THE VOICE: The '80s Chanteuses (3 of 4)

[GO HERE FOR PART I & HERE FOR PART II]

September 9, 1978, Universal Amphitheatre, Los Angeles. To the opening chords of Otis Redding’s “I Can’t Turn You Loose,” Dan Aykroyd is onstage laying down the intro to the Blues Brothers Show Band & Revue: “Well, here it is, folks, the late 1970s going on 1985. So much of the music we hear nowadays is pre-programmed electronic disco; it’s so rare to see master bluesmen practicing their craft…”

Setting aside the spectacle of two wealthy white comedy stars hiring a crack band of music vets to play watered down versions of classic soul music for frat boys and their dates, the question over “authenticity” has been with rock music since its inception. It wasn’t until the Disco Era, when technology and sexually ambiguous, jumpsuit-clad gamines seemed poised to take over the earth, that the word and all its meanings went into overdrive. The late seventies-early eighties war over authenticity was over “traditional” music like guitar-based blues rock and the “new” mechanized world of the Fairlight synthesizer, the Linn LM-1 drum machine, the Vocoder and, later, wacky New Romantic hairstyles on this new phenom called “MTV.” “Disco Sucks”was encoded with stealth arguments involving the “maniliness” of rock versus the “unmanliness” (read: gay, female, black, Latin, etc.) of synthpop and all its offshoots.

Alison Moyet

While Aykroyd made this speech, across the Atlantic in the South Essex burg of Basildon, England, a 16-year-old dropout named Geneviève Alison-Jane Moyet was test-piloting her nascent vocal style in front of various blues, punk, and pub-rock bands. A self-described “Bolshie” (Brit slang for “defiant and uncooperative”) from “an aggressive French peasant family,” the full-figured Moyet was from a council estate -- the English version of public housing -- and had left school at 16. Her prospects rested somewhere between hairdresser and piano tuner (she attended the local “College of Furniture”). By the dawn of the next decade, music fans would know her as “The High Priestess of Electro Pop.”

It would be too easy now to refer to Alison Moyet as “The first Adele” or the “pre-Winehouse” or “Joss Stone’s grandmammy”; certainly, her soulful pipes makes such comparions inevitable. In Yazoo, the electropop duo she formed with ex-Depeche Mode songwriter/keyboardist Vince Clarke after putting an ad in Melody Maker ("Female singer looking for a rootsy blues band”), she would confound the so-called “purists” with her deep, wind-tunnel contralto. (Tellingly, Moyet and Clarke named their band after the venerable U.S. acoustic-blues label Yazoo Records.) In their eighteen-month stint together, Clarke and Moyet hit upon an unbeatable strategy: powerful, earthy vocals mashed with chilly-yet-sensual electronics. Their blueprint would influence bands like Eurythmics (where Annie Lennox’s soul-diva roots would only reveal themselves over time), Animotion, I Am the World Trade Center, Hercules and Love Affair (which was practically a Yazoo tribute band), Frou Frou, Soul II Soul, Massive Attack and La Roux, not to mention the entire genre of Detroit House. (DJ/producer Derrick May used Moyet’s laugh in the pioneering House track "Nude Photo.")

The Nightengale onstage

Although there have been obvious links between Moyet’s voice and the likes of Big Mama Thornton, Bessie Smith, Billie Holliday (whose “That Ole Devil Called Love” Moyet covered) and Etta James, her tastes were more diverse than those obvious comparisons. Moyet listened to Gladys Knight, Janis Joplin, Poly Styrene and pub-rock vet Ian Dury, not to mention the Gallic heroes of her parents like Edih Piaf and Jacques Brel. Her oft remarked-about weight – she titled her first solo album after her self-deprecating nickname “Big Alf” – only added to her earth-motherish glow and gravitas to her vocal style, a husky, inviting yarl that was the warm human center of Clarke’s Jaguar-smooth pulses and minimal thwack-beats. This tension is the reason that nearly 30 years after Yazoo first recorded songs like “Only You,” “Situation,” “Nobody’s Diary” (Clarke’s “favorite ‘Alison’ song”), “Midnight,” “Good Times,” “Don’t Go” and “Walk Away from Love,” they embarked on a critically and artistically successful 2008 reunion tour – where Moyet swigged triumphantly from a bottle “medicinal cognac” onstage while singing songs that had never been performed live. With one foot in the Delta and another on the dance floor, Yaz never sounded old.

