Bettye LaVette, Kay Meek Centre, Tuesday, May 17 at 8 p.m. Tickets: $55 / $48 / $25. For more information go to kaymeekcentre.com.
She starts to sing and all the colour runs out of the world, like the Wizard of Oz in reverse.
When Bettye LaVette really hits her groove, when she’s singing with all the guts she took from Detroit to the world, everything is ageless black and white with that voice rising out of a pillar of smoke in the dark. It may not have the heft of Etta James or the brilliance of Aretha Franklin, but there’s something in her crackling voice that speaks to chromium will and to deep regrets in the cold part of the stomach.
Sounding like dry moss in a campfire or the leather binding of a bible opening winters after it was closed, that crackle is Lavette’s trademark.
She grew up in Motor City, but to hear Lavette tell it, she was born in the footlights.
“The first time I walked on stage in my life at 16 I had a record in the charts. I don’t know what’s before that,” she says. “This really is my existence, this is all I know.”
Her new album is called Worthy, and despite a Rolling Stones cover that seems like a misguided attempt to recapture younger days as an icon of England’s northern soul scene, there’s nary a miss.
Most of the arrangements are sparse and clear, letting you hear each drumbeat and the subtle squeak of fingertips on guitar strings.
“That was the magic of Joe Henry,” LaVette says, crediting her songwriter and producer. “He’s the only one who speaks jagga-jagga-jagga and chuka-chuka-chuka . . . He understands me when I say those kinds of things.”
Maybe the best song on the disc is called “Stop.”
She won’t, in case you were wondering.
“You might take the black off a crow, but you can’t tell me to go,” she sings on the track. Her defiance turns seductive as she falls into a whisper at the end of the spare, jazz-inspired groove.
Asked if she was ever tempted to walk away from the music business, Lavette laughs.
“Oh, yes! Every time sugar turned to shit, and that happened several times in my career. Every time it would fall apart I would quit – in my head. And then they’d call up and say, ‘Come and do a puppet show,’ or whatever, and I’d say, ‘Hey, I’m back in it.’”
After 55 years, LaVette – who once likened herself to Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard – is arguably bigger than ever.
She sang a duet with Jon Bon Jovi to mark U.S. President Barack Obama’s inauguration and performed “Love Reign O’er Me” at a Kennedy Centre tribute to The Who.
Asked about her setlist, LaVette turns touchy, as though suspicious of the neophytes who ignored the first 45 years of her career.
“You are asking the most ridiculous questions,” she says. “I’ve got 55 years’ worth of recording. My setlist has to change depending upon whether I’m with a group who have known me 55 years; or a group of people who have just known me since “Love Reign O’er Me,” like you, apparently have.”
(For the record, I was thinking of her 1965 hit: “Let Me Down Easy.”)
Speaking from a crowded and incredibly noisy Los Angeles airport, LaVette is mostly gregarious and forthcoming, peppering her answers with endearments of “baby” and “sugar.”
When discussing Worthy, which features Bob Dylan and Beatles covers and brims with stories of wounds that won’t heal and desire that doesn’t ebb, the singer is humble.
“I don’t know anything about music, ‘cause I’m not a music enthusiast,” she says. “Right now my entire life is wrapped up in this political race.”
Despite spending much of her life on the road, LaVette is considering a change of address if Hilary Clinton doesn’t find her way to the White House.
“I’m seriously thinking about leaving the country if Donald Trump is elected,” she says, describing the real estate mogul turned Republican presidential candidate as a “big, pompous, cashmere overcoat-wearing a__hole.”
Prior to a performance, Lavette typically waits backstage, stretching her body and voice to prepare.
Asked if she sings differently these days, she laughs.
“Well I do almost everything differently now, baby, I’m 70.”
With a new album and half a century of songs to draw from, different never sounded so good.
