<NASHVILLE>

DUSTY SPRINGFIELD
WOMAN of REPUTE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

NASHVILLE

Uncomfortable with the diva status that Reputation's success inevitably brought her in Britain, Dusty longed to record music with which she felt more at home; music that wouldn't make her sound as if she were about to "explode if I changed key one more time." By 1993, Dusty had relocated to Britain; her recording contract with Reputation's label EMI had been dissolved; and she was living a quiet life outside of London with her cat.

Dusty's reclusive existence was interrupted when the head of Columbia Records in Britain offered her a recording contract. She accepted, but insisted that she be allowed to "act my age, to be comfortable in my own skin." Having been listening to music coming from Nashville, Tennessee - in particular the music of K.T. Oslin and Mary Chapin-Carpenter, Dusty discussed with Columbia the possibility of her recording there. They agreed and so to America Dusty once more journeyed.

"All the things that have happened in my life are meant to happen. Having done the Rent-a- Diva bit, and having had some success with the Pet Shop Boys thing, there was no more mileage in it. I'm not a dance act. I felt if I was to do music again I'd have to be where I felt comfortable and was allowed to be less of a diva . . . If all this went terribly wrong, then bugger off, it's no great deal. I dislike the music business because it's about manipulation of people's needs and hopes. Luckily I see past all that. They just don't know that about me. I am the age I am and I've learned a lot. I wouldn't make a bloody record unless I were enthusiastic, because it's a lot of hard work . . ."

"It would have been so easy to go the diva route, but there's no substanse to it and it bores me. I have no real nostalgia for the sixties; for a lot of us who worked so hard throughout that decade, there isn't the same appeal. And music now is so much better . . . The technology, the playing proficiency, the imagination behind it all . . . A pop career today looks like so much more fun . . . [though] I don't envy today's stars for the way they're judged on the whole visual package."

Nashville took Dusty full circle. Before embarking on a solo career in 1963, she had recorded an album in Nashville with The Springfields, and had been invited to stay. "It wasn't the kind of music I wanted to make . . . my instinct was not to stay. I understood I would not be comfortable there because they didn't like women who fought their own case too hard. I was a very combative person and I couldn't have won in there." Dusty however acknowledged that the Nashville of the 1990s was a different place. "A lot of writers, singers and producers have gravitated to Nashville. Nashville's changed; it isn't what it was. It was very limited before, but now all kinds of music come out of Nashville and that suits me fine."

"There are some amazing musicians there [Nashville], many of whom are on this album. And though they're best known for playing country, their skills in the pop and R&B fields are equally well-developed. They really enjoyed themselves on these tracks."

Dusty's Nashville album, A Very Fine Love (1995), was produced by award-winning country music producer Tom Shapiro, and reflects Dusty In Memphis in its overall emphasis on restrait, simplicity and sparseness. Recording of the vocal tracks began in January 1994 and as the sessions wraped up three weeks later, Dusty found herself experiencing chest pains.

Returning to Britain Dusty was shocked to learn that she had developed breast cancer. She underwent radiation treatment at the Royal Marsden Hospital in Sutton for several months resulting in the cancer being diagnosed as in remission.

"We did [the album] in short bursts . . . I was finding it very difficult. The cancer was weakening me, though at that stage I didn't know what was wrong."

"If I had gone on doing drink and drugs, I would've died; albeit probably indirectly, as the result of a car crash or some other accident . . . the messesyou get into, the life-threatening situations you expose yourself to . . . too many people have been lost that way. Yet all that was of my own doing. Before it got to the point where it took over my life, I made a choice to go along that path. But I didn't choose cancer, and boy, does it make you face your own mortality. While all the other stuff is working, you don't get the bigger picture. So with this there was a certain anger involved. I have quite a controlling personality and yet here was something I could not have total control over. I was limited to a determination to fight it and fight it and fight it."

