I've been meaning to write about this awesome Light In The Attic reissue for some time. Still haven't got round to it. So I thought I'd welcome in a guest blogger, Sydney's own Loene Carmen, to talk about it. The following is reprinted, with permission, from her MySpace blog, with a note from the lady herself that Betty Davis' fourth album was actually recorded at a "studio in the country", not at Muscle Shoals as stated below.
Current mood: seriously foxy
Category: Music
I'm very excited that Betty Davis' great lost album has been found and will be out in 3 days. Its her fourth album, recorded in Muscle Shoals in 1976, and apparently her best.
Being that I am sitting on my own fourth album, I'm a believer that this is a very auspicious number, album wise. Its called 'Is It Love Or Desire?' and its out on the righteously cool Light In The Attic label, who have made sure that Betty is finally receiving the royalties due to her as well as presenting her music in the best packaging....
Anyway, here's some musings on Betty I wrote for J Mag "Private Lives" sometime last year...
I got to thinking last night. About what Bob Dylan calls being a musical expeditionist. About being a seeker. About the pavers and the lighters of the way forward. About the unsung, the masters that may have slipped through the cracks of popular culture. What got me to thinking about this was the realisation that the youth of today are now discovering what was once hard to find, obscure, difficult music just cos it somehow ended up on their Ipod, or cos Mojo put it on a cool compilation. And it made me feel kinda sorry for ‘em.
Cos if it’s all at your fingertips, where’s the thrill of the hunt, of the lucky find, the lifelong indebtedness for the introduction, that weird pride and sense of ownership that accompanies uncovering some mysterious wild magical sounds, known only to the secret few. Let alone the accompanying artwork…
I was fourteen when my disco loving big brother bestowed a copy of Betty Davis’ revolutionary record They Say I’m Different on me, and it was as though the world suddenly lit up and I knew my own possibilities were endless. The beautiful black woman adorning the cover wielding perspex rods in a funkadelic space suit simply blew my mind. And I wasn’t the only one – young Betty not only married Miles Davis in the late 1960’s but was responsible for introducing him to her up and coming guitarist buddy Jimi Hendrix, which lit the fire under Miles’ ass that inspired him to head down a whole new direction with Bitches Brew – thus inventing jazz fusion. Thanks Betty. But much more importantly to me, she wrote and produced her own albums. She was an auteur of song. She was the sole proprietress of her own foxy, down and dirty sound, with incredibly groundbreaking songs like He Was A Big Freak, If I’m In Luck I Just Might Get Picked Up and Anti Love Song. Miles Davis said in his autobiography “If Betty were singing today she would be something like Madonna, something like Prince, only as a woman”.
Betty was truly a musical expeditionist and you could hear it pay off in the genre defying sounds she created. In They Say I’m Different Betty sings about discovering Chuck Berry when she was sweet 16. About her grandfather playing her Lightning Hopkins, Bo Diddley, Big Mama Thornton, Leadbelly – and that’s why she’s different, why she’s strange. This moved me. I was hooked. I discovered that Betty was a hit songwriter for acts such as the Chamber Brothers and The Commodores, a top model, a nightclub entrepreneur. That Jimi wrote Foxy Lady for her. That not a single minute of video footage of this remarkable artist’s legendary concerts exists. That Betty finally decided the world wasn’t ready for her, after three albums that didn’t sell, and simply retired, leaving a tiny but ever growing legion of helpless, obsessive devotees in her wake.
This patchwork of facts, the deliciously torturous, slow gleaning of precious snippets of information was gathered over years from various unreliable sources, each new fragment accompanied by a flicker of excitement. Gazing at those album covers provided a portal into another world. I called my first album Born Funky Born Free in some kind of homage to Betty, and wrote a song from her imagined point of view calledMy Friends Call Me Foxy. Performing it always makes me stand up a little straighter.
My brother’s gift of Betty Davis really encouraged me to search out the unknown, the forgotten, those that ran their own race, often without anyone cheering them on from the sidelines. It taught me that popularity has never been a measure of talent and that as an artist its important to create whatever you damn well want and try not to let it break your heart if it takes an audience thirty years to hear you. Music has to be its own reward.
In this bowerbird era of homogenized idolatry it can be hard to determine the genuine from the contrived. Regurgitation from reinvention. Beyonce has stolen a lot of Betty’s moves, and although the girl is indisputably hot, her foxiness is mere pastiche, learned, perfected, smoothed out. It does not move me.
