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‘Sweet Forgiveness’ Paved the Way for Bonnie Raitt’s Just Desserts 45 Years Ago

on April 22, 2022 No comments

Sweet Forgiveness (1977) was Bonnie Raitt’s first breakthrough album, laying the groundwork for ‘Nick of Time’ and beyond. There can be no second act without a great first one.

Everybody loves a redemption story. The short version of Bonnie Raitt’s goes something like this: critically-acclaimed musician falls prey to the fast-living, hard-drinking rock ’n’ roll cliché. After nearly washing up, she dries out. Then, deus ex machina makes a blockbuster “comeback” album and walks away with a truckload of Grammy Awards.

The problem with these kinds of narratives is twofold. First, they’re not that simple or correct; they fail to reveal the whole picture in its messy, complicated humanity. Secondly, they discount everything that came before. It’s as though the artist had to renounce anything associated with their dark night of the soul to be rewarded with a lucrative career revival.

Sweet Forgiveness

Bonnie Raitt
Warner Bros.
April 1977

Raitt’s salvation came with 1989’s Nick of Time, which would produce three hit singles, win three Grammy awards, and go platinum five times over. This year Raitt was honored with a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award as well as the Icon Award from Billboard’s Women in Music. She was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2000. Nick of Time may have been the start of a brilliant second act, but it would not have been possible without the groundwork laid by Raitt’s early records. Among them is Sweet Forgiveness, released 45 years ago this month.

By 1976, Raitt had made five albums in as many years with Warner Bros., who offered her a record deal at age 21. Before signing with Warner Bros., she apprenticed herself to surviving blues greats like Mississippi Fred McDowell and Sippie Wallace while still enrolled at Radcliffe in the late 1960s. The albums established her as a devotee of traditional blues, folk, R&B, and rock and an inventive interpreter of other people’s songs. Her distinctive slide playing made Raitt a guitar slinger to be reckoned with, one who was competent and comfortable in any genre. Over the course of these early albums, Raitt’s esoteric tastes amalgamated into a style wholly her own.

On 1974’s Streetlights, producer and Hit Factory founder Jerry Ragovoy favored a sound that was less back-porch blues and more uptown R&B. It was the first album not to feature Raitt on slide guitar, a hallmark of her sound from the beginning. Even though Streetlights yielded what would become one of Raitt’s signature songs (the John Prine-penned “Angel from Montgomery”), widespread radio success eluded her. Pre Internet, a hit single was a prerequisite to mainstream recognition.

Nevertheless, Raitt persisted, building a fanbase through steady touring and regular play on progressive FM stations. She recruited Paul Rothchild (Janis Joplin, Paul Butterfield Blues Band, the Doors) to produce her fifth LP, 1975’s Home Plate. The album mixesgrittier blues numbers with heartrending ballads by the likes of J.D. Souther and Eric Kaz, two songwriters Raitt would return to on subsequent releases. Recorded with the first full band she assembled, Home Plate slid into number 43 on the Billboard Pop Albums chart. However, a hit single remained out of reach.

After Home Plate, the stage was set for a breakthrough at last. When it came time to record Sweet Forgiveness, Raitt again tapped Rothchild to produce and entered the studio with the same players. Song selections included tracks from favorite writers Kaz, Jackson Browne, and Karla Bonoff.

Sweet Forgiveness’ lead-off track, the gnarly, bluesy “About to Make Me Leave Home” (Earl Randall), sets the tone for the album. Its opening slide guitar riff, full of slink and swagger, indicates that the LP is going to go hard. Raitt’s voice is throatier here, and she sings in a lower register on several songs. That was by design. She told Marc Maron on his WTF podcast, “I was a little shrimp. I couldn’t stand the way I sounded. I was smoking and drinking, trying to get my voice older … because I had this little soprano voice.”

After the steamy opener, the album does not let up, going straight into “Runaway”, a cover of the 1961 Del Shannon hit. Raitt’s driving, sludgy version makes the original sound more like a throwaway than a runaway. Norton Buffalo—inexplicably uncredited on the album cover—contributes a harmonica solo for the record books that is at once ecstatic and profane. Seeing the solo performed live, with Buffalo deftly swapping different harps throughout, is wondrous. A live performance from the band’s 1997 Midnight Special appearance is preserved on YouTube.

As on Raitt’s previous albums, Sweet Forgiveness’s hard-driving blues tracks are rounded out by a selection of ballads equally powerful in their quiet intensity. Among them is “My Opening Farewell”, a deep cut from Jackson Browne’s debut LP. Raitt transforms its mournful chorus into something that manages to be both poignant and defiant. “Two Lives” transcends its soft-rock inclinations with Raitt’s soulful singing, a restrained backing arrangement, and Michael McDonald’s distinctive harmony on the chorus. The title track, written by Daniel Moore, fuses funk and gospel into a song that is greater than the sum of its parts.

On the rousing “Three Time Loser”, Raitt’s playing is the epitome of what the New Yorker calls the “fugitive emotions” of the slide guitar. Vying with “Runaway” for the album’s hardest rocker is “Gamblin’ Man”, written by Kaz. First recorded by the band American Flyer, Raitt turns its SoCal country-rock up to 11.