After she and Clarke had split in 1983 after two flawless albums, Moyet was primed to become massive in in Britain and (hopefully) in the U.S. She did the former through two successful if very ‘80s (read: overproduced and uneven) solo albums, Alf (1984) and Raindancing (1987). She sold over 25 million records worldwide, scored top ten hits with “All Cried Out,” “Love Resurrection,” “Invisible” (penned for her by Motown songwriter Lamont Dozier) and “Is This Love?” won 3 awards for top British female artist, even appearing before 2 billion people at Live Aid dueting with Paul Young on the Isley Brothers’ “That’s The Way Love Is.” Yet, to this day Moyet declares that “I never ever had the ambition to be a solo singer” and refers to the beginnings of her promising solo career as “a miserable time.”

What happened? Turns out, Yaz was a studio project mainly directed by Clarke, the admittedly brilliant wizard (writer Peter Sharpiro called him “the pied piper of synthpop” for his use of early sampling and owning one of the first Fairlights on the market) that brought Italodisco to English shores by penning most of Depeche Mode’s classic first album Speak & Spell, including the influential tracks “Dreaming of Me,” “Just Can’t Get Enough” and “New Life.” Although both Moyet and Clarke contributed lyrics to Yazoo, Clarke basically created electro-musical beds that merely needed a vocalist to make it work. He got lucky with Moyet (as he has stated many times), but their partnership was unequal from the beginning. “[Vince] was the one dealing with the record company, the publishers, he was the one who had the mates and I was completely reliant on whether he was communicative with me or not,” Moyet told The Quietus in 2011.

This pattern of reliance – odd for a self described “argumentative” and prole-punk but not so once you realize she was only 22 – bled into her first solo record. “[The record company] did that horrible A&R thing that they do, which is pick up a Music Week and see who's got one album that we can put together with a certain producer," she later remembered. "I was too mad to really consider what was happening.” It was this approach that planted veteran knobtwirlers Jolley & Swain (Spandau Ballet, Bananarama) behind the boards for Alf -- and later, current American Idol stalwart Jimmy Iovine for Raindancing – who drowned Moyet’s singular gift in sheets of electrowash.

She spent the ‘90s in inactivity, due to nearly a decade of litigation with her record labels and suffered from debilitating bouts of manic depression and agoraphobia, refusing to sing and donning goth makeup and short hair so as not to be recognized when she did venture out. “This took up a good decade of my life; my best singing years,” she told writer Nix Lowry. "Improvement can only come with work. And I’m aware that I’ve been hindered in my career by depending on other people to do things I could have easily mastered myself, but chose not to." Her personal life was in equal turmoil—she’s had three children by three different relationships—but it managed to upgrade Moyet’s talent for raw torch-confessionals that she first displayed in Yaz; in the midst of her legal mishmash, she managed to regain artistic control for the cult masterpiece Hoodoo, practically a concept album about deceit and broken relationships, exactly twenty years before Adele released 21.

When she finally reemerged in 2001 as Mama Morton in the musical Chicago in London’s West End, it was as a sophisticated (and newly svelte) grand damme who turned her voice to interpretations of classic and diverse material, covering Dusty Springfield’s “I Just Don’t Know What To Do with Myself,” John Lee Hooker’s “Boom Boom,” Kirsty McColl’s “Walking Down Madison,” Harold Arlen’s “The Man That Got Away” (made popular by Judy Garland) and “I Will Wait for You” from the 1964 musical The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. She even toured with French jazz pianist Michel Legrand in 2009 and offered her voice as a narrator for Jazz FM documentaries.

