WOMAN of REPUTE
CHAPTER SIX
MEMPHIS
CHAPTER SIX
MEMPHIS
For pop artists it was a time of sink or swim. Many failed to make the transition and either disappeared or were doomed to the cabaret/variety club circuit. Always considered mere tokens in the male-dominated music industry of the 1960s, British female vocalists--or "girl singers" as they were popularly termed--fared the worst in this cultural paradigm shift.
By 1967, Dusty Springfield's image had already undergone a major transformation.
Her international popularity ensured that the mod look of the early 60's was gradually replaced by a more glamorous, sophisticated one - though the trademark heavy mascara and bouffant hair remained.
It was a look that the New York Times would describe as "part Italian cinema minx, part West End drag queen." Yet even this new look, at home in the
glitz of venues like The Flamingo in Los Angeles and Checkers in Sydney, was viewed by many as cliched and irrelevant. Musically, Dusty was also at odds with the emerging cultural trends - a positive indication, critic Bob Stanley maintains, that Dusty "was always on a different plane" to just about anyone in music, but still nevertheless a hindrance to buoyancy in the wake of the new wave of musical genres. Dusty's dilemma stemmed from her innate combination of refined and eclectic musical sensibilities.
Although such a combination ensured her elevation to a "different plane," it nevertheless limited the commercial appeal of her diversely infused albums. Indeed, as early as her first solo album, up-tempo rave tracks shared
vinyl with wistful ballads--the overall result being the projection of a somewhat schizophrenic repertoire and persona.
This incongruity gained momentum as the decade progressed, reaching its peak on her 1968 album Dusty . . . Definitely, where the syrupy "Second Time Around" closes a set begun by the gritty "Ain't No Sun Since You've Been Gone." On the album's cover, Dusty appears swathed in the shimmering gold of a sequined gown, while her hair towers golden and haphazardly atop her head.
Dusty's previous album in 1967 had been entitled Where Am I Going?, and the rather insipid smile that adorns her face on Dusty . . . Definitely suggests that although the showbiz arena of international stardom was where she now found herself, this comfortable yet ultimately unchallenging and suffocating place was not where she wanted to remain.
Despite superlative renditions of songs like "I Think It's Gonna Rain Today" and David and Bacharach's "This Girl's In Love With You," Dusty . . . Definitely failed to capture the attention of an increasingly younger record-buying public. Reflecting back on this time, Dusty noted, "As soon as I saw my record sales in Britain dip, I saw the writing on the wall, and I didn't like it."
In response to her dilemma, Dusty intensified her focus on America. "America was the place I'd always dreamed of as a girl," she once remarked, "the vastness of it. It was where the music came from." No doubt this "vastness" and the range of musical styles and opportunities it held, was for Dusty the ultimate remedy for the claustrophobic condition she was experiencing in Britain. Accordingly in 1967 she requested a new record label to oversee the release of her output in the States. No less than Atlantic Records agreed to manage things Stateside, while Philips retained their managing and distribution rights throughout the rest of the world.
"I was coming to the end of a fairly good run [in Britain]. I'm a firm believer in quitting before they fire you. It's just a matter of being one step ahead. I could see that the writing was on the wall in the same way the Springfields knew the Beatles were coming . . . We knew the time to stop and I knew that my run was coming to an end . . . and besides, I was in love with America since a kid. It was where I wanted to be."
"I had cracked it [America] on an intermittent level . . . After all, I ONLY WANT TO BE WITH YOU was a hit, WISHIN' AND HOPIN' was a hit, umm . . . THE LOOK OF LOVE, YOU DON"T HAVE TO SAY YOU LOVE ME. I'd had quite a few hits but I was never there to take advantage of it. I mean, I'd sort of be there to promote and then disappear off again and I just decided that I wanted to spend more time there. And after all, it was sixty-three to sixty-nine . . . Six years was a long time to be sort of functioning at a very high profile level and I . . . as I said, I'm fairly intuitive and . . . there wasn't anywhere else I could go . . . This [Britain] is a small country. So yes, it was partly sort of wanderlust which I will always have. I look at planes flying over and wish I was on them."
Initially, Dusty's move to Atlantic Records looked promising as in 1968 an invitation was extended to her to record with the ace rhythm and blues session men at Chips Moman's and Don Crews' American Recording Studio in Memphis, Tennessee, which at that time was leased by Atlantic Records. Dusty accepted, though surprisingly, given her innate ability at interpreting American soul music, the prospect of recording in Memphis unnerved her. In a 1990 interview in Blues and Soul magazine, Dusty recalled the Memphis experience: "I got destroyed when someone said'Stand there, that's where Aretha Franklin stood' or 'Stand there, that's where Percy Sledge sang When A Man Loves A Woman' [NOTE: This track was actually recorded in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, not Memphis].
I became paralysed by the ghosts of the studio! I knew I could sing the songs well enough, but it brought pangs of insecurity. . . that I didn't deserve to be there."
"I hated it at first. I hated it because I couldn't be Aretha Franklin. . . Whatever you do, it's not going to be good enough. Added to the natural critic in me, it was a paralysing experience. I was someone who had come from thundering drums and Phil Spector, and I didn't understand sparseness. I wanted to fill every space. I didn't understand that the sparseness gave it an atmosphere. When I got free from that I finally liked it, but it took me a long time. I wouldn't play it for a year."