"I shed a few tears at the hospital when it had been confirmed, but then I pulled myself together and took everybody out for what turned into a roaringly funny lunch. Later, when I got home, there was a mundane thing that set me off again. I looked at my cat, Nicholas, lying there asleep, and I thought, who's going to look after you if I die? At that point I broke down. Of course, he just kept on sleeping, not giving a damn, and after a few seconds I thought to myself - so, that's it. He's going to be fine and this thing is not going to kill me. And I never entertained the notion again after that."

"The caring and dedication of these people [the doctors and nurses at the Royal Marsden Hospital] who get piss-all money for helping individuals like me day in, day out is utterly humbling. I thought I was hard done by, being in this situation and having to drive round the M25 for treatment. But one of the nurses treating me travelled in every day from Bedford, worked consistently hard throughout an incredibly long day and then went back to look after her husband and two children. Suddenly realization dawns: 'I've got the easy part. I just turn up at the right time and then go off again. But you . . . And they're with you even after you're back home, slightly dented - quite literally. I know they're there at the end of a phone any time, even though I'd never call unless I were about to slit my throat."

[Being diagnosed with cancer] was a bit of a shock. It's something that always happens to someone else, not you. And it happened so fast. I had just come back home, fallen in a heap, thinking, 'I recorded an album. Whoopee! Great!' And then I found out I was sick and felt like, 'Gee. Somebody hit me in the face. Wait a minute, is this my reward? Poor me.' But the experience has made me grow up . . . I haven't lost any enthusiasm for what I'm doing, though my illness got in the way of my music for a while. I didn't finish treatment until about three months ago. I lost some of my hair - and I do find myself tired. It was a bit dodgy for a time, but I came throught it, and I don't think this thing is going to get me. I'm not going to dwell on the fact that I had cancer. Life is about what's in front of me. I could have died, but I didn't and I won't, dammit."

Dusty's bout with illness delayed the release of A Very Fine Love for a year and a half. When it was finally released on June 20, 1995, the album received mixed reviews. While acknowledging that Dusty is the "perfect" singer for tracks such as "You Are The Storm" and "All I Have To Offer You Is Love",and that she has "all the qualities for a great honky tonk singer", the American Country Music magazine nevertheless notes that "too much of the album is devoted to warmed-over pop-soul served up by Hollywood hacks like Dianne Warren and Will Jennings."

Across the Atlantic, British music critic Sarah Nelson offered a more glowing apprisal of the album: "[Dusty] has made an album far more satisfying than her last pop venture, Reputation (1990). In A Very Fine Love, Springfield plays exactly to her strengths: harnessing an older, knowing, cigarette-grained voice to some powerful lyrics by top songwriters; rejecting synthesisers for class Nashville musicians; and getting personal again." Nelson even relates country star K.T. Oslin's comment to Dusty: "Honey, don't ever start singing country or we'll all have to leave town."

In Britain, despite an extensive promotional campaign launched by Columbia, A Very Fine Love peaked at a disappointing 43 on the national albums chart. A Very Fine Love's performance in Britain appeared to have dampened Columbia's enthusiasm for the album in the States, where no attempt was made to promote it - a decision that remains unduly conservative considering the album's decidedly American sound.

A couple of [the new songs] are what I call heartland music, but they weren't country. I think country audiences are very wise about their music in that they know when someone's dishonest in their singing. They've got to have the right licks, the right turns, the right sound, and my voice doesn't fit. And so it got away from being even remotely country and went where it was going to go, which is a more pop direction."

The songs on A Very Fine Love seek to explore and define authentic, or as stated on one of the tracks, real love. The title track for instance, looks at the transformative power of this type of love:

I never knew how good love could be
All I've ever known was make believe
So many times I've played the fool
Baby, tell I met you
Now everything has fallen in place
You can tell by the smile on my face
For every lonely tear that I've cried
I'm that much satisfied.

