Bonnie took off her second semester sophomore year. "It was getting silly. I really wanted to be with Dick more than I wanted to go to school." In Philadelphia she got a part-time job as a transcriptionist with the Quaker group, the American Friends Service Committee.
As for performing, it took a listen to another singer to inspire her. "It was at the Second Fret in Philadelphia and she was singing stuff that seemed kind of dated. And I said, 'If she can get away with singing those songs, which are basically not very original. . .1 can do the same thing... And I was just sick of typing. I wanted to quit my job and I didn't have any money-I mean, my parents never supported me-so I auditioned." She and Dick knew the owners, which didn't hurt her chances, and she was hired to open for a local band, Sweet Stavin' Chain, for 10 percent of the door. She made $ 54 and was hired back for her own four-night stand.
"I sang 'Built for Comfort, Not for Speed,' `Bluebird,' `That Song about the Midway'...James Taylor songs...God, I did...boy, some Elton John...and `Walking Blues,' `Women Be Wise'...all the songs on my first album."
Bonnie finished her sophomore year and a semester of junior, then found work in Worcester and Boston. She thought she sang "fruity" but, she said, she was playing "badass guitar."
With help from Dick, she got a job opening for John Hammond, one of her first idols. "I liked his neck off his first album cover," she said, craning her own neck to imitate the album shot. "I mean, he was my first Fabian. So when I had first started to play and it was still kind of cute and `Ha ha, Bonnie's playing to make some money,' as a present, Dick got me a gig at the Main Point and said it was with John Hammond. It was for $200 for the four nights, and I was in the middle of my set when he walked in with a leather coat on with the collar up-like with the points sticking up. With his hair all greased back. Holding this guitar. And then he sat and watched. I think I was the closest to...I came for the entire set, in whatever spiritual way you do that."
Bonnie worked her first few jobs by herself. At the Second Fret, she had met members of a local band, the Edison Electric Band, and when they broke up, Raitt hired their bass player. "I was making $300 a night by then, so I could afford it," she said.
"It" is a former champion tuba player from the West Pennsylvania State Marching Band, a football player there "until the mid-sixties when everybody found marijuana and got weird." This particular person proceeded to grow a healthy head of hair, adopt the name "Freebo," and join Bonnie Raitt. For two-and-a-half years, it was just Bonnie, Freebo, and Bonnie's dog, Prune, driving from gig to gig in a VW. "I never even had an apartment," Freebo said.
"We'd stay in dorms at whatever college we were playing, or share hotel rooms," said Bonnie. "It was real hand-to-mouth.
"Onstage we sat next to each other with a little Matthews Freedom Amp, which runs on forty flashlight batteries or you can plug it in." Raitt played a steel-bodied, National guitar in a "kind of style that covers both rhythm and lead parts, and Freebo would fill in second guitar parts on the bass, 'cause his head is just lyrical that way."
In the spring of 1971, Bonnie signed with Warner Bros., the label she wanted most to be with because of her respect for such artists as James Taylor, Joni Mitchell, Ry Cooder, and Randy Newman. Dick worked out a contract giving her a good deal of artistic control, and she did her first album at a camp on Lake Minnetonka, west of Minneapolis.
From the beginning, she was thinking politically. "I was very uncomfortable going with a big company and I thought it was immoral, politically, to be a leftist, to be trying to be a star..." But club owners had told her that they could use the advertising help a record company could provide.
Recording in a four-track studio garage in Minnesota was a way for her to use corporate money to help a friend, Dave Ray, get a recording scene going, and it was true to her nature. Recently, she said, "I met Ringo at a Clive Davis party, and he said, `I like your stuff. You should go back to the garage.' "
But working with friends and neighbors-in Minnesota, in Woodstock, and even in L.A., where she moved in 1973 and where her social circle had encompassed Lowell George and other members of Little Feat-was difficult.
Takin' My Time, she said, was essentially recorded twice-once with Lowell pro- ducing-"We were too personally involved to get along"-and then with John Hall of Orleans.
The cost of that album put her in a vulnerable position with Warner Bros. She was left with only $10,000 for her next one, and Warners told her they would advance her additional money only if she would hire a producer with a proven (hit) record.
