WOMAN of REPUTE
CHAPTER EIGHT
WILDERNESS
YEARS
CHAPTER EIGHT
WILDERNESS
YEARS
"I have been extremely hurt by people saying things about me. I have a certain pride in myself as a woman and it upsets my femininity. And because I don't float round from premiere to premiere, I've been criticized. They say you're either a prostitute or a lesbian, so if you're neither where are you?
You can't be in the middle, in people's minds. I've done nothing wrong and I refuse to invent a relationship to appease them."
"A lot of people say I'm bent and I've heard it so many times that I've almost learned to accept it . . . I couldn't stand to be thought as a big butch lady. But I know that I'm as perfectly capable of being swayed by a girl as a boy. More and more people feel that way and I don't know why I shouldn't."
Musically, Dusty found herself pushed by record companies towards a "middle-of-the-road" style, while she preferred to pursue the more soulful sounds of either Memphis or Philadelphia. The occasional single flirted with chart success, but her albums increasingly reflected confused musical direction and accordingly were limited in their appeal.
"A lot of work in America had been romanticized by American management. After all, they had all managed the best people. I should have followed my intuition though - my insides told me that it was wrong. They were pushing me towards nightclubs, the equivalent of what I was trying to get away from in England. I did intermittent albums [but] there was no continuity to anything."
"I did a lot of television but most of it was playing the Blue Room at the Roosevelt in New Orleans and the 'something' room at the Fairmount in San Francisco, the Persian Room at the Plaza and I had it all written and it was all quite slick and I suddenly realized I didn't like it very much but I was making a good living and that's what people did. That's what the outlets were for people. That's what singers did in the States at that time."
In 1973 Dusty relocated to Los Angeles, signed with ABC-Dunhill Records and teamed with songwriters/producers Dennis Lambert and Brian Potter to record her eighth studio album, Cameo.
"For as long as I can remember, I've been in love with the idea of California. It came first from the Hollywood musicals I saw as a child and later through friends in the music business. I was determined to go and, once there, determined to be as Californian as possible. To adjust to that way of life, I did all the things that Beverly Hills women do. You take care of your make-up, you go out to lunch, you drink too much, you experiment with drugs, you shop, you make appointments, you develop a social circle. I would spend ages shopping for those enormously complicated recipes and cooking them very successfully and getting very fat. And I really hated it. It became so incredibly boring after a while. The fact is that I'm just not that kind of person. It was an attempt to fit in and it was so . . . yuk, so superficial. I played the game . . ."
"I thought that in order to put down roots, I had to buy a house. So I bought one on the [San Fernando] valley side of Laurel Canyon. It had a fantastic view, a big pool, all the gadgets. It was sort of nouveau riche. The trouble was that I was not very nouvelle and not very riche. I staggered around that house for a while trying to convince myself that I really belonged. But every time I looked at the burnt-up hillside, I felt terribly alien."
The recording of Cameo was plagued with difficulties. "Dusty was a tough critic and was very hard on herself," recalled Dennis Lambert in 2001. "She would give us a great performance and we'd think it was really close, but we'd play it back and she would turn around and throw her lyric sheet across the room and be close to tears. It was difficult to understand. She didn't think of herself as being as important as she was."
Despite good reviews, the album was a commercial disappointment, perhaps in part because of the poor selection of tracks chosen for single release. While songs that showcased the album's overall contemporary and up-beat sound such as "I Just Wanna Be There," "Breaking Up A Happy Home" and "Who Could Be Loving You Other Than Me" were retained as album tracks, the ballad "Who Gets Your Love" and the overwrought "Learn To Say Goodbye" were released as inevitable flop singles.
The choice of songs for release as singles could be what impelled Dusty to later lament her "loss of creative control". Elaborating years later in a Rolling Stone interview, Dusty recalled: "They didn't even ask me what key I wanted to sing in. By that time I felt I'd lost control over my career. I felt totally alien in Los Angeles, I wasn't proud of the sounds coming from my throat, I didn't think I could tell what the good songs were anymore".
Recording of Dusty's second album with ABC/Dunhill began in the summer of 1974. Originally to be called Elements, the title was changed to Longing just prior to the entire project being abandoned--due to personal problems Dusty was experiencing at the time. Had the album been completed, says Paul Howes, author of The Complete Dusty Springfield and editor of The Dusty Springfield Bulletin, it would have been a highlight in her recording career: "It has an intimacy only hinted at on other recordings."
