Review: Dusty Springfield - A Girl Called Dusty (1964)
Tracks: 1) Mama Said; 2) You Don’t Own Me; 3) Do Re Mi; 4) When The Lovelight Starts Shining Through His Eyes; 5) My Coloring Book; 6) Mockingbird; 7) Twenty-Four Hours From Tulsa; 8) Nothing; 9) Anyone Who Had A Heart; 10) Will You Love Me Tomorrow; 11) Wishin’ And Hopin’; 12) Don’t You Know; 13*) I Only Want To Be With You; 14*) He’s Got Something; 15*) Every Day I Have To Cry; 16*) Can I Get A Witness; 17*) All Cried Out; 18*) I Wish I’d Never Loved You; 19*) Once Upon A Time; 20*) Summer Is Over.
REVIEW
At the time when Dusty Springfield’s first album was released, there weren’t all that many female pop stars in the UK — and there were most certainly no modern female pop stars, no young and brave girls who truly understood that the times they were a-changin’ and that the Vera Lynn model might be just a tad outdated. Consequently, when Mary Isabel Catherine Bernadette O’Brien, already better known as «Dusty Springfield», the perky singing sister in the folk-pop trio of the Springfields, decided to cut short her career of revivalism and go it alone with a trendy soul-pop routine, this move was as much of a sell-out as it was a risqué act of personal bravery.
Even the album title and cover carried an element of surprise. A Girl Called Dusty — not only does the name bring on American associations (because of the whole dust thing, and also because most notorious people called Dusty were and are indeed Americans), but it is also clearly a masculine name in origin, being a diminutive from Dustin, which is itself a simplified variant of Thorsteinn — so, here, literally is a blonde lady who has the guts to call herself The Stone of Thor without probably even realizing it. The photo is quite a big deal, too — a very tomboyish look with that denim shirt and confident, almost provocative pose, clearly more influenced by the French ye-ye girls than by the average British lady singer like Petula Clark. (Admittedly, Dusty’s typical stage outfits were and would be far more conservative and lady-like, but that was probably because she just felt comfortable in them rather than forced to wear them).
And then there is the music. Admittedly, Dusty’s first single and one of her best known songs, ‘I Only Want To Be With You’, was a homebrewn concoction: written by British songwriter Mike Hawker and arranged for orchestra by Ivor Raymonde who would go on to become Dusty’s close partner, its melody has more of a French pop ring to it than American soul — though Johnny Franz’s production clearly tips a hat to Phil Spector’s wall-of-sound stylistics. But I am not a big fan of that kind of catchy sugary sentimentality, and, judging by Dusty’s own decisions on the songs for her first LP, neither really was she, because there is virtually nothing on A Girl Called Dusty that comes close to capturing the same kind of sound. In this particular case, the pre-concept-album «LP Filler Curse» actually works to the artist’s advantage — since LPs, unlike singles, were not expected to yield megahits, being instead regarded as expensive bonus offerings for the true fan, artists generally had more freedom of choice here, provided they actually had the capacity and will to handle it.
And what Dusty Springfield really willed was to become the UK herald for edgy American pop music. Who do we have here on record? The Shirelles. The Supremes. Lesley Gore. Dionne Warwick. Gene Pitney. Even frickin’ Ray Charles. No actual rock’n’roll, but a good balance between romantic balladry and sturdy, upbeat, danceable Motown pop. If there is a problem, it is that many of the songs sound too close to the originals: for instance, ‘Mama Said’, the album opener, seems intent on copying the Shirelles note-for-note, right down to every single modulation of the backing vocals. The only thing that Dusty brings to the table is the understanding that a white British girl can actually bring as much earthy feminine power and confidence to that table as a black girl from New Jersey — because "there’ll be days like this" regardless of race, creed, or any particular side of the Atlantic.
