Tracks: 1) Won’t Be Long; 2) Oh No! Not My Baby; 3) Long After Tonight Is All Over; 4) La Bamba; 5) Who Can I Turn To?; 6) Doodlin’; 7) If It Don’t Work Out; 8) That’s How Heartaches Are Made; 9) It Was Easier To Hurt Him; 10) I’ve Been Wrong Before; 11) I Can’t Hear You; 12) I Had A Talk With My Man; 13) Packin’ Up.
REVIEW
Before everything else, let’s put back some order in a really messy discography. Like most of the big names in the British Invasion around 1964–66, Dusty Springfield had two different recording tracks running parallel to each other, the UK and the US ones, distinguished by the exact same commercial principles — the UK market offered the occasional (rare) LP with 13-14 tracks of new material, placing the rest of its trust in a series of 2-song singles and 4-song EPs; meanwhile, the US branch of the Philips label kept saturating its market with shorter-length LPs a-plenty while keeping singles and EPs to a relative minimum. Thus, in between the UK releases of Dusty’s first album (A Girl Called Dusty) and second album (Ev’rything’s Coming Up Dusty), the American public received no fewer than three albums: the crudely titled Stay Awhile / I Only Want To Be With You (June ’64), the humbly titled Dusty (October ’64), and the golly-gee-whiz-titled Ooooooweeee!!! (March ’65). And actually, that’s not all, because the majority of the songs on Dusty’s second UK album did not really appear in the States until You Don’t Have To Say You Love Me (July ’66). Whew. Meanwhile, the UK branch just kept pumpin’ out brief EPs (Dusty, Dusty In New York, Mademoiselle Dusty, etc.).
For the sake of formal consistency, this overview of Dusty’s career should have probably followed the American path, as I do, for instance, with the discographies of The Rolling Stones and The Animals — mainly because this makes it easier to take into consideration lots of great songs that could have slipped through the cracks otherwise. But, truth be told, zooming in on an entire series of Dusty Springfield albums from the early British Invasion period is not a whole lot of fun, because to a large degree, they are interchangeable and do not reveal a whole lot of artistic growth — not for Dusty herself, at least; her diligent and intelligent «shadowing» of the pop / soul / R&B side of American music lets you know a thing or two about the growth and maturation of that side, but she continues to be more of a passive «chronicler» here than an active agent.
In the end, I just made my own «custom» edition of Ev’rything’s Coming Up Dusty by combining the original 13-track album; the 8 bonus tracks from the 1998 CD edition (appended from the US-only Dusty and Ooooooweeee!!! LPs); and another 4 tracks culled from contemporary UK singles, which pretty much turns the whole thing into a short-ish double album, containing the absolute majority of commercial recordings made by Dusty from late 1964 to late 1965. However, trying to arrange them in some sort of chronologically relevant or conceptual order is largely useless: Dusty had very little by way of true «artistic evolution» at the time — her main weapon was consistency, as she cut one competent, confident, meaningful, enjoyable recording after another, worrying about hooks and emotions much more than about «edginess» or «relevance». So instead of chronology, I shall try to simply concentrate on the different sides of Dusty’s artistic persona through that year — not a particularly easy task, either, as it could be argued that Dusty Springfield did not have her own artistic persona much at all, serving primarily as an interpreter of other people’s artistic personae.
Indeed, just look at the track listing for the album: it’s not even that there is not a single song by Dusty herself, as she never aspired to be a songwriter, it’s that there isn’t even a single song written specifically for Dusty. Although she continued to have a close association with Mike Hawker and Ivor Raymonde, who had provided her with her first couple of hits, they weren’t prolific enough to keep up a steady supply: of all her singles in 1965, only ‘Your Hurtin’ Kind Of Love’ was provided by the duo, although Raymonde loyally stayed in charge of orchestration duties for most of the other recordings. Without even a single regular «court songwriter» to invest his or her musical soul into the body of Britain’s top singer, the top singer had to make do with what other investments had already been invested into other bodies, and try to convince her fans that the re-investment was worth their while. So you should actually take the title of the album — Ev’rything’s Coming Up Dusty — quite seriously, because what is really meant by ev’rything is ev’rything that ain’t used to be Dusty. But now it’s all Dusty and it’s all exciting in a different way from what it used to be... or is it? Well, let’s look at what we got here.
