The New Yorker Radio Hour - Bonnie Raitt Talks with David Remnick

Episode Date: February 3, 2023

You couldn’t write a history of American music without a solid chapter on Bonnie Raitt. From her roots as a blues guitarist, she’s created a gorgeous melange of rock, R. & B., blues, folk, and country—helping to establish a new category now known as Americana. But she’s far from resting on her laurels; her latest album, “Just Like That . . . ,” is nominated for four Grammy Awards this year, including Song of the Year—a category in which her competition includes Beyoncé and Adele, stars a generation younger than Raitt. She talks with David Remnick about her early career in the blues clubs of Boston; the relationship between older Black artists and the nineteen-sixties generation of younger white afficionados; and the state of the genre today. “The way that blues and R. & B. and soul music [are] interwoven with so many different styles now . . . the cross pollination of influences that streaming has made possible—it means that blues is always at the root of whatever funky music is out at the time,” she says. Raitt also reflects on how finding sobriety in her forties changed her music. “I think a lot of us are busy putting on a big persona—proving ourselves in the world—for the first two decades of our careers,” she says. “I became more who I really am at forty-one than I was at thirty-one.” New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. The upcoming Grammy Awards have got us thinking about music. Next week we'll have the rapper Chuck D. in conversation with our own Kellefassane. And right now, a pioneer in the genre known as Americana. Now, you couldn't write the history of American music without a solid chapter on Bonnie Rae. Her body of work is this gorgeous melange of rock, R&B, blues, folk, and country. And she's a hell of a slide guitarist to boot. Rather than resting on her laurels after 50 years in music,

Bonnie Rate is still productive, still making records, and she's never strayed very far from the mainstream of pop music. So, Bonnie, I have to begin by congratulating you on all these Grammy nominations, four Grammy nominations, Best Americana Album, Best Americana Performance, Best American Roots Song, and Song of the Year. That's pretty amazing.

I was pretty surprised, so thank you so much. I'm pretty chuffed, as they say, in England, yeah. Bonnie is nominated alongside some of the biggest stars in pop music today, and I wanted to get her take on their music, and we started with Adele. Okay. There ain't no gold.

in this river that I've been washing my hands in forever in these waters but I can't bring myself to swim Oh my gosh What do you think, fine? From the first time I heard it, I was just shaking my head,

you know, lump in my throat, go get it girl, because she just, When I first heard her, when out of the box, her first hit, I've resonated with her. But this was, you know, you always wonder what's going to happen in the next record. And this song is, it's a classic. It's one of the best songs I've ever heard, and her vocal just broke my heart. The next is Lizzo about damn time. Yay.

We're on Zoom, and I can see you dancing in your chair. Oh, man. First of all, I love her so much. I mean, I don't know if you got to see the People's Choice Awards when she took her time accepting her entertainer the year or whatever, and honored 17 activists of all kinds of different backgrounds and causes. I'm so floored, but not to get off the topic. You know, this harkens back to an era that I come up when we could still go to clubs and dance around, you know. And so for me, it's a fantastic retro neo-soul, and relentlessly grooving. I mean,

She's got a great vocal. It's a great track. It's right up there. And now we have some of you may have heard of, I'm not absolutely sure. Beyonce's Break My Soul. Bonnie, Beyonce has been a phenomenon for a very long time now. What do you think of her? A huge fan. She's a, can I say badass? You can. I mean, for someone's so gorgeous and so classy and the way that she runs her career and handles the press and handles her fame and is so vulnerable and open and yet such a leader. Your paths ever cross?

I think I waved to her at the backstage on the Grammys on the way. And I got to give Adele her Grammy and she, you know, she was so excited not to see me, but I'm just saying I was excited to be able to give it to her. But I would love to sit down and get to know those too. And Lizzo too. I'm a big fan. Bonnie, I'm sure you're more than aware, maybe painfully, aware of how the different ways that musical careers start now. I mean, some of them start and

burst first on TikTok and social media. Just to get started on your own career, when you watch that happen, does it feel incredibly alien? How would you describe your emergence in 1971 when your first album debuted? I know you came from a musical family, obviously. Yeah, but the Broadway music scene that I came out. You know, my folks were in. It was so different than the folk music that I fell in love with. I was not expecting to do this for a living. I had other plans. I was a sophomore in college and happened to be hanging out with a bunch of older blues people that I was so lucky to be introduced to by Dick Waterman, who rediscovered Sun House and managed Mississippi Fred McDowell. So for me, it was just a hobby turned into an absolute passion and an opportunity

to open for a couple of those bands and clubs and make a little pin money on the side. So for me to get offered a record deal at 21 when I wasn't even expecting to have a career in music is such an anomaly compared to what most people do that really slog away and are planning to be musicians since the time they're 13 or 14. I can't wait to get out there and make records.

