I had the best time in the world. And then it just went to crap, for a long time.
And now I feel like I’m back in that place, of just enjoying it, man. Being thankful and grateful and having fun, fun, fun. That’s where it’s come to.”
Beth Hart: Live At The Royal Albert Hall will be released on November 30 via Mascot.