After a long search, she hired R&B veteran Jerry Ragovoy for the album, Streetlights, and for the first time she found herself in a real studio situation, with session people she didn't know. Her guitar was left unused; she and Ragovoy had tiffs over song selection; she thought she was in a blues rut-and she wound up ambivalent about the album. "It's a pretty record," she said. "It was too slick, but I learned a lot. I learned that I really needed a producer."
And Bonnie's singing matured. What sometimes sounded, in 1971, like a frantic white girl's voice trying to sing ancient black music is now a real instrument. Bonnie always had a natural soulfulness and a good feel for the phrasings of blues music. But now she can use her voice to by turns narrate, scold, kid, challenge, wonder, moan, assert herself and, more than ever, rock and roll. The base is as sweet a soprano as ever, but there is a new layer of husk.
Freebo, who's been on every album, credits Ragovoy. "The environment changed her singing," he said. "She was in a professional world with Streetlights and had to act like one. She was being told, `Come on, Bonnie, be a professional, don't find excuses from the bottle, don't cop out with your friends. There you are, you know, get down.' And she did. The biggest growth is in her confidence in her voice. A lot of it came out in Home Plate."
For Home Plate, Bonnie hired Paul Rothchild as producer. "It combines all the good things on the first albums, like the group feeling, everybody putting in input [several songwriters ended up arranging or playing on their tracks], a producer taking some of the load off me, providing a structure within which I can be funky, with a band that's professional, so we got the songs sometimes in three takes instead of twenty because we'd be prepared. And I also think this is the first one where my voice is out, recorded better. It isn't necessarily true that I'll never do any old acoustic blues or play guitar, but it represents a time capsule of one particular change that I went through, and I think it's a change for the better."
And, since moving to L.A., she has settled down with one man, bought a modest house, and broken up her relationship with Jim Beam. "In Cambridge, I had a lot of nights of getting drunk-but not sloppy drunk, and I wouldn't get hungover. But last year, on tour, the work schedule was so hard and I was drinking, and I started to get hungover in the morning-that comes from being older, not getting exercise, and not having good food. And I'd get sloppy onstage. So this year I've stopped bourbon, and those nights are few and far between. Onstage I just have wine and club soda." As for drugs, she shrugged: "Nothing much, a toot 'n' a toke."
Bonnie is a champion for many women. She sings songs that often speak for them. She pulls her own weight on guitar; she's the leader of a rock and roll band.
"I get letters from women saying, 'Your music got me through' or, 'You were a real inspiration to me and my music and I really appreciate how strong you are.' Mostly what I get now is, 'You make me proud you're up there, you're one of the first women that I'm not jealous of,' instead of saying, 'I hate you 'cause my old man's in love with you.' I get all my response from women, I don't get any letters from guys. And a lot of gay women write letters-'You're one of my favorites."'
Raitt has said before that she wishes gay women-including musician friends of hers-could express themselves fully in their music. If she were gay, she said, she would. "I think I'm the kind of personality that would."
Despite her ability to double every entendre within earshot, Bonnie is a downright puritan in matters sexual. She is
not a fan of rock artists who flaunt their bisexuality; she has never seen a porn film, "and I hate dirty magazines. I really think sex is private."
Raitt would like to see more women's songs. "A lot of people say. 'You don't do any political songs.' Well, Any Day Woman' is real strong: 'Love Me like a Man' says, 'Don't put yourself above me."'
"Holly Near is the first woman I've seen who was able to integrate political ideasabout the war and politics-into her songs and not make it boring." But asked if she might do a Near song, Raitt responded: "She has red hair, too...and how many redheads can you take?" For now, she will continue to look for "obscure blues people's songs" and material by her own fab four, Eric Kaz, Joel Zoss. Chris Smither, and Jackson Browne.
She does not custom order songs, "but they all know I need songs. Eric wrote 'I'm Blowin' Away' for me. I think. After he wrote the first line about, 'I've been romanced, wined and danced/Crazy nights and wild tinges.' he called me up and said, 'I've got a song for you.'
Bonnie has done her last interview and at 4 A.M.. the morning after Alice Doesn't Day, she's curious about that commotion from down the hall. We walk into one of two parties, this one with Tom Waits and John Prine at a round table exchanging stories and songs, a handful of other people sitting around tugging on beers.
