If the cliché that great suffering makes great blues singers
holds true, and the same could be said of great rhythm and blues singers, then
there’s no wonder why Darlene Love possessed the greatest R&B voice of her
generation. The daughter of an abusive mother uprooted from a liberal South
Californian community to a racist Texas burg, a magnet for unfaithful men, and
one of the many victims of Phil Spector’s huge ego and insidious business
practices, Darlene Love’s mightily expressive voice can be heard on some of the
biggest records of the sixties, both as a soloist and as in-the-shadows support
to artists as diverse as Sam Cooke and Bobby “Boris” Pickett. Yet because her
name so rarely appeared on the labels of these discs, she never received the
acclaim she deserved. The bitterness such misfortunes brewed is evident in
Darlene’s autobiography My Name Is Love,
which often swells into outright nastiness.
Though her tone is semi-humorous much of the time, it’s kind
of a drag to read the constant stream of nose-thumbing directed at the
“non-classic” Rolling Stones and Kinks, Spector’s “crap” production of “River
Deep—Mountain High,” Ronnie Spector’s “mewly” voice, feminists, and Diana Ross,
whom she and her buddies gang up on and send running in a sequence that seems to
invite us to join in on having a laugh at the Supreme’s wardrobe. She mocks
Dionne Warwick for the thrush’s “crazy” belief in the paranormal, and then explains
how she hoped her own child was not born on Halloween because she “had enough
devils in (her) life already.” Nope, nothing crazy about that. Nothing
hypocritical either. Darlene’s injection of her own religious beliefs into
every tale she tells becomes wearisome very quickly, and when she says that the
concept of a female God in the song “Lord, If You’re a Woman” “makes me sick,” they
droop toward offensive.
Yet My Name Is Love
is pretty readable in a tabloidy way. There are plenty of juicy tidbits about
her affair with Righteous Brother Bill Medley, Phil Spector’s bizarre behavior,
as when he bought Ronnie a bunch of toddler’s toys to placate her during the Christmas Gift for You sessions, Tom
Jones’s insatiable libido, and her own broken-bottle-armed attack on a bully
she found beating up her brother. Such stories kept me turning the pages of My Name Is Love even if they made it read
like a weird mixture of nasty, trashy, and preachy.
I should have just stuck to listening to her wonderful, wonderful records.
My Name Is Love
was originally published in 1998 (hopefully, Darlene is less bitter these
days), and is now being reprinted by William Morrow, an imprint of Harper
Collins, as a tie-in with the upcoming documentary, Twenty Feet from Stardom.
