A FUNK QUEEN STEPS OUT OF THE SHADOWS
Betty Mabry Davis set the standard with her sassy '70s sound. Finally, she's getting her due.
Jeff Chang, Special to The Chronicle

Friday, May 18, 2007

Bay Area music producer Greg Errico knows something about artist buzz. He used to drum for a band called Sly and the Family Stone. But he can't believe the hum he's hearing now about an artist he produced decades ago: the mysterious funk queen and rocker Betty Mabry Davis.

"She never had big commercial success. We did this 35 years ago. And she's been a recluse for large parts of that," he says. But at a recent National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences function, he adds, veteran musicians were buzzing about her as if she were a brand-new sensation.

"I've got a half-dozen interview requests," he says. "We've got the Sly and the Family Stone reissues that just came out. But there's about a notch more interest in Betty."

This month, the Afroed beauty, circa '73, graces the cover of hipster music journal Wax Poetics magazine, and today, indie label Light in the Attic Records re-releases lovingly packaged versions of her first two albums, "Betty Davis" and "They Say I'm Different," both cut in San Francisco in the early '70s.

The woman once known mainly for being the former Mrs. Miles Davis is belatedly being acknowledged as one of the most influential artists of the funk era. Carlos Santana, Joi, Talib Kweli and Ice Cube have declared their fandom. Her sway over Macy Gray, Erykah Badu and Amy Winehouse is clear.

On the cover of her 1973 debut, she tilts coquettishly and flashes a million-dollar smile. Her thigh-high silver space boots seem to go on forever. But when her music begins -- written and arranged by her during a time when few black women were given such artistic license -- she shreds any idea that she is just another pretty face.

In the course of a single verse, she teases, pouts, snarls, taunts and rages. "It's like she's here in the room with you right now and she's basically caressing you and slapping you," says Chris Estey of Light in the Attic. "She is really confronting you with her womanhood, with her desires, with her complications, with ideas."

"All you lady haters don't be cruel to me," she sings on the opener, "If I'm in Luck I Might Get Picked Up." "Oh, don't you crush my velvet, don't you ruffle my feathers neither! Said I'm crazy, I'm wild. I said I'm nasty."

Born Betty Mabry in Durham, N.C., Davis was the first child of an Army serviceman and a homemaker. In a rare phone interview from her home outside Pittsburgh -- she hasn't done face-to-face interviews in decades -- she says that she was shaped indelibly by her grandmother's and mother's record collections, which featured bluesmen like Muddy Waters, B.B. King and John Lee Hooker. "No jazz," she says. She invented her own songs, humming out parts to different instruments as if she were already composing and arranging. "It was just a gift," she says.

In 1961, at age 16, she left the small Pittsburgh borough of Homestead to seek her fortune in New York City. She lived with an aunt, enrolled at the Fashion Institute of Technology as one of the few students of color, and journeyed into Greenwich Village to explore the jazz, folk and poetry-drenched scene. She waited tables at Café Figaro, a Beat Generation epicenter.

At now legendary clubs like the Electric Circus, Davis moved from scene-watcher to scene-maker with her friends the Cosmic Ladies, a magnetic clique of transplanted small-town African American women possessed of boundless energy and endless style. She hosted a private club called the Cellar that helped shape a new racially integrated bohemia. She became a Wilhemina model and continued to pursue singing and songwriting. She cut singles for Don Costa, Lou Courtney and Hugh Masekela, and wrote a proto-funk hit for the Chambers Brothers called "Uptown."

In 1967, she met Miles Davis at the Village Gate. She recalls, "I had to make a phone call. His trainer at the time, a guy named Bobby, tapped me on my shoulder while I was on the phone and said, 'I'd like to speak to you when you get off the phone.' So when I got off the phone he said, 'Mr. Davis would like to know if you'd have a drink with him upstairs. I said, 'Sure, why not.' "

A tempestuous romance between the 23-year-old singer and the 42-year-old trumpeter quickly led to a marriage proposal. (Her face graced his 1968 album, "Filles de Kilimanjaro.") Their marriage catalyzed Miles Davis' most notable musical transformation -- from the cerebral modality of "In a Silent Way" to the fiery fusion of "Bitches Brew," the beginning of his famous electric phase.

