He produced "Give It Up."
And on Saturday, he died.
I heard about Bonnie Raitt from the son of one of my mother's college friends. My mother went to a reunion, and after a couple of decades of no contact, she reconnected with her B.U. buddies and in this case, they came to Vermont to ski. And we were sitting in the lounge of the Equinox Hotel, which had just reopened, and this guy who went to Penn started testifying about Bonnie Raitt, whom I'd never heard of. Or maybe I had, there were many fewer record releases back then, but I certainly hadn't heard her music.
Now the first Bonnie Raitt album was produced by Willie Murphy on a four track machine at a summer camp in Minnesota. Bonnie wanted it raw and spontaneous, and although I bought 1971's "Bonnie Raitt" after being infected by "Give It Up," almost no one else did.
Now that first album has got a cover of Stephen Stills's "Bluebird," but the best cut is "I Ain't Blue," which was written by Willie Murphy and Spider John Koerner."
"Sit around the house
Readin' magazines"
As a magazine hound those lines resonated, and still do. "I Ain't Blue" is quiet and intimate, with Bonnie picking and singing about her state of mind, from back when you didn't play to the last row, but those in the building leaned in to pierce your space, to get into your head.
Hell, check out "I Ain't Blue" here:
Spotify: t.ly/qD-Zd
YouTube: t.ly/OFeS1
But I started with "Give It Up."
Before I went back to college for winter term, I went to the store and bought it, based on the way this guy testified. I trusted him, this was not the only album he spoke of, we could talk music, and I was willing to take a flyer, I was a big consumer of records, the best customer at so many stores.
Now at this point I was a junior. I'd woken up sometime in the first semester of the year and realized I had to get out of there. This was after this red-haired woman knocked on my door unexpectedly to talk about class... She was cool, the fact that she tracked me down makes me feel all good inside right now, even more back then, but she promptly dropped out and that's the last time I ever saw her. And dropping out at Middlebury was rare.
But I'd burned out on the school, just not soon enough. I checked into transferring and found out I'd have to go to college an extra year, and that was never going to happen.
This all goes to state of mind, as they say in the courtroom. Because mine was not good, but it was the records that got me through. "For the Roses" at the end of the year, and "Give It Up" in January.
So what I did was go to class in the morning, and go skiing in the afternoon. I'd come back to my room, drop the needle on a record, pull on my long johns, cotton Duofolds, back before the synthetic revolution, and when I was finally dressed I'd journey down to the Mobil station to hitch a ride up to the Bowl. But before I left Painter Hall, I'd listen to "Too Long at the Fair."
"Jesus cried, he wept and died
I guess he went up to heaven"
The guitar playing was just a bit imperfect, like it is live. And then Freebo's bass came in and ultimately Bonnie with the above lyrics.
"Won't you come and take me home
I've been too long at the fair
And lord I just can't stand it anymore"
Now you've got to know in the early seventies we were licking our wounds from Vietnam. There was the so-called "Back to the Land" movement. A retreat into the hills, to rebuild, it was personal, and so was "Too Long at the Fair."
Now sometimes I lifted the needle on the Dual turntable to hear it again. And sometimes I let it play through, to Bonnie's rollicking cover of Jackson Browne's "Under the Falling Sky." And then came a cover of the Sippie Wallace/Jack Viertel tune, "You Got to Know How." Which I knew, but it shattered the mood, and if I'd gotten this far, sometimes I lifted the needle to hear what came after, the Raitt original "You Told Me Baby."
"Told me baby
You were just too tired to try
There was nothing left for you to give
And no more tears to cry"
There was tape hiss at the beginning of the track. From back in the era when music wasn't background, but foreground, when we bought good stereos to get ever closer. And I always wondered about it, always think of it when "You Told Me Baby" comes to mind, and that is relatively frequently. What happened? Was this one take so perfect they had to keep it? Had they rerecorded too many times on the tape?
And then came the first cover of "Love Has No Pride" I ever heard. Long before Linda Ronstadt recorded it.
