Bonnie Raitt's Career Ended In 1986
Bonnie Raitt's career ended back in 1986. Her long-time record company Warner Bros. had sat on her album Nine Lives for a few years, refusing to release it. Until finally, they put out an updated version with little fanfare, resulting in poor sales — after which Warners dropped Raitt from their label.
Raitt wanted to tour in support of the new album, but didn't have enough money to pay for a full band. So she went on a solo tour, playing acoustic guitar, unable to do justice to the full blues-rock sound of that record. Around this time, her romantic relationship fell apart, and she was struggling to get sober. As she told Rolling Stone in 1990, "I stayed on the road, playing acoustic shows, but I was broken emotionally and physically, spiritually and financially."
Around this time, Prince was interested in signing her to his Paisley Park label, and writing some songs for her. As told to Rolling Stone, Raitt told Prince that "I was interested if it was a true collaboration and not just me singing his music — if we could meet somewhere in the middle." A true collaboration between Prince and Raitt would have been incredible, as would a collaboration between Prince and Joni Mitchell, or Miles Davis. But in all three cases, Prince provided finished demo tracks for the other artists to overdub their own parts, rather than working together in the studio.
In the case of Bonnie Raitt, Prince gave her updated versions of songs he'd written years earlier for his earliest attempt at founding a girl group, the Hookers. (The songs were "Promise to be True," "Jealous Girl," "There's Something I Like About Being Your Fool" and "I Need a Man." You can hear Prince's versions on the Super Deluxe Edition of Sign 'O' The Times.) I like those songs a lot, but they're not really in Bonnie Raitt's wheelhouse — and they were also not in her vocal range, as she told Rolling Stone. In the end Raitt's schedules and Prince's clashed, and she didn't want to go back to Warner Bros., which was distributing Paisley Park Records.
(Apparently Prince did ask Raitt to teach him how to play slide guitar, though.)
By 1987, when Raitt was considering signing with Prince, she'd been making records for sixteen years, starting when she was twenty-one. She released a series of brilliant albums in the 1970s and early '80s, scoring one hit with a 1977 cover version of the song "Runaway." What I love about Raitt's 1970s work is its stylistic range. As she told Guitar World recently, "I can't limit myself to one style of music." There's a very short list of artists who can cover Joni Mitchell without embarrassing themselves, and Raitt is right there at the top — but she also did some extraordinary covers of New Orleans impresario Allen Toussaint.
A lot of Raitt's early recordings have a big, expansive sound, with layers of horns, slide guitar and piano coming together to fill the high end of your speakers — listen to 1971's "Finest Lovin' Man" or 1972's "Give It Up or Let Me Go." It's the kind of dense, chewy sound that you'd usually expect from heavy synth and electronic effects, but it's pure analog — I get the same feeling of analog bigness from early 1940s Lionel Hampton jazz recordings like "Flying Home."
I've been listening a lot to her 1972 album Give It Up, where she effortlessly shuttles back and forth between Blues and Folk modes, her voice pivoting from high and bell-like with a touch of vibrato ("Too Long at the Fair"), to brassy and expansive, with a deeper undertone ("Love Me Like a Man"). It reminds me a bit of the early Rufus and Chaka Khan albums from the same era, when the band was still trying to do folk-rock and blues alongside heavy funk — Chaka Khan effortlessly shifting from the sweet treble of "I Finally Found You" to the howl of Stevie Wonder's "Maybe Your Baby" is a similar amount of versatility/virtuosity.
(The early 1970s seem to have been a moment when the walls between musical genres — and the racial segregation that lay behind them — seemed to open up a bit, only to slam shut in the late 70s, when both Bobby Womack and Millie Jackson recorded country albums and were punished for it by an unforgiving marketplace.)
A lot of artists whose careers started around 1970 or 1971 were finished by the late 1980s, as tastes shifted and the music industry's ageism caught up to them. But not Bonnie Raitt.
I was watching this 2012 BBC concert, and I was really struck by what she says right before she plays "Nick of Time," the title track from her 1989 comeback album that crushed the Grammy Awards and made her a superstar:
I wrote this song when I was feeling a little nervous about turning forty. Seems like an awful long time ago.
The thing about Nick of Time is that it's a brilliant album, but also that Raitt hustled to make it work: she got in with rising-star producer Don Was, she got Dennis Quaid to appear in the music video for her first single, "Thing Called Love," and she obsessed over every drum effect and sound.
"Nobody expected it to sell well," Raitt told Billboard in 2019. "They just said, 'We're not going to pay a lot of money for you, so just make a record that you want.'"
You probably know what happened next: A string of hits, including one song so massive ("Something To Talk About") that it spawned a movie of the same title. Another song, "I Can't Make You Love Me," has been covered by tons of people including.... Prince.
(As a sidebar, I once read a 1973 interview with Stevie Wonder where he was asked to comment on the fact that some music journalists had just proclaimed that Aretha Franklin's career was over. As I recall, his response was along the lines of, "Aretha gets to decide when it's over.")
One thing I love about Raitt's 2000s albums is her frequent collaborations with Jon Cleary, a British keyboard player who was heavily influenced by New Orleans musicians like Toussaint, and who helped push her music in a funkier direction. (Listen to "Gnawin' On It" or "Monkey Business.") I literally just found out that Cleary recorded an album of Toussaint covers, which I'm now going to pick up.
