Nobody put Betty Davis in a corner. If
they’d tried, they probably would have had their face torn off.
The artist behind possibly the
raunchiest, sweatiest, most lubricious funk albums of the 1970s, she
was born Betty Mabry in 1945 and spent her formative years in
Pittsburgh and Durham, North Carolina, growing up listening to her
grandmother’s blues collection. She started writing songs at the
age of 12, and at age 16 she arrived in New York City to attend the
Fashion Institute of Technology.
Already a beauty, she quickly made
friends and began frequenting both folk and soul clubs. She had no
trouble flitting from scene to scene, but was somehow never
considered a hanger-on. She worked as a model but also as a DJ at a
New York club called the Cellar.
Through the Cellar, she wound up
making connections in the music business, and in 1967 she wrote the
song “Uptown” for The Chambers Brothers, which was featured on
their smash hit LP, The Time Has Come. But also in 1967,
Betty Mabry met Miles Davis.
And the time really had come.
You can see Betty on the cover of
Miles’ 1968 LP Filles de Kilimanjaro. It’s a striking,
shattered-mirror image that indicates the influence she was having on
his life. The album features a piece titled “Mademoiselle Mabry.”
The couple was married in September 1968. Now Betty Mabry had
become Betty Davis.
Miles credited Betty for turning him
onto the possibilities of funk and rock by introducing him to the
works of artists like Jimi Hendrix and Sly Stone. Betty’s
influence transformed Miles’ playing, leading him into
hitherto-uncharted areas of rhythm and space. The groundbreaking
LPs In a Silent Way and Bitches Brew were the result.
Betty Davis, as a muse, had led Miles
Davis to create jazz fusion.
But Betty and Miles were too
tempestuous as a couple, both too hot-headed to remain together.
Miles divorced her in 1969, saying she was “too young and wild”
for him. There are those who believe that Miles discovered evidence
that Betty had an affair with Jimi Hendrix, but the fact that Miles
and Hendrix remained strong friends until Hendrix’s death a year
later puts this into doubt.
Betty took off to London and worked as
a model for a while, but her heart remained in the music industry.
She remained friends with influential people in the business, and
wound up in discussions to become a singer for Santana. But when she
returned to the USA, she instead decided to go her own way, as she
always did, and formed a funk supergroup that included such talents
as Neal Schon of Santana and Journey, over half of the band Graham
Central Station, members of Tower of Power, and The Pointer Sisters
on backing vocals.
What resulted from her first sessions
was the LP Betty Davis (1973, Just Sunshine), and it’s the
nastiest, dirtiest, most down-low funk that had been released to
that point. The first track, “If I’m in Luck I Might Get Picked
Up” starts the album off as a statement of intent: It’s Betty as
sexual predator and willing conquest at the same time, strutting her
stuff in a bar and ready to go. Her voice rips out of her like the
scream of an attacking puma. "I said I'm
wigglin' my fanny, I'm raunchy dancing, I'm-a-doing it doing it/This
is my night out."
Betty understood that funk wasn’t
just a style of music. She knew that funk meant the sweat of the
crowd boogieing for hours in a hot nightclub; she knew that funk
meant the scent of bed sheets after rough, passionate sex. She
attempted to bring a fiercely female sexual point of view to funk,
which previously had dealt with sex by male chest-thumping (James
Brown), juvenile scatological humor (Parliament/Funkadelic), or coy
flirtation (LaBelle).
This was the era of Women’s Lib and
burning bras. This was the era of Billie Jean King and Ms. Magazine.
The timing would have looked perfect to a woman of Betty’s frank
nature. Everything should have been primed to explode for her.
But Betty was too far ahead for
anyone. Her openly sexual attitude was a shocker; shows were
boycotted and her songs weren’t played on the radio. Amazingly,
given the temper of the times . . . or perhaps because of them, since
record labels were still fairly open-minded to artistry over the
bottom line, she was able to record and release two more albums of
charging, hardcore funk – They Say I’m Different (1974,
Just Sunshine) and Nasty Gal (1975, Island Records) – before
losing her recording contract. A fourth LP – considered by members
of her band to be her best work – was recorded in 1976 but left
shelved and unreleased until 2009, when it emerged as Is It Love
or Desire? (Light in the Attic)
On that final, unreleased LP, an
insight into Betty’s frame of mind can be found. Devoted to the
funk until the end, she complained, “Take off that disco and put on
some real music, we’re tired of listening to them ricky-ticky
sounds / Remember how it used to be in the ‘60s?”
Nobody put Betty in a corner. There
was no one who could be blamed for not promoting her music; her label
went above and beyond and stuck by her for three LPs when they didn’t
have to do so. The marketplace just wasn’t ready for her.
Davis returned to the recording studio
for one final session in 1979, but that was it. This strikingly
beautiful woman with the soul of a libertine, who had served as muse
to the most important jazz artist of the 20th Century and
who had tried to push the boundaries of black music forward by
opening a frank sexual dialogue, turned her back on the music
industry and retired.
Over time, however, her LPs were
cherished by funk devotees, and wound up being rediscovered by
hop-hop samplers, and now she is recognized as one of the most
forward-thinking and proudly individual women in rock and soul
history. She’s the woman who brought the funk of dirty sheets to
funk music.
And her tunes can still take your face off if you play
‘em loud, like you should.
-- Benjamin Adams
-- Benjamin Adams
