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Bonnie Raitt does not want to be a pop star
Rock music’s great survivor tops the charts on her own terms

on August 23, 1991 No comments

It’s four minutes before the taping of The Arsenio Hall Show, and Bonnie Raitt has lost something.

”Where’s my honey?” she asks plaintively, striding down a Hall hall. Following Raitt is her manager, Danny Goldberg, who has his own problems. He’s not sure he wants a reporter hanging around in the nervous minutes before the taping; then, too, another of his clients, Rickie Lee Jones, has shown up suddenly, and he wants to make sure she receives some of his dutiful attention as well. Nonetheless, Goldberg narrows his eyes and tries to concentrate on Raitt’s question.

”Now, Bonnie,” he says with a grim smile, ”by ‘honey,’ do you mean the stuff that soothes your throat, or that wonderful husband of yours?”

Raitt and Goldberg turn a corner in the maze of this Paramount television studio in Hollywood and the question is abruptly answered. ”There he is!” Raitt hoots, nearly bumping into actor, writer, and, yes, a real honey of a husband, Michael O’Keefe, who has been roaming the halls looking for his honey. They kiss, they grin, they look like what they are: newlyweds, married since April.

Everyone retreats to a tiny dressing room, where Goldberg is happy to report that in next week’s Billboard Raitt’s new album, Luck of the Draw, will remain a hit top-10-with-a-bullet success. With the first single from the album, ”Something to Talk About,” moving into the Top 40, Raitt has her second smash in a row — and her amazing comeback continues.

Before Bonnie Raitt released Nick of Time in 1989, she had received strong critical praise and the fervent admiration of a loyal following, yet in 18 years only two of her 11 albums had sold the 500,000 copies needed to make them gold records. Nick of Time changed all that by selling more than 2 million copies and bringing her a remarkable three Grammy awards — Album of the Year and best female vocals in both the rock and pop categories. At a time when many pop icons would rather prance and pose than play music, Raitt has come to stand for something more than just the great songs and progressive attitude that have always been her hallmarks. For the baby-boomer audience that has grown up with her and for the legion of younger fans she’s now attracting, the veteran of folk, blues, rock, hard times, and hard-won triumph transcends stardom: She embodies an emotional and artistic honesty and a survival instinct to be admired. And because of that, ironically, Bonnie Raitt has become a star at last.

She didn’t set out to be a pop star or even, exactly, a pop singer. Despite being the daughter of musical-comedy star John Raitt (Carousel, The Pajama Game), Raitt never embraced mainstream show biz. Given a guitar at the age of 8, she got hooked on folk music and the blues. By the time she was a teenager attending Radcliffe, she was moving up through the late-’60s Boston and Philadelphia folk scenes to establish her distinctive combination of bottleneck-guitar playing and no-bull frankness about romance, heartbreak, and bitterness.

From the start, Raitt was more wittily eclectic than any of her folk or blues heroes — her first two albums, Bonnie Raitt (1971) and Give It Up (1972), included songs from the Marvelettes, Robert Johnson, and Jackson Browne. Working out of Los Angeles, she struggled to achieve the commercial breakthrough that singer-songwriter contemporaries like Browne, Joni Mitchell, and the Eagles were enjoying, but without compromising her adventurous aesthetic. She made great music, but one after another, the albums flopped. The closest she came to a hit was a No. 57 single in 1977 — a cover of Del Shannon’s ”Runaway” that didn’t begin to suggest the depth and passion that her fervent following knew characterized her best work. The modest success of a song so atypical of her style seemed to throw her. ”Why the hell was that a hit?” she still asks. ”It made no sense to me.”

What followed was a series of increasingly uneven releases, each containing a few glowing high points. It wasn’t until Don Was, who produced Nick of Time, that she connected with someone who knew how to extract hits from her while clearing the way for her to make the straightforward, soulful music she’d always wanted.

”It touched me so much that Don was a real fan,” she says of the coleader of the group Was (Not Was), ”that he knew my work and respected it, and wasn’t trying to make me over into something else. I was able to use my past as a bedrock, and build something new on it.”

The out-of-nowhere triumph of Nick of Time has expanded her audience so dramatically that she is both surprised (again) and grateful. ”It’s unbelievable the way people react to me now,” Raitt says, laughing. ”It’s like I’ve become some living proof that there is justice in the world.”

At the Arsenio taping, Raitt and O’Keefe barely react to the good news about Luck‘s continuing commercial success, because her honey has Raitt in stitches doing a masterful impersonation of Martin Short doing a masterful impersonation of Bob Dylan as a rabbi. It’s easy to see why they get along: They’re both fast-talking wiseacres who like to discuss everything except the music biz, and their conversation zips from Zen (O’Keefe is a serious student of the stuff) to Berkeley in the Sixties, a PBS documentary they had loved the night before.

