Fever (17 page)

After that, Mitchell's muse drifted until
Turbulent Indigo,
her 1994 comeback album, which had a scathing attack on Jackson Browne as an alleged wife beater (“How Dare You?”). One of Mitchell's strongest contributions to feminism was how she steadfastly pursued her career even as her audience dwindled; her strongest contribution to the female rock empowerment in this period may be her allegiance to her aesthetic. Four albums appeared in the 1980s:
Shadows and Light
(1980),
Wild Things Run Fast
(1982),
Dog Eat Dog
(1985), and
Chalk Mark in a Rainstorm
(1988), none of them aesthetic duds, none of them hits. On the DVD of her
Shadows and Light
tour, with Pat Methany and Jaco Pastorious, Mitchell leads the Persuasions in a soaring version of “Why Do Fools Fall in Love,” with the ghost of Jackie Lyman doing the splits in film clips alongside her.

After 1991's
Night Ride Home, Turbulent Indigo
sounded like comeback material of the best kind—a careerist whose consistency finally came home to roost. “Sex Kills” was a seasoned meditation on the AIDS epidemic long before Jonathan Demme commissioned Bruce Springsteen's Oscar-winning “Philadelphia.” Two more recent albums (
Both Sides Now
in 2000 and
Travelogue
in 2002) played up Mitchell the chanteuse to uneven effect; a lot of this material sounded far better framed by acoustic guitar; Larry Klein's orchestral backing often made her sound pretentious and bathetic. There are few women songwriters who don't acknowledge Joni Mitchell's influence these days, but more men certainly should.

*   *   *

Tapestry
wouldn't have been the blockbuster it was unless Mitchell had prepared its arrival—people weren't ready for even a soft feminist like Carole King unless they had glimpsed the more “radical” kind in Mitchell. So it's yet another miscarriage of pop justice that one of the great female artists of the early 1970s, Bonnie Raitt, didn't score what her talent deserved until 1989 with her third (at least) comeback album,
Nick of Time.
Where Mitchell, again like Dylan, built a progressive persona from a folkie's roots, Raitt paid what debts she could to the blues, particularly Memphis R&B, for a snarly-smooth feminism that was an extrovert's answer to Mitchell's navel gazing. Raitt also broke new ground by playing her own lead slide guitar (previously male turf) and fronting all-male bands with the sass of a lion tamer. In Raitt's hands, the phallic bottleneck became a symbol of raunchy feminist sex.

Raitt was careful not to slip into singer-songwriter mush. She saw herself as a singer who just happened to write songs, and had a refined sense of how to approach other people's material, making even some of Jackson Browne's self-aggrandizing palatable. (How many other white singers out there—man or woman—felt compelled to cover Sam and Dave's “I Thank You”?) She championed many top-shelf writers—Fred McDowell, Mose Allison, Sippie Wallace, John Prine, John David Souther, Chris Smither, Randy Newman, Stephen Stills, Richard Thompson, John Hiatt, Don Covay, Michael McDonald, and even the Talking Heads (“Burning Down the House”)—and booked them as opening acts whenever possible. In fact, a survey of Raitt's career is enough to convince any singer, male or female, that there's no reason to rely on your own material—that it's better to begin with strong material and work your way into becoming a better songwriter.

Original material has been the bane of female acts from Linda Ronstadt, Crystal Gayle, and Melanie to Edie Brickell and Natalie Merchant, Alanis Morissette and Norah Jones, even though the better female rock acts always combine original with unoriginal material winningly (Emmylou Harris, Maria McKee, Sam Phillips, Marti Jones, Victoria Williams, Lucinda Williams, Annie Lennox, Christine McVie of Fleetwood Mac, and about half of Mary Chapin Carpenter). This is a Dylan spillover problem; the all-original album was a test of manhood as much as lead-guitar solos were, and women were subject to yet another double standard: how to make original material seem like an aesthetic success without playing into a man's game. In many cases, compared with women, men are criticized far less for the amount of original material they supply. The truth is, it takes a talent as large as John Prine or PJ Harvey to turn in all-original projects without sounding out of their depth. Even Sinéad O'Connor, perhaps the signal female voice of the early 1990s, didn't triumph as much as she probably deserved to when singing Prince's “Nothing Compares 2 U.” (Thank our gracious Lord that Barbra Streisand and Diana Ross negotiated for production, instead of songwriting, credits.)

