Chapel of Love

One of the great things about working on this book is the research. This is one of the more inspired pieces of music journalism I've read in a long time. I present it to you here unedited and without permission. It's long, so go get yourself a snack.

Magazine Desk; 6
The Power of Love
By Rob Hoerburger
4910 words
20 June 1993
The New York Times
Late Edition - Final
20
English
Copyright 1993 The New York Times Company. All Rights Reserved.

She had to keep the Mercedes out of sight.

The '74 burgundy sedan with the polished wooden dashboard was the last vestige of a time when Darlene Love was Somebody, and moreover, the only transportation she had. But she knew it would make her employers uncomfortable, so she parked it half a mile down the road and walked the rest of the way to the exclusive residence in Los Angeles where she was to report for "day work," which could earn her a fast $50. "When you go to clean someone's house," she says, "they don't want to know that you have nice things."

Sometimes the grown children of her employers would look at her quizzically, but never long enough to realize that a member of rock-and-roll royalty had come to scrub the grout between their bathroom tiles. If she had broken into song during her chores, perhaps she might have jarred some memories, but even then it's unlikely that anyone could have identified her, because her name was never listed on her biggest hits ("He's a Rebel," "He's Sure the Boy I Love"), now almost 20 years behind her. "Luckily, no one ever said, 'Wait a minute, aren't you Darlene Love?' " she says. She made sure she kept her head down.

On that day in 1982, a year removed from her last regular singing job and her comfortable life in Pasadena, the woman whom the critic Dave Marsh ranked just behind Aretha Franklin in the firmament of female rock singers was happy to have any kind of work at all. Every now and then, though, she would get into that Mercedes and her past would blind-side her: "If I turned on the radio and heard one of my songs," she says, "I would stop the car and break down and cry."

A DECADE LATER, THE dressing room in the Bottom Line, the chummy boite in Greenwich Village, could stand a good vacuuming, but on a spring evening Darlene Love is not there to perform that chore; instead, she's waiting for a rehearsal of "Portrait of a Singer," a revue of her life and career that could finally end the 30-year detour she has had from center stage. Since February, the show has been attracting steady crowds who may recognize her from the "Lethal Weapon" movies, in which she plays Danny Glover's unculinary wife, but who seem to be unprepared for the show's not-so-subtle subtext: that Love's voice is as embedded in the fabric of rock-and-roll as Eric Clapton's guitar or Bob Dylan's lyrics. The typical response to each song, measured in a chorus of stage whispers, is, "She sang that?"

"Nobody even knew I existed," Love says. "Only my family and the musicians knew it was me singing on those songs."

"Those songs" constitute an essential honor roll of 1960's pop: "Rockin' Robin'," "Chain Gang," "Johnny Angel," "Be My Baby," "Shoop Shoop Song," "The Little Old Lady (From Pasadena)," "Monday, Monday," "You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin' " and perhaps 200 others that Love sang and, in many cases, arranged backing vocals on. She was also the lead singer on a passel of legendary singles produced by Phil Spector, rock-and-roll's mad auteur, who gave Love her name but often neglected to put it on the record labels. By the time the show is over, the audience could walk out realizing that Darlene Love sings on more dusty disks in their collections than the Beatles.

As the band works out a few bars of "Monster Mash" (she sang on that one too), Love talks of the Bottom Line show as her last shot at the career she has for so long deserved. But hers is hardly a Judgment Day countenance: her face is still a wide ray of midsummer hope, her tapered figure the envy of the mid-lifers who sweat to the oldies with Richard Simmons. In other words, it's impossible to look at her and believe that her biggest hit was climbing the charts during the Cuban missile crisis. "Darlene can't lie," says the songwriter Barry Mann. "She's at least 65 years old." Love, a grandmother of four, admits to 51, but swats away an inquiry about her beauty secret: "It's nothing you could print anyway."