The taping goes well (Arsenio:””What does (winning all those Grammys) mean to you?” Bonnie: ”What it means is I get to smile a lot more”), and Raitt and her touring band perform rousing versions of two new Luck songs, ”Something to Talk About” and ”I Can’t Make You Love Me.” Backstage, the green room is filled with hangers — on and the show’s other guests, including Twin Peaks‘ Lara Flynn Boyle, out to promote her new film, Mobsters. Boyle is wearing a black sequined minidress which three women, any one of whom might be her mother, take turns yanking at, foolishly optimistic about the chances of forcing it to reach midway down her thighs.

”You look fabulous,” says one of the women.

Boyle, staring at the monitor as Raitt performs, murmurs, ”Yeah, well, I wish I looked as good as she sings.”

Raitt is sitting in a dark little grotto of a hotel restaurant off Sunset Boulevard, not far from where she and O’Keefe live, in the Hollywood hills. Relaxed and cheerful, she doesn’t look like a performer who’s just finished a month-long tour of Europe and is about to launch an extended series of American dates. Her pale skin is swirled with a mixture of freckles and wrinkles; she looks at once younger and older than her 41 years.

”I’ve always been very self-conscious about my looks,” she admits, ”and even more so now, when I’m being recognized, more and more people are coming up and talking to me and checking me out up close. I guess I feel that I look older than I feel, and in a way it’ll be a relief to reach an age where I can be all wrinkly because I’m supposed to be all wrinkly.” As a result, she seems genuinely alarmed at the prospect of being on the cover of this magazine. ”Oh, no — you don’t want me on the cover, do you?” she pleads. ”But you need young, beautiful girls to sell magazines! I mean, I’m worried your circulation will drop, and it’s such a nice young magazine!”

Indeed, Raitt’s compulsive modesty makes it difficult to secure new pictures of her — she routinely declines to be photographed — but that is the opposite of classic star vanity. ”You’re not dealing with Cher here,” says manager Goldberg. ”Bonnie is not the kind of person who thinks of herself as a walking media event, who wants to have her every move and expression documented.”

Perhaps looking to steer the subject away from her appearance, Raitt starts talking about Suzanne Pleshette, at a nearby table. ”She’s great — she’s got that rough, sexy voice,” she whispers. ”Anyone who managed to make Bob Newhart seem like an ideal husband — that’s a good actress, right?” Then Peter Boyle (The Dream Team) stops by to say hello. He and Raitt had met at various political rallies but haven’t seen each other in years. ”Hey Pete, you’ll be pleased,” says Raitt. ”I married an Irishman, and one with a great ass, too!” ”It’s an ethnic trait, I believe,” says the Irish Boyle.

After he leaves, Raitt mumbles something about the crazy world of show business, and offers opinions on everything from Roseanne Barr (”Why do people give her such a hard time? She’s a really smart, very up-front feminist. She’s always been nice to me; I barely know her, and she and Tom sent us flowers for our wedding”) to Thelma & Louise: ”Wasn’t it wonderful? I cheered and clapped involuntarily when Susan Sarandon shot that guy who was trying to rape Geena Davis — Michael looked at me like I was from the moon. I’ll bet a movie like Thelma & Louise will change some people’s lives, especially women’s, for the better.”

Raitt’s strong opinions, taken with the steely, unsentimental music on Luck, should allay any fears that her recent good fortune is turning her into a softy. Luck moves beyond the sort of my-baby-broke-my-heart songs that used to dominate Raitt records to grapple with questions of commitment and marriage. The most moving of these is ”One Part Be My Lover,” which she cowrote with O’Keefe.

”People ask me if I’ve lost my edge because of all the good things in my life now,” she says. ”Well, no matter how nice things get, I’m not gonna turn into John Denver and start writing ‘Rocky Mountain High’ — you don’t have to worry about that.”

She grins a little grimly. ”You know why I say that? Because no matter how popular I may get, I just don’t relate to the mainstream. My parents were like that, and it’s the way I felt when I was a kid, when Vietnam War protesters felt that the world was divided into Us against Them. Basically, I still feel that way, I think. The rest of the world is this jingoist, mean mess.”

If her new success has caused Raitt any problems, they have to do with adjusting to the intense examination that pop stardom brings. Soon after expressing these opinions, for example, she starts worrying whether she should be speaking out so forcefully. ”I used to express my opinions virulently — partly because I never believed people were reading what I was saying,” she says. ”But most of the time I feel a desire to be more closed-in since I got more famous. The glare of the spotlight is more powerful than I was expecting, and I can see now where spouting off about people can really hurt them. I started going out with Michael just as I was becoming more well known, and seeing my personal life written about really threw me. My life was never under that kind of scrutiny before.”