Waits, in his cigarette-filtered voice, is performing "Putnam County." and has Prine laughing uncontrollably, clapping his feet together atop the table, with lines not in the recorded version: "He got more ass than a toilet seat ...I was hornier than a dog on a chain with two dicks...I was so horny, even the crack of dawn wasn't safe in mii presence." he serenaded. And as he crooned on, over the giggles, toward the end of the song Bonnie leaned over to me and whispered: "He sounds like Fred-eight hundred years old."
-December 18, 1975
Rolling Stone
What a life. I had hooked up with Bonnie Raitt only a week after catching Olivia NewtonJohn-and Dick Clark-in Vegas. Now, as 1975 wound down, I joined fellow editor Charles Perry (better known around the office as "Smokestack") for a special issue observing the tenth anniversary of the Summer of Love. While Smoke wrote a social history of the Haight-Ashbury, I chronicled the music scene, interviewing every major figure I could find. As the issue went to press in early February, I wrote and narrated a radio special, San Francisco: What a Long, Strange Trip It's Been, mixing music with bits of the interviews we'd conducted. For a couple of years, I had written and narrated short features, based on our music articles, to send to radio stations for free. The tradeoff, of course, was promotion for the magazine. This was our first fulllength program, running two hours. It aired nationally and ultimately won a Billboard Award for Broadcast Excellence.
Spring brought some nice distractions. On the Rolling Stone front, the magazinethanks to writers Howard Kohn and David Weir-had scored a major scoop the previous fall on the Patty Hearst kidnapping of February 1974, unearthing the story of her conversion and her eight months of life underground. Then, in the spring of 1975, Kohn and Weir followed up with the story of the Symbionese Liberation Army's destruction. Rolling Stone, already in the big leagues, had become an international sensation. On the eve of April Fool's Day, an artist friend of the magazine staged a "no-talent" show that included a ragtag band of our staffers. I wrote a song about Hearst, to the tune of Bob Dylan's "Hurricane." Dylan's saga of the incarcerated boxer, Rubin Carter, lasted eight minutes. My ballad went at least as long, and included the lines:
Ystrda, Today, aild Paul
n retrospect, the assignment to cover the beginning of Paul McCartney's first American tour with Wings was a case of perfect timing. McCartney kicked off his tour on May 8th, 1976, in Detroit, with his wife Linda not only along for the ride, but alongside him on stage, on keyboards. He defended her against all critics, as a good husband and bandleader should.
I had just gotten married a week before the tour began.
After a few years of handling relationships as if I were some kind of rock journalist, I'd finally settled down with Dianne Sweet, whom I'd first met a decade before at San Francisco State, when she was a homecoming queen candidate and I was a campus newspaper geek. We'd reconnected in 1972, when she called me at KSAN. After a fitful relationship hampered by the presence of other women in my life, we decided to make May Day our day. We got married in the midst of disco fever, and I hustled off, after a brief escape to the Napa Valley wine country, to the Motor City.
I was thrilled to be meeting McCartney. I'd been one of those swept up in Beatlemania twelve years before. Without knowing exactly who had written which parts of all those Lennon-McCartney songs, I admired them equally, although Lennon's sharper wit got to me. But I loved Paul's sweet voice, his ability to switch from ballads to Little Richard-raving, and his overall Beatleness.
Hanging, literally, with McCartney.
In this first visit with McCartney, which stretched from Detroit through Toronto, and in subsequent encounters, I came to see him as a good deal more than the artist formerly known as "the cute Beatle." He was also, quite possibly, the smartest, most savvy of the Fab Four-at least when it came to marketing himself. He was not only unfailingly charming and cooperative in interviews, but he also knew how to switch gears, depending on who his visitor was and which publication he or she was representing. Marvin Gaye had addressed this quality. Paul McCartney perfected it.