By far Love's finest -- and most age-inappropriate -- feature is her voice, still one of rock's great clarions, a heated exchange between gospel great Marian Anderson and a backtalking teen-ager. Aretha may have been a few degrees more febrile, but Love had just as proud an instrument -- simultaneously noisy and rejoicing, jarring and reassuring, like church bells that swing. And while most other 60's divas now rely on good intentions and the failing memories of adoring fans, Love is afraid of neither volume nor heights: she can still flood a melody, not to mention a few city blocks. As one confused British producer who saw "Portrait of a Singer" said: "This woman is so good, the real Darlene Love must have been amazing."

It's fitting that "Portrait" has come along in a season when the music industry is honoring its legends and redressing old wounds: Clapton's sackful of Grammys, Dylan's star-studded, $150-a-pop for-profit tribute at Madison Square Garden. Love, meanwhile, has to settle for a piece of $17.50, less than the going price of summer stock, in a venue a little smaller than the average poolroom. Not that she's complaining: the low years, when she was not only working as a maid but helping run a friend's dry-cleaning establishment and singing on cruise ships, aren't so far behind her. But the bitterness isn't completely buried, even when she's joking. "When I finally do win my Grammy," she says, "I don't think I'm going to have anybody to thank."

HE WAS THIS LITTLE bitty man, and I didn't think much of him," Darlene Love says of her first meeting with Phil Spector. Thirty years later, she reins in her temper when she speaks of the producer who may have cost her superstardom, not to mention untold sums in royalties; she could be remembering a grade-school prankster who used to dip her pigtails in ink. The moral high ground provides some needed distance. "I knew Phil before he was crazy," she says. "Back then, I thought I was as big as he was."

She was almost right. In the early 60's, Love -- still known by her given name, Darlene Wright -- was just about the hardest-working background singer in Los Angeles. The eldest daughter of a Pentecostal preacher, she had joined a group called the Blossoms at 16, and soon they were blending in, Zelig-like, with any kind of lead singer. (That is, they could sound white or black.) They sang on records by Duane Eddy and Jackie DeShannon, Bobby Darin and James Darren, even Doris Day and Gene Autry. One afternoon when Love was in high school, Sam Cooke picked her up in his Cadillac convertible to take her to a recording session.

Meanwhile, Spector (who declined to be interviewed for this article) was well on his way to being considered, by turns, the American Mozart or an all-America psychotic; his records seemed to bear out both sobriquets. In the space of a three-minute single, he would set off an avalanche, typically with spiked horn solos, drumbeats that could split rails and a thicket of overdubbed voices. Whether the songs were made for dancing ("Da Doo Ron Ron"), making out ("Be My Baby," "Then He Kissed Me") or inducing emotional paralysis ("You've Lost That Lovin' Feel in' "), he kept his teen-age charges surrounded, with what later became known as the Wall of Sound.

Those masterpieces were still ahead of him when he met Darlene in the summer of '62; she was 20, he was 21 and needed a singer fast. Spector had found a song he believed would transmogrify him into a rock-and-roll deity. The only problem was that a competing version was about to be released and his regular group, the Crystals, was unavailable for the session.
He called in Darlene and the Blossoms, who demanded triple scale for the record (about $3,000). Spector agreed, with the proviso that the Crystals' name and not theirs would appear on the label; radio stations would be more likely to play a song by a group with a track record than one by an unknown. Darlene would receive no royalties, which didn't especially concern her at the time. "The song was cute," she says now, "but I didn't think it would be much of a hit."

That wouldn't be the last time she underestimated Phil Spector. By November, the song, "He's a Rebel," was No. 1, and with it, Spector commandeered the rudder of pop music, which he wouldn't begin to relinquish until the Beatles arrived in early '64. In "He's a Rebel," Spector deployed his usual arsenal, topping it off with a lead vocal from Darlene that was equal parts her father's pulpit and Rosa Parks. A more muscular and defiant voice was not to be heard on any rock-and-roll record.