Critic Jim Pierson notes that "recording sessions for [Longing] began in early July [1974] at [producer Brook] Arthur's 914 Studios, about an hour north of New York City. It was a heady period with Arthur also producing Janis Ian's acclaimed Between The Lines album and Bruce Springsteen recording at 914 as well, where he could be seen watching and admiring Dusty at work. Arthur decided to emphasize deeply personal material, on the grounds that these songs would best show off Dusty's richly vulnerable timbre. Singer-songwriters were experiencing a heyday, and Arthur chose from among the very best of the genre in his attempt to give Dusty a contemporary sound. Arthur recalls, 'Recording Dusty, with her grainy vocal quality and her expressionistic body language, was like viewing a magnificent black-and-white photograph'."
For many, the closing track "Beautiful Soul" is the album's highlight. As Pierson observes, "The emotionally-charged Margaret Adam composition explores a progressive premise for 1974--love between two women. Dusty handles the delicate material with her typical sensitivity and a trace of sadness."
Could it be you ask too much, lovable lady?
From a world that's out of touch, beautiful woman
So you're hammering at a door that will not open
And your beautiful soul is weeping
Better learn the way it goes
Oh, better share the pain that shows
You wanna transcend it in order to end it
But your loneliness grows
Ah, ha, do you hate yourself, lovable lady?
Can I be of help, beautiful woman?
Your silence is a wall between the two of us
And my beautiful soul is weeping
Paul Howes notes that "Beautiful Soul" is "a declaration appropriate to the period in Dusty's life when the recording was made." He goes on to say that "the song is a statement by a woman to a woman, but Dusty's rendition can also be taken as introspection, the reflections of a lonely and depressed person . . . The recording is sublime, though Dusty's vocal is so pained and private it seems almost instrusive to listen to it." (NOTE: In February, 2001, US-based Hip-O Records released all but one of the Longing tracks plus Dusty's 1973 albun Cameo on a single CD entitled Beautiful Soul: The ABC/Dunhill Collection).
"When I started working here, something happened. My thinking musically was here, only I lost confidence in myself. I lost the ability to voice my opinions. I suddenly started thinking that maybe my views were amateur and empty. After all, I kept telling myself, 'this is Hollywood!' I thought, 'What do I know?' . . . I floundered miserably. That was a low time.
California can be a dangerous place to come to alone. It's a very strange country in many ways . . . I'm a tough lady . . . but my emotional stamina is not terrific. I'm inclined to get panicky. So when things started to go wrong, I got depressed and very lost for a couple of years . . ."
Lack of commercial success coupled with the trappings of Hollywood life worked against Dusty's confidence and self-esteem. During this period alcohol and substance abuse became a major problem, and between 1975 and 1976, she did no recording work, save for some back-up singing for Canadian singer Anne Murray. "Out of sheer disenchantment, I was really anaesthetizing myself by taking too many tranquilizers and drinking too much. I just wanted to stop the noise of frustration in my head. I suppose the term for me would be 'difficult', but it was a very difficult period for me."
"Somewhere - you never know when - I crossed the line from heavy drinking into problem drinking. I was addicted to all sorts of things . . . I'm an addictive personality. A lot of us who went through the sixties went through a training period of being ravers. It was encouraged. The more you fell down stairs and indulged in lunatic behavior, the more people said, 'Oh, she's a right card, isn't she?' And actually it worked for a while . . . I felt I was obsolete with a feeling of uselessness and depression."
"Chemicals, you know, are always good for taking you outside yourself--initially. But finally they bring you down to earth with such a horrible crash that you can barely stand yourself at all. I very nearly went under . . . Ironically, if you think about it at all, they [drugs] were part and parcel of the trappings of success - having too much - not of failure. Thank God I got out in time . . . I never wanted to die. I wanted to go to sleep for a very long time, like Rip van Winkle. I wanted peace and I wanted quiet but I never wanted to do myself in. I suppose all those Catholic whatevers come at you when your mind begins to enter those murky waters. You go to hell, you know, if you kill yourself . . . Anyway, I discovered that I had tremendous survival instinct. I'm a fighter at heart, I suppose . . ."
"I began looking at these women and thinking, Christ . . . What a load of bullshitters. I realized their lives didn't add up to anything, that they were a waste of time . . . I dropped the cooking, I dropped the social life, I dropped the massage and I got back to work, to vocal lessons, to trying to get the pulse of the music scene."
". . . the time since then has been sort of reconstructional--admitting how lost I was. Trying to do something about it. I wish I could tell you I've been painting or tap-dancing or growing potatoes in Idaho. I haven't. I've simply been destroying what was wrong with my life - as a woman, as a performer - and building on the debris. I grew up more last year [1977] than in the whole of the rest of my life put together . . . It's not as if I landed up in the gutter, but there was a time . . . the mental gutter, the emotional gutter, is very uncomfortable."