Raitt grows more somber, because she knows where this line of chatter is inevitably leading — to that most highly scrutinized aspect of her recent life: her newfound sobriety after many years of heavy drinking and fitful drugging. Her low point came about five years ago, when, having been dropped by her career-long label, Warner Bros., she was without a record contract, romantically bereft, and ”just about broke.”

”I’d go to visit my father, and I think he was really scared, because he saw me collapsing inside myself, right in front of his eyes. I mean, I wasn’t stumbling around, doing a Foster Brooks-drunk thing, but I was bloated and depressed and I wasn’t responsive. I couldn’t think beyond myself, about how miserable I was. It was easier to deal with life if I was loaded for at least half the day.”

In early ’87, Raitt finally entered a substance-abuse program. You can hear in her voice a profound relief mixed with guardedness when she speaks of it. ”You’re not supposed to talk much about these programs — that’s why they’re anonymous. But I needed to get back some self-respect. And it was as if, having taken that first step toward getting sober, I was rewarded. I got signed to Capitol and hooked up with Don Was and we made Nick of Time; then I met Michael and fell in love. Then the Grammys, and…” She takes a sip of cappuccino that’s getting cold. ”I know it sounds like a bad movie, but I’m really glad I decided to stick around and enjoy my life and the people around me.”

The people around Raitt include, most devotedly, her parents, with whom she has remained close throughout everything. They are divorced — her mother, Marjorie Haydock, lives in Connecticut, her father in Los Angeles. ”My dad is 74 and he’s out on the road, touring in Man of La Mancha. He does eight shows a week — it’s unbelievable! When we’re both in L.A., I go over to his house and swim in his pool while he jogs around it — and we sing Christmas carols to each other. Every time we do that, I wish I was videotaping it, because it’s such a crazy scene, but such a sweet one, too.” Father and daughter are considering doing a Broadway show together. ”The Double Raitts,” she laughs, ”wouldn’t that be great? I’ve talked with a Broadway production company and they think there’d be an audience for it. He’d sing some of my songs, I’d sing some of his, and we’d do a few duets.”

For now, though, there is the work of touring. Pushing aside her plate, Raitt lays her head on the table and emits a mock groan. ”Oh, it’s hard work!” Then her head pops up and she smiles. ”Before Nick of Time, I was bored with it, but not anymore, because after all those years of playing the same clubs in the same towns, I’m playing different halls — much bigger ones, with some new people in the audience who aren’t going to just be calling out for songs from my first album 20 years ago.” And, as always, Raitt tries to involve her audience with her political concerns. In a number of cities, as she has for many years, she will raise money for various left-liberal causes, ”especially abortion rights this time, that’s really the crucial issue out there right now.”

For so socially involved a performer, it’s interesting that Raitt avoids sloganeering in her work. ”I can’t write songs about what’s wrong with a country that seems to lack compassion for pain and suffering,” she says. ”I’ve never written one that works as both a statement and a piece of music. Besides, I never really know what I’m going to end up with when I write — it’s kind of haphazard. Marriage is the same thing — I have no idea what I’m doing, and that’s what makes it so exhilarating.”

Dinner is over, and Raitt goes over to compliment the pianist who has been playing discreetly dry versions of pop standards in the hotel bar. She introduces herself, but she needn’t have: ”I swear, I bought Luck of the Draw two days ago!” says the young fellow. As Raitt walks to the door, the pianist calls out, ”I’ll try playing ‘Nick of Time!”’

”Naw,” Raitt says over her shoulder, ”you’ll give yourself a hernia — it’s a real hard song to play on the piano. Stick to Cole Porter — he’s a better songwriter.”

Source: © Copyright Entertainment Weekly

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Singer Bonnie Raitt: “I’m afraid of hits”

on May 21, 1977 No comments

Haagse Post – Bert Jansen

Bonnie Raitt is a new generation blues singer. White and young, but aware of the debt to an old black generation. With her sixth LP Sweet Forgiveness (8 on HP’s Top 10) the breakthrough seems to have finally begun. Bert Jansen spoke to her in Los Angeles for VARA’s Wonderland. About the committed musician in America and the role of a woman in an “all-male” band.

