THE QUEEN of rock'n'roll has to take her heart pills before we can
talk. She looks lost, sitting in a huge armchair in the cavernous lounge
of Liverpool's Adelphi Hotel. The setting is perfect, in fact. Faded
Regency grandeur. It could almost be a metaphor for her life.
This
is LaVern Baker, whose career goes back to the Forties, who was in at
the very birth of rock'n'roll, whose recordings for Atlantic in the
mid-Fifties helped build that label's great reputation. There are only
two women in America's Rock'n'Roll Hall of Fame. Aretha Franklin is one.
This small bespectacled 63-year-old lady in a funny floppy hat,
fumbling in her handbag for her pills, is the other. She is performing
in Britain for the first time.
So
why isn't she on national television? Why do record stores not bulge
with re-issues of her rock'n'roll classics? Why, when I tell friends I
am going to meet her, do they ask, 'LaVern who?'
These
are not questions the lady herself is much interested in addressing.
The heart pills come first, and they must be taken with food, so we
wander across to Riley's Bar for a chicken curry. We are accompanied by
Bill, the jovial keyboard player she has brought over from the States,
and Larry, also from America, who performs some unspecified management
function with a reticence that does not normally go with the job. He
smiles beatifically but says virtually nothing. Bill and Larry help
LaVern with the funny English money, but the rest of the weekend is
largely looked after by fans - rock'n'roll purists who will quote you
catalogue numbers as soon as look at you. It is their unpaid promotional
work, the lobbying, the articles in the specialist papers that have
helped keep LaVern's name alive and bring her over here.
It is not
big time to be sure - an interview on Radio Merseyside, a spot on
Granada TV's local arts show, and gigs at Liverpool's 051 club and a
rock'n'roll weekend in Great Yarmouth - but LaVern is enjoying herself
in Britain. These zealots have made her feel like a queen again.
LaVern
has been chauffeured to Liverpool by Paul, one such enthusiast who,
when not performing vital personal services for seminal figures from
popular music's past, works for an estate agent in Crewe. Paul's main
qualification for the job of collecting the Queen of rock'n'roll from
Gatwick and ferrying her north appears to be his ownership of a car and
an enormous record collection, not necessarily in that order.
The
official promoter Roger Eagle, veteran of Manchester's famous Twisted
Wheel and International clubs, clearly has a more professional interest
in LaVern, but it is enthusiasm for the singer rather than any business
consideration that has inspired his two-year struggle to bring her to
Britain.
'She has an extraordinarily expressive voice,' says
Roger. 'It is virtually undimmed by age. I cannot tell you how delighted
I am to be promoting LaVern in Britain. There is almost nobody else of
her quality and vintage still performing.'
Until
two years ago, LaVern herself was consigned by many to the 'Missing,
Presumed Dead' file. In 1968 she went into a self-imposed exile in the
Philippines that lasted 22 years. LaVern is vague about the reasons for
this lengthy 'disappearance', citing health and marriage problems - but
then she is fairly sketchy on most personal details.
We know she
was born in Chicago in 1929, and was not called LaVern Baker. Neither
was she called Dolores Williams, as most biographies state. (She says
maybe she'll announce her real name on primetime television, though no
date is fixed for this.) While still in her teens, she got a job
performing in a club, wearing ragged clothes, and billed as 'Little Miss
Sharecropper'. This was something of a misnomer in that her father was
actually quite well fixed. 'He never told us what he did and we never
asked,' says LaVern, 'but he brought home good money. Chicago was run by
the Syndicate,' she adds gnomically.
In
1954, LaVern started recording for Atlantic and became one of the most
popular female R'n'B singers in the early rock era. Rock'n'roll hits
included 'Tweedle Dee', 'Jim Dandy', and the glorious ballad 'I Cried A
Tear', featuring a soaring tenor sax solo from King Curtis. Those were
the days of the exhaustive and exhausting tours across America, the
horrors of which have been well documented - the endless bus journeys,
the prejudice in the segregated south, and the perfunctory
under-rehearsed performance of the two songs that were meant to justify
the whole exercise. The roster of artistes joining LaVern on these
coast-to-coast tours included virtually every big name from the
rock'n'roll years.
