Not Fade Away: A Backstage Pass to 20 Years of Rock & Roll

by Ben Fong-Torres

  She cheers lustily at Prine, and after an encore he announces, "Bonnie will be out in a minute" and she screams from the wings: "No I won't, eat it!"

  Onstage, after her opening number ("I Thought I Was a Child"), she casually mentions Alice Doesn't Day, drawing a few cheers here in "Stand by Your Man" land, and she dedicates the next song, Seibel's `Any Day Woman," to the cause.

  Bonnie Raitt is a romantic socialist, a politician of the heart. She sings, often using other writers' words, about the relationship between man and woman-about why the man has always come first; about why that shouldn't be so automatic-or why it shouldn't be, period. Like many politicians, she is smart-but erratic. She has causes, all leaning toward activism, but they are clouded with contradictions.

  She sings put-'em-up, we-take-no-shit songs to men, but often pines and cries in her songs. She plays brassy blues and bottleneck guitar and never fails to get the audience whooping with her first run down an electric neck, but her audiences seem to love her even more for her interpretations of contemporary ballads.

  Bonnie has worked hard to earn what is still, after four years, an.. .intimate. . .but growing constituency-and a corresponding power. She wants to use whatever muscle she's developed to change some of the ways of the business and to funnel money back to community causes and political groups. She frequently does benefits for women's groups and is organizing concerts for Tom Hayden's California senatorial campaign.

  She doesn't want the trappings and the traps of success, doesn't want friends wondering whether she's "gone Hollywood," and doesn't want limousines and jets (her fall tour's logo depicts a turkey on wheels). But, for political reasons, she needs the muscle that usually comes only with pop-top success. And so she is working on the road and in the studios just about every day.

  Bonnie is a natural, earthy woman (though not quite the "lusty, rowdy blues mama" she's been called). Offstage, she has no prima-donna pretensions, hesitates, even, before asking a roadie to fetch her a drink when she's strapped down with a guitar and working on a number. Onstage in Arlington, Texas, she shook off countdown nervousness-walking toward the stage, she turned to a friend and remarked: "This is like the last mile and you're the warden"-and served up some stream-of-consciousness humor. Freebo, her faithful bassist through the years, posited himself behind a tuba for "Give It Up" as Bonnie announced: "Now here's Freebo on oral martial arts," teasing him: `A little more practice on that and you'll be ready for me!" After singing "Sugar Mama" from the new album, she dutifully plugged it: "We had a lot of fun making it. I always have a lot of fun making it." Then the voice from her omnipresent third eye: "Oh, she's so witty-that darn Bon!"

  But if she's having an off day, it'll show onstage that night. Before her concert in Arlington, she had told a visiting periodista, "Sometimes I feel like a whore. No matter how depressed I am, I go out and I'm okay. It's kinda like being... phony." Onstage, she revealed herself before a half-empty house of 1.500, emphasizing the downer ballads and closing with a song she had dropped after last year's tour, "Love Has No Pride." Heading back to the hotel, she said she brushed aside requests for blues numbers because "they hadn't earned going back to the blues. It was like one or two people trying to show other people they knew about the blues." At 3 A.M., with the bars long closed and a need still burning to somehow... party, she and manager Dick Waterman and the band climbed into the bus, parked on the Ramada Inn lot. And it took a listen to a tape of her Santa Monica concert, a couple weeks before, to bring her up. There had been a hometown warmth in the air, Bonnie and her band responded to it, and they were joined for the encore by a parade of friends led by Joni Mitchell, Jackson Browne, and J. D. Souther. On the bus, Bonnie slammed the table in delight, poked at Waterman's arm. "This was like the best show of my life," she said.

  Bonnie Raitt is aware of her occasional verbal excesses, but she admitted, "I don't think before I talk. In terms of true freedom, you should just be able to be what you are. And that just naturally comes out of my mouth. Me and my brothers' friends were always a group-I was the only girl and I probably started to make off-color jokes as a way to get in with the guys. And ever since I can remember, it's been me and a bunch of guys.

  "I really like cracking up with my friends and foolin' around with the guys," she said. "It's a release of tension. But I have to learn how to curb it because, if I am gonna be a model, I should be a model."