W E L L. I T S U R F. sounds like rock and roll, even if it is Wings. Little Jimmy McCulloch, former Thunderclap Newman, and Denny Laine, former Moody Blue, are burners on guitars. Joe English, former nobody, is ecstatic on blistering drums. Linda McCartney, former photographer, punches away at a stockpile of keyboards and accounts for all the sound effects we've grown to love on all the Wings albums. And Paul McCartney, former Beatle, drives the whole band, plus a four-piece horn section adding funk and frills. He cruises it, on bass while Laine and McCulloch provide the power: on piano, he hammers out "Lady Madonna" and "Live and Let Die": back on bass, he screams, reaching back for some of that Little Richard inspiration, through "Beware My Love" and "Letting Go." And after a particularly meaty, beaty number, there is a shout from Laine or McCartney of "rock and roll!"
And Wings gets all the rock and roll responses: people in the audience suddenly sticking their arms up in clenched-fist salutes, piercing the air with two-fingered whistling, whooping in celebration of each of the five Beatles songs offered, unleashing ferocious, match-lit, Bic-flicked encore calls. It is the first American tour by Paul McCartney since 1966, when he was still a you-know-what. Along with John, George, and Ringo, he was supposed to have detested the audiences, scream storms of wet panties that rushed them everywhere from Shea Stadium in New York to Candlestick Park in San Francisco. Now, with the Apple rot, Beatles split, lawsuits and bad mouthings pretty much behind them, Paul finds himself invoking the old days, inviting people to clap hands and stomp feet, waving and posing to audiences behind and to the sides of the stage.
But here in America in 19 76, few try rushing the stage; first-aid setups go untested; security guards wind up turning down their walkie-talkies so they can hear the show. The only Beatlemaniacal screaming is at the beginning, when Paul first appears out of the darkness. The one song that gets screeches-an absolute demonstration, in fact-is the quietest Beatle song of all....
Saturday, May 8th: on the main floor of the seedy Olympia Stadium in Detroit, Michigan, one young man keeps shouting for the people in front of him to sit down. We were into the acoustic set, with Laine, McCulloch, and the McCartneys on rattan chairs, all but Linda playing guitars. After a few numbers, it is Paul alone onstage, tuning up for "Blackbird." The man in the audience-he apparently saw the first show here the night before-seems to know what's coming.
"Siddown!" he shrieks. "Siddown, you fuckers!" Then he turns to a friend and explains his urgency. The voice level is down to conversational and he sounds rational. "I wanna see 'Yesterday,"' he says.
If you want the Beatles, go see Wings.
-George Harris
on, November 1974
PAUL M C C A R T N E Y D o E S N' T MIND a look back at Yesterday, but today he is dedicated to two goals: the acceptance by the public and press of Wings as a band and not as a backup for a former Beatle, and acknowledgment from those same two difficult institutions that Wings (and Paul) are rock, not pop.
But McCartney has some difficulties.
First, he was a Beatles he can't change or deny that. And he wouldn't anyway. "I'm a Beatles fan," he says later. "When John was saying a couple of years ago that it was all crap, it was all a dream, I know what he was talking about, but at the same time I was sitting there thinking, `No it wasn't.' It was as much a dream as anything else is; as much crap as anything else is. In fact, it was less crap than a lot of other stuff." And he agrees with George's equation of Wings and Beatles:
"I wouldn't put it just like that. I'd say, `if you want the Wings, go see Wings; if you want Beatles, look at an old film. But I probably was a little more sort of Beatle-mind- ed than the rest. I tended to ring people up and say, `Let's work now,' `Let's do this.' So I suppose it's a fair point that that was my bag anyway and I just continued doing it. Whereas George...'round about Sergeant Pepper, he only did the one track on Sergeant Pepper, he didn't turn up for a lot of the other stuff, because he really wasn't that interested. I was still very interested."
Second difficulty: McCartney is cute. And at age 33, there are none of the signs that make for easy writing-that, say, his face is fuller.. .fleshier.. .rounded out by the years. Backstage, he introduced himself cheerfully as "David Cassidy," and I could see why. But with few exceptions, cute people are not quite believable as pained, ravaged, booze-based, serious rockers.
Another difficulty is that McCartney writes, sings, and produces what comes down to pop music. Not that he wants to. "We're trying to make it sound as hard as possible," he says. "But sometimes you just don't bring off in a studio what you can bring off in a live thing."
Not Fade Away: A Backstage Pass to 20 Years of Rock & Roll Page 37