Bonnie Raitt left Capitol Records in the mid-2000s, and started releasing albums on her own private label — which would usually lead to smaller sales, with records being bought only by her hardcore fans. But her first self-released album, 2012's Slipstream, was also her highest-charting album in years, hitting number six on the Billboard 200. (Slipstream is probably my favorite Bonnie Raitt album of all time, with its ultra-sarcastic lyrics and a harder political edge than much of her earlier work.) She's continued to win Grammy's, including "Best Song" a few years ago, and her most recent album was number one on six different Billboard charts. Pretty good for someone whose career came to a halt nearly forty years ago.
This has turned out to be a very long newsletter — sorry, I got carried away! — but I wanted to close with some lessons from Bonnie Raitt's career.
1) There are no straight lines. One reason I hate the idea of careers (at least for creative people) is because of this idea of a smooth upward progression — which isn't my experience, or that of most other people I know. Making art and surviving are messy and frantic, and there are going to be disasters and low points. If you're expecting a steady climb, you won't be ready for the occasional mudslide.
2) Not every great opportunity is right for you. In 1987, making a record with Prince probably seemed like Raitt's last chance — but it might've been a huge mistake, and not just because Prince wasn't offering Raitt his best songs. Paisley Park Records put out a ton of albums with zero promotion in the late 1980s, by artists like Dale Bozzio (former lead singer of Missing Persons). As Alan Leeds (who was president of Paisley Park Records) put it in an interview, Warner Bros. was upset that Prince kept putting out albums by "legacy artists past their prime."
3) Ageism is fucking bullshit. So yeah... the notion of artists being "past their prime" is beyond toxic. Creative people aren't baseball players! A lot of my favorite writers, musicians and artists have created their best work later in life, and there are real benefits to having a lot of experiments and screw-ups in your rear-view mirror. When I was in my late twenties, I used to obsess about the notion that I was running out of time to make something of myself — as if I would be doomed to permanent failure if I didn't succeed as a writer by the age of thirty-five or forty. I've since learned better: for every writer who hits it big in their late teens, there are plenty of us who struggle in obscurity for years before finally reaching an audience.
4) Be true to yourself — but never quit experimenting. In many ways, Raitt's sound has remained consistent for the past fifty years. But she's also kept trying new stuff, like her funky collaborations with Cleary and the slew of sombre songs about death and loss she wrote (or co-wrote) for her latest album Just Like That... I feel like the secret of longevity is always finding fresh ways to be yourself.
Allen Toussaint Songs I Think Bonnie Raitt Should Cover
I mentioned above that Raitt covered a couple of songs by Allen Toussaint back in the day, and her frequent collaborator Jon Cleary released a whole Toussaint cover album. But here are some mostly lesser-known Toussaint compositions I think Raitt might want to tackle:
King Biscuit Boy, "Mind Over Matter." This plaintive song from a lover who's "wasting my time," drenched in harmonica and horns, is just crying out for some slide guitar.
John Mayall, "Just Knowing You is a Pleasure." One of Toussaint's trademark sweet ballads, along the lines of "With You In Mind," but more wistful. Honestly, half of Mayall's Toussaint-produced album Notice to Appear would be ideal for Raitt, including the ultra-sarcastic "Boy Most Likely to Succeed," "Hale to the Man Who Lives Alone" and "Mess of Love."
Allen Toussaint & Elvis Costello, "Broken Promise Land." Co-written by Costello, this gorgeous song has a sharp political bite.
Patti LaBelle, "Give It Up (The Dawning of Rejection)". It's a disco song, but slow it down and you've got a classic rocker.
Wallace Johnson, "I Can Stop." This whole album, Whoever's Thrilling You, is full of incredible Blues compositions by Toussaint. But "I Can Stop" utterly breaks me.
Albert King, "We All Wanna Boogie." No, it's not a dance song — it's a snarky protest song.
Allen Toussaint, "Viva La Money." Cleary already covered this harsh takedown of economic inequality, but Raitt would crush it.
Etta James, "Wheel of Fire." It's a slow burn – until it reaches the bridge and goes up in a full inferno.
Z.Z. Hill, "Whoever's Thrilling You (Is Killing Me)". This mournful Blues song used to be a standard — Rufus & Chaka Khan covered it, in fact — but now it feels brand new again.
My Stuff
The next episode of Our Opinions Are Correct comes out on Thursday, and it's one of my favorites. Stay tuned!
My next book review column in the Washington Post should be out in the next few days.
We're doing a special bonus Trans Nerd Meet Up on Feb. 25 at the Game Parlour on Irving St. in San Francisco. No need to RSVP, just show up!
You can buy two trade paperback collections featuring Escapade, the trans superhero I co-created: New Mutants Vol. 4 and New Mutants: Lethal Legion. If you want the very first appearance of Escapade, you need to find a copy of the 2022 pride issue, which is on Marvel Unlimited but otherwise (sob) out of print.
I've also written some books! The Unstoppable trilogy is a fun young-adult space fantasy with loads of ambient queerness. Never Say You Can't Survive is a guide to writing yourself out of hard times. Even Greater Mistakes is a weird, silly, scary, cute collection of stories.