She says, modestly, "I know that the music that I played in the house influenced him a lot. I was listening to Jimi Hendrix and Sly Stone and Otis Redding." When he began dressing like a freaky peacock, rumors spread that she had thrown out all of his tailored suits. "No, I didn't do that. I loved him in suits," she chuckles. "He would go with me when I would shop for my clothes, and he would pick him some things, and that's how his look changed."

As he began the bold experiments that would transform black music, Miles Davis put full trust in her ears. Then he took the helm to record her in what may be one of the greatest lost albums.

Her sensibility, she says, was "rock-oriented" and "progressive." Backed by an all-star lineup of Wayne Shorter, Billy Cox, John McLaughlin, Mike Shrieve and Tony Williams and produced by Teo Macero, she recorded a long version of Cream's "Politician" and at least one other side of songs. Was her record the missing link between "In a Silent Way" and "Bitches Brew"? We may never know. Columbia Records, at what is widely believed to have been at Miles Davis' request, shelved the tapes.

"He was afraid that I would leave him if I became famous. He had that kind of fear about me," Davis says. Their marriage ended after just one year. "It fell apart because of his temper. He would get physical sometimes and I didn't want to be caught in an abusive relationship. That just wasn't my style," she says.

Betty Davis' name was soon romantically tied to Eric Clapton, but she continued to write and explored publishing deals with the help of T-Rex's Marc Bolan. She gave a clutch of funky songs to the Commodores, which helped them seal a deal with Motown.

Yet she remained fiercely independent. She walked away from a contract with Motown (and took her songs back from the Commodores) when the company demanded she give up her publishing rights. Although she had been linked to male stars, she wanted to be recognized for her own talents and to retain control of her music. "I didn't want it to be commercialized, really," she says. "I wanted to have a certain kind of purity."

Perhaps inevitably, her iconoclastic ways led her to San Francisco in the early '70s. "It was much slower than New York, but it was freer also," she says. "The vibrations of the city affected me." She experienced a creative breakthrough, if never quite a commercial one.

Soon after she moved here, a record deal "just happened," she says, when she met a talent scout for Woodstock promoter Michael Lang's Just Sunshine Records at "this vegetarian Thanksgiving dinner." Lang gave her a contract and the creative control she desired. She now enjoyed the kind of power reserved for a very small group of women, like Joni Mitchell, Carole King and Aretha Franklin.

Through then-boyfriend Santana percussionist Michael Carabello, Davis met Errico, who had just left the Family Stone and was working at Columbia Records' Folsom Street studio, and enlisted him as producer. He assembled what he calls "a who's-who list of great musicians in the Bay Area at that time," including fellow Family Stone refugee Larry Graham, the Pointer Sisters, the Tower of Power horns, Neil Schon, Doug Rodrigues and Merl Saunders.

The result was an undeniable classic. "She looked like Beyoncé, she sang like Macy Gray on steroids, and she crafted her own brand of liberated black womanhood that people are still trying to understand and get to today," says KPFA DJ and funk scholar Rickey Vincent. "Her album was so noisy. It's gnarly raw grooves with thunderous rock chords and her chainsaw voice on top of it."

She swung hard at gender conventions. She didn't do silly love songs but did an "Anti-Love Song." (She denies, with a laugh, that the song was about Miles Davis.) "Stepping in Her I. Miller Shoes" celebrates Devon Wilson, the former Cosmic Lady and Jimi Hendrix paramour who died in a mysterious fall from New York's Chelsea Hotel. Sympathy for strong but troubled women remained a constant theme in her music.

Although Angela Davis and Pam Grier were changing perceptions of women of color in the popular culture, Davis' 1973 debut made little splash. Vincent says, "She was too black for rock and too hard for soul."

"She was early, man. No one could deal with it," says Errico. "Now, it would have been easy. But no one knew how to market that then." A decade later, Prince and Madonna would conquer the pop charts with Davis-esque sexuality.