A spacious flat converted into an office. A sink in the corner reminds of that. Bonnie comes in five minutes later with a hair dryer in her hand. Introducing herself and disappears giggling in another room. “I need to do something about my hair. Already not mother’s most beautiful. Can you please wait? “It is something that with her arrival has blown into the room, so un-American. So unusual and on the other hand very reassuring that we have all the time in the world for her. European flux-de-bouche. Maybe it’s also because she brought her sister with husband and two children. “They’re staying with me and I had promised them we would go into town this afternoon.” A somewhat messy family, one of the children has a runny nose. Bonnie gives them ten dollars and they will return an hour later. Above the murmur of the hair dryer she now and then screams something unintelligible into the room. Fifteen minutes later she comes back inside. “How do I look now?” In the same way as in the past my sister used to show a just purchased dress.

The phenomenon Bonnie Raitt, because that’s what she is, is gradually becoming better known in America. For a long time – she was more popular in the Netherlands than in America. A change has been noticeable for a month and a half. Her latest album, Sweet Forgiveness, is gratefully accepted thanks to a sympathetic bow to commerce. And her version of Del Shannon’s Runaway is featured on a lot of playlists of many radio stations. After six years and the same amount of LP’s. Bonnie Raitt’s music is in the blues idiom, occasionally mixed with a well-lived “listening song” in the genre of Jackson Browne. She plays excellent acoustic and electric guitar and controls the bottle-neck technique better than many male colleagues.

Why are you interested in the blues?
“I grew up in Los Angeles, California. During the period when The Beach Boys and surfing were in. The beach scene that was it back then. But I have red hair and never get tanned, so I stayed at home. Apart from that, I hated the American culture of the time: become tanned, white teeth, surfing, big cars. American Graffiti. I listened to the radio a lot, Muddy Waters and soul records. It was not possible then, to love soul music. “I came into contact with people who were involved in the Civil Rights Movement through a summer camp at highschool. One thing led to another: Joan Baez, The Newport Folk Festival. And I wanted to leave the L.A.-scene almost desperately. I went to study in Cambridge, Massachusetts. There were many folk & blues clubs there. Taj Mahal, Paul Butterfield and Kurt Rainclover played there. I hung out in those clubs until late at night and taught myself to play the guitar. And met Dick Waterman, my manager. He also represented interests in Son House, Fred McDowell, Arthur Crudup and Skip James. They are now deceased. But he still books Buddy Guy and Junior Wells, and that’s how I got to know them and often played with them. We are good friends. “
(On this point, the relationship between Waterman – Raitt needs to be explained in more detail. They have lived together for years, seem to have been married, but that cannot be traced. However, it is a fact that Waterman can be seen as the rediscoverer of many long-forgotten blues artists, who had a meager existence as a pump attendant or gardener. He is one of the blues authorities. Owns a large collection of 78rpm records in this field and devotes all his time to one of America’s most important cultural expressions: the blues.)

Did they respect you, all those important and influential rich blues musicians?
“I believe so. They thought it was funny to see an eighteen-year-old girl playing the slide guitar. I mean, I saw them so many times that we were already friends before I started making music professionally. I started with the music because I was fed up with typing. Every night I went to a club and saw people playing there. And I thought: if they earn their money with that, then I can
do it also. “

You’re one of the first Americans who has deliberately started digging into the past of the blues of your country, where people here were already much more involved in Europe. John Mayall, the whole blues boom here. Ten years ago.
“Yes, first of all it is a shame that you don’t have a record shop anywhere in America where you can buy old Chess and Checker records from Howlin’ Wolf. Let alone old Delta blues. Because it has never been commercial in the sense that you supposedly can’t dance to it. While the blues, as Son House told me, actually originated as entertainment, dance music on the plantations and so on. But it developed before the record industry came into being. In 1929 there was a large market for this type of music. The race records. Which made many people famous. But then the depression came and everything collapsed like a house of cards. And after that the blues was forgotten. “After World War II the electric guitars came and the blues was adapted. Chicago blues. Bobby Bland, T-Bone Walker and BB. King. The rhythm & blues was only one step further. Through Arthur Crudup that evolved into soul. I’m talking about the fifties now. And that soul still exists and has been bringing in money for decades. And that seems to be important after all anyway.

*Bonnie Raitt performs live in 1977 in San Francisco, CA* © Richard McCaffrey /Michael Ochs Archive/ Getty Images

Nowadays, the black people here don’t care about the blues. In fact, it reminds them of their past, poverty and the rest. The people on the corner of the street who are my age, twenty seven, just don’t want it. It is the music of their grandparents. And to return to your question: in the sixties you had a generation of middle-class teenagers in Europe, who fought for the blues from a semi-revolutionary point of view and thought that was it. And what happened was that the Rolling Stones and Eric Clapton brought the blues back to America. To the country it once came from. Without them, there would never have been a blues-revival here. There had been no support for it, I mean. Apart from the fact that some freak might graduate with a thesis on black culture that casually the blues would be discussed also.

