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The Scene of the Crime is Bettye’s second album for the Anti- label after I’ve Got My Own Hell to Raise two years ago. Bettye: “I’m not really sure about the sales of that one, but it wasn’t as much as I was expecting. But it did very well, and I got a tremendous amount of publicity from it.” Produced by David Barbe, who also did the engineering and mixing, Patterson Hood, the son of David Hood and Bettye herself, the set was recorded at Fame Studios in Muscle Shoals, Alabama.
Actually, that’s where the title of the CD derives from, since Bettye’s early 70s album, Child of the Seventies, was also cut in Muscle Shoals – only at different studios, at 3614 Jackson Highway – but then Atlantic Records shelved it, which still is the biggest disappointment for Bettye in her career. So here we have the crime and the scene. We finally got to hear that masterpiece, when in 2000 a French company, Art & Soul, released it under the title of Souvenirs. “Andrew Kaulkin, the president of Anti-, came up with the idea to record with the Drive-By Truckers. My husband, Kevin Kiley, came up with the idea of recording it in Muscle Shoals, at Fame. They put it together and came up with a great little marketing idea. And I came up with the songs.”
Drive-By Truckers, a southern rock band, plays today in the line-up of Mike Cooley (guitar), Patterson Hood (guitar), Brad Morgan (drums), John Neff (guitar and pedal steel), Shonna Tucker (bass) and also Spooner Oldham (Wurlitzer and piano). David Hood plays bass on three tracks on Bettye’s set. “When Kevin and I got married five years ago, I’ve listened to more music than I’ve listened to in my entire 46-year-career. In the five years we’ve been married I’ve found about thirty songs that I like of all the stuff he listens to all the time. I sent those thirty tunes to the Truckers and the company, and they liked them. So I chose ten out of the thirty. I’ll do the other twenty some other time.”
Southern “swamp” rock and Bettye’s soulful style make an interesting combination. “You know how women are. As long as you’re doing what they want you to do, they’re happy. They did what I wanted them to do, and that was it. I’m 61 years old. I wasn’t going to compromise in any way, shape or form – not musically. I sang the songs the way I wanted to sing them.”The set begins with a mid-tempo beater called I Still Want to Be Your Baby (Take Me Like I Am), which its writer, Eddie Hinton, recorded under the title of I Still Wanna Be Your Man, and along with Talking Old Soldiers it’s Betty’s own favourite on the CD. “I really wanted to sing those two songs. I hated it, when people write songs and close them into the point, where no-one else can sing them. Then I have to rewrite them. I just can’t let the song go by, just because a guy is singing it or it’s about a mouse or whatever…”
Choices is a stripped-down, acoustic and plaintive ballad with a vulnerable interpretation from Bettye. George Jones won a Grammy with the song in the “Best Male Country Vocal Performance” category in 1999. “I’ve always liked the song. I’ve liked it from the time I first heard it. I never thought of it in terms of recording it. Kevin is a great, great George Jones fan, and I’m a great country & western fan. Kevin was very surprised to know that. Kevin just wants you to listen to music. When he finds out what you like, he gets 20,000 of those recordings and plays them. My mother familiarized me with the Grand Ole Opry at a very early age, and over my career I’ve recorded a lot of country & western music.”
Frankie Miller’s Jealousy is a gloomy beat ballad, with occasional vocal spurts. Frankie himself recorded the song for his ’82 Standing on the Edge album, and cut it in Muscle Shoals. “It was one of the tunes I heard by Frankie Miller that I wanted to sing. Not that I liked it, but that I wanted to sing. I’m not a jealous person. I’m too arrogant to be jealous, but I’ve always liked the melody and all the darkness of it. Here again it was something that was written from a different perspective that I wanted to sing it, but it’s the same song. Everybody recognizes it.”
Don Henley co-wrote and recorded a rocking mid-tempo song titled You Don’t Know Me At All in the mid-90s. “It wasn’t a really big song. I like something else by Don Henley, but after we watched him on television my husband brought out everything he had ever recorded. Then I heard this and I said ‘I really like that, but it hasn’t enough words. It just seems to be part of the story’. When I rewrite these songs, I don’t ask anybody for any royalties or anything. I don’t try to make the song better. I just try to make it so that I can sing it.”
Somebody Pick Up My Pieces, a very intimate and slow “hurting” song, was written by Willie Nelson and cut for his ’98 Teatro CD. “He’s one of my greatest writers. I like him as a singer, too. This one my husband didn’t bring to me. In fact, I heard a friend of his sing it in a club one night. I said that if I ever get a chance to do another recording, I’m going to do that. That was about three years ago.”