  Bonnie was born twenty-six years ago-she celebrated her birthday November 8th-in Burbank, California, daughter of John and Marge Raitt. You, or perhaps your folks, remember John as the star of Carousel, Oklahoma! and Pajama Game on Broadway, and on "original cast" albums. The two met at the University of Redlands in California: Marge was the leading lady in an alumni production of The Vagabond King, John was the returning hero.

  Bonnie spent most of her first years in New York, where her father was doing Pajama Game. The family moved back to Los Angeles in 19 5 7 when Raitt starred in the movie of that play. "He wasn't around enough to be a real father," said Bonnie. "He'd come home off the road and bring us presents, so naturally as a little girl I'd fall in love with him. My mother got a raw deal that way, because she was strict and had to be both the mother and father. I didn't get along with her at all. She's real strong, and I think there was a natural jealousy."

  John Raitt always sang around the house, and Marge was his accompanist on piano. `And we would go to his shows. There was just lots of music in the house. And all three of the kids-I have two brothers-we all sang. I was singing from the time I was 2 or 3. It wasn't any deliberate, `Okay, I'm going to teach you how to be musical.' There was no force-feeding."

  At age 8, her parents and grandparents chipped in to get her a $25 Stella guitar for Christmas, each party wrapping half of the box. Bonnie's grandfather was "real musical, too," she said. "He's a Methodist missionary and was head of the Prohibition party for twenty years in California. He wrote about six hundred hymns and he used to play Hawaiian slide guitar on his lap and play zither and accordion and a piano." She took piano lessons for five years. Her teacher, she remembered, told her she had "a quick ear."

  "By the time I was 10, I taught myself how to play my grandfather's slide guitar. When I was 11, I got enough money to get one of those red Guild gut-string guitars."

  The only daughter of a famous Broadway leading man had to scrounge for money to buy a guitar? "My parents were Quakers and Scottish," she explained. "They were both raised real poor, and we got a minimal allowance. We had to earn if we wanted anything. I'd iron clothes if I needed to make extra money."

  John Raitt was an isolationist from the Hollywood showbiz circuit. Off the road, he liked to stay at their home atop Mulholland Drive in Coldwater Canyon, working in the garden and fixing up the house. His antistyle deeply affected Bonnie.

  "I wasn't allowed to hang out, because I was always the first kid on the bus or the last kid off. It took me an hour to get to school every day. And by the time I'd get home it'd be four, and for me to get back down the hill to play with my friends, I'd have to get somebody to drive me, and my parents weren't into it. That's how I got into just sitting in my room playing a guitar."

  At age 8, in 1958, the year of Perez Prado and Domenico Modugno, of "Sugartime" and "Witch Doctor," Bonnie was tuned into R&B radio and listening to her older brother's records of "Rockin Robin" and "Yakety Yak." "I didn't have one of those things for Frankie Avalon," she said. "I liked my dad. I thought he was hot looking because he had that same kind of hairstyle."

  In the summers, while classmates hit the beach and learned to surf, Bonnie went to a camp in the Adirondacks while John Raitt did Dinah Shore's summer-replacement TV show. Later, he would do the summer stock circuit. Altogether, Bonnie was packed off to camp every year from age 8 to 15.

  The camp was run by friends of her parents, fellow Quakers, and the counselors were college students from Swarthmore, Antioch, and Reed, many of them into the peace movement, Joan Baez and Pete Seeger. Bonnie found herself it
ching to be older than she was.

  "I took to wearing a peace symbol around my neck when I was 11, around 1961. It represented my whole belief! And I used to wear olive green tights and black turtlenecks and I had a pair of earrings-my mother wouldn't let me pierce my ears, but I had a pair of hoop earrings. I'd grow my hair real long so I looked like a beatnik."

  But Bonnie wasn't just playing make-believe. "Being a Quaker, Ban the Bomb was a reality since I was 6. I mean, at Quaker meetings at Christmas time we'd decorate trees with ornaments and dollar bills. We were getting money for Algerian refugees. And the whole thing was to learn about Christmas in other countries. I was real aware of the Third World getting ripped off, that kind of thing."

