I used to made a living writing record and concert reviews and bios for rock bands. It wasn’t much of a living, which is why I stopped doing it. But when the Hollywood Reporter asked me to review Etta James at the House of Blues in 2001, I couldn’t say no. I’d been watching Etta incinerate the Sunset Strip HOB since the place opened. And when RCA Records asked me to write her bio for the 2002 live album of that very performance… hell, I would have paid them. (Don’t tell them I said that.) A chance to talk to Jamesetta Hawkins, the love addict’s official spokeswoman? Yes, please!
This is a woman who never knew her father, and whose teenaged mother was used and abused by men as a profession. Her drunken choir director used to beat her to make her sing for his friends. She became B.B. “Blues Boy” King’s girlfriend when she was 16 and he was 30. Her husband, Artis Mills, went to prison for heroin possession; they were still married when she died.
How do you not become a sex and love addict with a pedigree like that?
Etta James was the alpha and the omega of affection deficit disorder. Her first single (“Roll With Me, Henry”) was so overtly sexual in its day that disc jockeys couldn’t say the title out loud. When I last saw her onstage, she was 62 years old and so fat she could barely stand up. She was still sexy. “With that big voice and that little smirk, James manages to sell sexuality with nothing more than gesture,” read the review. “When she sings ‘I Just Want to Make Love to You,’ you believe her.”
But the flip side of the cool, sexy Etta (“I used to ride a motorcycle to work on the Harbor Freeway, nothing but a kerchief on my head,” she told me proudly. “I was born to be wild.”) was the “I Would Rather Go Blind” Etta. She wrote that song, although for a long time she wasn’t able to take legal credit — or get legal royalties — for it. Sing it with me now: “Something told me it was over/When I saw you and her talking… I would rather, I would rather go blind/than see you walk away from me.”
The clutch-his-ankle Etta, though, never sucked the joy out of the hopeless romantic Etta. The Etta who could sing “At last/My love has come along/My lonely days are over/And life is like a song” with such conviction that it has watched over the first dance of half the newly marrieds in North America.
“Everybody who gets married wants that song,” she sighed. “First dance, ‘At Last.’ Cutting the cake, ‘At Last.’ Last dance….” When we spoke, the tune was all over the television as the soundtrack of a car commercial. “I thought I was finally going to get me a Jaguar! I didn’t get no Jaguar. But I tell you something, my manager turned up in a bad green convertible Jag!”
That’s Etta all over. She pours her heart into a microphone, and some man drives off in a bad green convertible. I wanted to hug her.
Etta James tacked a picture of me up on her bulletin board back in 2002. She was impressed that I had learned to scuba dive, and wanted a snapshot of me underwater to use as inspiration for her new fitness program; her doctor told her she had to lose weight or lose a leg to diabetes. She was quite thin when she died, but that was just the leukemia.
I wish I had sent her a copy of LOVE ADDICT; she would have related. But then, she had already summed up the whole book in the first couplet of her first composition: “Hey baby, what do I have to do/To make you love me too.”