Ray Charles cut W.T. Davidson’s slow beater named They Call It Love for his Do I Ever Cross Your Mind album in 1984. “I don’t like a lot of singers, but I like Ray Charles three times, so that takes three singers right there. He was one of the earliest people that I liked. I’ve liked him since I was a little bitty girl, way before there was Bettye LaVette. Kevin knew the singers that I liked, so he just recorded a whole bunch of stuff by Ray Charles to take on our honeymoon with us, and this was one of the songs. I said that I really, really liked that song. Always the thing with the Ray Charles songs is that I like the way he did them, so I don’t want to hear it any other way. I like it just like that. So Andrew Kaulkin came into the studio and said ‘why don’t you try it like this’. If he had not changed the groove for me, I would not have recorded it because I just didn’t want to do it the way Ray did it.”
John Hiatt recorded his rocky mover called The Last Time in 2003, and here we can’t avoid the inevitable comparison to Tina Turner again. “She did start before I did, but I’ve never covered one of her recordings, but she’s covered a couple of mine, so what… (laughing). I really love and admire Tina. The whole thing that’s happened to her – that’s the only time I’ve had anything happen to one of my contemporaries, when I felt like it was happening to me. Every time they gave her a reward or something, I cried. I was so happy, plus she is the nicest person next to Smokey Robinson’s first wife, Claudette, and Joe Tex that I’ve ever met in show business.”
“Most of the people, who was happening while I was happening, I wasn’t listening to them. I was hanging with them and singing with them. We were all listening to people, who happened before us. But if you must compare me to someone, why won’t any of you guys look at the guys that I’m patterning myself after – Little Willie John and Bobby Bland and James Brown.”
Elton John co-wrote with Bernie Taupin and recorded for his ’71 Tumbleweed Connection album a pouring song titled Talking Old Soldiers. “First of all, I don’t drink beer and I’m not a soldier. Every time I would hear something that I liked, Kevin put it on a list. Every time he would make a new list, Old Soldiers would be on it, and I would say ‘but I didn’t ask you to put that on there’, but he said ‘I just wanted you to listen to it again’. This went on like five years. When I sent the thirty songs to the record company, of course, he put it in the group, and my record company president – it was one of his favourite songs as well. So then of course they were ganging up on me. Then I just rewrote it the way I wanted to sing it, and then when I got involved in it I just loved it. It was very hard to sing, very hard to rewrite it, but I’m very proud of it. I just thought the music listeners would say ‘oh, my goodness, how melodramatic could you be’! It sounds like a scene out of a soap opera. I really thought they would hate it, but they loved it. I was stunned.”
A rocking mid-tempo song called Before The Money Came (The Battle of Bettye LaVette) was written by Patterson Hood together with Bettye, and this is her first own song after Bettye’s Blues on the Blues Express album in 2003 titled A Woman Like Me. “I wrote Bettye’s Blues, because Dennis Walker told me that any idiot could write a blues song. All you have to write is ‘woke up one morning…’. Patterson said that anybody, who could talk as much as I, could write a song. Patterson really is a writer. He wrote the liner notes, and they are perfectly written. And he thinks that everyone can do that, and I was explaining to him that everyone just can’t do this. If you give me something to write about, then I can write, but if you’re a writer you’re supposed to think of things to write about. He said ‘just write the things that you keep saying to me’. So I just wrote what I would say. But I’m still not a writer.”
The final song, I Guess We Shouldn’t Talk about That Now, is a beautiful, poignant ballad by Ed Pettersen and Kim Mclean. “On the CD, Song of America (a 3-CD set on ‘31 Tigers’ in 2007), I do a Bruce Springsteen song, Streets of Philadelphia, and Ed Pettersen is the producer of that album. When I went to Nashville, he said ‘would you take some of my songs back with you and just give them a listen’. So I brought the songs back with me, and of course Kevin listened to them. So we’re getting ready to go to Muscle Shoals and we had already chosen the songs, but Kevin said ‘you should just listen to this… you never know’. There were five songs on that CD, and the last song was this one.”
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Pieces of Peace - S/T
Track List:
1. Cease Fire
2. Pollution
3. Flunky for Your Love
4. I Still Care
5. Peace and Blessings
6. Yesterday's Visions
7. Pollution (Instrumental)
8. Yesterday's Visions (Alternate Take)
A lost treasure of rare soul from the Chicago scene -- the unreleased, self-titled album by Pieces Of Peace -- a combo with ties both to the late 60s soul of Twinight Records and the early 70s grooves of The Pharoahs! This set was initially recorded by The Pharoahs' Scarab label, but never issued at the time -- and it shows a tremendous growth from the earlier hard funk styles of the Pieces -- a move into fuller, more complicated modes that often had the same righteous blend of jazz, soul, and spirituality as Earth Wind & Fire! The production here is great, and the tapes haven't suffered at all for all their years on the shelf -- and if anything, the album's even more explosive now than if it was issued at the time -- given how long we've had to wait. From Dusty Groove. (AKA "the best record store in America")
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When: 11/20/07. Eccentric Soul: The Outskirts of Deep City. Numero Group. 'Nuff said.
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Don't forget to slide me some of your hard earned dollars on Thursday the 1st. I am counting on you! Seriously, I can't do alone. Thanks.