For her next album, 1974's "They Say I'm Different," she assumed complete control. She assembled her own band, wrote the music, produced the album and crafted her image. Her sound became bluesier, edgier and even less compromising. Hip-hop fans now consider the rippling riffs of "Shoo-B-Doop and Cop Him" breakbeat gold. Looking like an intergalactic funkstress on the album cover, her only peers on funk's cutting edge were fellow Afronauts Parliament and Funkadelic.

She could do both rootsy and raunchy. On the title track, she transformed a roll call of blues men and women and her own blood relatives into a self-mythologizing genealogy. On "He Was a Big Freak," she sang about a man who enjoyed being whipped with a turquoise chain.

It was too much for some. "Don't Call Her No Tramp," a fierce defense of independent-minded women, caused the NAACP to call for a radio boycott. When she celebrated women whom she called "elegant hustlers," others thought she was advocating prostitution.

Davis herself had been slandered and dismissed as a groupie by men in the industry, including her ex-husband. But she dealt with the situation with mother wit: "I said that I was colored and they were stopping my advancement!" The song has since taken on a new layer of meaning in the wake of the Don Imus controversy.

She honed her live act in a residency at the famed Boarding House on Bush Street and built a cultish following among the pop musician elite. But some male critics didn't get her. "I had a lot of anti-publicity," she says. And she had yet to reach commercial success. "It was just musicians carrying these (records) around under their arms, these little underground cult followings," Errico says.

Island Records head Chris Blackwell bought out Davis' contract and she put together 1975's "Nasty Gal," even including a Miles Davis composition "You and I." But the album still failed to break her. After recording two more albums that never saw official release (her last late-'70s effort has shown up in bootlegged form), she disappeared to a quiet life in Pennsylvania. "I just," she says, pausing slightly, "lost interest."

Former musical colleagues don't know much about what happened next. "She disappeared for years and years," says Errico, who has spoken to her only a few times in the past two years. "First time I talked to her, she had really seemed like she had come out of some deep, serious seclusion. Very soft-spoken. She wasn't the same person."

When asked about what she has done since her retreat from the public eye, Davis becomes diffident. She hints that she took comfort from being close to her parents (who have since passed away) and her younger brother.

She adds that she is talking to the media reluctantly. "The guy who runs Light in the Attic, he asked me if I would do interviews, and to help him sell the album I told him I would," she says. But after this interview, she says, the rest will be canceled.

Is she pleased by the resurgent interest in her career? "You want your music to sell. You want your work to be heard, regardless of how long ago you did it," she answers. "So, um, it's good."

A trace of impatience creeping into her voice, she says, politely, "Have a good day." And the enigmatic woman who always wanted to do it her own way hangs up the phone.

She adds that she is talking to the media reluctantly. "The guy who runs Light in the Attic, he asked me if I would do interviews, and to help him sell the album I told him I would," she says. But after this interview, she says, the rest will be canceled.

someone's in love!

GangstaFam said:

look. you guys have tori and kylie and all that stuff. betty's my obligatory M:NP niche diva.

Anxiety said:

I claim no such Kylie!

:aghast:

it's friday, let me generalize.

Anxiety said:

GangstaFam said:

look. you guys have tori and kylie and all that stuff. betty's my obligatory M:NP niche diva.

Anxiety said:

Well because u I download albums from Betty. I think F.U.N.K. is the funkiest song I ever heard

MikeMatronik said:

didja get the NASTY GAL album? did you hear the song with her making the OWWAH noise?

Anxiety said:

I download both Nasty Gal and Betty Davis. I also really dig Steppin' in Her I. Miller Shoes. Excelent song. It's like Betty was the template for Nikka Costa.

I love that you love her

Really interesting. I know nithgin about Betty. How'd you get turned onto her, Anx?

"...Her album was so noisy. It's gnarly raw grooves with thunderous rock chords and her chainsaw voice on top of it."

That was a great article!
Are there any books abouther?

united1878 said:

No.

gypsyfire said:

not yet, anyway.

SupaFunkyOrgangrinderSexy said:

that must mean you love her too, which i love

Anxiety said:

I bought the album yesterday!

Thanks for the article, can't say I knew much about her before this...now I wanna hear all her stuff!

SupaFunkyOrgangrinderSexy said:

which one?