ALBUM: Jackie DeShannon, ‘All the Love: The Lost Atlantic Recordings’
One of pop’s great mysteries is why Jackie DeShannon isn’t a bigger star. She’s blessed with the warmest voice in pop, rich with a Kentucky twang and a touch of soulfulness that keeps her eternal optimism just this side of perky. She’s proven herself a distinctive songwriting talent (even if her “Bette Davis Eyes,” “Come and Stay With Me,” and “When You Walk In the Room” ended up as other people’s hits), but also has impeccable taste in covers, infusing herself fully into the material without ever overdoing it. She adapted effortlessly to the rapidly evolving pop styles of rock ‘n’ roll’s first two decades, starting out as a country/rockabilly singer in the mid-’50s, transitioning to a girl-groupish sound in the early ’60s, contributing to the birth of folk rock, opening for the Beatles’ first US tour, writing songs with Randy Newman and a pre-Led Zeppelin Jimmy Page, and carving out her own pristine but welcoming blend of folk-pop, country rock, and blue-eyed soul. Sure, she managed a couple of major hits — 1965’s “What the World Needs Now is Love,” written by Burt Bacharach and Hal David, and 1969’s self-penned “Put a Little Love in Your Heart” — but she spent most of her late ’60s/early ’70s golden era on the fringes of the charts: too eclectic for the mainstream pop audience, but too earnestly pop for her Laurel Canyon peers.
By 1972, freshly signed with Atlantic Records, DeShannon released her milestone album Jackie, produced by the Atlantic dream team of Jerry Wexler, Arif Mardin, and Tom Dowd, who were also responsible for Dusty Springfield’s Dusty in Memphis three years earlier. Jackie attempted to recapture that album’s rootsy magic, even sending DeShannon to Tennessee to record. The album yielded the minor hit “Vanilla O’Lay,” but its commercial fortunes, as with Springfield’s album before it, failed to reflect its artistic quality.
The following year, DeShannon reunited with Dowd at the legendary Sound City Studios in California, for what should have been her second album for Atlantic. Despite recording 14 tracks together, however, just one saw the light of day, and then only as a B-side. Real Gone Music’s new compilation All the Love: The Lost Atlantic Recordings brings together the whole set for the first time with a thoughtfully sequenced track listing and liner notes by The Second Disc’s Joe Marchese, including a new interview with DeShannon herself. As Real Gone’s recent release slate has proven, Atlantic in the early ’70s had a knack for recording ace material and inexplicably shelving it. While All the Love doesn’t quite reveal a lost classic, as Real Gone’s editions of Dusty Springfield’s Faithful and Bettye LaVette’s Child of the Seventies have done, it’s still a valuable listen for fans of the underrated singer-songwriter working at the tail-end of a hot streak.
On these sessions, Dowd toned down some of Jackie’s more elaborate orchestration in favor of a looser, rootsier sound. The emphatic use of electronic organ recalls Bob Dylan’s mid-’60s recordings, but the warm acoustic guitars, upright piano, and accents of Memphis-like horns give the recordings an inviting, down-home feel. DeShannon co-wrote four of the tracks with Jorge Calderón, later known for his collaborations with Warren Zevon. Among these is “Speak Out to Me,” the sole song from the session that Atlantic opted to release. It starts out with aimless, vaguely political verses (“Washington news/Washington blues”) before exploding into a transcendent, heart-wrenching chorus.
“Grand Canyon Blues,” another DeShannon-Calderon co-write, goes one better than “Speak Out to Me” by managing to sustain that chorus’s poignancy over the course of the whole song. Best of all, however, is “Hydra,” an ode to the namesake Greek isle that departs from the rest of the sessions’ sound in favor of a briskly strummed acoustic guitar, hand percussion, and prominent use of flute. The song vividly evokes moonlit Mediterranean nights warmed-up on ouzo, without relying on any kitschy “ethnic” trappings.
The remaining 10 tracks recorded with Dowd comprise interpretations of other songwriters, including the definitive versions of such oft-recorded songs of the era as Barbara Keith’s fiery gospel-folk “Free the People” and Alan O’Day’s sultry “Easy Evil.” If her take on Mentor Williams’ “Drift Away” doesn’t quite join the pantheon, it’s only trumped by Dobie Gray’s version, recorded almost simultaneously. Another Williams tune, “Good Old Days,” returns DeShannon to her country roots, featuring bluegrass picking playing off a soulful horn section. “When I’m Gone” adds a dose of gospel into the mixture, which ramps up into a full-on pastiche for “If You Like My Music”; the latter cheekily subs out the traditional gospel plea for old-time religion in favor of a tribute to “that old-time music.”
The driving rock of “Your Old Lady’s Leaving” shakes up the track listing, proving DeShannon can turn in a sarcastic kiss-off while still sounding completely adorable. A gentler highlight is her take on Christine McVie’s “Spare Me a Little of Your Love,” which, despite DeShannon’s trepidations in the liner notes, does justice to the subtle beauty of Fleetwood Mac’s original. The most moving cover, however, is her interpretation of Bob Dylan’s “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right.” DeShannon had originally covered the song for her very first LP, 1963’s Jackie DeShannon, in a style modeled on Dylan’s spare, resentful original. A decade older, DeShannon revisits the song with an air of understated melancholy, the lyrics now sounding less like accusations directed at her partner than explanations for why she has to leave.
In addition to the aborted album sessions with Tom Dowd, All the Love includes four tracks recorded with Van Morrison later in 1973. DeShannon had previously released covers of Morrison’s “And It Stoned Me” and “I Wanna Roo You” and would contribute backing vocals to his Hard Nose the Highway album, including “Warm Love,” the same year. The four collaborations here (Morrison producing, writing, and contributing backing vocals; DeShannon singing lead and co-writing “Santa Fe”) meld his mystic jazz-soul rock with her engaging personality and pop sheen. Atlantic released the bouncy “Sweet Sixteen” from the session as a non-album single (b/w “Speak Out to Me”), but it never charted. Later in the decade, Morrison reworked two of the other tracks, “Flamingos Fly” and “Santa Fe,” for his own albums A Period of Transition and Wavelength, respectively. (All the Love also includes a fifth, unlisted bonus track: a surprisingly groovy jingle DeShannon recorded for Coca-Cola.)
Atlantic’s decision to shelve the bulk of DeShannon’s 1973 recordings with Dowd and Morrison seems all the more confounding when compared with the album the label did chose to release the following year: the lukewarm Your Baby is a Lady. It would be her last for Atlantic; 1975’s New Arrangement, recorded for Columbia Records, would debut a glossier mainstream sound. (It featured the original version of “Bette Davis Eyes” — much lighter and funnier than Kim Carnes’ 1981 blockbuster cover — but no hits for Jackie herself.) DeShannon has recorded only sporadically since, which makes the recordings comprising All the Love all the more precious. While DeShannon herself is always a joy to listen to, the quality of her work depends largely on her collaborators. With Dowd and Morrison, she found two of her very best.
Get your copy of Jackie DeShannon’s All the Love: The Lost Atlantic Recordings from the Real Gone Music online shop!
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George L