Bonnie Raitt - Classic or Dud?

^^This. I just spent a little bit on Spotify trying to find that wonderful boozy sing-along final track on an album of hers which I'd forgotten the important stuff about, and yup, that was it.

Yeah Give It Up is my favorite too. Those first three LP's in general are still my favorites.

Good call on "Sweet and Shiny Eyes" too, one of my favorites off of that one.

A lot of her interviews from the mid-'90s to the '00s mention a box set she was hoping to put together - like the classic three or four-disc career retrospective with choice rarities, etc. Given where the market's at now, I guess that's never gonna happen.

Maybe on vinyl? Meanwhile, we'll just have to grow our own. Mine might start with "I Know," end with "I Knew." She certainly had me for the first 11 years, right through '82's Green Light, wnich as xgau observed, was her most rocking and worst selling of that era, maybe ever. Why? Just a more consistently emphatic beat than before, even a Stonesy riff for Eric Freakin Justin Kaz's "River of Tears"! It all worked in sufficiently Raittesque terms, I htought. Wiki quotes her plausible thinking on this:

What I wanted this time out was a combination of the music I've been listening to recently," Raitt said in 1982, "Billy Burnette, the Blasters, Rockpile, and the rock-a-billy New Wave scene. I knew I had to get away from the slick sound I had with the Peter Asher record...I was a little stung by the lack of response to The Glow. And I was disappointed by not being able to make a record that sounded the way I wanted it to sound. Moving to Shangri-la, I wanted to get back to the roots and to the funkiness I had on earlier records, even though I'm not crazy about how they sound. They sound like I was having a lot more fun than I really was. Green Light is the first album I actually had fun doing."
Was covering NRBQ a bridge too far?
"Well, a lot of my friends thought I had moved to the beach and turned into Gidget. But it's not like I suddenly became an airhead. I needed to lighten up a bit, that's all. I was laughing all the time, having a lot of fun, hanging out at this funky old studio that had hippie blankets hanging from the ceiling. Now I'm getting some feedback from people who feel the same way that I do about rock and roll. Then there are other, more conservative friends whom I've known for years who still wish I was sitting in a chair playing acoustic guitar."
So she tried some other things---duet w Bryan Adams, covered "Burning Down The House," Irishy sounds---I wasn't following by then, but did love "In The Nick of Time" and some Grammy-Platinum Years album tracks I heard at friends' houses. Heard Fundamental at the mall: trended monotonous, but I only heard it that once---yadda yadda Slipstream brought me back, seemed strong as and songfully compatible to the first 11 years. Need to listen more to Dig In Deep and earlier ones I missed almost entirely.

I saw her do a few online performances in the first week of lockdown--a fundraiser for Austin musicians, a tribute to John Prine. Nice house!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mgcfw3BTBIc

Oh yeah!
Somebody mentioned Ian McLagen upthread: he was in her Bump Band, and def. on The Green Light, though she's also shading the rowdiness with guests incl. Jackson Browne, Richard Manuel---Vince Gill, even (never heard a solo track of his I liked, but he's good w the harmonies, also in Emmylou Harris's line-ups of that era. Have not heard him with the Eagles).

xxp I like Green Light, and it's a shame that for a while it was her career-killer, or rather the lack of commercial success was.

The Grammy-era Raitt was the first one I knew. I just remember "Something to Talk About" et al being all over adult contemporary anything, romantic comedy movie trailers, etc. I actually thought it was pleasant stuff, but I wasn't really diving into music past top 40 radio. It was a nice surprise to find out she had almost 20 years of stuff that no one played.

I remember Fundamental when it came out. IIRC she was on Oprah promoting it and gave a guitar away to a girl in the audience (maybe middle school age or jr. high?). She played something that I mistook for a Babyface song and I thought the rest would be the same. Then years later, on xgau's old recommendation, I checked it out again. I don't rate it as highly as he does, but there's surprisingly some good stuff on there, a few of which wouldn't sound out of place on a Los Lobos or Latin Playboys album, specifically the J.B. Lenoir tune (which is basically Raitt with Los Lobos) and "Cure for Love." I like "Spit of Love" too.

Luck of the Draw is my favorite Raitt.

expert mom-rock

Yeah, it's really good. If you think of mom-rock not as a derogatory term but the pop music equivalent of, say, what used to be called (somewhat derogatorily) "women's films," you can't do much better. Getting older, family (parents passing away, raising children or grandchildren), they're universal topics, and she does them right and honestly.