Similarly, "Wherever Would I Be?," a duet with Daryl Hall, acknowledges the profound impact that a relationship can have on one's outlook and life:

When the dreams I dream all seem a million miles away
When I'm sure I'll never win
When it's looking like I've lost my faith I just look at you baby
And I've got reason to believe again

Not all the tracks however, celebrate the joys of love. "You Are The Storm" hauntingly relates the experience of a woman's stepping back in order to allow the person she loves to be who they need to be:

I'm haunted by your troubled soul
That rages out of control
I had to let you go
Had to let you go
I tried to love you, I tried to keep you from harm
But I might as well be holding the wind in my arms
Oh, I can't give you shelter
When you are the storm.

The tables are turned on "I Can't Help The Way I Don't Feel," when it is the singer who must be honest to who she is and decline from entering into a relationship, which though potentially pleasurable, would nevertheless be inauthentic:

You will never know how hard I've tried
But I can't change the way I feel inside
It's nothing that you did, or haven't done
Who knows what makes somebody love someone
I wish that's the way that we could be
But love is up to love and not to me.

Dusty's desire to reflect her age and experience was realized through the worldly lyrics of the songs chosen by her to interpret. "Go Easy On Me" sees her portraying a woman who clearly has experienced heart break as a result of surrendering herself to another too fast and too soon, and who accordingly is not afraid to express her self-concern and wariness:

Go easy on me, baby not to rough
If this is right, there's no need to rush
Go easy on me, if you don't mind
'Cause I can't afford to lose another time.

In a similar vein, "All I Have To Offer You Is Love," a gutsy number delivered in a low- down, gravelly voice, expresses a direct-from-the-heart, no apologies assessment of the way things are:

If all you want's a good time baby, there's a party down the street
If you're trying to fight an old flame, well, I can't take the heat
If you're looking for a game to play, well, I wish you luck
'Cause all I have to offer you is love
Oh darling, there's a whole lot of things
I've found I just can't be
But if you're looking for a real love, baby
I've got all that you'll ever need
It might be more than you're after
Or not nearly enough
But all I've got to offer you is love.

In the gospel-tinged opening track, "Roll Away," Dusty sings knowingly of the uncertainties of life. Yet far from being a lament, the song embodies an ode of celebration to life's inherent quality of ultimate mystery:

Every day when I look in the mirror
I try to see where my soul's at now
Happy day - is it farther or nearer?
On the way
Will I find it somehow?
Yesterday's gone
Love lead me on
I won't ask why

Roll away - it's only time and the river
Roll away - to the endless sea
Roll away - it could all change tomorrow
This is life in its glory
And the river runs free
Roll away

The album's closing track, the K.T. Oslin-penned "Where Is A Woman To Go?," is generally ranked by fans and critics alike as the album's standout track - one that sees Dusty personify a woman taking refuge from her woes in a "little ole bar 'cross town". Back-up vocals are provided by K.T. Oslin and Mary Chapin-Carpenter, with the end result being a vivid honky- tonk blues song; an aural presentation of fake cheer disguising uncertainty and despair:

Hey, bartender
Honey, give me change for a ten dollar bill
Bring it back as a stack of quarters, if you will
'Cause I'm gonna play every song on your jukebox that makes me cry
Gonna find out how many tears ten dollars can buy.

"GO EASY ON ME . . . was the hardest song to sing on the album, because it requires that breathy stuff. That is a voice tearer-upper of the first magnitude. And [in] WHERE IS A WOMAN TO GO? there's a line: 'Sometimes your friends ain't always available/To pick you up when you're feeling down.' And I went 'Ooooh! That's so true.' There are times when you think, Let's be alone and get through it."

"WHERE IS A WOMAN TO GO? was almost the last thing I recorded. After that, I came back and found out about the cancer. This song, even though it's got nothing to do with that, it has that [alone and getting through it theme]. It's very much a grown-up woman's song, and it means a lot to me."

Dusty Rides Again by Rob Hoerburger, The New York Times Magazine, October 29, 1995.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

THE VOICE