“Runaway” came within spitting distance of the top 40 but failed to crack it, peaking at 57. Still, it was Raitt’s first bonafide hit single, and the radio play brought more fans to the fold. As she told Classic Rock in 2004, “It was certainly the closest I’d got to a hit record. But it was the first time the national press put me on the map, and I got on the cover of Rolling Stone. That was a big deal to me at age 27. It was great to get some radio play.”

A follow-up hit didn’t materialize, but Raitt was always more of an album-oriented artist anyway, preferring the long haul over transitory fame. Her subsequent two albums, 1979’s The Glow and Green Light from 1982, garnered Raitt her first Grammy nominations. The Academy’s endorsement didn’t seem to be enough for Warner Bros., though, who dropped her from the label in 1983.

Those looking for a timeworn story of debauchery and hitting rock bottom will be disappointed. There was no “come to Jesus” moment that prompted Raitt to give up drinking. Raitt’s move to sobriety came in the form of another divine intervention: Prince. After Warner Bros. showed her the door, Prince got in touch in 1986. He floated the idea of working together and Raitt signing to his label, Paisley Park. As she tells Maron, “I just got heavy and wanted to lose some weight ‘cause I was going to work with Prince in the mid-’80s. I said, ‘you know, if we make a video together, I’d better drop some weight.’ So that’s when I quit drinking.”

Nothing came of the Prince collaboration. “By the time we got our schedules lined up,” she tells Maron, “He had already recorded some songs in the wrong key, with lyrics that didn’t really fit me.” Raitt canceled her summer tour that year to work with him, but he forgot to let her know he’d extended his own tour and couldn’t make it.

Everything worked out in the end, which is an oversimplification, just like the rest of the story. Nick of Time may have been a new beginning, but so was Sweet Forgiveness in many ways. Its legacy lives on in Raitt’s affinity for blending muscular blues-rock and potent ballads into a coherent—and yes, commercially successful—whole. Its presence was also felt in Raitt’s live shows, with “About to Make Me Leave Home”, “Three Time Loser”, and “Louise”, all staples in her sets well into the 1990s.

Listeners who only know Raitt from Nick of Time and beyond would do well to give Sweet Forgiveness a spin. The album has more in common with Raitt’s 1989 breakthrough than any hackneyed narrative would suggest. Serving as a blueprint for her later success, Sweet Forgiveness proves there can be no second act without a hell of a first one.

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About The Author

Cheryl Graham

Cheryl Graham is a writer based in Iowa City. A classically trained percussionist, she took up the drum kit when punk broke and never looked back. She played in various bands in her hometown of Tucson, Arizona, then went on to earn a Master’s degree in Fine Art from the University of Cincinnati. She worked as a newspaper designer, a technical writer, and a freelance illustrator, finally landing in Iowa and beginning a writing career. Her essays have appeared in several literary journals and print publications, and she writes about music for PopMatters. She still has a drum set in her spare room.

But wait, there's more!

Bonnie Raitt Faces Mortality With Compassion and Hope
On her latest album, “Just Like That…,” the singer-songwriter brings new depth to songs of love and loss.

on April 21, 2022 No comments

By Jon Pareles

Just Like That – NYT Critic’s Pick

Who would expect a Bonnie Raitt song to start like this? “Had the flu in the prison infirmary,” she sings in “Down the Hall,” from her new album, “Just Like That…,” which arrives more than half a century after her debut.

“Down the Hall” is a folky, fingerpicked ballad, written by Raitt, with the plain-spoken diction of a John Prine song. Based on a New York Times story, it is narrated by a convict, a murderer, who finds a kind of atonement in becoming a prison hospice worker: “The thought of those guys goin’ out alone/It hit me somewhere deep,” she sings, as Glenn Patscha’s organ chords swell behind her like glimmers of redemption.

“Down the Hall” is the somber finale to “Just Like That…,” Raitt’s first album since 2016. The music’s style is familiar; Raitt, 72, reconvened her longtime band members, who are old hands at blues, soul, ballads and reggae, and she produced the tracks with the feel of musicians performing together in real time, savoring grooves and finding warmth in human imperfections.

But the album was recorded in 2021, well into the pandemic, and it shows. Along with her usual insights into grown-up love, desire, heartbreak and regret, Raitt’s latest collection of songs directly faces mortality.

“Livin’ for the Ones,” with words by Raitt and music by the band’s guitarist George Marinelli, is a Rolling Stones-flavored rocker, with strummed and sliding guitars tumbling across the backbeat. It draws a life force from mourning, countering petty impulses toward lethargy or self-pity with the blunt recognition of so many lives lost: “If you ever start to bitch and moan,” Raitt sings, “Just remember the ones who won’t/Ever feel the sun on their faces again.”

Another kind of solace after death arrives in the quietly poignant title track of “Just Like That…,” also written by Raitt. Its story unfolds at a measured pace. A stranger shows up on the doorstep of a woman who has never stopped blaming herself for the death of her son. The man has sought her out because he’s the one who got her son’s heart as a transplant: “I lay my head upon his chest/And I was with my boy again,” Raitt sings, with sorrow and relief in the grain of her voice.

