Atlantic crossing
Going to America to find her soul didn’t quite work out. By Jim Irvin.
“Perhaps Atlantic missed the point.”
DOES ADMIRING soul singers and covering their work automatically make you one yourself? Discuss. Ms Springfield, Dusty by name, smokey by timbre, was born Mary O’Brien into an Irish family in middle-class West Hampstead, London. After making her name as part of folksy trio The Springfields, somebody decided to market her as “the great British blue-eyed soul singer”, a chancy bit of ’60s PR that somehow took root. The description is routinely trotted out to this day, without much aural evidence to back it up.
Dusty was a vocal chameleon, adapting her delivery to suit the material. Covering Tony Joe White’s Willie & Laura Mae she affected a greasy delivery behind the beat, singing Michel Legrand’s Windmills Of Your Mind she sounded cool, precise, and French. So, “superior pop singer with excellent taste, who sometimes sang soul songs” would be a more accurate, if less sexy description of her gifts. Whatever, Atlantic Records, noting her enthusiasm for their output, thought she might at least help them find a white audience they weren’t reaching, so snapped up her US rights in 1968 and sent her to Memphis. Label boss and producer Jerry Wexler offered her a slew of songs to record, which she turned down, bar Son Of A Preacher Man and Just A Little Lovin’, both sides of her first single, which annoyed him a little, because he had to find a load more material. Then Dusty choked in front of American Sound’s celebrated studio band. Most of Dusty In Memphis’s vocals were eventually cut in New York. Wexler decided she had a “gigantic inferiority complex.” However, it is said that it was Springfield who tipped off Atlantic about a new band featuring her talented mate John Paul Jones, called Led Zeppelin. In that way, she did find Atlantic the huge white audience they craved.
But, aside from Son Of A Preacher Man – a Top 10 hit everywhere, Grammy nominated – her own gig with the label didn’t really work out. Dusty In Memphis was a modest seller, peaking at Number 99 in the US. She released 12 singles with Atlantic and all 24 of the A- and B-sides are collected on The Complete Atlantic Singles 1968-1971 HHH (Real Gone). Eight of these tracks appear on Dusty In Memphis, six are from her second album for the label, recorded with Philly team Gamble & Huff, the underwhelming A Brand New Me. The rest were standalone sides on flop singles, a few of them – I Believe In
You, Haunted, Nothing Is Forever – taken from sessions for a shelved third Atlantic album produced in 1971 by writer Jeff Barry (eventually released in 2015 as Faithful). Perhaps Atlantic missed the point of her talents. Perhaps that inferiority complex became too crippling, manifesting as intense, costly, time-consuming perfectionism. (Later producers would have to record Springfield one word at a time.) Her Atlantic singles output adds up to an enjoyable, skilfully rendered, soul-flavoured, pop collection, but you get why they weren’t bigger hits: some kind of conviction has gone missing at some point in the process. Walkin’ My Cat Named Dog HHHH (Real Gone) was the first album by Panamanian/Filipino singer Norma Tanega, who hit internationally with the title track in 1966 but paused her career to live with Springfield in London for five years. On the surface it’s pleasing summer-camp folk, but Tanega’s songs are a cut above that, possessing a dry Randy Newman-ish quality and unusual, sophisticated themes. Case in point is opening track You’re Dead, which has just shown up in the hit TV series What We Do In the Shadows. The CD comes with bonus single tracks Bread and Run.