For me, there are few positive sides to the blues-revival socially. I think it’s very sad that on the one hand people from their rather comfortable lives have been put in the spotlight for little money, while on the other hand people like Janis Joplin and Johnny Winter made $ 50,000 a night from their music. Not that I think they get their bread in a handy way, I also play blues. It is very nice to earn your money with it but then you have to help the people too, from whom it came, who you got it from, I think. But most people who used to like Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee now prefer to see a young white person imitate them, then. . . the real thing. ”

You’re one of those “young whites”. What do you do about it?
“I try to have old traditional artists in the opening acts of my concerts, with which I play together also at the end of the concert. Even if the audience doesn’t want it. I’m just telling them to shut up. It is necessary that they know where it comes from. And I work together with Sippie Wallace (a blues singer who was already emancipated in the 1920s and shows this in her songs and is gratefully interpreted by Bonnie Raitt) on a film that we want to make. I am convinced that it is very important that that generation is captured. Before all of them being dead.
In the past two years about sixteen major blues artists have died: Jimmy Reed, Mance Lipscomb, you name them. It is also unimaginable how the black history is ignored in the schools in this country. Before they value the blues here in America as an American expression of art, the first generation of musicians has long since died. Hence my plan to raise so much money that I can make movies and TV shows with that people before they are no longer there.
“But as it is in a capitalist society: if there is no profit to be made then there is no interest whatsoever. In my point of view the government needs to establish a fund for the blues. . . as National Art. It is one of the most important parts of our history and people just ignore it!”

Money and commerce. The main driving force in America. It is all the more remarkable that you have been able to make five albums without any profit for the company and without a hit anywhere.
“Only on the first album (Bonnie Raitt 1971) they did earn anything”. Because I recorded it on a ordinary recorder with friends in the garage. But I am certainly not a commercial success. I earn just enough to support myself and my band. By playing a lot and everywhere. That’s okay. I could have recorded songs that would have been more commercially acceptable. It’s just what you want: a white Rolls Royce and a tennis court in your backyard, or make the music you believe in and a limited fan base. I know how to fill small halls and my records sell just enough. “I’m afraid of hits. They are one-off, if you don’t come up with the next one soon, then people quickly forget you. Don McLean had one hit and who knows him now? No, then I am more proud of the group of people who buy my LP’s every time, so that we can just break even. “On the other hand, that money is attractive. I could finally start making that movie that I have been talking too long and too passionate about. And I don’t have to perform every other day. “

You are very close friends with Little Feat. I get the impression that this band is very underestimated here in America.
“It is the best pop group in the world. Perhaps in the entire universe. It is the mixture. Every instrumentalist in that band is my favorite on that instrument. If you split me up, Billy Payne would be the best keyboard player for me and Lowell George the best guitar player. They sound right up my alley. Something from Howlin’ Wolf, something like. . . everything actually. It is unique music. “They’re the reason I came back to LA from Boston at the time. I heard a Little Feat record and I said: I don’t know who or what it is, but I’m going there to get it, you see? Nobody likes it here in America, but I assume they will become very famous in due course. But I like that they are so unknown, that makes me part of it, I can hold them here in my hand and say they are mine. It’s with Little Feat just like Jimi Hendrix, he first had to go to England to become famous. America becomes constantly faced with what it unconsciously or perhaps also consciously missed. It’s the irony of the people who never appreciate what they have in their backyard. And on the other hand a compliment for the good taste of the people in Europe. They were the first also by appreciating the blues…”

I think you do survive well as a woman in that harsh male-dominated world of pop music.
“Like Alice in Wonderland. (A shy smile that just isn’t enough for her to hide honest determination.) I love it. Traveling with ten guys. I like to work at night. Performing an hour and a half every evening is very different from sitting behind a desk for eight hours during the day do other people’s work. Except running my own business is not nice. There are more fun things to do than keep a business going, hire musicians, find songs, write arrangements. If you were to ask the first on the street if he or she can sing and play an instrument and you would give them the choice of making money with that or sitting at a desk, getting married and having children, they would choose first. I’m sure about that.”