"I wasn't used to singing to a sparse rhythm track. To this day I prefer to sing last, after the strings have been written, because I get moved by a string line or an oboe solo and it will bring things out of me. I was the opposite of the normal thing which is to say, The singer's the important thing, let's surround her."
The selection of songs itself initially took Dusty by surprise. "When I first heard about Memphis, I figured it would be Aretha kinds of songs, by these people I'd never heard of, much more gritty R&B. The album is very different; and for the most part, the songwriters are all my favourites." Co-producer of the Memphis album, Arif Mardin, agrees--describing it as "a meeting place of great pop songs and soul with funky arrangements."
Despite Dusty's reservations, the album Dusty in Memphis, is regarded as her finest, and a sixties classic--spurring the sultry "Son-Of-A Preacher Man" up the international charts. Years later, Jerry Wexler, co-producer of Dusty in Memphis, recalled in Rolling Stone magazine the making of the album: "Dusty is the incarnation of white soul . . . I don't know a singer with better intonation - she never hit a wrong note. She's certainly not a rhythm and blues singer, but she is soulful as hell." It was Wexler who after the completion of the Memphis album, dubbed Dusty, "the Great White Lady."
Throughout the recording of the album however, relations between Dusty and Wexler were at times strained. Wexler remembers cutting the final vocals as a "most excruciating experience": "During playback," he recounts, "we feed the track back to the singer through headphones, and she sings vocal overdubs into the mike. There's a judgment point about how loud to feed the track back, and I've always gone for the minimum possible amount. There's usually a little warfare between producer and singer at this point, the latter calling for more. The less voice you feed back on the phones, the harder the singer will project, it's a physiological fact. With Dusty, she insisted we crank up the track so loud it was physically painful. There was no way she could hear herself - it was like she was singing into a void, projecting an interior monologue. Like she was totally deaf and asked to sing from aural memory. The thing was - and this shows what a gifted, idiosyncratic artist she was - she sang perfectly in tune. Her pitch was miraculous."
"I think the highest and most sure I've ever sung is on the fades [of] some of the Memphis songs . . . they're stratospheric! I've never hit them again. I don't know how I did it. I just loved the songs so much that I'd probably take a . . . stand about ten yards from the mike and run up to it, come out with it. Those songs . . . just have tremendous atmosphere and they have a great quality. . . I always like the fades on things so I get an enormous sense of relief when we get to the fade which takes the anxiety out of it, which means I can sing higher. It's daft, isn't it? They should put the fade first. By the time we got to the end, the beginning would be terrific!"
Although a critical success upon it's release, Dusty in Memphis did not figure highly in either the British or U.S. charts. "Everybody loved it except the damn public," recalls Wexler. "It sold 100,000 copies in America before Ahmet Ertegun (the head of Atlantic records) deleted it. Maybe he did us a favor in terms of our reputation, giving the record a rare status. People didn't expect to hear such a polished sound. They were used to raggedy-arse Bob Dylan records with everyone plucking away . . . ours was a masterful interweaving of voices and instruments, not just a bunch of chords."
Yet despite its commercial failure, Dusty in Memphis established Dusty Springfield as a singer of hip taste in the United States, as in many ways the album breaks boundaries and defies categorization. Rolling Stone writer Greil Marcus noted in 1969 that with hit singles such as "You Don't Have To Say You Love Me" and "The Look Of Love," "Dusty seemed destined to join that crowd of big-bosomed, low-necked lady singers that play what Lenny Bruce called 'the class rooms,' and always encore with Born Free. It didn't happen, and Dusty in Memphis is the reason why."
Though she avoided "the class rooms" in the States, Dusty was not so fortunate with regard television appearances in Britain--the primary means at that time for promotion of new material. Geared towards older audiences, the variety format of many T.V. shows and "specials", with their production numbers and elaborate sets, lacked the edge of raw energy and wider cultural awareness of Dusty's earlier appearances on shows such as Ready, Steady, Go!
Instead, the late '60s saw Dusty, complete with ostrich plume fans, singing about glamour with Phyllis Diller and Liberace on the latter's British television show, and guesting on an Engelbert Humperdinck T.V. special in flowing gossomer and cascading golden tresses, looking like a glam Blue Fairy; a proto-type Stevie Nicks.
Perhaps such lavish production numbers satisfied Dusty's childhood dreams of Hollywood spectacle, but such antics remained at odds with the burgeoning social and cultural paradigm shift and, more often than not, served merely to place a great singer in the kitsch and unthreatening context (musical and otherwise) of psuedo-Hollywood extravaganzas.
Yet Dusty's late '60s/early '70s T.V. appearances did have their redeeming moments, some intentional (her involvement in an innovative reading and visual presentation of "The Look of Love" with French singer Mireille Mathieu on a Burt Bacharach special), and some not (her call to an off screen orchestra for a key change midway through a rendition of "The Other Man's Grass Is Always Greener," with Tom Jones).
RELATED ARTICLES:
Memphis Falls For Our Dusty by Terry Manning, New Musical Express, 1968.
Team Work Is Secret Of Atlantic's Soul Success by Alan Smith, 1969.
Dusty: The Music Maker Interview (1968).