  "To do what my dad did, you had to live in a house and drive a Lincoln. I always was very embarrassed when we came to Quaker meetings in a nice car, 'cause my parents both look larger than life. They're both really ridiculously good looking. I wanted my parents to drive a VW and my mother to not set her hair. But she had to. I remember my mother explaining to me that it was very important, especially since my dad wasn't exactly on the top rung as a major star, to drive a car that made it look like you still were."

  When Bonnie talks about the post Broadway career of John Raitt, her tone assumes a loving defensiveness, a loyal daughter's bitterness. And she learned from his mistakes.

  "I could never let anybody control my life like he did." After Raitt's Broadway run ended in 1956, he traveled with stock companies. "He wasn't washed up; he made more money off Broadway." said Bonnie, "but it seemed like the circuit was somehow not as glamorous as Broadway." Raitt now takes his own troupe around the country, performing Kiss Me Kate, Camelot and the like.

  "He does what I do," said Bonnie, "travels around in buses and does shows. In fact, just the other week we passed each other on a highway and waved to each other. Then, when we got to our hotel, I found out he'd stayed there, and he sent me a message: `Don't eat the fried chicken!'

  "I thought he was great," said Bonnie, "and I watched him not get a show. He didn't really make mistakes. He just seemed to be at the mercy of his agents. He had to wait for someone to write a show and then be in the show and maybe one reviewer would kill it. And it made me mad that he wasn't on Broadway and all these punk imitators, Robert Goulet and all....

  John Raitt is currently back on Broadway with a revue called A Musical Jubilee. He saw Bonnie perform at Avery Fisher Hall, then attended a party for her at Sardi's.

  "She watched me struggle for years," he said. "I'd like to think that she learned something about dignity and integrity. "

  In her early teens, Bonnie's music got folky. "I was like Miss Protest," she said, "the fat Joan Baez for sure." At 15, she and a friend named Daphne played at a Troubadour hoot night. "We sang combination Scottish and Israeli songs. We were like a female Joe and Eddie. I thought Joe and Eddie were hot stuff."

  Bonnie went to University High School in Hollywood, also home away from home for a few years to Randy Newman and the kids of numerous stars. Bonnie went steady with one of Jerry Lewis' sons. A semester before she planned to go to Poughkeepsie, New York, to attend a progressive, Quaker-run high school there, she ran for the position of mascot for the Uni Warriors.

  "It was a complete joke," she said since she'd never attended a football game and didn't plan to. "I remember telling the guy I was running against, `Listen, it's in the bag. I'm leaving but don't tell anybody. I just want to see if I can win.'

  `Also", she said, "You had to run for a student body office to have that on your college application to get into a good college." She won, went to Poughkeepsie, then chose Radcliffe from among seven universities that accepted her.

  "Harvard had a ratio of guys to girls that was four to one.. .they didn't have a phys. ed. requirement, and they didn't make you come in at night." But she was "serious" academically; she was planning to go into African studies. "I didn't want to work in America, she said. "I thought it was kind of hopeless. I didn't like growing up wealthy and watching all this waste-too many cars, too many pretty people, too many manicured lawns. I lived in the privileged section of Los Angeles. It's just ironic about having been raised to understand what's wrong with this country, to want to work with civil rights and yet live in this fantasy world where there's barely any black people so barely any discrimination."

  Bonnie was idealistic, she said, until age 16. "Then I just said, 'Forget it.' The country was falling apart in the sixties, it was just a lot of hedonistic rock music. It went from the beautiful days of Selma and SNCC, when white and black people were working together in the South...then Watts blew up and all of a sudden black power came about, and there wasn't anything pleasant about being a white person working in America."

  At Radcliffe, she played her music at "folk orgies" during exam periods, at hoots and in her own dorm room where she answered her fellow dormies' requests for songs like "Suzanne." Still, she considered herself a blues freak, and in her freshman year she met white blues freak Number One, Dick Waterman.

  Dick is a beady-eyed man with a shock of black hair. He is 40 and looks like a 28year-old man who looks 40-ish. He speaks haltingly in a high voice, is smarter than he sounds and spends most of his office hours on Bonnie. Dick had been in Cambridge since 1962, working as a photojournalist. He covered the 1963 Newport Folk Festival for the National Observer, and in 1964 rediscovered Son House, who was interested in working again but had no manager. Since then, he has managed Fred ("I Do Not Play No Rock & Roll") McDowell, Skip James, Arthur Crudup, Junior Wells, and Buddy Guy. He not only managed them, but housed them, fed them, and booked them in blues festival packages at colleges around the country.