Until the release of
Fundamental
(1998) and
Silver Lining
(2002), you could have argued that Raitt did her best work before the age of twenty-four, on her first four albums, 1971's
Bonnie Raitt,
1972's
Give it Up,
and 1973's
Takin' My Time,
with 1975's
Home Plate
her sleeper. Her loyal audience knew she was a singer in a million, with a smooth, nuanced style that deserved a lot more attention than, say, Linda Ronstadt's. Her cover of the Marvelettes' 1961 number “Danger Heartbreak Dead Ahead” sounded like Raitt appreciated the girl-group depths she might reckon with.

But it took until 1977 for Raitt to get her first chart single, a cover of Del Shannon's “Runaway,” and even that didn't crack the Top 40. The song is a marvel: Shannon's original nerve-addled version does nothing to cover up the song's tender side. Raitt slowed it down, tried to make it a bluesy come-on, and the results were a bit forced; but the song helped turn
Sweet Forgiveness
into her first gold record. From there she hooked up with Ronstadt's hitmaker, Peter Asher (of Peter and Gordon) for 1979's
The Glow,
an overripe commercial pitch that went downhill after its hefty lead track (the aforementioned “I Thank You”). There followed an embarrassing hit with 1979's “You're Gonna Get What's Coming,” a Robert Palmer song, before she endured almost a decade touring state fairs, giving great shows that nobody noticed. Even a solid 1986 album like
Nine Lives,
with a delirious reggae turn on Toots Hibbert's “True Love Is Hard to Find,” failed to turn heads.

So when Bonnie Raitt made her way down the aisle for her fourth Grammy for
Nick of Time,
1990's Album of the Year, the industry cheered a feminist talent who addressed adult themes in her music as a way of staying connected to her aging audience. In the same way that Carole King's solo success stood on Joni Mitchell's shoulders, Raitt's comeback success was tied to Tina Turner's 1984 rebound, which discovered a vast audience of thirty-and-up listeners who worried about how being married to a career got in the way of even planning a family, and how women, who still felt three emotional steps ahead of men years after high school, still got stuck with indecisive partners. Turner's “What's Love Got to Do with It” and Raitt's “Nick of Time” were of a piece with the way grown-up women were thinking and behaving. Here was a Tina Turner for the new soccer moms—married to her career in ways much of her audience suddenly identified with.

It would be hard to put Bonnie Raitt in the category of “hard” or “soft” feminist, even though she's made social activism a central part of her public life since the beginning (and helped mount the No Nukes concert of 1979). She threw down her gauntlet in songs like “That Ain't No Way to Treat a Lady,” but she's also been enamored of more men than may be good for her. Her breakup songs can be forlorn to the point of distaste (even when they tug, as in “I Can't Make You Love Me”), and if her love songs are downright winning (“Something to Talk About”), she never matched Joni Mitchell's free-form experiments. Roots meant more to Raitt than to Mitchell, and her devotion to R&B finally redeemed her career. And Mitchell would kill for the audience that Raitt ultimately won over. Carole King and James Taylor still outsold them both.

*   *   *

Rock's new crop of women delivered articulate writers with roots in country, and they weren't the least bit fey about it. If Joni Mitchell was the emblematic female singer-songwriter of the 1970s, a personal confessor who made intimate ideas ring with the truth of many different women leading many different lives, Rosanne Cash dovetailed many of Mitchell's themes and extended them into 1980s and 1990s. There was seldom a press clip about her that didn't lead with her prestigious country pedigree: as Johnny Cash's daughter by his first wife, Vivian Liberto, Rosanne Cash had a prestigious brand name to help get her signed and recorded.

But from the beginning, her original material set her apart, and her ambitions were always bigger than country music's mainstream could fathom. She recorded in Nashville for many years, and most of her hits failed to cross over to pop. But her music was never really part of mainstream Nashville culture, even when she paid tribute to her dad (“My Old Man,” or her sweet versions of his “Big River” and “Tennessee Flat-Top Box”). She even covered the Beatles' “I Don't Want to Spoil the Party” a good six years before Nashville stars put together a hit Beatle tribute album. Her other Beatle cover, “I'm Only Sleeping,” anchored her first collection of hits.