Except everybody thought it was the Crystals. Darlene, who quickly revised her opinion of the song after hearing the finished product, was now eager to record with Spector under her own name. Spector, meanwhile, was eager to keep Darlene in his stable, but was not about to let her outshine him.

The shenanigans began immediately after she signed a seven-year contract. Darlene was quickly back in the Top 10 with a PG-13 version of "Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah," paired with a male singer in a prefab aggregate called Bob B. Soxx and the Blue Jeans. Spector assured her that the next record ("He's Sure the Boy I Love") would be hers alone, an impression Darlene held until the first time she heard it on the radio, when the disk jockey announced the new song by "the Crystals." Then Spector pulled her lead vocal off "Da Doo Ron Ron," supposedly to get a more innocent sound (for which he ended up going back to the original Crystals). But it may also have been punishment for the grief Darlene was giving him about the constant bait and switch.
"Darlene was the only one who stood up to Phil," Sonny Bono told Mark Ribowsky in his biography of Spector, "He's a Rebel." Bono, Spector's chief gofer, was trying to persuade him to record his 17-year-old girlfriend, Cherilyn Sarkisian. "Phil would just back everybody down, but Darlene didn't give a [ expletive ] . She was tough."

Recalls Darlene: "The singers were nothing to Phil. He used to say it was all about 'his music.' So I'd say, 'If it's all about your music, why aren't you making instrumentals?' "

Spector finally relented and by mid-1963 started giving her solo credit on her records, but not before tinkering with her identity one more time -- renaming her Darlene Love. She outdid herself on "Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)" with a lead vocal that had enough juice to light the tree in Rockefeller Center, but by then Spector was paying more attention to Ronnie Bennett, the lead singer of his newest group, the Ronettes. An 18-year-old go-go dancer from Spanish Harlem, she had a girlish mewl that was no match for Love's Almighty Fire. But Spector had designs on more than Ronnie's voice, and Love became little more than an afterthought. (The ultimate insult was that the other Ronettes couldn't really sing and, in fact, on "Ronettes" records like "Be My Baby" and "Walking in the Rain," didn't. The backgrounds were provided by Darlene Love and the Blossoms.)

"In the beginning, Ronnie, Cher and I would hang around together," Love remembers. "After Phil left the studio one day, we went around the corner to get a hamburger. Phil came back and he went nuts. When we came back he said: 'I told her not to leave. I gave her comic books and a ball and jacks to amuse herself.' After that, I wasn't allowed to hang around with Ronnie anymore."

With Spector ignoring her, Love took refuge in her backup work, if for nothing else than to pay the bills; she says that in all her years with Spector she received only one royalty statement for her own records, which listed deductions for things like "cartage" -- delivery of musical instruments to the recording studio. Love recalls Spector's handwritten words at the bottom of the statement: "Hopefully there will be something left next time."

Love was hardly alone. "Not everyone had Col. Tom Parker to protect them in those days," says Jackie DeShannon, herself a veteran of royalty wars in the 60's. "We were naive: we signed the contracts and made the records and thought we would get paid. Artists today have much more protection."

Love got some measure of revenge when she and the Blossoms landed a regular spot on the television show "Shindig," where they sang behind Aretha, Marvin Gaye, the Rolling Stones and Jerry Lee Lewis, among others. A few record executives tried to sign them, but Spector wouldn't let them go. And Love was still convinced he would come back to her as soon as he found the right song, one that would re-create the magic of "He's a Rebel."

That song might have been "River Deep-Mountain High," the musical and emotional demands of which were far beyond Ronnie. Spector gave the song to Tina Turner instead, proclaiming that it would be his "monument." When it crashed at No. 88 on the charts, Love knew the end was near.

"I was happy in one sense, like 'Ha, ha, it would have done better if you had made it with me,' " Love says now, "but I was also sad that he was going to make this great record and didn't want me to sing lead. I had been a part of everything he had done."

