Bettye LaVette on Aretha, Beyoncé and why she was too ferocious to be successful

http://www.theguardian.com/music/2015/jan/15/bettye-lavette-interview-otis-redding-worthy-album

Version 0 of 1.

Hi, Bettye, how are you?

I’m holdin’ on, baby. I’m in New Jersey at the moment, it’s eight degrees [-13C] here.

Your new album is called Worthy (1). Is the title about how you feel now after years of feeling the opposite?

Yeah, that’s why I didn’t want a picture on the cover and I wanted the word “worthy” to be small. Like it says in the song: “What a thing to claim.” It can be an arrogant thing to claim. But I figured here, in my 52nd year of being broke, I could say it.

Your autobiography (2) is astounding. You had a baby at 14, were divorced by 15 and became in, your own words, “a great groupie but a horrible hooker” hooked on pills and weed while building a career as a singer in Detroit. It also opens with you being dangled from the top of a 20-storey building by a pimp.

[Laughs uproariously] I love it! Actually, they’re working on a screenplay right now; they have licensed the book for a movie. It would be incredible. But, you know, nothing huge ever happens to me.

Who would play you?

Well, Alicia Keys wants to do me – it’s her production company, and she seemed to be very taken with me. We’re assuming she’d be the one. We just don’t know at this point whether [the film] will cover a fixed time period or whether [it will show me as] I grow old.

In the 60s, you toured with James Brown and Ben E King but never managed to record the right song at the right time. In the 70s, you struggled to find your niche despite a minor disco hit. Do you feel like the nearly-woman of soul?

Out of all the stories in my book, the most shocking incident to me is that I wouldn’t be allowed to sing all the time. That I would be so discouraged that I would be talked into anything else [but singing]; that I would be that low and feel that worthless about myself. When you’re young and your career starts at a very young age, you don’t know how to separate yourself from it. So once somebody says, “Bettye’s bad”, you take it completely personally. It took me a long time to accept that I may never be a star. But I have mastered my craft.

I loved the story about Tammi Terrell pulling a gun on you …

It was just in jest. She and I became the best of friends from that night on. She was hysterically funny.

Or the one where you’re snorting coke with Bobby “Blue” Bland.

Ha. Actually, whoever you were with then, that’s what you were doing. When I was writing the book, I couldn’t think of anybody – apart from Joe Simon and Joe Tex – who didn’t take cocaine.

Are you happy to have lived through that time?

No. I would rather have been two shades lighter – not white – in the 20s and 30s. I love the music, the clothes, the furniture, the cars – I love everything about that period. And the fact that everybody was just as lewd and lascivious, but they weren’t as openly obscene.

Throughout your career, you always seemed to miss out on the big breaks. Is it true you considered slitting your wrists for not covering R.E.S.P.E.C.T. before Aretha?

Gosh, I wanted to slit my wrists on several occasions, when I would hear a song that I know would have saved my life [if I’d covered it].

One of the most surprising things in your book is when you say the sight of a man slapping a woman didn’t horrify you, because “context is everything”.

It didn’t horrify Tina Turner, either. I’ve only been in her company a couple of times and she seemed to be one of the sweetest people I ever met in showbusiness. But I do know gaggles of men who were brighter, smarter and nicer [than Ike Turner], who would have left whatever they were doing to be with her. And it wasn’t like we were talking about an uneducated woman in a one-room flat with 50 babies – someone like that can’t go anywhere if the man is beating her up. But Tina could have stepped out at any time and said, “This man is doing this” – and the whole country would have jumped on him. A lot of people were angry with me for saying she could have left – but she could have left. Since that idiot dangled me over the building when I was 17, I would probably hit someone for even discussing hitting me.

Do you mean Tina Turner stayed with Ike because the positives outweighed the negatives?

Well, he taught her everything she knows. He was an extremely talented individual before he met her, and she wasn’t. Some of the big success they had, it was strictly through Ike that they had to get it done. But who knows? If she’d have been by herself, she might have been bigger.

You’re like the female Zelig – you’re even there at the birth of psychedelic funk with George Clinton, dropping acid while he’s wearing a diaper. Fun night?

Well, yeah, as much as I can remember. But he did that several times. They [Funkadelic] were really wild. That was the first and last time I dropped acid. The stuff stays in your system for so many years, it’s only been about 10 years that I haven’t seen any kind of residuals from it: a burst of bright light or everything going stroboscopic for a split second. I don’t understand how anyone could take it on a regular basis, and I wonder where their mind is now.

Your mind, on the other hand, is super-sharp. In the book you recount whole conversations from decades ago.

You have to remember this: since my career wasn’t a success, whenever there was a dinner party or whatever, all I had were these stories. People say, “It’s amazing that you can remember that.” And I say: “Nothing else happened to me!”

Didn’t Otis Redding want to marry you?

Otis and I did suggest it would be a great thing if we got married. He wasn’t married when I met him but he did tell me his girlfriend was pregnant. I don’t know if he wanted to marry me, but he liked me a whole bunch more than I liked him.

That’s quite a claim – Otis, the king of soul!

He wasn’t the king of anything. He was a very young, dumb country guy from Macon, who had a record out. And I was a very young, dumb – thinking I was sophisticated – girl from the north who had a record out. We’re not talking about people of note.

Were you surprised when he became such a huge star?

Of course. But I thought I was really hot stuff back then. He would have to have been the Otis Redding he is today to have turned my head!

Marvin Gaye was the one who got away, wasn’t he (3)?

Yeah. Marvin was so square and so polite before he turned into the Marvin Gaye that got killed. He probably was just coming to smoke a joint and talk, ’cos that’s the kind of guy he was. And I was involved with other people at that time. The other people who were there, like David Ruffin or Eddie Kendricks, they didn’t change; they may have gotten strung out on drugs, but they were the same guys. But Marvin totally, totally changed. If anything, he was bashful.

Now you’re considered one of the soul greats.

And I’m so pleased about that. I’m grateful that I’m so strong and so vital, being dealt with almost as a new person, but I’ve got these credentials so they’re not asking me to prove anything. If I could just make some money – that’s the only thing this business has not given me.

Still, Barbra Streisand enjoyed your Kennedy Center Honors performance.

See, there again: it makes me angry that she had never heard of me. I’ve heard of her – I want her to have heard of me! I can sing good. That whole Kennedy performance was bad for me. Aretha was there, Barbra Streisand was there, Beyoncé was there, and I was saying, “I sing too, y’all!”

Did you go up to Aretha and say: “Why you, not me?”

No, I just went up to her and hugged her. I would have gone up to Beyoncé and said: “Why you, not me?”

Why haven’t you had mass success? Is it, as Ry Cooder said, that “perhaps she was just too ferocious for mass white taste”?

Well, certainly I think that was my problem with Berry Gordy at Motown. I was a ferocious singer and the only people he allowed to be ferocious were David Ruffin and Levi Stubbs. But every record company I went to, none of those fools would sign me. We had Don Was, from Detroit, who they made president of Blue Note, we got Jack White who was carrying all kinds of weight from Detroit. And if these people were musicians from Detroit, they had to come across on me to get wherever they are now. I am the bridge they came across on. And they’re like, “I know her, I love her!” And still nobody would sign me. But I’m not a has-been. I’m an old never-was.

Footnotes

(1) Released next week, featuring covers of songs by Bob Dylan, the Rolling Stones and Paul McCartney, among others.

(2) A Woman Like Me, published in 2012, includes stories such as the time her then-manager was shot and almost killed by the husband of the Motown singer Mary Wells.

(3) She says she actively courted Gaye, but when he showed up at her hotel room one night, she was already with someone else.