But still, as a woman you seem very un-American. No glamor, heavy makeup or a psychiatrist within reach. You don’t correspond to the familiar image at all.
“When I was a kid, my parents were sent a catalog of Frederick’s of Hollywood, the famous firm of sexy lingerie, four times a year. The mannequins had the hair – that blonde cotton candy – and the figure of Dolly Parton. Big tits and a wasp waist. When I got older I didn’t understand why I didn’t
become just like them. “As an adult I once bought clothes there and nothing fit. You can’t look like nature has made you, you have to change yourself, make it more attractive. Artificial, plastic.
“Until recently, as a woman you had to look so dressed up to be able to make it a bit in show business. Fortunately, it is finally here that you no longer need to have the voice of Olivia Newton-John and the figure of Mae West to make it. That did result in the sixties. . . I believe that the young people will soon be in charge here. Half of the population of this country is below twenty five. I long for the time when a band of exclusively women no longer needs to perform in sexy clothes and be exploited by the men in the music industry who only see the money. ”

Like The Runaways?
“Yes. But I don’t like commercialization anyway, be it men or women. And the music business is one of the most commercial and rotten industries in this country. It’s like the TV commercial where they tell you what kind of corn flakes to eat. It is the structure of America. Money creates opportunities. And the music business has made clever use of the post-war baby boom for its share. Now everybody wants a piece of the pie, and the kids in the street their records.”

Many pop artists have been campaigning for presidential candidate campaigns last year.
“I did something for Tom Hayden, Jane Fonda’s husband. They acted together against the Vietnam War at the time. He then ran for election to the Senate. I thought that was quite brave, after Vietnam he could have rested on his laurels but he decided to put on a suit and take the whole trip. With Jackson Browne, James Taylor and Maria Muldaur we did benefits for him. Because I consider myself a “radical” and have more confident in him than the Republicans and those who are in power now. But the funny thing is that when you have brought all those people together and the goal has not been achieved, everything falls apart immediately. Especially for me because I was involved in the university riots and had been throwing stones during Vietnam demonstrations and had connections with the Weathermen.
And nowadays. . . . kids are going to the dogs!. I have the impression that the new generation is hanging around and alone but interested in getting high. We are back at the same point as before the sixties. They don’t care anymore, they prefer to watch TV. Apathy. No activity at all. Just like with musicians. They just hang out in the hotel and their only concern is getting stoned. Not that I’m such a good person myself, I also have my weaknesses. I know that I now speak like my parents when they said, “What should become of this generation?” I see fourteen-year-olds going to bed at high school, and stuff. I mean, I would rather go back to when I was young. When a little went a longer way.”

Politics and pop, can go hand in hand? For example, you once had put on a record sleeve “dedicated to the people of North-Vietnam.”
“In my case I would like to give the context of my concerts a political basis. By returning part of the money I earn with it to the community where it came from. But I have never been able to sing “protest songs”. Of the type “let’s hold hands together”. Those terrible songs they sing at meetings. For me, it boils down to basically wanting to do benefit concerts for every organization in need. In principle, in the sense that I should be able to unite myself with it.”

How do you feel about the content of the lyrics you sing?
“I sing most about love and people getting messed up in a room. That’s also political, you know, the relationship between men and women. It is equally important. It is as political as war. And it is the oldest war in existence. I have experience with it, who doesn’t?”

Translated from Dutch. Apologies for any grammatical errors.
HP 20 – May 21, 1977

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Bonnie Raitt – A Talent In Transition
From Blues to Rock

on May 1, 1977 No comments

Cover photo by Neil Zlozower

Classic Interview

By Patricia Brody

BONNIE RAITT was almost a folksinger, part of the plethora of guitar-playing protesters of the Sixties led by Bob Dylan and Joan Baez. Sitting in her girlhood bedroom in a house atop Coldwater Canyon’s peacefully affluent Mulholland Drive, Bonnie, born in Burbank, California, in 1949, was inspired by loneliness to teach herself guitar. “If I’d been able to hang out with other kids, I’d never have gotten into it,” says the daughter of successful Broadway actor John Raitt, best known for his leading roles in musical comedies like Pajama Game, Oklahoma, and Carousel.

The Raitt house—last stop on the school bus route—though somewhat isolated and not particularly conducive to visits with friends, hardly seemed located within earshot of the whiney, mournful tones of a generation of blues guitarists whose techniques and repertoire Bonnie came to adopt. Blues developed far from what Raitt describes as the Los Angeles “blonde-streaked surf scene” whose “political and intellectual vacancy” drove her to a progressive Quaker boarding school in upstate New York. There, feeling more in her element among, as she calls them, “the precocious children of leftist lawyers and actors into modern theater of the absurd and Marxism,” Raitt listened to Pete Seeger records and expressed her own discontent playing Peter, Paul, And Mary and Kingston Trio-type laments on her guitar. “For years,” she recalls, “I wanted desperately to get old enough to be able to go to civil rights demonstrations and peace marches, be a beatnik, grow my hair, and have cheek bones like Joan Baez.”

