Hanging out with the sublime singer who makes her guitar sound “the way bacon smells” — and reflecting on her lifetime of music and activism.
SAN FRANCISCO
In the late 1960s during her sophomore year, Bonnie Raitt took a leave from Radcliffe. Her intention was to hang with blues legends Mississippi Fred McDowell, Son House, Buddy Guy and Junior Wells, who were managed by her then-boyfriend Dick Waterman, inhaling the sort of storied education that wasn’t offered at Harvard.
Music was “just a hobby and a passion of mine,” says Raitt, 75, who began noodling on a $25 guitar from Sears at the age of 8 and was quickly influenced by an array of blues, folk and country artists. “I never expected it to be my life. My intention was to have a really cool side experience.”
Instead, Raitt has helmed a rock, folk and blues odyssey that is as improbable as it is lengthy, 21 albums and 54 years of touring punctuated by triumphs that erupted decades apart in an industry that tends to Vitamix its young.
“Takin’ My Time,” the title of her 1973 third album, proved prophetic. It took Raitt, among this year’s Kennedy Center Honors recipients, nearly two decades of recording to top the charts with her 1989 Grammy album of the year “Nick of Time” and then — wait for it — another two decades to have her writing honored for the tear-duct-depleter and 2023 Grammy song of the year, “Just Like That.” In broadcast footage of both ceremonies, she looks profoundly shocked by the wins.
When Raitt first left college, “my plan was to hang out with my heroes and use my hobby to maybe open some shows,” she says, sitting in a friend’s loft office near her home in Marin County, California. “She jumped into the deep end of the pool,” says Taj Mahal, who met her during those early days. “She could hang with any of them.”
Raitt returned to college for another year, while playing in local clubs. The record labels came courting. With characteristic moxie, Raitt told executives, “If you give me complete artistic control and never tell me what to wear or what to sing and who to work with or how often to make the records, I will work really hard.”
She was all of 20.
Warner Brothers conceded to every wish, and Raitt quit Radcliffe for good. She found a way to meld music and activism through a lifetime of touring, a calling. “Making people happy every night, including us, is a thrill,” she says.
A lengthy autumn afternoon hanging with Raitt is exactly as you might expect, like meeting a dear friend. Her distinctive face — an aquiline nose, eyes canopied by a high crease — is framed by a fountain of Titian hair fronted by a signature white streak that first appeared in her 30s. She’s bought a vivid bouquet to brighten the room, answers every question without hesitation, and leaves with a powerful hug. There are candid and lively peregrinations about politics (progressive), old friends (kept), new causes (myriad), industry gossip (delicious), sobriety (since age 37), exercise (yoga, biking and hiking so she can keep touring), children (never wanted them, asks about yours), men (marriage to actor Michael O’Keefe, 1991-1999, mum about her love life, invoking the Sippie Wallace mantra, “women be wise, keep your mouth shut, don’t advertise your man”), the influence of parents (profound) and thrift (“I’m Quaker and Scottish so I’m quite frugal”).
“Bonnie epitomized and personified what I saw for myself,” says Sheryl Crow, who credits Raitt as “the template for showing me that a woman can front a band playing the guitar. She shares her ideas. She’s an excellent mentor.” Best advice? “Keep your nose in the work, and don’t ever listen to anybody.” Says Raitt, “I’m really lucky that I’m the boss. I was just too much of a feminist to be pushed around.”
Her late father, musical theater luminary John Raitt (“Carousel,” “Oklahoma,” “The Pajama Game”), remains her Polaris. “My dad didn’t care if he had another Broadway show. He just wanted to take his music to the people,” she says. “He knew that he would last a long time if every show was opening night. I grew up with that ethos and knew how much fun he had.” He toured until his mid-80s, until his body would no longer let him. (He died of complications from pneumonia in 2005 at the age of 88.)
