ALBUM: Betty LaVette, ‘Child of the Seventies’
The best word to describe Bettye LaVette’s career — besides “talented,” of course — is “persistent.” After scoring a Top 10 R&B hit with “My Man — He’s a Lovin’ Man” as a teenager in 1962, she spent decades overcoming a series of false starts and broken promises, never quite grasping the success that her exquisite voice and sharp interpretive skills deserved. Fortunately, the years of struggle paid off when she finally broke through in the mid-2000s, signing with the rock-oriented label ANTI- for I’ve Got My Own Hell to Raise in 2005. In the wake of her latest release, Worthy, issued this January, it seems fitting to take a look back at her first album — or rather, what should have been her first, had her record company not killed it.
LaVette (then spelling her first name as “Betty”) recorded Child of the Seventies in 1972, but Atlantic Records subsidiary Atco shelved it when the lead single failed to become a hit. She finally released her first album a decade later, 1982’s Tell Me a Lie, for Motown, but it would still take decades before her career got any traction. As the years progressed, Child of the Seventies attained a legendary status in soul circles — largely because no one had actually heard it. Believed for many years to have been lost in a warehouse fire, the recordings from the album were discovered and released as Souvenirs on the French label Art & Soul in 2000, instigating LaVette’s career revival. Child of the Seventies finally received a limited-edition domestic release through Rhino Handmade in 2006. Now, Real Gone Music has reissued the album for wider release, preserving the bonus tracks, album art, and David Nathan’s liner notes from the hard-to-find Rhino version.
Child of the Seventies is a phenomenal album, the product of a woman with a distinctive voice — both literally, in terms of her growling, scathing maelstrom vocals, and in her cross-pollination of rock, funk, R&B balladry, and country soul. The album may have been shelved over commercial concerns (as genre-pushing music often is) or record company politics (perhaps fears that her success would diminish the stars of other Atlantic artists, including Aretha Franklin), but it certainly wasn’t quality control.
Like many Atlantic soul singers, LaVette recorded her album in Alabama at Muscle Shoals Sound Studio with its legendary house band the Swampers, whose organic approach to genre-mixing made them an ideal choice to back the musical shapeshifter. Child of the Seventies opens with a loosely-rolled version of “It Ain’t Easy,” most famously recorded earlier that year by David Bowie in his Ziggy Stardust guise. LaVette’s affinity for rock music has been a running thread throughout her career, and her reinterpretations on this compilation provide some of its highlights. In some cases, she reworks the song into a more straightforward R&B style, whether its transforming John Prine‘s folky, low-key “Souvenirs” into a wrenching soul power ballad, or injecting panic-attack funk into Neil Young’s “Heart of Gold,” rendering it less self-pitying but just as tragic. Sometimes, however, she commits fully to the rock, as on album high point “The Stealer,” where her shredded voice and steely attitude are even harder and heavier than Free’s original version.
LaVette’s rock and roll leanings carry over to her more soul-oriented tracks as well, her spiky vocal stylings gracing the ferocious, triumphant “Ain’t Nothing Gonna Change Me” and the desperate “My Love is Showing.” Yet Child of the Seventies is also a showcase for her versatility. “If I Can’t Be Your Woman” recalls the sort of heart-splitting heavy soul that Aretha made her hallmark, while the easygoing groove of “Fortune Teller” elicits a lighter touch. On “Our Own Love Song,” LaVette irons out her characteristic rasp in favor of a soothing coo. Not coincidentally, the track only really gets convincing when she drops the little girl act and brings it home in the second half. Likewise, her intense vocals and commitment to the material sell even a trifle like “Soul Tambourine”; never has the humble shaker sounded so sexy.
In fact, many of Child’s potentially questionable songs wind up as the album’s best tracks. The message behind aching ballad “Outside Woman” may not be the most female-friendly — in short, you have to do whatever your man wants if you want to keep him — but LaVette’s empathic reading taps into the layers of regret that have broken the narrator. The title “All the Black and White Children” recalls other earnest paeans to racial equality popular in the ‘70s (many of whose intentions were better than their songwriting), but the record itself slides along a silky groove, taking winding melodic turns and a sincere but matter-of-fact tone. And while there’s nothing inherently iffy about LaVette’s throat-shredding, heart-breaking rendition of Joe Simon’s “Your Time to Cry” (here titled “Your Turn to Cry”), nevertheless it was problematic from a commercial standpoint: its failure to perform as an advance single led to Child’s release getting canceled. (Either the record buyers were blind to LaVette’s charms, or someone in Atlantic’s promotional offices was out to lunch.)
This edition of Child of the Seventies features not only its namesake album, but also the single-only sides “Heart of Gold” and the bossa nova-esque “You’ll Wake Up Wiser”; mono versions of the “Your Turn to Cry” b/w “Soul Tambourine” single; and two tracks recorded for Atlantic in late 1973, over a year after the sessions for Child of the Seventies. LaVette is a credited writer on both “Waiting for Tomorrow” and “Livin’ Life on a Shoestring,” and appropriately, both songs reflect the disappointment of her botched album release and thwarted career. (As she huffs on the latter track: “People keep saying this is called paying your dues.”) In keeping with the label’s handling of her album, this pair of tracks also remained sealed in the Atlantic vault.
Child of the Seventies is rounded out with four sides LaVette released through Atlantic a decade earlier: her 1962 R&B hit “My Man — He’s a Lovin’ Man” b/w “Shut Your Mouth,” and its even better (if less commercially successful) follow-up, the slinky “You’ll Never Change” b/w “Here I Am.” Even as an adolescent, LaVette sounds uninterested in conforming to the expected R&B sound; she’s far too gritty and earthy to fit the meek girl-grouper mode. It’s an early sign of the self-determination that would define LaVette’s career since. The teenaged “Betty LaVett” sings with a higher, softer voice than the “Betty LaVette” of the ‘70s (not to mention the “Bettye LaVette” of today), but that hint of growl in her throat makes it clear she’s not the type to give up.
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