some random thoughts lead to a long digression on Darlene Love

Saint Hillary's smack to the knuckles of SecDef Rumsfeld almost passed for entertainment last week, in the end though, it was just another attempt by another Democrat to rationalize her support for this misguided war by attacking the administration she helped give the blank check to for fighting this war. She disgusts me because for her, the grilling of Dick Rumsfeld had not even the slightest of anything to do with the 2600 war dead, had nothing to do with the decimated Iraqi society come completely unglued, had nothing to do even, with the subject nominally at hand, that is the gross incompetence of the Bush Administration in planning and fighting this war; no, this had everything to do with the Saint putting herself on center stage in a position she has never actually held and doesn't believe in, that is the role of somebody actually against this war. It's odd for somebody to desire to be perceived as believing something they actually don't believe, but there you had it, with microphones, last week. In an odd way, watching her was like reading about Mel Gibson's apology. She's talking about management, he's talking about alcohol, and the real issue is why was there a completely unnecessary war? In terms of Mel, there is no real issue, save that Disney was earlier willing to give him gobs of money to produce something about the Holocaust.

Meanwhile, you don't hear Senator Clinton putting pressure on Condoleezza Rice to put any diplomatic pressure on Israel, you don't hear her taking on the oil companies (with profits just below record levels) and you don't hear her talking about what needs to be done in New Orleans, where the drug trade is flourishing, the neighborhoods are being priced out of existence and where thousands and thousands of people still live in trailer cities far from their former homes. Actually, I haven't heard of too many Democratic politicians doing any of these things, though you hear a lot of people wishing they would.

Anyway, my views on the current political climate I find to be pretty pedestrian at the moment, there doesn't seem to be too much to say that's not being better said elsewhere about Lebanon, Iraq, Iran, the environment (I'm for it) and all other subjects political. However, I've been thinking a lot about Darlene Love's voice lately, having just purchased her greatest hits collection, and about how beautiful and overlooked she is.

Listening to her "Strange Love" from the Phil Spector box set, "Back to Mono", I cannot stop thinking about her similarities to Dusty Springfield and about how she should have had her own concerts in Memphis (though supposedly she does have a pretty good concert record). And all that would have happened, if she had been better served by her producer, her manager, anybody, and she would not have ended up acting in soaps, which really isn't a lamentable fate. Spector, though, never really seemed to know what to do with her and nobody else figured it out either, her voice is so strong that it almost even overpowers his wall of sound, you hear him employing all the tricks he can as producer to make the voice part of his own idea of the song, but he fails: the voice breaks free from the strings, the choruses, the upwelling of staging that goes into declaring undying and unsatisfying love and hints at the famous tears in things of Lucretius. Her voice is beyond Ronnie Spector's even, way beyond, but to whom should she have gone to in the early 1960s besides Phil Spector? Sue Records is too sparse, the arrangements on their sides would have in effect led to her singing a capella, and anyway, that's an East Coast label and she was from Los Angeles. Stax's sound was to earthy, wouldn't provide, I don't think, the right context for her voice, in a sense there's too much sex in Stax, too much earth. Motown might have been a nice fit, except Barry Gordy already had his Diana Ross and I don't think he could even understand that here is a voice that could be something even more than that, not to undersell "Mountain High, River Deep" or "Love Child", but "Strange Love", in two and a half minutes, is proof enough that Darlene Love was made for greater things than even these songs. Besides, Motown, as great as it was, was a bit middle of the road, I don't think it hurt enough for her voice. You never really believe, except in "Up the Ladder to the Roof", that any of the Supremes is really all that put out by love (though in "Mountain High, River Deep"...)

But Phil Spector was married to an idea of pop music in which his ideas of the song had to be central. The theme was all and the theme was that there was this place just of west of reality where love would finally prevail, where things were pure and all the drama of this world was in the conflict between what we are faced with and what we are going to make when we can finally fall into each other's arms. Like Bresson in film, his little dramas were tightly controlled and the singers and the actors in these productions were entirely interchangeable as far as Spector and Bresson were concerned. But where Bresson stripped his actors of all emotion, and where Bresson broke down the settings so that they were little more than stages with tables and ceilings in order to make the story everything, Spector, in his attempt to do the same thing, gave the singer a central role, put emphasis on the voice but then dressed it up in the strings, the choruses and the words of eternal adolescent longing so that again, the idea, the story became everything, but unlike with Bresson's sparseness, this was achieved with the consistancy of Spector's lushness. I think this effect, of making the story all, really backfired when he tried to work with the Beatles who were also a little bit beyond the adolescent longings of 1961 by the time Phil got to them, but I mean, the essence of the Beatles from where we are, seems to be in their individualness, there individual cults of personality, something almost anathema to a Phil Spector song. How many people can really tell the difference between the Chrystals and the Shirelles? But it's pretty easy with Paul, John, George and Ringo.

But even Spector seemed to understand that Darlene Love was different, didn't really fit into the way that he made records. And a long time later he tried to record with her again, trying to reconnect to some sense she had given his songs even beyond what he had imagined and never really been able to pin down anywhere else, and though she had been ill-served by him way back when, she agreed to show up once again to his studio after her new producers had sold out her contract back to Spector. But it never did work, one last great song, "Lord, if You're a Woman", and she never looked back.

I don't know why this story bothers me so much, why I keep thinking about it.