She even had an opportunity to address the ceaseless digs on her weight. “Being fat all my life…I am used to people having their say over me,” she wrote in an August 2004 blog post. “But we live in new times and instead of giggles behind hands, a spiteful byline and the odd shout-out, it is now in your face and unashamed. I feel no more confident or lush than I did as big me...I feel utterly unchanged. I am certainly not flattered that a few more 'would'. It is utterly irrelevant.” She even coped to her ‘80s fashion crimes—with a caveat. “What I did like about the 1980s…was that people developed their own style,” she told a Scottish newspaper in 2009. “We might have looked minging, but at least we were authentic."

Right, Elwood?

THE VOICE: The '80s Chanteuses (2 of 4)

There was a time when the great doo-wop vocal groups of the 50s and 60s were as faceless to music critics as they were to their audiences, partially due to their frequently shifting lineups. But in the 70s and 80s, certain music writers began to sit down with the catalogues of groups like The Coasters and the Dell-Vikings and The Diamonds and discover the names of their distinctive singers, and figure out seriously what made them great singers other than the fact that they weren’t Clyde McPhatter or Ben E. King. It was through this reinvestment in scholarship that we can now appreciate the vocal talents of the likes of Darlene Love, Ronnie Spector, Fred Parris, Earl Carroll, Carl Gardner and Kripp Johnson.

The Beast thinks that now – some thirty years down the line – the same should be done for the first generation of great American synthpop/New Wave female vocalists of the early 1980s, the ones who weren’t named Tina or Madonna, the ones who popped up on MTV in one hit wonder bands and now pop up on the occasional reunion tour or nostalgia cruise. It seems an unfair fate to befall these superb vocal stylists, mostly because the music that accompanied them can sound so terribly dated to us now. So let’s give them their due.

As we were working on Part 1 of this series within a series, we realized how influential Pat Benatar was, something that only recently singers of newer generations started to cop to. (Joan Jett and Teena Marie were always the hipper names to drop.) One of Benatar’s best inheritors was Patty Smyth, who took the tough-cookie persona into New Wave territory when she led the Brooklyn-based power pop band Scandal from 1982 to 1985. Smyth’s lovely voice is the reason this band is even is still on the radio and not a mere rock & roll footnote for having a pre-fame Jon Bon Jovi as a guitarist for about five minutes. Their big claim to fame was 1982's “Goodbye To You,” in which Tom Welsch's punchy rubberband bass line is the only instrument that can match Smyth’s hit-the-road-jack vocals. But we always preferred the more restrained “Love’s Got a Line on You”:

Smyth's bluesy, crystalline wail is like erotic sandpaper, sounding very much influenced by Janis Joplin, Robert Plant and Heart's Ann Wilson. Her voice had a way of breaking in a compelling way, revealing the aches in a defiant pose, deepening lyrics that weren’t very deep to begin with. Unlike other vocalists of her ilk, Smyth didn’t wear her sex on her body but in that voice. Being a first-generation MTV staple, she of course was telegenic, with the oval-shaped face of a pixie but with a biker chick's sense of vulnerable command. She was a nightengale with a big yawp. This is why it becomes painfully obvious watching any of Scandal's videos that Columbia Records had no knowledge of how to market her.

This is why “The Warrior,” still sticks, despite the grim Big Label hypestorm that seemed bent on destroying this band by throwing tons of money and hackneyed concepts at it in hopes that something would stick. For one, it's essentially a rewrite of "Love's Got A Line on You." Second, it was on an album where the band's name had been changed – no doubt by a roomful of conference room suits – to ‘Scandal featuring Patti Smyth’ like she was Nutrasweet. Third, they threw her into what is quite possibly the worst video for a Top 10 song from that decade IN PERPETUITY:

Yet the song, despite all cynical attempts to the contrary, despite fatuous lyrics (“Shootin’ at the walls of heartache...”??) and a half-assed guitar break that kills the song's momentum dead in its tracks, is unforgettable for Smyth’s superb performance. Her defiant, operatic vocals are the only thing in this Reagan Decade hot mess that bring it's "A" game. As everything else fails around her, she still sings like a Warrior -- putting up with all the music industry lameness that money can buy. In microsm, this song is almost an essay on why the record industry became the immobile behemoth we know now.