Aretha coming up Dusty: I think most of us, on an average day, think of the Aretha Franklin / Dusty Springfield «rivalry» in terms of ‘Son Of A Preacher Man’ (which is actually a rare case of Aretha borrowing from Dusty, rather than the other way around), but it all began much earlier, as ‘Won’t Be Long’, the opening track on this album, is almost symbolically a cover of the opening track on Aretha’s own debut album from 1961. And not just a cover — a note-for-note recreation, with pretty much the same arrangement, same tempo, and same mood. Absolutely nothing except for certain inborn qualities of the two lady singers differentiates these two versions from one another — and, alas, I must say that when it comes to inborn qualities, Dusty Springfield inevitably loses to Aretha Franklin on the battleground of «hot / agitated / exuberant». When Aretha sings "I’m so excited, my knees are shaking" in the bridge section, it’s much easier to suspend disbelief than when Dusty does the same: as much as she clearly loves that gospel-bred passion, she does not have it in her blood. It’s a good enough substitute when you have nothing else around (like, say, the average horny British kid circa 1965), but when you’re spoiled for choice, the concept of «Aretha coming up Dusty» is pretty much useless. (Running so much ahead, though, I must say that a song like ‘Son Of A Preacher Man’, with its sexuality less flamboyant and more subtly titillating, is a far better fit for Dusty than Aretha — there’s no overall preference here, everything should be taken on a case-by-case basis).
Carole King coming up Dusty: Although Aretha actually covered ‘Oh No! Not My Baby’ as well (in 1970), that would be a long time in the future and kinda funkified — on the whole, Dusty fares much better with Brill Building material because, well, it’s basically «white» music (I use this in the cultural sense, not racial, of course), and although the first successful recording was by Maxine Brown in 1964, Dusty’s rendition is probably closer to the way King originally intended it (as confirmed by comparison with Carole’s own performance from 1980). It’s a subtly tragic song about refusing to believe the obvious — "you’re not like those other boys who play with hearts like they were toys", yeah right — and Dusty gets it just right, mixing the proper amount of desperation, hope, and hysterics. Then on the second side of the album, she repeats the same feat with a fast one, literally wiping the floor with Betty Everett’s original 1964 recording of ‘I Can’t Hear You’, now that there’s a few extra inches of muscular meat on every part of the arrangement. Lulu’s version from the same year is a bit of an acquired taste (though some might take her grizzled raspiness as a nice «punkish» touch), and Carole’s own recording on Writer (1970) is slowed down and funkified, going for a more contemporary vibe — which leaves Dusty’s version as more or less the definitive one.
Burt Bacharach coming up Dusty: Well, it was only a matter of time (three tracks, to be precise) before a Bacharach-David composition found its inevitable way to a Dusty Springfield album. Strangely, it’s just this one, ‘Long After Tonight Is Over’, a recent hit for little-known soul singer Jimmy Radcliffe that unexpectedly charted in the UK and led to Jimmy being invited to perform on British TV — which is probably where Dusty got the song from. I am deeply alergic to Burt Bacharach and couldn’t care less about his songwriting genius as long as it was all in the name of soapy schmaltz, but the build-up in this one ain’t bad, and at least I’m mildly amused how, once again, Dusty punches the original soul singer into the corner with more power, emotion, believability, and even goddamn elementary breath control. Oh well, at least there’s no direct competition with Dionne Warwick on this one.
Ritchie Valens coming up Dusty: Whose ridiculous idea was it to have Dusty Springfield perform her own version of ‘La Bamba’? This is totally stupid, and shows how low one can fall when putting all of one’s eggs in one basket. The entire thing about ‘La Bamba’ is that, with its rugged distorted riffage, it was trying to turn a Latin dance number into rock’n’roll; here, it’s like "oh, I bet can outsing that poor wonderful kid, too, as long as they just keep blowing those pretty horns instead of all that ugly fuzz!" and no, doing ‘La Bamba’ this way is like performing wart removal surgery on Lemmy’s face. Can’t be done, shan’t be done, can I have some more Burt Bacharach instead, please?
Tony Bennett coming up Dusty: ‘Who Can I Turn To?’ is probably mostly associated with Tony Bennett. Dusty Springfield cannot outsing Tony Bennett. Maybe she cannot outsing Dionne Warwick, either. Heck, she might not even outsing Shirley Bassey. But the bottomline is: why should we care? It’s just more schmaltzy melodrama. I certainly think Dusty Springfield can do better than competing with Tony Bennett.
Hard bop coming up Dusty: Ah, but now we’re talking. To be fair, this lyrical version of ‘Doodlin’ is not so much a cover of the classic Horace Silver original as it is of the then-recent pop re-arrangement by Baby Washington (which, in itself, inherited the reinterpretation by Jon Hendricks), but once again Dusty improves on her predecessors, showing that she can handle a rythmically complex, almost «rappy» vocal challenge as fine as anything else. There are, of course, more complex and demanding vocal jazz renditions, e.g. by Sarah Vaughan, but if we’re talking about smoothing and streamlining the rhythms to make the whole thing more poppy and danceable, Dusty does a great job highlighting the song’s sunny, nonchalant, oh-so-Sixties attitude of "enjoying procrastinating". (There’s another Baby Washington cover later on, ‘That’s How Heartaches Are Made’, but it’s a much less interesting slow pop ballad where the organ solo in the middle is more curious than any of the actual vocals).