I saw her in 2017 and after "Nick of Time" she said "I wrote that when I was afraid of turning 40....HUH." LMAO

“Love Letter” and “Thing Called Love” and “Something to Talk About” all kind of set her up as the female counterpart to John Hiatt. (I assumed until checking now that he wrote all of these!) I’d like to dig deeper into what she does beyond this era.

Warner Bros. should be your next stop then. That will cover her entire career before her unlikely "comeback" at Capitol. First three albums are probably her best. After that the albums get much more uneven, but nearly all of them have some good stuff on them.

In terms of the worst, that's easily the last WB album Nine Lives, completed under desultory conditions. (I like the Toots Hibbert cover though - it was a single.) The Glow isn't good either, but it does have a great Stax/Volt cover, "Your Good Thing (Is About To End)."

"Something to Talk About" was such a unexpected phenomenon. A year and a half after her Grammys comeback, she earns a top fiver played alongside Karyn White and Jesus Jones and Marky Mark. Fully earned too -- she sings and plays the shit out of it.

That's for sure. I didn't realize how miraculous Bonnie Raitt's popularity was until years later.

FWIW Billboard did an oral history on Nick of Time for its anniversary: https://www.billboard.com/articles/columns/rock/8503466/bonnie-raitt-nick-of-time-oral-history-30th-anniversary/

It's a good read for fans and really emphasizes how much she bottomed out and how low the expectations were, even by the people who signed her Capitol (and they liked her). NOBODY in their right mind would've bet on a hit.

I kind of wish she pulled off an album with Prince, but given his luck with everyone else on his label, it probably worked out for the best.

XP ...and then a few years later it gave a name to a now largely-forgotten Julia Roberts/Dennis Quaid romcom!

It's even in the trailer!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yxbLkx8A1WI

nice to see all the love for Give It Up and Green Light, HBD rock legend

one of the all-time voices

And Home Plate is yet another 70s peak. The follow-up, Sweet Forgiveness is not quite as good, but she set the bar high, and, as xgau said of this un, Anyone who can induce me to dance to Eric Kaz has got to be doing some kind of job.

said of Sweet Forgiveness, that is.

Way too many pesky ads on this JamBase item, but here's gist:
Bonnie Raitt & Mavis Staples Announce Summer Tour 2022
The iconic musicians will team up for concerts in July, August and September.

By Scott Bernstein Feb 16, 2022 • 8:16 am PST

Only in the midwest and west. The east and southeast get Lucinda Williams, which is...fine, but it ain't Mavis.

Also several with NRBQ, and at least one w Chris Smither, but mostly Mavis or Lucinda:
https://tour.bonnieraitt.com/

Paywalled, but at the library just now, I read WSJ full-page rave for Just Like That, out Friday: Mark Richardson is not the most exciting writer, but we happen to agree on some stuff (like preferring Rust Bucket to Barn), and he's very conscientious, while going almost cut for cut through this one, which is apparently a colorful cohesion of originals and covers whose titles I don't recognize, nothing too obvious. Only thing that worries me: says the sound is "lean," foregrounding her vocals---damn, I always want the sparky details of her arrangements too---oh well, it's self-produced, no Boomer Wizards behind the throne, so maybe.

It's good. I'll have more to say at the end of the week.

Cool, thanks! Was gonna add(And her vocals are always prominent enough, seems like, so crucial need to go lean cuisine.)

The two tracks she's released so far (both originals?) sounded like traditional "old school" productions - blues-rock and R&B that sticks to the basics without too much polishing or tampering. For all I know, they could've been rehearsed then recorded them in one take. I know there's a Toots cover in there too, and I liked her version of "True Love Is Hard To Find."

Looking forward to her tour - last time I saw her was in 2017 at Lincoln Center's annual outdoor summer shows, and in retrospect it was kind of re-assuring to have her up there telling everyone "Don't worry, we can get through this!"

In contrast, the previous year had Patti Smith right after the RNC and she excoriated the GOP for their shameful rhetoric - she threw it back at them when she grabbed her electric guitar and yelled "EXECUTE THIS MOTHERFUCKER!" (since the RNC had chanted "execute Hillary") and unleashed a torrent of brutal feedback.

For whatever reason, I always thought of Raitt and Smith as the grandmothers everyone should have. Like if there's ever a Disney coming-of-age story in need of some stunt casting, I'd have both of them play the grandmothers the main character visits for life guidance.

"Made Up Mind" is an NRBQ cover irrc

Never knew this, but for "Cream" Prince apparently mixed in samples of Bonnie Raitt playing slide guitar. Raitt mentioned this while talking about her aborted collaboration with Prince and how he asked her to teach him how to play slide guitar.