The rest of the album features Raitt’s more typical fare: songs about love lost and found, about getting together or drifting apart. “Made Up Mind,” from the Canadian band Bros. Landreth, opens the album with a stolid portrait of a slow-motion separation, feeling “the quiet behind a slamming door.” Its counterbalance is “Something’s Got a Hold of My Heart,” an Al Anderson song about a late-arriving, unexpected romance.

Yet mortality haunts even the love songs. The album includes Raitt’s remake of “Love So Strong” by the reggae pioneer Toots Hibbert, who led Toots and the Maytals and died in 2020 after being hospitalized for Covid-like symptoms. “Blame It on Me,” by John Capek and Andrew Matheson, is a bluesy, torchy, slow-dance breakup ballad that couches accusations in apologies, warning that “Truth is love’s first casualty”; near the end, Raitt turns the tables with an exquisite, sustained, breaking high note. The song also assigns some of the blame to time, which has, “Poured like sand through your hands and mine.”

Understanding that life is finite, the stakes are higher for every relationship, every moment. On “Just Like That…,” Raitt calls for compassion, consolation and perseverance to get through with grace.

Bonnie Raitt
“Just Like That …”
(Redwing)

About The Author

Jon Pareles

Jon Pareles has been the chief popular music critic at The New York Times since 1988.
A musician, he has played in rock bands, jazz groups and classical ensembles. He majored in music at Yale University.

Source: © Copyright The New York Times

But wait, there's more!

Bonnie Raitt – Just Like That…
Diverse, expertly crafted and resilient - with Just Like That..., it's clear that veteran Bonnie Raitt is nowhere near running out of gas.

on April 20, 2022 No comments

By Hal Horowitz

“You take a good look at my face / You will see my future is still bright” sings Bonnie Raitt on her first release in six years. After listening through, it’s clear she’s not bragging. At an effervescent 72 years old, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee sounds as vibrant and fresh as on her 1971 self-titled debut.

Raitt has covered a lot of ground in that half century as a professional musician; alongside other political and extracurricular activities (like ecological work promoting BioDiesel fuel and no Nukes involvement). It’s an impressive run. Her career resume boasts about 20 albums of material and, based on the quality of Just Like That…, it’s still nowhere near running out of gas.

There aren’t many detours from Raitt’s established MO in these 10 tracks, but that’s not an issue. She dabbles in roots pop, reggae, R&B-laced soul, gritty rock and roll, easy rolling funk and honeyed/salty singer-songwriter fare.

It’s all enhanced with a dusting of the blues, the music that has been at the heart of her sound since she worked with legendary figures like Junior Wells and John Lee Hooker, and interpreted songs from Sippie Wallace and Robert Johnson on her first album. Raitt’s trademarked slide guitar, somewhere between the stylings of Ry Cooder and Lowell George, invigorates even the slickest of these songs.

*Bonnie Raitt – Just Like That… New Album 2022*

And then there’s that voice.

It’s an instrument in itself, shifting from sounding as vibrant and fiery as her iconic red hair to a whisky smooth burr. Her singing funnels the hurt, pride, anger and regret contained in songs like the rollicking ‘Living for the Ones’ (“…that didn’t make it” continues the chorus of this tribute to her fallen mentors and peers) with effortless grace and a veteran’s authority.

The acoustic folk/blues of the mournful title track which tells the story of an organ donor’s effect on two families, and the meditative closing ‘Down the Hall’, about a prison hospice program written in intimate detail of those involved, are both Raitt originals (she penned or co-wrote four selections). These pensive slices of life were influenced by the late John Prine, a longtime friend whose best work captured the humanity in everyday life.

But there are plenty of upbeat selections too, such as the funky ‘Waiting for You to Blow’ with its spirited organ solo and Raitt singing sweet and sassy. The frisky reggae of Toots Hibbert’s ‘Love So Strong’ (Toots passed before he could join for a planned duet) is another highlight. She digs into blues with the shimmering noir of ‘Blame It on Me’, reflecting a late night, closing time vibe with the chilling “your words sting so heartlessly” before letting fly with a touching, torchy slide solo.

This is generally more polished than it needs to be but the material, both covers and originals, is diverse, expertly crafted (she also produced) and resilient. Raitt’s committed performance is commanding as her journeyman band provides support without impeding her considerable talents. She could – and should – record more often because it’ll be frustrating to wait another six years for a follow-up to a set as moving, compelling and enjoyable as Just Like That….

8/10

About The Author

Hal Horowitz

Roots music journalist since 1994 for a variety of publications.

Like most music lovers my age, I got the bug from The Beatles, and still have my first picture sleeve 45 of ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand.’ Living in New York City as a teen allowed me to experience a wide variety of acts now considered legends. In college I was music, then program, director of my college radio station which widened my music lens substantially, and did two weekly air slots. I started writing seriously in 1994 upon moving to Atlanta, Georgia and haven’t stopped since. I won Best Blues Journalist for the prestigious Keeping the Blues Alive organization in 2009 and continue to write about that genre along with country, roots based rock and what has now become known as Americana.