But back to "You Told Me Baby"... Bonnie's personality shined through. You see there was no one like her. Not a girly girl, not a girl's girl, but a man's girl. Someone who leaned in as opposed to leaned out, someone who could hold her own, who was "tough" as we said in the seventies. Tough as in "cool."
"Told me baby
To find somebody new
Do you really think that I'd come this far
Just to lose a man like you"
That's the second side, but all the hype, whatever stories there were, were about the first side. Mostly Chris Smither's "Love Me Like a Man," which speaks to the attitude I was talking about in "You Told Me Baby."
And then there's the slow burner "If You Gotta Make a Fool of Somebody," which was good, but not exactly my kind of track. And the opener was a tear, the title cut, with slide guitar, once again written by Raitt, "Give It Up or Let Me Go." But the song on the first side that reached me, that equaled what I loved on the second, was another Raitt original, "Nothing Seems to Matter."
"Seems like such a long time since I held you in my arms
And felt you close and warm beside me
Another night is getting late, and I'm alone with just the ache
And the memory of you beside me"
But it gets better:
"Last time I saw you
There was nothing we could say
And we knew it was a time for a change
'A time to think,' you said that night
But I lied and said 'Alright'
And I left you in the morning
I watched you in the window
And Mexico will never be the same"
Ah, you play along. You don't want to appear desperate. You don't know that this is a turning point, either save the relationship now or it's gone forever.
"It was time to be apart
But somehow it seems this heart of mine
Will never find a way to live without you
And now I'm out here on the road
And I'm feeling bought and sold
And tonight I just can't help but think about you"
Heartache. Bonnie conveys it better than all the melisma masters on the hit parade. She's real, and therefore you connect.
2
Now the 1973 follow-up, "Takin' My Time," was highly anticipated, Bonnie was poised for a breakthrough, and the cover of the aforementioned Smither's "I Feel the Same," with its slide guitar/chicken pickin', was amazing.
But the sound of the album just wasn't right. It was less immediate than "Give It Up," the album was just a bit more polished, a bit more slick, and therefore it couldn't be penetrated as much, there was a wall between Bonnie and the listener, unlike on "Give It Up.
"Streetlights" is the album that contains Bonnie's iconic version of John Prine's "Angel from Montgomery," and it opens with an overlooked cover of Joni Mitchell's "That Song About the Midway" that is better than the original. But "Streetlights" was produced by Jerry Ragavoy, and it was just too slick.
Then came "Home Plate" and "Sweet Forgiveness," which have some absolutely great songs, but Paul Rothchild's production... Hell, the albums are produced, you can see the cats in the studio creating it, it's serious business, which is very different from "Give It Up."
And Bonnie seemed to know this, so for her next album she worked with the king of singer-songwriter producers, Peter Asher. But Raitt wasn't like the rest of Asher's clients, Bonnie had an edge, she was the tough chick, and the rough edges on "The Glow" were smoothed off.
"Green Light" was produced by Rob Fraboni, and it was rougher, but the material wasn't equal to that on "Give It Up," and it sounds like it was a good time party making the album, but it was a party the listener wasn't invited to, you felt like you were outside the door, looking in, whereas with "Give It Up" you were in the room, right next to Bonnie and the band.
Ultimately Bonnie lost her Warner deal and ended up on Capitol, and surprised the entire community with "Nick of Time." The dearly departed engineer Ed Cherney recorded most of the tracks live, and you could tell the difference.
But as good as some of the peaks were, the piece-de-resistance is the album that followed it, "Luck of the Draw." It was utterly amazing, just as good as "Give It Up," and almost never does an act hit that height twice, usually they peak and never get close again. Credit Don Was, who let Bonnie be Bonnie, who didn't try to remake her, turn her into something she was not. Cuscuna's album was even more raw, but they were both authentic, human and alive in a way most albums are not.