So I don't want to say it fell in my lap, but I think of the people I know in the business, I got the greatest opportune, right place at the right time by being a woman blues guitar player, right, in that particular time. You were at Harvard, you were a kid, and were you studying hard or not so much? I loved school. I always have. I don't know why, but I'm not always good at math and science, but I was very excited to be majoring in African studies and studying modern theater. and I was a social relations major,

which was psychology, anthropology, and sociology. So right in the hotbed, hotbed of anti-war movement and the feminist movement. What did you think your life was going to be when you were 18, 19 years old? I wanted to work for the American Friends Service Committee where my uncle had been involved with that organization. My folks converted to being Quaker

and very much into the peace and justice movements. And the AFSC had branches all around the world and kind of undoing some of the damage that colonialism had done, I thought. And it was kind of a more less government-oriented Peace Corps type thing. And that was my plan. And you were hanging out in the Cambridge club scene? I was a student. And then my friend, Jack Virtel, who actually runs to Jemson Theater,

so it became a producer on Broadway. He called up and we were blues hounds, just absolute fanatics. and we were listening to the Harvard radio station Blues show and Sun House, the father of Delta Blues, was being interviewed and was going to do a concert. So Jack called me at my dorm and said, I know where the manager lives right around the corner from Mass Avenue. I think we could go meet Sun House,

and that's when it all started for me. I went down to the station. I said, I mean, never against the door. I was too young to have. hang out in clubs. You know, he couldn't drink until you're 21. Well, I want to know everything about your meeting with Sun House. That's, that's an amazing thing. Well, it wasn't, because we were just fans, you know, I think I was a freshman. Yeah, I was a freshman at that point. And I don't know how we got to be friends through the disc jockey that did the interview. And we met Dick Waterman

and Sun House. I mean, I was trembling to, as I, at that point, you know, Robert Johnson's records had been reissued in the mid-60s and everybody was just the Newport Folk. festivals had rediscovered, broadcasted and on labels and recorded all these great Delta Blues people from every different region. So Sun was the pinnacle to me. So I don't know if he remembers meeting me, but I later became, got to be friends with him. He said if you're going in a while now, son, you know you got to lay your money down. I'm talking today with Bonnie Ray. More in a moment. Now, I remember when I was a kid, there was a record from Sunny Terry and Brownie McGee, a great, great blues duo. And one of their

funnier songs was White Boy Lost in the Blues. You're going to Abendable were older black musicians to a young white woman Not being to be Not just being a fan of the music But wanting to be a part of that scene

wanting to learn that music? I don't know how, it didn't occur to me to ask Muddy or any of those guys, what those interviews are always asking them, what do you think about Mike Bloomfield and Eric Clapton? I just know that from my experience, the people I knew, John Lee Hooker and Fred McDowell and Big Boar Arthur Crutup and Big Mom of Thornt, and they were thrilled to get the accolades and the acknowledgement

and the recognition and get paid and have the, this incredible bloom in their midlife of the resurgence of blast off appreciation in the mainstream culture. And I think the fact that we were, those of us that just happened to study from records and learn and learn how to play, you know, when I first played for Fred McDowell, I played some Robert Johnson for him, Tommy Johnson, and I played some of his songs. He was tickled, you know. He said, how did you learn that? I said, man, I just listened to records and taught myself. And then, you know, I know that Muddy and Beebe loved to listen to Eric Clapton. I mean, they loved Paul Butterfield. They loved anybody that honored their music and who was good at it,

you know, probably mediocre, not so thrilled about. But the question of white people versus black and age versus youth and which sex you were never came up in my world. You know, I went to do a couple of years ago in Chicago right before the pandemic a profile of Buddy Guy. And he was, as you described, really vocal in expressing his affection for, in particular, you know, Jeff Beck, Eric Clapton, your own good self. And at the same time, there was a sense that in him, although it was more subtly expressed, that, He had been hard done by, that it was not easy. And writing about the Staples, I remember Pop Staples was offered $500 to be the opening act by the Rolling Stones, an offer that he turned down.

Were things better by the time you came along just a little bit later in that regard? From what I understand, the prices of a lot of the legendary groups, like Albert Collins or Albert King and even BB, people that were bigger stars, pittance compared to the white artists that did the same kind of music. And one of the things that made me so proud to work with Dick Waterman for 15 years is my booking agent. And my office was that he put a lot of the blues artists under one agency and did collective bargaining as opposed to clubs that would say, why should I pay $800 for Sun House when I can get Book of White for $500?