I was told that, during one of these odysseys,
LaVern had been present when Buddy Holly lost his virginity, something
she would neither confirm nor deny, but as most rock'n'roll biographies
these days include some mention of Buddy Holly's whole-hearted enjoyment
of the fruits of fame, the story is maybe not that remarkable. All
LaVern will say of Buddy is that they used to 'fight all the time. He
would say little things that weren't nice. Racial things. It wasn't his
fault. It was the way he was brought up in Texas, but I wasn't going to
sit by and do nothing.'
LaVern, variously described as sassy,
earthy, zesty, and lusty, believed in standing her ground at all times.
Like many black R'n'B artistes of the time, she suffered from the
experience of having sanitised versions of her material released by
white artistes - who effectively went on to steal her rightful place in
the pop charts. Unlike her contemporaries, LaVern tried to do something
about the practice, vainly petitioning her congressman to pass a law to
protect her arrangements.
In 1964, LaVern left Atlantic, a
decision she still regrets; the hits dried up. 'One Monkey Don't Stop
The Show' is probably the best known of her post-Atlantic songs, and
still a major floor-filler on Northern Soul nights. In the late Sixties
she was visiting Vietnam regularly to entertain the troops, and on one
of these trips she fell ill. Her first marriage was collapsing around
the same time, so she took medical advice and went to the Philippines to
recuperate.
'I got a job as a show director for the US Marine
Corps, putting on floor shows, and, before I knew it, the months had
turned into years and my daughter was 21 years old.'
Those two
daughters (there is another, aged 14) are still in the Philippines.
LaVern lives - 'regretfully' she says - in Manhattan on Tenth Avenue.
She shares what she describes as a cubby hole with her cat Mouci
(pronounced Mousey), and seems to lead the kind of slightly dotty
solitary Manhattan existence familiar to us from films.
She tells
stories of crack dealers outside her door, of 14-year-old kids driving
Cadillacs, of bizarre arguments in the department store where she buys
the perfume she sprays around her apartment. 'New York isn't a friendly
place, I don't have many friends. I sometimes go to a show, and I see my
mother from time to time. She is 80 now and still lives in Chicago. But
my real passion is TV. I'm a TV fanatic, a TV addict.'
An
animated discussion follows on whether Raymond Burr is still alive, and
the parts played by Clayton Moore and Jay Silverheels in The Lone
Ranger. To prove she is as sassy, zesty, etc as ever, LaVern throws in a
Lone Ranger joke ('How, Kimusabe.' 'Hell, I know how. Question is,
when?'). Now we have started on television, LaVern proves difficult to
shift. She wants to know what happened to the chap from Hawaii 5-O, and
whether it was Merle Oberon or Vivien Leigh in Wuthering Heights.
Kick-boxing movies are her favourite. There are too many repeats on HBO,
she says.
At times she looks and sounds like one of those New
York bag ladies. But when she makes up and changes for the photos, she
is transformed. Jet-lagged and a little confused she may be, but she
knows how to pose for a picture.
Should doubts remain as to
LaVern's rock'n'roll credentials they are dispelled by the gig. In
Barney Hoskyns' book, From a Whisper to a Scream, LaVern Baker is
bracketed with Etta James, Bessie Smith and others as an Earth Mama,
whose business is 'tearing up' clubs or churches. The good news is
LaVern tore with a passion at Club 051, and didn't finish tearing until
2.40am in the morning.
The less good news is that there were only
100 or so paying customers there to enjoy the experience. LaVern's
supporters hope the buzz generated by this short trip will make it
worthwhile for her to leave her TV and cat once more to make a return
visit. Should that happen, you are advised to take advantage while
stocks last.