And her success with Scandal was no fluke. After turning down an offer from Van Halen to replace David Lee Roth, she had a moderately successful solo career and later married crotchety tennis star John McEnroe. They gracefully never starred a reality show together.

 

THE VOICE: The '80s Chanteuses (1 of 4)

["The Voice" is OUR ongoing series on unique & overlooked vocalists of any genre.
Any similarities between it and another network TV series -- including the logo -- is purely hallucinatory.]

While we were watching the final episode of Sam Dunn’s Metal Evolution series, the Beast played a game with the VH1 Classic ad campaign that offers a spate of enigmatic visuals corresponding to famous rock & roll icons (a “pumpkin” being “smashed”; a “flock of" flying "seagulls”; guy with a “radio” for a “head”, etc.). We managed to name all of them, save for a quick two-shot of a blonde-haired woman with a prominent metal bustier. The Beast blurted out “Madonna! Lady Gaga!” but our wife surprised us with “That chick from Missing Persons!”

Dale Frances Consalvi

It couldn’t have been, could it? A few years ago, we picked up a Missing Persons greatest hits CD for $7.99 – and it was the bargain of a lifetime. We remembered lead vocalist Dale Bozzio as the New Wave sex siren who predated both Lady Gaga and Lady Miss Kier with her swap-meet-on-Mars fashion sense (like breasts floating in fishbowl bra cups with live goldfish) that led one one reviewer to describe her as “somewhere between Barbarella and Judy Jetson." She was svelte and angular with day-glo shocks of pink and aqua in her platinum blonde hair – think of a WW II pinup stamped on the side of an alien starfighter.

Of course, we of a certain Gen (X) know the songs: “Words,” “Destination Unknown” (later covered by Smashing Pumpkins), “Walking in L.A.,” “Give,” “Windows,” “Right Now,” “Mental Hopscotch.” (The arty “U.S. Drag” arguably is the tune where her vocals are most Gaga-like.) But why does this band still pop up on the modern rock radio? How have Missing Persons, despite being one of the first image-conscious New Wave bands thrown at the public by a nascent MTV, remained somewhat relevant?

First off, there’s Bozzio’s unmistakable vocals – among her own improbable influences are the hicuppy yelps of Buddy Holly (her trademark falsetto “ah!” sent a million geeks into lap-to-hand overdrive) and the loverlorn croon of Frank Sinatra. (One might also add in Dion and Debbie Harry.) Like her contemporaries -- mainly The Motels’ Martha Davis, The Waitresses' Patty Donahue and Quarterflash’s Rindy Ross -- Bozzio affected a sort of slick toughness. But her voice sounded truly otherwordly -- like a confused pleasure robot that just became self-aware.

Her heliumized chops, it turns out, was a perfect foil for Chuck Wild’s pre-trance synthesizer, which seemed handed down from German motorik music of the mid-1970s and the L.A. noir flourishes of the Doors’ Ray Manzarek. Both Bozzio and Wild kept the rest of the band -- including Dale's hubby and fellow Zappa collaborator Terry Bozzio -- from sounding fully rock & roll. Each seemed like they were trying mimic each other, like a flesh siren and artificial intelligence were meeting for the first time and figuring out how to get their groove on. It was this tension that ensured that a rock and roll singer would have an unwitting influence on the dance music of the next century – just check out all of the "Missing Persons Remix" albums on Spotify. (Dale even went onto the dance floor herself with the Prince-produced “Simon Simon,” which was a minor European hit in 1986.) Her broken-baby-doll vocals wound up influencing future indie divas like Santi “Santigold” White and Gwen Stefani.

