Читать книгу The Mojo Collection - Various Mojo Magazine - Страница 93

Record label: Chess

Produced: Leonard and Philip Chess

Recorded: Fame Studios, Muscle Shoals, Alabama; early 1967

Released: August 1967

Chart peaks: None (UK) 82 (US)

Personnel: Etta James (v); Albert Lowe Jr (g); Jimmy Ray Johnson (g); David Hood (b); Roger Dawkins (d); Dewey Oldham (p); Carl Banks (o); Gene ‘Bowlegs’ Miller (t); Charles Chalmers, Aaron Varnell, Floyd Newman (s); George Davis (p)

Track listing: Tell Mama (S); I’d Rather Go Blind (S); Watch Dog; The Love Of My Man (S); I’m Gonna Take What He’s Got; The Same Rope; Security (S); Steal Away; My Mother In Law; Don’t Lose Your Good Thing; It Hurts Me So Much; Just A Little Bit

Running time: 30.10

Current CD: The Complete Muscle Shoals Sessions: Remastered adds: Do Right Woman, Do Right Man; You Took It; I Worship The Ground You Walk On; I Got You Babe; You Got It; I’ve Gone Too Far (Previously Unreleased); Misty (Previously Unreleased); Almost Persuaded; Fire; Do Right Woman, Do Right Man (Alternate)

Further listening: Live album Etta James Rocks The House (1964); Etta James Sings Funk (1970); Chess Masters (1983)

Further reading: Rage To Survive (Etta James and David Ritz, 1998); www.ettajames.com

Download: Not currently legally available

Etta James began singing at the age of five as little Jamesetta Hawkins, belting out gospel at Los Angeles’ St Paul Baptist Church. Discovered and re-christened by LA band leader Johnny Otis, the 16-year-old Etta James had her first hit in 1955 with Roll With Me Henry. For the next five years James’s life was one of constant touring and full immersion in a rough on-the-road life – sex, drugs and real mean men. A voice of sweet’n’lowdown power, like a born-bad angel, James signed to Leonard Chess’s Chess Records in 1960 and the hits soon followed: At Last, Something Got A Hold Of Me and Stop The Wedding. By 1967 she was a full-time soul star with painted-on cat eyes, tight cup dresses, a pistol in her purse and a full-time heroin habit – ‘Working to get high, stay high, live high and, if the stuff was strong enough, die high.’

James sang the life she lived. Leonard Chess was convinced that the only woman who did it like Etta was Aretha Franklin. So, after Jerry Wexler put Aretha in Rick Hall’s Fame Studios in 1967 to cut the R&B heartache classic I Never Loved a Man The Way I Love You, Chess decided to do the same with Etta. The first track James cut with the Muscle Shoals team was I’d Rather Go Blind, a song ripped from the heart about loving someone so much that you ‘just don’t want to be free.’ James knew all about that. At the time she was seeing a guy called Billy Foster. Sometimes they fought so hard that Etta would end up sticking Billy with a kitchen knife. Etta says she wrote I’d Rather Go Blind. The songwriting credit went to Billy Foster. James sang about Security as she saw it slipping through her fingers. ‘The same rope that pulls you up/sure can hang you,’ she hollers on The Same Rope.

What she ended up with was an album of pure pain and suffering, and drum-tight soul. Just don’t expect Etta to love it in the same way. ‘They rant and rave about Tell Mama,’ says James, ‘how I sang the shit out of it. I wish I could agree. I don’t like being cast in the role of the Great Earth Mother, the gal you come to for comfort and easy sex. Nothing was easy then. My career was building up but my life was falling apart.’