WOMAN of REPUTE
CHAPTER THREE
DIFFICULT
CHAPTER THREE
DIFFICULT
This drive for perfection was evident from the beginning of Dusty's career: "Up yours, they're staying!" was her response to an irate theatre-manager's demand that a set of amplifiers be dispensed with. "It was hilarious," remembers Mike Hurst of the Springfields, "Dusty always spoke her mind."
". . . I was asking musicians to play sounds they'd never heard before. For instance, Motown hadn't released any records in Britain but I'd heard them on tour in the States. I wanted to use those influences in a country where they were still playing stand-up bass and the only black music they knew about was jazz. So, I would scowl a lot. They knew what I wanted but the last person they were going to take it from was a beehived bird."
"I was . . . wanting to cop Phil Spector's sounds and I knew that I could. I wanted to be THE CRYSTALS and Darlene Love and knew that there was going to be a space for that in this country because it hadn't hit here and I definitely knew that that wall of sound thing could be adapted for England and I was the one to do it . . ."
"The magic of my situation with Johnny Franz [Dusty's recording manager at Phillips] was that he allowed me the freedom to follow my enthusiasm. He'd sit in the control room while I'd go out and scowl at the musicians. It was very difficult for them because they'd never heard this stuff before. I'm asking somebody with a stand-up bass to play Motown basslines, and it was a shock. The ones who thought I was a cow I didn't work with again. The ones who wanted to learn with me, they had the greatest time. Johnnie had played piano for Anne Shelton, and
perfect pitch. Bless his heart, he'd sit in there and read Popular Mechanics. But he had good ears - he'd suddenly look up from Popular Mechanics and go, 'E flat!'"
"I never took the producer's credit for two reasons. For one, he [Johnny Franz] deserved it and I was grateful. And then there was the calculating part of me that thought it looked too slick for me to produce and sing. Because women didn't do that. And there remains in the British audience, though less so, that attitude of 'Don't get too slick on us. Don't be too smart or we won't love you'. And I wanted to be loved."
"Men have been good to me. But I shouldn't feel they've been good to me. They should have just bloody well listened. But in those days it was quite something to listen to a woman who had a musical mind. You sang the song. You sang it fast and cheaply. And they might take you out for a meal. I worked with some bastards, and some nice guys who saw that I knew what I was doing. A few of them went away and said what a cow I was, having made a great deal of money off me. And those are the people I don't want in my life."
"Marble Arch [recording studio] was hard because there were only four tracks and so the internal balance on any track . . . you were stuck with. You'd end up with some maniac putting a bass on the same track as the strings and by then, you know . . . and all I did was hang over . . . the control board and turn the reverb knob up so that the drums sounded as though the household cavalry had just gone past and any mistakes were buried . . . that gave it bigness. When in doubt, turn the echo knob up!"
"Phillips was an extremely dead studio and to this day I can't stand it. It sounded as though someone had turned down the treble on everything and it was essential to get an edge on things. I couldn't get an edge. I don't have an 'edgy' voice and, then, didn't know about EQ-ing. The whole thing was like carpet and sound baffles and things I can't stand. There was no ambience and it was like singing in a padded cell and . . . I'd land up feeling like I was IN a padded cell. I had to get out of there!"
". . . Probably [to] the ladies loo at Phillips at two or three in the morning . . . because the sound in the corridor was right. And no one was doing that and so I was viewed with a mixture of fear and . . . there's a word for it . . . Behind my back they were probably stabbing me furiously and I'm not being paranoid because I know it's the truth . . . Then you know, they used to play track to speakers. The mike was dead on the back so you had to have them really low. Well, I have to have them on the threshold of pain, the headphones on the threshold of pain, for me even to utter a note. That's where I get my courage from - sheer decibel level . . . So I was always working within tremendous restrictive conditions and just dying to bust out of it by anyway I could and the more hits I had the more indulgent they became . . . to that point where I DID end up in the ladies' loo because that's where it was live . . . The end of the corridor was CLOSE MY EYES AND COUNT TO TEN.";
"I've had very few fights with artists. I've had a few with club managers over, say, an out-of-tune piano. That ignorance, and lack of concern for the patrons of the club and the act would make me angry. I've had a few right old punch-ups. But the run-ins I've had with artists were always with groups, the pack instinct. They didn't like the fact that I'd had a bit more applause, and they would be disparaging. Together they had the courage but if one of them passed me in the corridor he'd look down, embarrassed."
As well as her battles in the studio, Dusty had to combat exaggerated media accounts of her partying exploits - and especially the habit she had of throwing the odd food item: "If a head waiter who was obsequious to me while really abusing some common waiter who was trying to do his best, then I felt this great need to make a stink and hurl something at the head waiter. It was usually just a vol-au-vent, but it inevitably missed and hit someone else which set everyone off. By the time the headline reached Australia, it would be this vast cake I had thrown, when actually it was quite a delicate hors d'oeuvres. I thought it was funny, though not everyone else did. What I liked was the chaos it caused; the way things came out of people who were really quite prim . . ."
"They were the all-time food-fight parties. My brother always started it. THE SEEKERS' manager would always be there and she'd be wearing a low, black dress - and I knew my brother wouldn't be able to resist it. Something would just go hurtling across the room. A slice of something, cold meat or something and it would hit her and that was just at the point of the V in the back. That was the point for me to start and it was surprising the number of people who liked it who you thought would never like it and the people you thought WOULD like it [who] left. I always believe if you give people enough food and enough drink and mix them all up, it will all work and if they don't like it they can go home. I remember MARTHA AND THE VANDELLAS cowering behind the couch because there was just everything flying in the air and then once they got used to it they sort of came out swinging with these huge long French loaves. God! Poached eggs - tennis racquets and poached eggs were good! How many people were in that room at any one time? Seventy five? Yes! Poor Kim Weston, she caught a load of sauerkraut or something. She came in and she just made this great entrance - like 'Hi, honey!' and went sliding across, practically out into Baker Street, off the top floor. Gene Pitney got hit with a bag of flour. He wasn't too keen. He had his best suit on . . . there were people in the bath, people's clothes were shoved down the loo. I mean it was real students' stuff but it was 1963-4. It was wonderful. I do remember lobbing - or was it my brother - anyway, one or other of the O'Briens lobbed a sardine right across the room to one of the SHANGRI LAS and she had a very deep - how do you say it - decolletage, and it went straight down. I think . . . No, that was the cue for the second party. Something like that had to be achieved before all hell could let loose. They were great parties. . . There got less and less time to be that crazy."
RELATED ARTICLE:
"Dusty Always Knew What She Wanted" Says Johnny Franz, Her Recording Manager by Alan Smith, August 1966.