That kind of staying power is Raitt’s mission, too. In 1978, she attended the first Kennedy Center Honors, where her father performed as part of the tribute to composer Richard Rodgers. Almost a half-century later, it’s her turn.
Early on, in addition to being a red-haired Radcliffe dropout steeped in the blues, Raitt was aware that she was peddling something novel. “If I was only doing blues, we wouldn’t be sitting here. The mix of what I do is what makes it stand out,” she says. “If I didn’t play guitar the way I did, I would never have gotten a record deal.” The late B.B. King, one of Raitt’s many collaborators, dubbed her “the best damn slide player working.” She’s a master of fingerpicking, too. The goal, she has said, is to make her guitar sound “the way bacon smells,” inspiring a trove of younger female performers. When she landed a record deal in 1969, Raitt told Billboard, “I was inexpensive, nonthreatening and interesting.”
She was more than that. “When Bonnie sings, she commands this truth. She demands it of herself and of the song and the music,” says Jackson Browne, who toured with Raitt during the early 1970s, two bands sardined into one bus. She was a self-identified tomboy and often the only woman on board.
Blues and jazz legends have perennially aged with grace, becoming more venerated with time. No one could have guessed when she entered the youth-obsessed rock industry — just after Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin and Jim Morrison died at age 27 — that its performers could enjoy a lasting audience, and that their fans might stay true to their musical heroes for the long haul, achieving a profound bond spanning decades.
She is the one singer who I kind of feel like she’s mine. Thousands of fans feel exactly the same way
Julia Louis-Dreyfus
“She is the one singer who I kind of feel like she’s mine. Thousands of fans feel exactly the same way,” Julia Louis-Dreyfus gushed when Raitt appeared on the actor’s podcast this year. Almost everyone wanted to collaborate with Raitt: Aretha Franklin, blues titans (John Lee Hooker, Ruth Brown, Pops and Mavis Staples), Tony Bennett, Ray Charles, Willie Nelson. “She loves the collaboration, the spark, and knows that’s where all the good juju is,” Crow says.
“We’ve all become really comfortable with our age. Your elder years have completely changed,” Raitt says. “It’s wonderful that Billie Eilish and Olivia Rodrigo and Taylor Swift are fans of mine. I think they’re all fantastic.”
One of her childhood role models was Miss Kitty on television’s “Gunsmoke,” portrayed by Amanda Blake. “She was sassy, had swagger and owned the saloon, so she didn’t have to get married.” A redhead, too. Raitt views herself as a character actress among singers, not a leading lady. “I get to age more gracefully. I don’t have to follow the path where I’m going to do a skin-care commercial,” she says.
There was also durability in primarily being an interpreter of other people’s songs. “I would be totally bored doing only my own point of view. It’s the mix of different points of views and styles that keeps me interested,” Raitt says. She didn’t have to wait for inspiration to strike, an advantage in delivering the next album and mastering new material.
Raitt never tired of the road. Never wanting children made it easier. “It’s like a magical exhalation that happens, the exchange between the audience and us,” says Raitt, who has won 13 Grammys as well as a Lifetime Achievement Award, and was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2000. “Playing live is what drives you. That’s what your purpose is. At the end of the night, I feel like I’ve had my blood changed.” Being at home for too long “is really boring,” she says. “Traveling in a pack on the road is like a moving summer camp.”
Raitt’s parents were Quakers and peace activists. Her mother, Marjorie, was a pianist and her father’s musical director. (They divorced in 1971.) Bonnie was the middle of three children, the only girl, all of them musical. At school, she refused to participate in mandatory bomb threat drills. At age 15, she accompanied her mother to the March on Washington against the Vietnam War. “I’m an activist musician, a woman bandleader and music director. It’s a big deal,” says Raitt.
She buys back her concert tickets to thwart speculators, offering premium seats at higher prices with the proceeds funneled into a dizzying number of causes. In 2022, she dispensed 147 charitable grants totaling more than $300,000 from touring, independent of her benefit performances and personal donations. “I think of my causes as my fifth band member,” she says. “Fairness is the thing that runs through everything I do.”
