{"id":10079,"date":"2013-06-14T18:15:13","date_gmt":"2013-06-15T01:15:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/?p=10079"},"modified":"2013-06-14T18:15:13","modified_gmt":"2013-06-15T01:15:13","slug":"darlene-love-20-feet","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/2013\/06\/darlene-love-20-feet\/","title":{"rendered":"DARLENE LOVE \u2013 20 FEET"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"p1\"<\/h1>\n

DARLENE LOVE \u2013 20 FEET<\/i><\/h1>\n

Darlene Love, who at this point deserves to be called the Eighth Wonder of the World, noted after an outdoor screening at Open Road Rooftop (the roof of a former high school on the Lower East Side) of Twenty Feet From Stardom<\/i> how most of the background singers that are the subject of the film\u2014herself included\u2014came from church music beginnings.<\/p>\n

She had just finished reprising live \u201cLean On Me,\u201d which she performs, backed by fellow backup luminaries Jo Lawry, Judith Hill, and Lisa Fischer, at the end of the film, which centers on Love, Hill, Fischer, Claudia Lennear and Merry Clayton and also features plenty of other stellar background singers\u2014along with such employers as Bruce Springsteen, Sting and Mick Jagger.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a remarkable film on many levels, starting with Love, who sang behind everyone\u2014and I mean everyone<\/i>\u2014from Buck Owens to James Brown, and came to solo fame as Phil Spector\u2019s leading female voice. Still, by the end of the 1970s, she was relegated to cleaning houses to support her family, prior to being rediscovered in New York in the \u201980s and finally being inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2011.<\/p>\n

Love is hardly alone in struggling to make it as a solo artist\u2014and remains one of a few to have succeeded so well. Clayton, who famously soared opposite Jagger on the recorded version of \u201cGimme Shelter\u201d (Fischer has since owned it with him in concert), is said by producer Lou Adler to be as strong as Aretha Franklin, yet failed to make much of a dent with her early \u201970s Adler-produced solo albums, it being suggested by Adler that there\u2019s only one Franklin, only one Diana Ross, and little room leftover for another star female solo singer\u2014at least at that time.<\/p>\n

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Indeed, as a perplexed Sting, who has employed Fischer and Lawry (and Janice Pendarvis, who\u2019s also in the film), surmises, it takes as much luck as destiny<\/i> to break out of the background as a solo artist. Not that there\u2019s anything wrong with that, as is shown in an opening performance clip of Talking Heads \u201cSlippery People\u201d showcasing the magnificent Lynn Mabry\u2014another key Twenty Feet<\/i> subject\u2014and Edna Holt singing backup for David Byrne.<\/p>\n

\"p3\"Reference is made at the outset to Lou Reed\u2019s \u201cWalk On The Wild Side\u201d and its \u201cand the colored girls go \u2018do, do, do\u2026\u2019\u201d homage to the backup singing style represented by Twenty Feet From Stardom<\/i>\u2014these girls, Springsteen notes, having secularized the emotive gospel chorus singing style.<\/p>\n

Later on Clayton relates how she originally balked at singing background on Lynyrd Skynyrd\u2019s \u201cSweet Home Albama,\u201d which was interpreted by some as an endorsement of the Old South. Clayton then decided it was better to essentially sing the shit out of it as a means of neutralizing any such message and thereby contributing indirectly to the then timely expression of black pride.<\/p>\n

That the film only concerns African-American background singers is made clear early on, with video of Perry Como being backed by the very white (and very good) Fontane Sisters, presumably. Bette Midler and Stevie Wonder then appear to differentiate between the gospel-derived singers, who sang with feel, and the preceding readers<\/i>, who could read and perform their vocal parts perfectly, but with no soul.<\/p>\n

It may be a bit of a dig at the readers\u2014and the pre-rock \u2019n\u2019 roll\/R&B music their background singing represents\u2014but it\u2019s apples and oranges. No female background singer I ever saw was better than Bonnie Owens in her husband Merle Haggard\u2019s band, and I\u2019m sure Darlene Love, who sang with everyone from James Brown to Bonnie\u2019s first husband Buck, would readily agree.<\/p>\n

Jim Bessman<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

DARLENE LOVE \u2013 20 FEET Darlene Love, who at this point deserves to be called the Eighth Wonder of the World, noted after an outdoor screening at Open Road Rooftop (the roof of a former high school on the Lower East Side) of Twenty Feet From Stardom how most of the background singers that are […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[4976],"tags":[6717,6721,6715,6726,6720,6719,6723,6724,6725,6718,6722,6716],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10079"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10079"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10079\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10083,"href":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10079\/revisions\/10083"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10079"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10079"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10079"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}