As the one and only Dave Graney puts it…I dig the pioneers.
Find your own masters and let ‘em kill you…
Being that I am sitting on my own fourth album, I'm a believer that this is a very auspicious number, album wise. Its called 'Is It Love Or Desire?' and its out on the righteously cool Light In The Attic label, who have made sure that Betty is finally receiving the royalties due to her as well as presenting her music in the best packaging....
Anyway, here's some musings on Betty I wrote for J Mag "Private Lives" sometime last year...
I got to thinking last night. About what Bob Dylan calls being a musical expeditionist. About being a seeker. About the pavers and the lighters of the way forward. About the unsung, the masters that may have slipped through the cracks of popular culture. What got me to thinking about this was the realisation that the youth of today are now discovering what was once hard to find, obscure, difficult music just cos it somehow ended up on their Ipod, or cos Mojo put it on a cool compilation. And it made me feel kinda sorry for ‘em.
Cos if it’s all at your fingertips, where’s the thrill of the hunt, of the lucky find, the lifelong indebtedness for the introduction, that weird pride and sense of ownership that accompanies uncovering some mysterious wild magical sounds, known only to the secret few. Let alone the accompanying artwork…
I was fourteen when my disco loving big brother bestowed a copy of Betty Davis’ revolutionary record They Say I’m Different on me, and it was as though the world suddenly lit up and I knew my own possibilities were endless. The beautiful black woman adorning the cover wielding perspex rods in a funkadelic space suit simply blew my mind. And I wasn’t the only one – young Betty not only married Miles Davis in the late 1960’s but was responsible for introducing him to her up and coming guitarist buddy Jimi Hendrix, which lit the fire under Miles’ ass that inspired him to head down a whole new direction with Bitches Brew – thus inventing jazz fusion. Thanks Betty. But much more importantly to me, she wrote and produced her own albums. She was an auteur of song. She was the sole proprietress of her own foxy, down and dirty sound, with incredibly groundbreaking songs like He Was A Big Freak, If I’m In Luck I Just Might Get Picked Up and Anti Love Song. Miles Davis said in his autobiography “If Betty were singing today she would be something like Madonna, something like Prince, only as a woman”.
Betty was truly a musical expeditionist and you could hear it pay off in the genre defying sounds she created. In They Say I’m Different Betty sings about discovering Chuck Berry when she was sweet 16. About her grandfather playing her Lightning Hopkins, Bo Diddley, Big Mama Thornton, Leadbelly – and that’s why she’s different, why she’s strange. This moved me. I was hooked. I discovered that Betty was a hit songwriter for acts such as the Chamber Brothers and The Commodores, a top model, a nightclub entrepreneur. That Jimi wrote Foxy Lady for her. That not a single minute of video footage of this remarkable artist’s legendary concerts exists. That Betty finally decided the world wasn’t ready for her, after three albums that didn’t sell, and simply retired, leaving a tiny but ever growing legion of helpless, obsessive devotees in her wake.
This patchwork of facts, the deliciously torturous, slow gleaning of precious snippets of information was gathered over years from various unreliable sources, each new fragment accompanied by a flicker of excitement. Gazing at those album covers provided a portal into another world. I called my first album Born Funky Born Free in some kind of homage to Betty, and wrote a song from her imagined point of view calledMy Friends Call Me Foxy. Performing it always makes me stand up a little straighter.
My brother’s gift of Betty Davis really encouraged me to search out the unknown, the forgotten, those that ran their own race, often without anyone cheering them on from the sidelines. It taught me that popularity has never been a measure of talent and that as an artist its important to create whatever you damn well want and try not to let it break your heart if it takes an audience thirty years to hear you. Music has to be its own reward.
In this bowerbird era of homogenized idolatry it can be hard to determine the genuine from the contrived. Regurgitation from reinvention. Beyonce has stolen a lot of Betty’s moves, and although the girl is indisputably hot, her foxiness is mere pastiche, learned, perfected, smoothed out. It does not move me.
As the one and only Dave Graney puts it…I dig the pioneers.
Find your own masters and let ‘em kill you…
(from Facebook)
ReplyDeleteShelly Jenkin
Both done got a good collection of knee boots, but Betty wins my heart.
12 November at 18:53 · Delete