Wow, never heard of that! Well, come to think of it, he did work with Mavis Staples: she was a Paisley Park artist, even. Wonder what the problem was with Raitt? Maybe he was too weird for her, compared to Froom, Was, and so on.

In the recent Questlove and Maron interviews, she said she was pretty hype to work with Prince but, at the same time, wasn't keen about her album sounding overtly Princey, so once they agreed to work together he ditched her for a European tour (the Sign O The Times tour) after she had canceled her own tour. She still sounds a little salty about it.

As well she might!

The beginning of the pre-chorus of "The Longing in Their Heart" where all of the lead instruments drop out except that rad mandolin part and vocals, that's on my list of all-time favorite musical moments.

Never knew this, but for "Cream" Prince apparently mixed in samples of Bonnie Raitt playing slide guitar. Raitt mentioned this while talking about her aborted collaboration with Prince and how he asked her to teach him how to play slide guitar.

― birdistheword, Friday, April 22, 2022 6:55 PM (yesterday)

I wondered why "Cream" sounded like it could be a parallel-universe re-interpretation of "Something to Talk About"; all while the backup vocals on "STTA" sound heavily influenced by the chorus harmonies in "Take Me With U" and "I Wanna Be Your Lover". And then the chord progressions on the choruses of "Cream" and "STTA" conclude similarly. Yet both songs were released within a similar timeframe - as if Bonnie and The Purple One were telepathically communicating via the ouroboros of shared influence.

Until today, I had no idea this was the European cover for Nick of Time.

let's give'em something to talk about!

Acid wash covers - they're gonna come back, just like the jeans!

That reminds me of the European cover of White Light/White Heat:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Light/White_Heat#/media/File:VUToySoldiers.jpg

Just saw her show at the Beacon. Her singing hasn’t diminished at all - if anything it’s as great as ever, and while the whole show was good (the new material went over well) there were three highlights that towered over the rest: “Nick of Time” (her phrasing was amazing), “Have a Heart” where her phrasing was at times remarkably sexy as if rewriting the song to suggest what the recipient was going to miss (I know she’s much older but that voice can’t be denied), and “Angel from Montgomery” which was incredibly powerful. She has apparently sung it at literally every concert she’s done, and the last time in NYC was with Prine at his Songwriters HoF induction. It’s really astonishing she can sing it so frequently and knock it out of the park every time like it’s never lost any meaning for her, and this time there was even more weight to it, possibly due to Prine being gone.

Lucinda Williams opened. Still on the road to recovery - just singing, no guitar from her yet - but she sung really well, close to if not right on 100%, and her band was fantastic.

When Bonnie Raitt & Her Band Had No Chill On SNL

pic.twitter.com/j4Obatqcx9

— SNL Hosts Introducing the Musical Guest (@snlhostsintro) August 18, 2022

just a btw in very with-it NPR newsletter:

(Meanwhile, the Grammy for song of the year — which honors songwriters specifically — was more or less a total surprise: It went to Bonnie Raitt for her song "Just Like That.")

Xgau was a fan - gave it an A- and put it at #39 on the "Dean's List."

I reviewed it, made my top 40.

Legendary, nigh-universally beloved songwriter in still legendary and beloved shockah.

Her first Grammy (or other award?) for songwriting though---right-?

She's def. quality over quantity in that dept.

Yep - I think her first nomination for songwriting. (I was surprised she didn't get one for "Nick of Time" given how well the album did.)

the album's best written jam

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hnI54ZpTxww

Hold the phone! Her *other* Grammy wins last night: there were three in all:

American singer Bonnie Raitt took home three Grammy Awards this weekend, including one for a cover she did of a Manitoba band’s song.

On Sunday, Raitt won the Grammy for Best Americana Performance for “Made Up Mind,” a cover of The Bros. Landreth’s song from their 2012 album called “Let It Lie." ...Raitt also won the 2023 Grammys for Song of the Year and Best American Roots Song for “Just Like That.”

it's cool that this unknown blues singer has her own thread

I did not know what Wiki sez:

As of 2023, Raitt has received thirteen competitive Grammy Awards, as well as a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award.[2]

ehhh, think that's actually 14 competitive---read your own lists, Wiki-- oh-ok, one of those is MusiCares Person of the Year, which

is an award presented annually by MusiCares, the charity arm of The Recording Academy, the same organization that distributes the Grammy Awards, to commend musicians for their artistic achievement in the music industry and dedication to philanthropy.[1][2]