Encouraged in a musical home where “my mother was my father’s accompanist, and we’d all sit around singing together,” plus five years of piano lessons, Bonnie first turned to guitar, a Stella given to her as a Christmas present by her parents and grandparents, at the age of ten. She enthusiastically pursued her hobby through several summers at camp, in Massachusetts, where her counselors inspired even more longing for contact with the outside world, with their exciting reports of musical events at the nearby Newport jazz and folk festivals.

Then, an album, Blues At Newport ’63 (on Vanguard, S79145) containing tracks by John Lee Hooker, John Hammond, Mississippi John Hurt, as well as several other blues and folk artists fell on Raitt’s fourteen-year-old ears with enough impact to permanently change the direction of her music. “From that point on,” she remembers, “I was split into two parts. One side of me was all Joan Baez, my early idol, or Childe-type ballads, while the other suddenly had to learn whatever the hell it was Mississippi John Hurt was doing on ‘Candy Man’.’’ Being Bonnie Raitt, she learned “Candy Man.”

An acceptance from Radcliffe College in Cambridge, Massachusetts—they didn’t have curfews there—further assured Raitt’s entanglement with the blues. Though she began by majoring in African studies with plans to do a community development, political organizing program, she soon came into contact with a leading figure of what she terms the blues “mafia.” Dick Waterman, manager and promoter for many blues artists and events, seems to have been the catalyst who turned Bonnie’s guitar hobby into a pursuit of somewhat greater intensity. It was at Waterman’s Cambridge apartment that Bonnie met Son House, the first in a long chain of encounters with aging blues giants who were to definitively shape the young woman’s entire career. She did not become a political organizer or a white Odetta (another of her childhood influences). The black woman with whom she is most identified is Sippie Wallace, a blues artist now in her eighties who has been making records since the Twenties, and many of whose songs—”You Got To Know How,” “Mighty Tight Woman”—have become Raitt standards.

Hindered, she says, by a voice more Judy Collins than Memphis Minnie, Raitt has worked continuously for nearly ten years to combine her evocative Delta-style slide guitar with her “white girl’s” vocals to create a memorable sound. Her playing has expanded to include electric explorations on a Gibson ES-175 and a Fender Stratocaster, in close coordination with a five-member band, while her voice has noticeably matured. She’s a long way from the bonier days of just “Freebo [her bassist from the beginning], my little dog Prune, a Matthews amp, and me.” In some ways. Upon the release of her sixth album, Sweet Forgiveness, Raitt does not deny her impatience for the long awaited, frustratingly elusive hit. Yet she maintains a unique hesitancy about making it big. Despite half-hearted forays into the realm of commercial appeal with her last two LPs, Streetlights and Home Plate, she seems to have returned to staunchly guarding her independence. Her most fervently expressed hopes focus on taking the blues into a new form; finding her own sound.

“I’ve been almost making it for a long time,” she says with traces of irony. “My records are never everything to everybody, but I’ve always got another chance to make something new. Once you have a hit, you’ve got to follow it up; that becomes your object or you won’t stay around.” Raitt is apparently not about to disappear from today’s music scene.

* * * *

How did you first learn to play slide?
I just broke off a wine bottle! Well, the style was called bottleneck, so I figured that’s what it was. The only problem was you couldn’t get wine bottles too easily if you didn’t drink, and at boarding school there weren’t a whole lot of wine-drinking orgies.

Were you still playing the Stella?
No, after the Stella I got a red Guild with gut strings. No idea of the model number, but I remember wanting the red one because everyone else had white-topped guitars, and the red one went with my hair. I thought it made me look like an Irish Setter. Later I saved up and bought my first Guild. I forget the number, but I always play an F-50 now. My first National was a copper-colored metal one but it was painted. They used to paint them to look like wood. The one I have now is around a 1929. It has a wooden body which is very unique.

Cambridge, Massachusetts, was a turning point for you. What happened there?
I went there to go to college. I just played guitar as a hobby, but I ran into a lot of blues freaks at the Harvard station, WHRB, and at Club 47 in Harvard Square, a major outlet for musicians like Buddy Guy, Junior Wells, Taj Mahal, and Canned Heat, not to mention John Hurt and Skip James. Strangely enough. I’d rushed to get old enough to catch this great Greenwich Village folk scene I’d heard about, and naturally the year I moved to Cambridge the club closed, and along came The Ultimate Spinach and acid rock. This whole incredible political scene went to pot, literally, but that’s when I met Dick Waterman.