Spector retreated to his mansion after the failure of "River Deep-Mountain High," finally marrying Ronnie Bennett in 1968 and emerging only on rare occasions. Love was left with no identity as a solo act, and the teen-age melodramas she had perfected were being supplanted by a trippier sound -- it's hard to imagine "Wait Till My Bobby Gets Home" playing at Woodstock. So background singing became her ticket out of the Spector era.

BACKUP SINGERS ARE sometimes looked upon as the less-talented, less-loved siblings of pop music. But by sacrificing the spotlight, they are also free of the glare that goes with it, and the pay is steady. Love and the Blossoms hit the road with the Righteous Brothers -- Bill Medley and Bobby Hatfield -- who had scored a monster hit with "You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin'." While the Blossoms weren't the headliners, they also didn't have to worry about paying the band, hotel bills or cartage fees. And for Love, there were other benefits: she and Medley, both of whose marriages had hit the skids, became lovers.

That Medley was white and Love black was of no concern to them, but there were whispers from managers about the wisdom of going public. "It was as if they were telling Bill it was O.K. to have sex with a black woman, but you can't fall in love with her," Love says. Medley adds: "It was harder for me, because I wasn't used to dealing with racism. Darlene had been dealing with it her whole life."

In the end, they were divided not by race but, Love says, by Medley's insistence that she stop touring if they were married. "I said, 'What is it that you would like me to do?' I had two kids to support." (Marcus and Chawn, now 32 and 28. A third son, Jason, was born in 1974.) The Righteous Brothers tour ended and the Blossoms took off for Vegas, where they worked with Elvis, Nancy Sinatra and Tom Jones.

"Elvis was very shy, except when it came to gospel music," Love says. "I was surprised to hear about all the prescription drugs, because he always talked about his body as a temple. I always say, I knew the other Elvis, just like I knew the other Phil Spector."

By the early 70's, Love, now remarried, settled into a 10-year stint as Dionne Warwick's main background singer, which is sort of like Frank Sinatra backing up Tony Bennett. But, as has often, and tragically, been the case, Love's ego failed her. "Darlene never focused enough on herself, never wanted to go for the throat," says the songwriter Barry Mann. Love does not disagree, but defends herself anyway. "Singing backup for Dionne Warwick was no put-down for me," she says. "Besides, I got paid very well." (Love salutes Warwick in her show with a blood-and-guts version of "Don't Make Me Over" that could convince Warwick not to give up her late-night job on the Psychic Friends Network.)

Love did make one stab at a solo career during this period, signing with Philadelphia International Records, the Motown of the early 70's. Just as sessions were under way, the owners called her in with what they thought was good news and bad news: they had decided to exercise a clause that said they could sell her contract at any time. That was the bad news. But, they said, they had sold her contract to Phil Spector (who just happened to have the same lawyer and knew about the clause). Love kept waiting to hear the good news.

"So there I was, back in the studio with Phil, and John Lennon was there, and I think Phil was trying to impress him, so he started pulling stuff that he never pulled with me before, having me do things over and over for eight hours, standing with his back to me and pressing the control button and saying, 'Sing, Darlene.' I was pregnant with my last child and finally I just put on my coat and walked out."

HOLLYWOOD AND Vine may be the most famous intersection in America, but not for the pawn shop hidden a few doors down. That's what Darlene Love was looking for in 1982, armed with five rings, a gold bracelet and a pearl necklace -- the remaining spoils, along with the Mercedes, of her 20 years in the record business. Love got $800 for the haul -- enough to stop imposing on friends like Warwick and the producer Lou Adler, who were offering sympathy and sofas.

Love's financial problems intensified after she finally (Continued on page 47) decided to pursue a solo career full time. "I turned 40," she explains. "I had got lazy with Dionne, and who knew how much longer she was going to be touring anyway?" But Love didn't realize that by then the music business was not only post-Phil Spector but post-disco and post-new wave. She was also unprepared for the traumatic expenses of going solo, like hiring a band and making videos.

The financial strains cost her a husband and a house. She took any job she could while she tried to jump-start her career, performing the grunt work usually reserved for neophytes and no-talents. She landed a booking on a cruise line only after she convinced the director that she was the real Darlene Love. "It was easy for him to say, 'You're Darlene Love, why do you want to sing on a boat?' But I was the one who couldn't get a job."

While on board, she received a message that the Bottom Line was preparing a show based on the songs of Ellie Greenwich, who had written many of the Love-Spector hits. Called "Leader of the Pack," the show crammed 33 songs and about 20 singers -- including a now-disembarked Love -- onto the club's tabletop stage. In the wake of "The Big Chill," the notices and business were so good that it might still be playing there today.

Then Greenwich decided to bring it uptown, and Love went along, thinking her second big break had finally come: she was now going to be a headliner on Broadway. But once more she was cruelly disappointed.

"I was abused all over again," she says. "They promised my name would be above the title, but the next thing I knew I had been pushed down, and Patrick Cassidy and Dinah Manoff" -- who played the young Greenwich and her husband Jeff Barry -- "were being pumped up. At the Bottom Line, it was fun going to work every day, but on Broadway it was back to being a job." Other than Love's performance, the show's magic did not survive the trip north; "Leader of the Pack" was one of the big Broadway bombs of the 1985 season.

It did, however, renew Love's acquaintance with Cher, who took her on tour for two and a half years (another backup stint, like Frank Sinatra singing behind Dean Martin). It also introduced her to the film director Richard Donner, who was a year away from making the first "Lethal Weapon" movie. There was another Broadway disaster, the musical version of "Carrie," and another round of "despite the presence of the incandescent Darlene Love" reviews. She got her rings, bracelet and necklace out of hock. But there were still jewels left to reclaim.

THE FAITHFUL gather at the Bottom Line on Tuesdays -- the nights that "Portrait of a Singer" plays, with a zeal somewhere between that of a revival meeting and "The Rocky Horror Picture Show." "Portrait" has brought out Love contemporaries like Ronnie Spector (who divorced Phil in 1974), DeShannon (who has a new song in the show) and Lesley Gore, all of whom hope to resurrect their own dormant careers. Art, a cosmetics salesman from Philadelphia, stays for both sets and then hops back on Amtrak, which gets him home at 5 A.M. At last count, he had seen the show 36 times. And there are new converts: a lawyer born four years after "He's a Rebel" was No. 1 says, "I want to take out that Spector guy."

Love has also won the hearts of perhaps the toughest crowd of all -- the band members -- who can't decide what overwhelms them more, Love's still-soaring talent or the ego that shuts down every second she's not singing. "She's so approachable," says Larry Saltzman, a guitarist who impersonates Duane Eddy in the show. "Then you get on stage with her and it's like being five feet from a nuclear reactor."

Adds Bette Sussman, the show's musical director, who executes hairpin gospel turns on the piano with the abandon of a roller-derby queen: "The thing about Darlene is that I get to spend some time behind a real piano." When Sussman plays for younger singers, she says, "it's mostly synthesizers."

The show does ask a hard question, perhaps unintentionally: Is Love too real for today's marketplace? "Portrait" balances her classics with a half-dozen new songs that are, to a couplet and 64th note, smart and honest and catchy, and on Love's lips more of all of the above. But today record companies get into million-dollar bidding wars over grunge bands. As for Love's own predilections, suffice it to say that her musical sensibility is closer to the era of Nancy Sinatra than that of the Trash Can Sinatras.

Still, the easiest way to raise her mostly sluggish hackles is to ask her why she doesn't have a recording contract now. "I still sound decent," she says, "and I don't look like a fat slob. I don't want to hear that I'm too old."