In her early days, Raitt made good on her promise to the record label, releasing six albums in seven years, interpreting other writers’ songs to the point of ownership: Chris Smither’s “Love Me Like a Man,” Joni Mitchell’s “That Song About the Midway” and John Prine’s “Angel From Montgomery,” the last performed at every concert.
“I couldn’t stand my voice back then. It was high and fruity sounding,” Raitt says. She aged it with late nights of drink to sound more like her heroes, Sippie Wallace and Etta James. “I hammered that baby into submission,” she says.
“It was a great voice learning to expand itself to its potential,” says Taj Mahal. “She’s done the thing that you have to do with your voice, and that is make it a signature. As soon as you hear it, you know who you’re listening to.” The same holds true for her guitar playing.
Raitt developed a devoted fan base on college campuses, smaller venues and progressive FM radio, but not substantial sales. Becoming big wasn’t the dream. “I’ve turned down songs that were clearly hits because I just thought it was too on the nose,” she says.
“Bonnie’s not standing in line waiting to be made the latest flavor,” Browne says. “She’s one of those people that is plugged into the moment, and the truth of the moment.”
In late 1983, the label dumped her, along with Randy Newman, T-Bone Burnett and Arlo Guthrie. Raitt was livid.
The quest was for young artists, pop hits, a hailstorm of synthesizer.
“I wasn’t linking up with what they were looking for,” she says.
Raitt got sober, got in shape and teamed up with musician Don Was, now a vaunted producer. “We weren’t the most attractive or the most commercial package to be offered to a label,” Was says. But they agreed on the path forward.
The only way to get noticed is to go deeper,” Was says. “At that time, no one wanted to hear music about turning 40. ‘Nick of Time’ is totally about turning 40.
“The only way to get noticed is to go deeper,” Was says. “At that time, no one wanted to hear music about turning 40. ‘Nick of Time’ is totally about turning 40.”
Their aim was to acquire emotional intimacy, to make the album sound like “Bonnie was six inches away from you, talking to you in your ear,” Was says. “That called for a whole lot of space, which wasn’t fashionable at the time. The really great, sensitive artists always know when to leave. The emotion is sometimes in the nuance.”
When Raitt recorded her gut-wrenching single “I Can’t Make You Love Me,” written by Mike Reid and Allen Shamblin, which routinely leaves fans in tears, she was newly married to O’Keefe, happy. “She kind of Stanislavskied it. She found some incident in her life to access,” Was says. Steeped in the blues, Raitt was a musical method actor, leaning into the hurt. A studio exec dropped by one of their sessions. Was recalls the executive asking him, “Do you have a tux? Because you better get one. You’re going to the Grammys.”
Forty turned out to be just fine, as did 50 through 75. Lo and behold, her audience grew. “Nick of Time” has now sold more than 5 million copies in the United States and, two years ago, entered the Library of Congress’s National Recording Registry.
Raitt has contributed more original compositions on recent albums. “Just Like That” tells the story of a woman who causes a car accident that kills her son, then meets the transplant victim who received his heart, the latter inspired by a news story. Even after singing the song a few hundred times, Raitt cries recalling its genesis.
“Songs like ‘Just Like That’ don’t come along very often,” Crow says. “It’s a perfect song, and if she never wrote a song before or after it, it wouldn’t matter. It is deep and meaningful, and I feel like it’s who she truly is. A thinker, an intellect. She shows up for the cause.”
“To have your livelihood fall into your lap without desiring it,” Raitt says, “then to be able to use your gift to raise money and more attention than you would have had you become an activist or social worker is incredible.”
This, she did. Hold steady. Maintain artistic autonomy. Don’t let anyone tell you what to do. Work really hard. Bring your music to the fans. Love what you’re doing. Do it as long as you can. Sooner but possibly much later, the accolades will come.
by DAVID BROWNE
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