By coincidence?
No, I was already a blues freak when I left California. There was a kind of blues mafia between New York, Philadelphia, and Cambridge—all these esoteric people talking about their blues idols’ eating habits, the obscure 78s they’d find, and Dick was a kind of liaison, but he was unique in his concern for taking care of artists who were still alive rather than trying to revive an era that was dead. Everyone at the Harvard station knew him, and if you wanted to do a blues show, you’d call Dick Waterman. Periodically Son House, Skip James, or Arthur Crudup would come to town. Anyway, one afternoon a friend of mine invited me to this apartment on Franklin Street, and who was there housesitting for Dick Waterman, but Son House. I was just floored. Then I began to meet them all.

All through Waterman?
Dick at the time managed Junior Wells, Buddy Guy, Magic Sam, Otis Rush, Luther Allison, J.B. Hutto, as well as many other traditional bluesmen. The reason it made sense to have so many under one agency was to protect them from the abuse of white blues promoters. Club owners would play one bluesman against the other. They’d say, “Well, we can get Bukka White for $200 less, so why bother with Son House?” Then Son’s manager would have to drop his price in order to get the guy a gig at all. Dick was outraged, and by keeping them all under one agency he could protect their rights. “You’re not going to get any of them to play unless you pay what they deserve,” he’d say. I started traveling around with Dick, driving Son, Skip, or Sleepy John Estes to the blues festivals, and I became real tight with them. With Buddy or Junior Wells, guys in their forties, that was fun, but with the older men friendship was difficult. John Hurt died right before I met Dick, and that was just the beginning of a series of five or six deaths, which was terribly painful for those who knew them. But still, meeting them and knowing them was overwhelming; I can’t describe it.

Of all these legendary figures, who influenced you the most?
That’s impossible to say. One of them had to be Fred McDowell, who stayed with Dick when he was in town. He thought it was really funny, this little eighteen-year-old girl playing guitar, but he was flattered at my interest, and he taught me. Also, I’d say I emulate Muddy Waters’ style.

Did you actually try to imitate him or any of the others?
Not exactly. You can’t help but learn if you sit and play music with somebody. It was like being stung with a guitar style, and I had to play that way, or else it didn’t feel good. It’s not like a singing style where you try to avoid sounding like someone else.

When did you develop confidence in playing ‘their’ style?
During my first gig with Taj Mahal one afternoon. I took out my National and started playing some Fred McDowell stuff, and Taj, who didn’t know me, looked over and said, “hey all right.” He came over, took out his guitar, and we started playing a wordless duet, him playing Willie Brown to my Charley Patton [both Delta blues figures]; you know, just throwing blues licks off each other, not saying anything. Finally he reached out his hand and said, “Hello, my name is Taj Mahal.” [Blues interpreter] John Hammond has been a great help to me. I had a crush on him for years. Being a girl helped. These musicians came in, heard me sounding—or trying to—just like them, and they’d be flattered, and helpful. If I’d been a young guy doing a show just like John Hammond’s, he might have felt a bit threatened. I wasn’t playing as good as them, but they were real tickled that I was into their style.

How did you develop your own style out of the traditional blues?
My style is probably the result of a problem. My voice, actually soprano, is around five keys up from where Robert Johnson or Son House would do a song, say in Spanish open G tuning. I can’t tune the strings up or down to get that open octave;
I have to capo up three or five frets to get the same tuning, which is the only way to make the guitar part sound good. You lose the octaves—with no cutaway you can’t get your hand up there, and you’ve got only around three frets left to play slide. My National has a new, hybrid neck with fourteen frets, and that’s one of the reasons I went to electric, for the longer neck. Just adding my voice to a Fred McDowell guitar part would bring about a unique style, though.

Do you have trouble with your voice?
As my throat doctor says, “You’re trying to sing that Afro style.” I lose my voice often, because I do push it a lot to sing more blues, soul, or R&B. It was hard to do “Walking Blues” (on Bonnie Raitt) for instance, but I was not born with a voice like Mavis Staples or [contemporary English blues singer] Jo Ann Kelly who sounds uncannily like Memphis Minnie, or any ballsy, chesty blueswoman. My voice is neo-Judy Collins.

You don’t really sound like her.
Well, I’ve beaten my voice down over the years by pickling it with alcohol and screaming and yelling, so it’s gotten lower. If I was to sit here and play some blues for you now, and not worry about singing, I’d play what I feel is real good. I’d have liked to play more Fred McDowell and Robert Johnson stuff, but I have kind of this bird voice. As I was learning how to sing in public, I found that putting the tune in my key took away a lot of beautiful positions. My style is not a B.B. King lead guitar solo style, but just kind of half rhythm, usually in the key of E or A drawn from Muddy Waters, Brownie McGhee, John Hammond, Fred McDowell. It limits what I can do. Instead of doing a song in D, like most guitarists who really know their way around the neck, I move the capo around because I don’t want to miss that Muddy Waters-type blues riff. That’s the only way I can get the sound I want.

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