LIVE: Bettye LaVette at City Winery, NYC (10/16/15)
As the audience at City Winery waited for Bettye LaVette to take the stage last Friday night, sipping glasses of the house pinot noir and Sauvignon blanc, a stereo system piped in classics from the golden era of R&B: “It’s a Shame,” “My Girl,” “I Was Made to Love Her,” “Everyday People.” But while LaVette is typically classified as a soul singer, she spent the ’60s and ’70s largely struggling to be heard, with only a handful of R&B chart hits to her name. Instead, the music that finally won her widespread acclaim just over a decade ago — making her, as she joked during the show, “an overnight success that only took 54 years” — consists largely of interpretations of classic rock and alt-country songs. A performer without a genre, LaVette boasts an intensely soulful voice, two Grammy nominations for Best Contemporary Blues Album, and a knack for rocking harder than nearly any musician her age and most of the younger ones, too.
[Check out our review of Bettye LaVette’s Child of the Seventies reissue!]
As her four-piece band vamped, the 69-year-old LaVette sashayed onto the stage, dressed in a black halter-top jumpsuit with a sequined bodice. She not only cut a striking figure, with her toned arms, flawless skin, and sharp cropped hairstyle, but her voice bears the rare distinction of having grown stronger and richer with age. Over the course of the night, she’d flip on a dime between pensive half-whispers and anguished cries, slide across octaves on a wave of melisma, and never once falter or hit a bum note.
Then again, LaVette is a true professional, never having had the luxury of resting on her laurels. Unlike the majority of her contemporaries, LaVette’s audience is coming to see her almost entirely based on her most recent records, starting with 2003’s turning point A Woman Like Me and 2005’s popular breakthrough I’ve Got My Own Hell to Raise, which set the rock-driven template that’s reinvigorated her career. The lack of nostalgia makes LaVette feel thoroughly modern, a sense furthered by the timeless arrangements of her songs, which neither try to ape retro sounds nor hop on current trends.
LaVette and her band opened the set with the first three tracks from her most recent album, 2015’s Worthy: a slinky take on Bob Dylan’s relatively obscure “Unbelievable”; “When I Was a Young Girl,” a reinterpretation of a song by ’60s British blues rockers Savoy Brown; and “Bless Us All” by country singer-songwriter Mickey Newbury, whose “What Condition My Condition Was In” LaVette had recorded 40 years earlier. (When LaVette claimed that Newbury preferred her “Condition” over the hit version by Kenny Rogers & the First Edition, she’s so down-to-earth that it’s almost self-deprecating.) After that trilogy, she revisited some of her earlier favorites, from Lucinda Williams’ “Joy,” to Gnarls Barkley’s “Crazy,” to Traffic’s “No Time to Live,” the last of which she dedicated to her husband in the audience, whom she credits with suggesting much of her material.
LaVette didn’t just reinterpret other people’s songs, however. She transformed her 1962 single “My Man – He’s a Loving Man,” a Top 10 R&B record and still her biggest hit, into a loose, bluesy vehicle for a shaggy-dog story of why, unlike so many of her friends and neighbors in her native Detroit, she never got to perform on American Bandstand. LaVette reigned over her audience, bringing them to whoops and cheers during “My Man,” then singing the very next song, a confessional reworking of Elton John’s “Talking Old Soldiers,” to a room so quiet that a wine glass wouldn’t dare to clink.
After returning to Worthy for another couple of tracks — the new power ballad “Step Away,” and a sassy take on the Rolling Stones’ “Complicated,” performed while strutting across the stage (“just so Mick don’t think he’s the only 70-year-old who can move”) — LaVette launched the final phase of her set, filled with her most meaningful songs. The first, “Love Reign O’er Me,” is probably the performance most associated with her, thanks to her tribute to the Who at the 2008 Kennedy Center Honors. It only took the first two words of the song for the audience to start cheering; even so, LaVette’s powerful voice and elastic phrasing effortlessly overcame the crowd noise. Afterwards, she returned to the album that changed her life, A Woman Like Me, for Renee Geyer’s “Close as I’ll Get to Heaven,” which LaVette described as “still the tune that most exemplifies how I feel now in my heart and in my mind.” If the uniformly strong night could be said to have a high point, this was it: LaVette pouring all of her life experience into the performance without a shred of self-pity or miserabilism.
LaVette followed with an equally powerful interpretation of Fiona Apple’s “Sleep to Dream,” a line from which gave I’ve Got My Own Hell to Raise its title. During the coda, the members of her band left the stage one by one, leaving LaVette for one final song a capella: Sinéad O’Connor’s “I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got,” which the singer sang as if it were her life’s manifesto. After LaVette finished, she silently retreated into the wings, where a man stood holding a robe for her. She wrapped herself in it, then disappeared. There was no encore — but what could possibly follow that?
Lavette’s fame may have been a long time coming, but her years out of the spotlight granted her plenty of time to hone her craft. She frames her voice with evocative gestures and facial expressions, but just as she doesn’t oversing, she doesn’t overact, either. Her stage presence is classy but a little tough, unpretentious but with a natural air of command. The City Winery proved to be an ideal venue for her: intimate enough where the audience could catch every nuance of her performance, and infused with the spirit of something that takes years to reach its peak.
