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Dates Appearing: July 25, July 27 - August 4 Current Release: Relish Home: My mother's voice on the telephone Birthday: Everyday Favourite Colours: The red of the first day of my period when I thought I might be pregnant;the flourescent green radiator fluid in my '61 Mercury Meteor;the blue of the sky last night at 9:30PM. Pets: Otis, the Gekko Lizard, now deceased; Lucy, the cat who ate Otis Favourite Tour Pastime: Avoiding morning"shock-jock" deejays; Smelling my clothes to see if I can get one more wear out of them. Favourite Album: Hasn't been made yet. Favourite Movie:If I can narrow it down to one, I'm sure I'd find it at Two Boots Video, NYC, along with a spinach/crawfish pizza. |
It's not where you've been, the saying goes, it's where you're going. And if the past two years have proven anything, it's that Joan Osborne is an artist whose talent can take her anywhere. Indeed, it already has. Since the startling Success of her Blue Gorilla/Mercury debut, Relish, which sold nearly three million copies and garnered an astounding Seven Grammy nominations, Osborne has toured the world and performed with an eclectic array of stars ranging from Stevie Wonder to Luciano Pavarotti to Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. What could be more instructive, then, than to consider just how one of music's brightest new talents came to be?
That's the raison d'etre of Joan Osborne: Early Recordings, a revealing portrait of the singer as a gritty soul shouter on the New York club circuit, and a recording-studio initiate whose curiosity and enthusiasm added new dimensions to her sound. The album's 11 songs hail from Soul Show, a full-length live disc recorded in 1991, and Blue Million Miles, a 1993 EP of studio tracks. Both were originally released on Joan's own label, Womanly Hips Music.
Looking back on those recordings now, Joan can't suppress a chuckle. "It's a little bit like looking at your old high school yearbook photo," she says. "You're a little embarrassed by it, but it's a measure of how much you've grown. I feel my skills are better now than when I recorded those songs, but I definitely had all the heart I needed."
"The impetus for re-releasing these long-out-of-print tracks," Joan says, "was the demand of the fans. So many people who had the CDs or heard them at a friend's, or didn't have them anymore and wanted to get them again would come up and ask me about them. Also, some of the fans who liked Relish, would ask me if I had anything else out, or they'd heard about the earlier stuff and wanted to buy it. So it's really at the request of people who want to hear it that I'm putting it out."
Soul Show was recorded at Delta 88, a now-defunct club on the west side of Manhattan. "It was this funky Southern-cooking kind of place that had old Coca-Cola bottle cap signs on the wall, catfish on the menu and zydeco bands playing, stuff like that," Joan recalls. "We had a gig there every Tuesday night."
At the time, Delta 88 was part of a thriving live music scene that also included such dubs as Mondo Cane, Mondo Perso, Dan Lynch, Rodeo Bar, Tramps and the Nightingale. Habitues of those venues were then-nascent acts such as Blues Traveler, Spin Doctors,The Holmes Brothers, and Chris Whitley, among others. In an extraordinary show of camaraderie, the bands would frequently show up at other bands' gigs to lend moral support, and to sit in if called upon to do so.
Seasoned by her live performances and schooled on the records of Etta James, Tina Turner, Aretha Franklin and Otis Redding, Osborne decided it was time to make a record, and Delta 88 turned out to be the spot. "I had never been in a recording studio, so I didn't have a firm grasp of what I wanted to use all that equipment for," she says. "Besides, all we really wanted to do was capture the thing we did live. So we just got a truck, pulled it up outside, ran the cables in and did it that way."
Blue Million Miles, on the other hand, Joan regards as an act of discovery. "I was trying to get away from that bar-band sound and explore different sonic textures and atmospheres," she says. "I was very deliberately trying to push myself in a direction that I wasn't familiar with, but wanted to explore. And being in the studio for the first time, I thought, 'Wow, look at all these toys. Let's see what we can do.'"
In both cases, what Joan could do turned out to be pretty extraordinary, and Early Recordings presents a rare and intriguing glimpse of an artist in progress. "4 Camels," for instance, is the sort of unshrinking street-corner sociology that later came to fruition in Relish's "St. Theresa." "Wild World" is an apocalyptic dream in the manner of the later album's "Spiderweb." "Fingerprints" and "Match Burn Twice" both feature the forthright sexuality that is the hallmark of Relish's hit, "Right Hand Man," and "What You Gonna Do" showcases Osborne's emotionally bottomless blues wail that colors nearly every word she sings. "Because I was singing in bars at the time, I certainly was very influenced and steeped in the blues, she says. I was really into those rougher textures."
Not all of the material on Early Recordings is her own. "His Eyes Are a Blue Million Miles" was written by Don Van Vliet, aka Captain Beefheart. "A friend of mine, Chris Butler, who co-produced the tracks from that record, had turned me on to Captain Beefheart earlier that year," Joan recalls. "I just loved the way this guy was taking these sonic elements of the blues, and these lyrics and structural elements of the blues, turning them inside out and creating these wild things."
Osborne also covers the Dusty Springfield classic, "Son of a Preacher Man." "That was a song that we pretty much did every night," Joan says. "It was a real crowd-pleaser. I liked the Aretha Franklin version, but Dusty Springfield's version was just a great record. The way she stepped into that whole Memphis sound, even though she was a pop singer from London. But she had a real interesting take on that whole style, a way to filter it through her own voice."
In their initial incarnations, Soul Show and Blue Million Miles represented more than calling cards to get her band new and better gigs. Rather, it was a means of taking control of her career and assuring she made it to the next level of the music business. "I think I had the idea that some larger success might happen for me at some point," Osborne says. "I was very conscious of thinking about it in terms of, 'Well, if this is something you would like to have happen, what's the thing you can make happen on your own? You're not going to wait around for someone to discover you, that"s for chumps. What can you do as an artist, as a person who's conscious of the business end of this to make it happen?"
Happy now that her self-determination has paid off, Osborne can listen to Early Recordings and reflect on the distance she has traveled in a relatively short span of time. As can her growing legion of fans. "I think if people like what we do, especially in our live performance, they're going to find something on this album they enjoy," Joan says. "I still get people coming up to me and saying, Wow, that was my favorite CD, but I lent it to somebody and they never gave it back. Please rerelease it.' So that means something. Even if it's a little embarrassing looking back at your high school yearbook picture, I think it's still worthwhile putting it out there."
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