  Dick, then 33, and Bonnie, 18, met at blues hangouts like the Club 47 in Cambridge and WHRB, the Harvard radio station. "We were just sort of vague friends," said Bonnie. "Then after a while...I think he bled redheads or something."

  But in 1969, blues were giving way, she said, to "all that psychedelic supermarket stuff. So Dick picked up and said, 'Forget Cambridge,' and went to Philadelphia."

  Bonnie herself took the summer of '68 off to go to Europe with two girlfriends, and in England she discovered the work of Sippie Wallace, a woman who would later be called her "mentor." Sippie Wallace was 70 and had been making records since the twenties. She wrote such numbers (now identified with Bonnie) as "You Got to Know How" and "Women Be Wise." Bonnie heard an album Sippie cut in 1966 while on a European tour with Junior Wells, Roosevelt Sykes, and Little Brother Montgomery, among others.

  "I'd never heard a voice like that in my entire life," said Bonnie. "I liked Bessie Smith but I wasn't a big fan of classic blues, and Sippie was somehow much more raw."

  Sippie, she said, is not so much her mentor as "my sassy grandmother. She probably, in her day, was as sassy as some of the things I get into. There is just no gap.

  `And did I tell you she thought I was Karen Carpenter, She wrote Dick a letter: `One day I hope to be able to have Bonnie play drums behind me!"' Bonnie, sitting on her hotel bed, bounced with laughter.

  After her return from Europe in 1968, Bonnie continued to see Waterman and other friends in Philadelphia. "It only cost $8 student standby to fly to Philly," she said, "so twice a month I'd fly down there. That's when I started to hang out. I would skip school a lot, we would take off to lots of little blues festivals Dick would book. And I think I went to almost every gig."

  Occasionally Bonnie would pick up her guitar and work out arrangements on blues tunes. "But I mean I had this whole other life. Music at that point had become a hobby. I was mostly a college student. I still was really working at having to study. And it was real hard to try to do my homework with Fred McDowell sitting ten feet away from me."

  "She played well when I met her," said Dick Waterman in Houston. "She had a real genuine love for the music. There were many people trying to be like Michael Bloomfield or Johnny Hammond," he said, but Bonnie had the advantage of accessthrough him-to all the blues performers. Sh
e took advantage, he said, to ask them about tunings and songs. She would return favors later by hiring artists as opening acts at her concerts. The musicians' initial response to her, Dick said, was "sort of amusement. They thought her interest in the blues was some kind of freakish quirk. But she's proud that Buddy and Muddy and Junior and Wolf now regard her as a genuine peer, not `She plays good for a white person or a girl,' but, `She plays good."'

  After the show in Austin, Bonnie fretted in her dressing room about the people waiting to see her in an adjoining room. "I'm trying to figure out a way to sneak to the bus," she said. "I really don't want to be rude, but I used to always talk till 4 A.M. and spend an hour telling someone why I couldn't talk to them. I want to get over to Antone's and pay my...respects."

  She was able to move by the thirty visitors in a breeze and rode through the rain to Antone's, a blues club where Muddy Waters was appearing. She snaked through the crowd, up the stairs behind the stage and found Muddy on a sofa with a local ragtime pianist, Robert Shaw. "I just came to say hello," she began, and Muddy stormed back: "Don't you never say goodbye!"

  Muddy, looking robust-he broke his hip in an auto accident a couple of years ago-told Bonnie: `Austin is the next empire for the blues!" They talked about blues, about depression and sad songs. Muddy lost his wife last year and moved out of Chicago. Bonnie expressed condolences and added a brighter note. "I used to be sad," she said, "but now I'm happy."

  Still upstairs, she peeked through some drapes to watch Muddy turn the club into a dance floor and get collared into a conversation by Doug Sahm, Austin's one-man, one-speed (high) Chamber of Commerce. He helped her miss her cue to join Muddy Waters onstage. She would grumble about it for hours.