Not that it is such a little thing, of course: A Girl Called Dusty is arguably one of the biggest girl-power musical statements of 1964, all due to Dusty’s highly unconventional (for the white entertainment world, anyway) approach to vocal performing. To the general listener, her style might seem a tad monotonous, projecting that husky nasal energy onto just about everything she sings — but this is a complaint that could be directed at a vast majority of performers, and it is easily dissipated by focusing on the musical and stylistic variety of the material rather than on the formally similar manner of delivering it. And yet it is precisely that manner which is the precious glue holding it all together. Next to all the other girl singers whose songs Dusty claims here for herself, she sounds decidedly woman-esque, deeper, more experienced, more mature, making many of those teenage emotion anthems feel more serious while at the same time retaining their hooks, energy, and defiant attitude. Play her cover of ‘You Don’t Own Me’ next to Lesley Gore’s original, for instance, and the first thing you notice is that Lesley gives her jealous lover the finger as a teenage girl (which, admittedly, is quite adequate because she was a teenage girl in 1963); Dusty does the exact same thing as if she were a character from an Ingmar Bergman movie. Which, just to make myself clearer on the subject, does not make any one version of the song superior to another — it merely adds a new market slot for «adult-style rebellion» next to the already well-established «teen-style rebellion».
Actually, correcting myself, the first thing you shall probably notice is not the difference in singing, but the difference in playing and production: Johnny Franz does a good job adjusting all the tonalities and instrumentations for Dusty’s specifications, so that ‘You Don’t Own Me’ is played, I think, one octave lower than the original — again, creating a subtle feeling of more depth and extra psychologism. The exact thing happens with Dionne Warwick’s ‘Wishin’ And Hopin’ (in which the "you won’t get him thinkin’ and prayin’" bridge almost puts on a threatening ominousness) and lots of other stuff; additionally, it is hard not to admire just how much the sharpness and clarity of London’s Olympic Studios sound surpasses the comparably thin and shaky Motown production values (though far be it from me to declare this glossy perfectionism as inherently superior).
Dusty is also quite adept at inverting gender roles — for instance, on Gene Pitney’s ‘Twenty-Four Hours From Tulsa’, or, even more notably, on the Earl King-penned New Orleanian novelty song ‘Do Re Mi’, which she probably nicked from Lee Dorsey with the explicit aim of showing that girls can come on to the opposite sex with a sense of ironic swagger that can actually make boys blush and cower in embarrassment. Again, it is amusing to play the Dorsey and the Springfield versions back-to-back and hear how much more mature the latter one sounds — mixing together playfulness, seriousness, and a strong whiff of sarcasm.
The girl called Dusty takes perhaps her biggest risk at the very end of the album, when she takes on Ray Charles’ loud and rowdy anthem ‘Don’t You Know’ to provide a high-energy final kick à la ‘Twist And Shout’ — which, much like John Lennon on that track, requires her to give it her all and show the public just how much of a reckless screamer she can be. And while Uncle Ray probably has nothing to fear, she still handles the job well enough: after all, all that strength of mind and cocky confidence displayed on the previous eleven tracks already had us prepared to believe that here is a woman who can truly "love you daddy all night long" when she gets in that mood. Considering how the new liner notes to the album define Dusty in 1964 as a «shy, convent-educated twenty-five year old», I’d say this particular performance is pretty much a textbook example for all convent-educated ladies on how to overcome their shyness...
And speaking of new liner notes, the 1996 CD edition of A Girl Called Dusty is the definitive version to get, adding an extra eight songs from Dusty’s contemporary A- and B-sides (including superb renditions of ‘Every Day I Have To Cry’ and ‘All Cried Out’) and more or less eliminating the need to lay one’s hands on her two American albums from 1964 (the clumsily titled Stay Awhile / I Only Want To Be With You and the way too laconically titled Dusty) which sawed A Girl Called Dusty in half, padded each of the halves with singles and US-only tracks and doubled the profits for savvy record industry people, as usual. There are no huge surprises among the extra additions, but at this point in her career, more Dusty was simply better Dusty, and I imagine that if you do not get bored with the denim-clad powergirl in thirty minutes, you sure as hell won’t be over fifty.
Only Solitaire: Dusty Springfield reviews