So it was just a lot. No, it was the same old thing that is the music business, unfair wages. And we started the Rhythm and Blues Foundation, Howell Beagle brought it to my attention that after all these years, half the people on my record collection had never gotten any royalties. And that was blown out of the water. And from the time I started, white artists, especially with good legal representation, you know, the record label deals that we were making were a lot more fair. And everybody before that really got ripped off.

And they continued to get not paid for decades. Bonnie, tell me about the club life that was such a big part of your career early on. Oh, well, you know, there's a romance to the club life, just like. like there was with Hemingway and John Cheever and everybody thinking that they had to drink. I mean, people drank and smoked cigarettes in the 50s and the beats were the coolest. And then after the beats, it was the folk musicians and Bob Dylan and, you know, the folk world. So people drinking and smoking pot just kind of came with the era that we were in. You know, in the 70s, cocaine was more around as well.

And it was just part of the scene. I mean, the stones are super cool, and guess who did drugs? You know, it was like modeled. The people that were our heroes culturally in the 60s, I mean, because they added drugs to the picture, that was our world, you know, mixing drugs and alcohol, whereas our folks were, my folks didn't drink, but their world of the rat pack and all of that was more cigarettes and drinking. So the jazz and blues scene was way. too much drinking, you know, I think. What was the breakthrough moment for you when you were 37? You know, after the things you can do when you're, I never drank to like pass out, you know,

on gigs or anything. I mean, it was more like a recreational when I had time off or when after the shows, you know, to unwind a little bit. By the time you're in your mid-30s, you're wearing it, you know, you don't look as good, you don't recover from colds as well. I put on some weight. I had to stop running because my knees were making noises. The next thing I knew, I'm going, man, I'm going to be one of these chunky blues women that is going to be 60 years old and people are going to say, man, she's really been through it. But, you know, I wanted to work with Prince who called me up and said, come to Minnesota and we were going to do maybe something like a duet on a video. And I looked in the mirror and went, oh, my, this is not going to work. So it was an inspiration to just lose weight.

And I just loved, I got the sobriety thing and realized a lot more about my personality. the corks and the things that were making my life get in my own way. And so I've been sober about 35 years now, and I suppose I have Prince to thank for it. Bonnie, let's talk about the song just like that, which is the song of the year Grammy nomination. Tell me a little bit about its background. Where has it come from? Well, I was watching the evening news, and often at the end of the news, they put a human interest story to try to, you know, soften the blow of what just went down.

And they followed a, they were doing a story. They took a film crew to follow a woman going to the home of the man who had received her son's heart. And they were going to meet for the first time. So I was already emotionally primed at that point. And they hugged and he invited her in and they followed her in with the camera. And then he asked her to sit down next to him and asked her if she'd like to put her head on his chest and listen to his heart. And I just, I'm teared up now because it was so incredibly moving to me. And it stayed with me and stayed with me for, you know, a couple of weeks.

And I decided that I really wanted to write a song from that point of view. So that's where the germ started of that because I just made up a story. I'm a big short story fan. And I was trying to figure out how I could put in some elements of what this, what a woman who was felt responsible by looking away for a second while she was driving and it was in an accident and her son

was killed. And I just made up a backstory that she was living and just in darkness and drinking and probably suicidal thinking she was responsible and had no idea that this man was looking for her

for 20 years or so and knocked on her door and she let him in and that turned out He had her son's heart. I just was playing on my couch one day, and I started, opened up the lyrics, and the song just fit. I just, it came out in one big rush. I watched him circle around the block. I finally stopped at mine.

Took a while before he knocked like all he had was time. Excuse me, ma'am, maybe you can help. The directions weren't so clear. I'm looking for a little. Bonnie Rae, I couldn't be more grateful to you for your music and for your being here with us today. Thank you so much. David, I'm such a fan. Thank you for including me in your pantheon interviews.

Bonnie, thank you. Be well. Thank you so much. You too, David. Bonnie Raid's latest album is entitled just like that. She's up for four Grammy Awards this year, including Song of the Year and Best Americana album. The ceremony is February 5th. I'm David Remnick.

Thanks for listening. We'll be back with The New Yorker Radio Hour next week, and we hope you'll join us. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbus of Tuneiards. This episode was produced by Max Walton, Breda Green, Adam Howard, Calalea. David Krasnow, Jeffrey Masters, Louis Mitchell, and Ingofen in Putabuele, with guidance from Emily Boutin and assistance from Harrison Keithline, Mike Cutchman, and Meher Batia. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund.