Bonnie Raitt’s 1972 album Give it Up is the sort of front-to-back solid record that sounds better listened to in toto than it does when you pick out individual songs. The trick is how the songs draw strength from those that precede and follow them, right from the start of the record: Nothing Seems to Matter (featuring none other than Dave Holland on double bass, two years on from Bitches Brew – worlds colliding indeed) wouldn’t be so affecting if it didn’t follow the rollicking, New Orleansy Give it Up or Let Me Go. All the elements that are thrown into the mix – R&B, soul, blues, folk, country – sound thoroughly natural sitting side by side with each other, and they add up to a record that sounds substantially earthier than just about anything else being made in California at the time. Certainly anything being made in Laurel Canyon. It’s worth noting too that Raitt, more famed as a guitarist (BB King’s favourite slide guitarist, no less) and singer than writer, was solely responsible for the two above-mentioned songs, which are among Give it Up‘s best cuts.
The last of the record’s ten songs is Love Has No Pride, by Eric Kaz and Libby Titus*, the most LA-sounding cut, but also one of the most moving. In fact, the track succeeds almost in spite of itself. Its opening lyrics are a syntactic muddle so grievous that I promptly switched it off the first time I heard it. Surely no song that started “I’ve had bad dreams too many times/To think that they don’t mean much anymore” could ever be any good? Its middle section is a lopsided 20 bars long and feels like it should finish four bars earlier.
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Yet Raitt makes everything out of this song that’s there to be made and turns it into something really special. Her vocal, unaffected as always, is devastating, and her arrangement choices are exemplary: she resists the temptation to pump the song up and make it big with the addition of drums or extraneous instrumentation, instead keeping it simple and intimate. Compare Linda Ronstadt’s much showier version from a year later, which adds strings, gospel backing vocals, and half a dozen instruments. No prizes for guessing which one has more emotional heft.
Raitt’s been doing this time and again over her career. By the standards of their era and locale, even her Don Was/Ed Cherney albums (overexposed and overgarlanded at the time, but so darn likeable it’s hard to begrudge her – they’ll never be a time when I’m not happy to hear Something to Talk About come on the radio, which is just as well) from the late eighties and early nineties sound warm, organic and earthy. If you want to hear what makes her so good, though, skip Nick of Time and Luck of the Draw and go back to 1972’s Give it Up.
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Check out this version, too, with Raitt guesting at a CSN show, and David Crosby on Graham Nash singing backing vocals. The old-timers proceed to show the youngsters how it’s done:
Bonnie, with Strat and slide
Source: https://t-tees.com
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