UK pop-rock coming up Dusty: There’s quite a conspicuous lack of contemporary material by British Invasion bands on Dusty’s albums from that period, even if she did spend quite a bit of time in their companies while touring or doing her TV shows — perhaps due to the idea that this kind of music was, after all, a bit too «juvenile» for her image. One curious semi-exception is ‘If It Don’t Work Out’, a song that Dusty asked Rod Argent of The Zombies to write for her while they were touring together (there’s a lady of culture for you, singling out the one guy in the pop-rock business who was already using refined chords in his writing way back in 1964). The Zombies themselves would cut a version of this song years later, during their short-lived reunion in 1969, by which time, of course, it already sounded a little dated — but this rendition is all but perfect for 1965, even if it had to add plenty of strings and backing vocals to make it «come up Dusty». Although she does not possess the natural misery of Colin Blunstone’s voice to make this cute little hymn to anxiety-over-rekindling-an-old-romance, the sheer power of the voice almost makes up for it. I, for one, would have no problem if all those Bacharach songs on Dusty’s albums were swapped with Rod Argent songs.
Randy Newman coming up Dusty: ...nah, not really. This is a very young, much too serious Randy Newman churning out decent, but generic love ballads with just a slight touch of paranoia for whoever might take a liking to them. ‘I’ve Been Wrong Before’ is one of those, first recorded by Cilla Black and then picked up by Dusty, and frankly, I’m not smitten with either version and cannot even decide who of the two does it better. Honestly, I just close my eyes and imagine it done by Randy himself, with his little-Jewish-loser attitude, and I already like my fantasy more than objective reality.
I could probably extend this account to indefinite length, seeing as how there are also all those songs from 1965 that ended up on US-only albums, but this is already getting tedious, and no matter how far we go, the degree of consistency would remain more or less the same. The overall message that we get to take home with us is that, compared to her earliest pop days, by 1965 Dusty seems to have gained a little «weight» (purely figurative, of course!), with more emphasis on slow melodramatic soul balladry and less on sprightly dance-pop numbers, though the ratios are still comparable to some extent; what she had not gained was the emergence of a special kind of «Dusty Springfield sound» — Johnny Franz’s production is solid, but stereotypical, and while the producer and the singer do succeed in tightening up, beefing up, and «adulting-up», so to say, many of the selected cover choices, it’s, well, not absolutely necessary for anybody to enjoy them specifically in these polished versions.
There might, in fact, be something subtly ironic in the fact that the second of Dusty’s singles in 1965, written specially for her by American songwriters Buddy Kaye and Bea Verdi, was titled ‘In The Middle Of Nowhere’. It’s quite an exciting and catchy pop-rocker, but its basic style is that of Martha & The Vandellas (the backing vocals are like 100% Vandellas — think ‘Heatwave’, etc.) — and absolutely nothing other than Dusty’s usual powerhouse of a voice stands out to make the overall sound preferable to an authentic Motown rendition.
The theoretical idea that Dusty Springfield was there to creatively and intelligently bridge the gap between American soul and European pop is seductive as hell — but more so on paper than in reality. As we can see by Dusty’s UK popularity in 1964-1965, Britain adored her as its own resident «queen of soul», and she probably did more to popularize R&B from overseas than anybody else at the time, yet it was still a substitute; America, on the other hand, logically saw Dusty as a relatively minor and superfluous piece of import from the British Invasion, and actually cared more for her as a messenger of the European tradition — no wonder that she did not score any hits on the US market in 1965, and only managed to break through once more with the Italian-flavored ‘You Don’t Have To Say You Love Me’ the following year.
In retrospect, there’s no harm whatsoever to get some kicks out of Dusty Springfield, the 1965 edition, but little reason to insist that anything within that edition was in any way «important» for purely musical, rather than social, merits. It goes without saying that if you simply go nuts for that kind of voice, Dusty was in peak form on every single track (yes, even ‘La Bamba’!) and it’s just one non-stop sonic orgasm, track after track. But to my ears, it’s not the kind of voice that reveals any hidden depths of emotional meaning, and it’s certainly not enough to redeem a mediocre song or a song with not enough creative ideas to justify the production of a new cover version. When The Beatles covered Motown, they always made sure to give the covered song a new musical identity; when Dusty covers Motown, she and Franz just go along the lines of «oh, this particular vocal / piano / string note felt a little thin on the original record, let’s tighten it up! Show those wussy Yanks the true meaning of good old-timey British discipline!» It makes sense (and I’m pretty sure that George Martin, on his own, shared exactly the same ideology), but it was still the house that Berry Gordy built — Dusty and Franz were merely giving it a brand new coat of paint to raise the nominal property value.
Only Solitaire reviews: Dusty Springfield
I don't know, I don't remember Dusty that much. I was young in the early 60s. But dam, I remember Shirley Bassey as you mention. This article is powerful, George, Just as you always write. I read you for the satisfaction of good writing even if I don't know the artist well.
"I am deeply alergic to Burt Bacharach and couldn’t care less about his songwriting genius as long as it was all in the name of soapy schmaltz."
You always make my day, George.