Says Medley, with whom she is still close: "Everybody's pulling for her, but I guess that's what makes show business, why some people get 9 or 10 breaks and others don't." After all these years, he says, Love is still "a huge star waiting to happen."

Saltzman says it's a crime that record executives are too young to understand how important a singer Love is. "They're all out looking for the next Lisa Stansfield," he says. "They don't realize that Darlene's a big part of American culture." Love's period of pop music, he says, "was like the time of Beethoven and Mozart in classical."

Love did make one album in 1988, "Paint Another Picture," the first solo album of her career. It was promoted for about five minutes and buried under reviews that said, "Can there ever be another Darlene Love record without Phil Spector." "I've got all those reviews at home," she says. "Oooh, they make me so mad."

"BACK TO MONO," A four-CD Phil Spector retrospective, was released in November 1991. Darlene Love sang lead on 15 of the 73 songs (though only 11 are credited to her outright) and sang and supervised the background vocals for at least three dozen others. The collection is one of the few "box sets" to be certified gold for $1 million in sales. Spector sent Love a gold record, but there was nothing negotiable attached to it.

"That thing is always sold out at Tower Records," says Love's third husband, Alton Allison, a floor refinisher she married in 1984. "Unfortunately, every time Darlene does a show it sells more."

Says Love: "Who needs a gold record? I've got plenty of them on my wall. There's nothing like a check." Love does admit that she owes a lot to Phil Spector and the durability of the songs they made together. But even now, it is awkward when they cross paths, as they have at several Rock-and-Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremonies. "He makes it hard, because he thinks we're buddy-buddy," Love says. "I could cuss him out, but I won't lower myself to that level."
Spector was inducted into the Hall of Fame in 1989; Love's name has yet to appear on a ballot. "Maybe I missed something, but I thought the Rock-and-Roll Hall of Fame was supposed to be for singers," she says. "And if I'm not a rock-and-roll singer, then rock-and-roll better start all over again. Still, it's coming, it's just gonna take them some time to figure it out."

Time may be about the only thing Love doesn't have going for her. For all her talent, beauty and warmth, her career is entering the top of the seventh. But even that, subject to the Darlene Love aura, becomes a positive. "So many artists made their millions at 25 and burned out," says the writer of "Portrait of a Singer," Melanie Mintz. "Look at Spector. He's 52 and he can't do a thing."

At this stage in her life, Love does have some happiness in the bank -- she's happily married and living in Rockland County, happy to be working, happy that Bruce Springsteen and Elton John tell her how much her music means to them. And there may be a royalty check in her future yet: If "Portrait of a Singer" is still running down the line, perhaps at a bigger theater in New York or London, and it gets to be too much and "some other girl" is up there playing her, Love will still get paid, because she owns an equal share of the rights to her own life story.

Yet it's hard to imagine anyone else plumbing the depths of "He's a Rebel" or lending the right autobiographical resonance to a gospel number in the show that begs, "Please be patient with me, God is not through with me yet." What the song doesn't say is that if just recompense ever comes around, it will be because Darlene Love was patient with God.

Photos: Yes, she really did sing all those hits. Love, center, with the Blossoms circa 1964. These days, she's at last cleaning up -- musically -- in her own right at the Bottom Line in New York. (Photograph by Michael O'Brien for The New York Times)(pg. 20-21); Darlene Love's show at the Bottom Line is called "Portrait of a Singer." Here's another one. (Photograph by Michael O'Brien for The New York Times); The record producer Phil Spector, right, gave Love her name but often forgot to put it on the label. With them at the Gold Star Recording Studios in 1963 is Jack Nitzsche, Spector's arranger. Spector, Love and Cherilyn Sarkisian, who would become Cher, at Gold Star in 1963. (Ray Avery/Michael Ochs Archive)(pg. 22-23)

Rob Hoerburger is an editor of this magazine.