February 11, 2004
R.I.P The Divine Miss M, 1945 - 1979
This is an obituary for a singer that many of you may have heard of, and many of you may THINK you have heard of - but very few of you realise that not only is she no longer with us, but she died twenty three years ago, and nobody even noticed it. It was 1979, so maybe everyone was off listening to The Wall and Aja or something.
An album was released in 1972 by a then unknown singer who used the pseudonym 'The Divine Miss M'. The eponymously titled record is a deeply-felt collection of ballads, retooled girl-group tracks, and maudlin set pieces - dealing with loss, longing, and loneliness. The kick-off track, 'Do Ya Wanna Dance?', covered by everyone from The Beach Boys to John Lennon, is transformed from a speedy, clattering, ramshackle teen dance song to a slow, translucent croon - lithely slithering out of the speakers and raining a cloud of soft kisses upon the listener, before building into a muscular slice of early-70's doo-wop. It became one of her signature songs - and one of the first signs of Miss M's amazing ability to reinvent both herself and the music of others.
Which she does over the course of the album. Taking Leon Russell's "Superstar" - made famous by The Carpenters - she shows a dazzling emotional range, as she allows the song to build to an epic vortex of emotion, before throwing the pieces of sound into the air, and letting them clatter around her - her pained voice, now simply a whisper, cutting through the sonic pallette, and displaying a tonal control and a sense of space which brings out the true sadness of both the music and the lyric.
And, of course, she transforms Helen Reddy's "Delta Dawn" into a gospel-fuelled powerhouse, anchored by both Miss M's undeniable personality and chutzpah, and a melancholy, longing lyric. Underpinning this, of course, is the muscular arrangement, which buffers the lead vocal with a soaring mass of choral voices - texturing the flawless lead delivery which changes in tone from an uncertain quaver, to a melodic scream.
Miss M found the 70's a period of transition, struggling to top her debut - which is understandable, as it would have been a daunting proposition. There were highlights, of course - 'You're Moving Out Today', co-written with Carol Bayer Sager (who also had a criminally underrated debut), 1973's 'Bette' contained a dramatic reworking of 'I Shall Be Released' - thus predating her duet with Dylan on 'Buckets Of Rain' , from 1979's 'Songs From The New Depression'.
It was, however, 1979's 'The Rose' that was to be both her acme and her downfall. Starring in a biopic which told the story of a character loosely based on doomed proto-riot grrl Janis Joplin, Miss M. seemed to feel it necessary to take her emulation of Joplin's eventual expiration to its logical conclusion. The soundtrack album from 'The Rose' is, certainly, the album that Janis never had time to make - a stunning collection of ragged blues tracks which see Miss M's voice slowly disintegrating as her character spirals downward into an abyss of drugs, booze, self-loathing, and eventually - self-destruction. The final song of the film, "Stay With Me", sees Miss M's finest hour as she lets loose with a torrent of howls, screams, and bloated, crazy-eyed rage - thrashing her voice with a visceral fury that seems unthinkable in light of the smooth diva's voice of old. "Stay With Me" builds and builds, filling the sky with sound, anguish, and the voice of a woman in the throes of some insurmountable pain. What viewers didn't realise, however, is that as they watched The Rose overdosing onstage in the final moments of the film, they also watched Miss M putting a pistol to the head of her career and pulling the trigger. Maybe she knew that she could never top "Stay With Me" - and she felt that it was better off not trying.
She's gone now, of course - leaving the stage just as dramatically as she entered it, and although a stand-in using the stage name of 'Bette Midler' has replaced her from 1979 onwards, recording an infinte number of godawful AOR 'hits', and appearing in a series of films which vary in quality, 'Bette Midler' is a poor, poor imitation of The Divine Miss M. Her record company, Atlantic, took a gamble - and guessed that if they hired a stand-in to replace her, the public would never notice. And, sure enough, they never did. Interestingly, this particular hoax has never recieved the amount of attention that the infamous 'Paul Is Dead' controversy that engulfed The Beatles in 1969 has - yet there is something far more sinister about the sudden, disturbing disappearance of The Divine Miss M - and her replacement with a clearly less talented, and far more user-friendly woman, who has spent years riding the achievements of her predecessor.
Wherever she is, I hope she's happy - and I hope she realises that even if she'd only ever recorded those two wonderful records, she would still have done more than most artists could ever dream of. Maybe one day we'll discover what actually happened to her - and then, The Divine Miss M can truly rest in peace, with her legacy intact.
(Some of the facts in this article may have been changed for dramatic/satirical purposes.)
Posted by David at February 11, 2004 12:33 AM | TrackBack