3
Now when "Give It Up" was released in 1972 it was not seen as a triumph, not seen as the victory lap of "Cowboy Carter." Sure, there was advertising, but there was no big push, the album penetrated the consciousness via word of mouth, and it only got so far.
But the record still exists.
Now when you broke the shrinkwrap you read the credits. And if you loved an album, you read them again and again. You wanted to know who was responsible, you needed to know who was responsible. Therefore I knew the producer of "Give It Up" was Michael Cuscuna.
But I never saw his name again.
Usually when you nail it, you get more work, you become more famous, but Cuscuna seemed to disappear after "Give It Up."
Until the internet hit with its troves of information and I found out Cuscuna was very successful in the jazz world, which made me feel good, because if you do work this good you deserve a future, you deserve a place in the music firmament.
But jazz isn't really my thing.
But "Give It Up"? It's one of my favorite albums of all time. One of the first CDs I ever bought, needing to get even closer to the music than the vinyl.
And now Michael Cuscuna is dead. I found out on the "New York Times" website, I check the obituaries at least once a day, usually twice.
"Michael Cuscuna, Who Unearthed Hidden Jazz Gems, Dies at 75 - Possibly the most prolific archival record producer in history, he was a founder of the Mosaic label, which became the gold standard of jazz reissues."
t.ly/0HWjz
I was stunned he was 75, I thought he was older. And that he grew up in Stamford and lived there when he died, just down the turnpike from where I grew up.
Now you've got to be somebody to get a "Times" obit. But I never saw Cuscuna's name on TMZ. I didn't see hosannas on X/Twitter. I Googled and found some more obits, and I'm sure the people in the jazz world know, but if you were a fan of "Give It Up"...
Records aren't made the same way anymore. They're polished, the goal is to get them right. Which is why it was such a departure for "Nick of Time" to be recorded live, as a group.
When I first met Ed Cherney I testified about "Luck of the Draw." And multiple times thereafter, to the point where it was a thing between us, bedrock as we became much closer friends, got tight not long before he got the Big C and passed.
And the way I testified to Ed about "Luck of the Draw" is the same way I feel about "Give It Up," but I didn't know Michael Cuscuna, I couldn't testify to him.
Now some people only do one thing in their life. As per the obit, Cuscuna did a lot more than "Give It Up," and I don't know if he even thought about it anymore, if he was still proud of it, after all it never made a big breakthrough commercially, and no ever talks about it today other than maybe me.
But there are a few records... Sometimes they're the biggies, the ones everybody knows and loves, but oftentimes they're in the nooks and crannies, you stumbled on to them for odd reasons, it's not like you were turned on by the radio, and they became personal favorites.
I can play every note of "Give It Up" in my head. I love hearing "Too Long at the Fair," but I can play it in my mind, and I do, all the time.
Lots of other people produced Bonnie Raitt, but only Don Was equaled the work of Michael Cuscuna, and Was went on to produce the Stones, Cuscuna didn't ride the artistic success of "Give It Up" anyplace in the rock firmament.
Cuscuna had to be hands-on, had to add something to "Give It Up" to get it so right. Other than Was, no one else ever came close. And I own those songs, they're personal, they were never banged on the radio. "Give It Up" was made when radio was secondary, when you didn't try to have a hit, but just to get it right, believing if you did people would get it, and spread the word.
For a minute there, I thought the obits wouldn't even mention "Give It Up," because ultimately Cuscuna made his name elsewhere. But they all did. Because the work was just that important, it lasts. "Give It Up" could not be easily categorized back in '72, nothing else sounded like it, and therefore it sounds just as fresh fifty years later, like an old blues record.
It's so hard to get it right. Talk to anybody who's tried in the studio. You go in with good intentions, but usually you miss, not by a mile, but the tracks don't have that magic you were searching for.
But that magnetism, that lightning in a bottle feel...
Michael Cuscuna was in the room where it happened. Steering. Whatever he did and said, it's hard to quantify the work of a producer, made a difference, he and Bonnie didn't create good work, they created TRANSCENDENT WORK!
Just listen.
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