And, of course, she was drop-dead gorgeous!

 

THE VOICE: Garland Jeffreys

OK THEN. Let's jump back in from our late summer solstice with both feet...

Garland Jeffreys is a music geek's wet dream. He's had one of those odd and singular careers where he has been present at the edge of a variety of iconic musical scenes. Originally from Brooklyn (more specifically, Sheepshead Bay), Jeffreys attended Syracuse University, where he knew Lou Reed BEFORE Reed was in the Velvet Underground and even later got to play guitar on John Cale's solo debut Vintage Violence. (He also wrote one of that record's best tunes, "Farweather Friend.") In the mid-1960s, Jeffreys was a haunt of the Greenwich Village folk scene that birthed Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Ramblin' Jack Elliott, Odetta and Dave Van Ronk; influenced by that gaggle, he later formed the country-soul combo Grinder's Switch the same year as the Flying Burritos Brothers released The Gilded Palace of Sin. In the late 70s, the half-black, half-Puerto Rican was part of a loose confederation of musicians (Mink De Ville, August Darnell, Hector Lavoe, the rosters of Fania and Salsoul Records) who were broadcasting the ethnic underbelly of New York music that was quietly and inexorably shifting away from the legacies of Tin Pan Alley and the Brill Building. And, at his 1977-1982 peak, he even skirted the edge of Gothamite New Wave and Two-Tone Ska.

When Clarence Clemons died this year, music journalists waxed rhapsodic about the unique and groundbreaking interracial bromance between Clemons and his boss, Bruce Springsteen. But Garland Jeffreys embodied this in one body and one career. His persona was arguably as groundbreaking: onstage he cut the figure of an Afro-Rican toughie, like he always expected to get into it after the show, and his literate songs could be as operatic and cinematic as anything off The Wild, The Innocent & The E Street Shuffle but with a better integration on the legacies of reggae and soul. His voice carried all the grit of a dog day afternoon in '77 Brooklyn, but was undercut with the tiniest amount of vulnerabity -- the vato who secretly sheds a tear on the tenement staircase -- that could only have come from the tradition of corner doo wop and sweat-soaked rocksteady. All told, Jeffreys was the Dion DiMucci for the John Lindsay-Abraham Beame-Ed Koch era.

Jeffreys, now nearing 70, still records and tours -- in fact, he just recently released his 14th record The King of In Between. But he has released at least four legitimate classics that if there were any justice, will soon be reissued in deluxe packages by Rhino or Sundazed with 62-page liner notes by Greil Marcus or Jonathan Lethem: Ghost Writer (1977), One-Eyed Jack (1978), Escape Artist (1980) and the smokin' gunfight that was Rock 'n' Roll Adult (1982), arguably the second greatest live album ever made. There are his now-classic songs: "Wild in the Streets," "35mm Dreams," "Graveyard Rock" "New York Skyline" and the haunting "Ghost Writer" -- not to mention his revelatory covers of "96 Tears," "No Woman No Cry" and "Streets of Philadelphia." Jeffreys stands with George Clinton as one of the godfathers of the "Black Bands CAN Play Rock & Roll" aesthetic later championed by Prince, Living Colour, Ice T's Body Count, Lenny Kravitz and Lil Wayne. And Jeffreys was a bit of an agitateur racial, appearing onstage in minstrel makeup and with a disturbing puppet named Ramon. "Wild in the Streets," with its Springsteenesque title, had dark inspiration coming from a rape and murder of a young girl in the Bronx; it later became an inadvertent influence on the SoCal skatepunk culture, with covers coming from such unlikely inheritors as the Circle Jerks and Hot Water Music.

I guess what we're getting at with all this is that we should start our harrassing of the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame nomination committee now. They have a lot of catching up to do.