Cash hooked up with country jock Rodney Crowell to record and cowrite her first album, which got released only in Germany (as a kind of test market) but was strong enough to get Columbia Nashville interested in signing her. Crowell and Cash married in 1979, and the ensuing pregnancy prevented her from touring to support her debut,
Right or Wrong,
in 1980. Theirs was a stormy marriage if you believe her songs, and they battled cocaine addiction together—successfully, by 1987 (“Halfway House”). Most of Rosanne's material is about how an independent woman can stay in a relationship—and rock out—with just as much self-respect as you please. And her first-personisms had more layers than mere autobiography.

This would turn out to be ironic: according to Cash's confessional songs, Crowell never could keep his fly zipped, and Cash wound up leaving him in 1992. In her material, Cash has always been a strong, defiant woman seeking out the awkward truths of intimacy. A song like “This Has Happened Before” had its country roots in cheatin' and lyin' men, as did “Man Smart, Woman Smarter,” which was campy feminism, as strident as country dared get in those days (“Women got the men like a puppet show…”) But other songs hinted at a depth of perspective that would mark Cash as a writer who sure could sing (“This Has Happened Before”) and a singer who might just out-write her famous husband. By closing her debut with a Crowell song as layered and melancholy as “Anybody's Darlin' (Anything but Mine),” Cash greeted listeners with plenty to say about how men and women interacted.

Her follow-up,
Seven-Year Ache
(1981), delivered on that promise, producing three number-one country hits. Songs like “Runaway Train” and “My Baby Thinks He's a Train” were fall-too-fast cautionary tales that conveyed the thrill of early romance and the cost of bruising experience. Both her mid-80s albums,
Rhythm and Romance
(1985) and
King's Record Shop
(1987), strike this balance with humor and élan (in “Green, Yellow to Red” she sings, “Don't drive so fast/These brakes are bad”).

Her breakthrough confessional, 1990's
Interiors,
showcased her arrival as a new kind of songstress, one who wrote as well about women's internal life as Joni Mitchell, only in a much more traditional format—which almost made her more radical. In “Dance with the Tiger,” a song she wrote with ex–Kingston Trio folkie John Stewart, Cash captured the hesitancy and studiousness of adult romance. It opens up to be a song about America, but the feelings traced in the first verse trail along behind, and the long, singing guitar solo spins the song out from uncertainty into an airy benevolence. On 1996's
Ten Song Demo,
a sequence of song sketches that got published in draft form (much like Springsteen's
Nebraska
), she sang a sweet, slow waltz called “If I Were a Man.” She sang it with a dreamy reluctance, as if she knew the very conceit was somehow a little over the top, and she might was well imagine she was God (as she concluded in the last verse). But the song was exquisite about what women usually kept hidden in their disappointment, even as it articulated qualms about how some men freeze up at certain emotional depths:

If I were a man

I'd be so sweet

I'd give me everything I need

I'd be so glad to go this deep …

(I'd change the way the whole world thinks …)

If I were a man …

The song is as understated as its premise is fantastic, and its force doesn't sink until you consider what any male songwriter's analogy might be: will Elvis Costello ever contemplate what his life would be like as a woman?

By the time Cash covered Costello's “Our Little Angel” on her career
Restrospective,
the gesture was from one writer to another, and it would be hard to judge who the better craftsman was. Costello may be more prolific—Cash takes extreme care with each record—but it would be hard to argue that he was a better songwriter than Cash (he would do well to try singing her “Land of Nightmares” or “If There's a God on My Side”; come to think of it, Costello could repair of a lot of accusations of misanthropy simply by churning out a disc of Rosanne Cash songs).

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As Joni Mitchell and Bonnie Raitt worked pop's front lines, punk and hard-core persisted underground, and produced a variety of women who trounced stereotypes for kicks. There were Tina Weymouth of the Talking Heads, who was ultra-hip almost simply because she was a bassist in a major progressive act, and Kim Gordon of Sonic Youth, the rakish singer and writer who helped put avant-garde concepts and radical guitar tunings over to more adventurous postpunk tastes. That most writers identified these two primarily as blondes was an index of the sexism they still pressed against.