‘Brighter Days’: An Aquarian Interview With Phoebe Snow
(Originally published April 22, 1981. Used by permission.)
The first thing you hear on Phoebe Snow’s terrific Atlantic debut LP is a great wash of electric guitar. “Baby Please” by Carolyne Mas follows and then comes Rod Stewart’s “Gasoline Alley.” Rock Away is Snow’s coming-out party. “The critics are implying that I did this rock’n’roll thing to be commercial and mainstream,” Snow says from her living room where we sit on her black couch so she can lie down and nurse her bad back.
“We’ll, that’s not the only reason I did it. If I denied that, I’d be an asshole. Anybody who denies that they’re at least partially doing it for the money is crazy. Why are we in the business. To flail our tails? To flog our logs? No! It’s my job. Everybody gets a paycheck every week. Why shouldn’t I?”
A funny thing happened to Phoebe Snow on the way to the record business. She met a guy with whom she fell in love. She was 19, a heartfelt, staunch rock’n’roller. This guy took Snow—who at the time listened to nothing but Jimi Hendrix—and turned her on to Billie Holiday, Lester “Prez” Young and the beautiful music those two made together. Then he turned her on to Duke Ellington and Count Basie. Then the lucky lady garnered herself a recording contract with Shelter Records and made a 1974 self-titled debut album which hit #4 and yielded a Top 10 single in “Poetry Man,” a song she wrote about that guy. “I think what happened,” she remembers, “was that I wanted to pay tribute to him in my own way. And I had a great platform for doing it.”
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She’s such a rock fan that she still gushes to this day over a concert she once saw at The Singer Bowl in Flushing, Queens, New York City, with Iron Butterfly, The Chambers Brothers, Jimi and Janis. “It still blows my mind,” she says, “that it didn’t go down well. People were there to see Jimi but Janis was stripping onstage, into her own thing, and getting booed. She wasn’t exactly the best at crowd control.” So this staunch rock fan goes and gets her head turned around about jazz from her poetry man who winds up dying of an accidental overdose of prescribed medicine sending Phoebe down the rabbit hole into a total rebellious phase.
She changes labels to Columbia. She puts jazz on a pedestal for her 1976 Second Childhood follow-up, using well-known cats like Grady Tate, Richard Tee, Ralph McDonald and Ron Carter. “I wanted to do exactly what I wanted to do,” he explains rather matter-of-factly. “A lot of it had to do with the death of my poetry man. That was extremely instrumental in making me create the music I created.” Thus, rock’n’roller Phoebe Snow got tagged with a jazz label that she didn’t want, never asked for, and would like to give back.
“I was, for most of the time I’ve been in the music business, beset by personal problems,” comes the stunning admission. “There were many times I was in that studio that I didn’t care where I was. I was so depressed, I should have been told to go lie down for a few days, not work, and, as a result, I think the quality of some of the albums suffered greatly.”
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“I wasn’t dropped from Columbia. I wanted to leave because I felt that the chemistry between myself and the label had disintegrated.”
Snow had previously told this reporter that she simply cannot listen to any of her albums because they bring back depressing memories (Aquarian #251). Columbia Records, after putting out Second Childhood in ’76, rushes her right back into the studio for It Looks Like Snow within months, telling her, “this is the one.” It wasn’t. “Listen,” she softly says, “I wasn’t dropped from Columbia. I wanted to leave because I felt that the chemistry between myself and the label had disintegrated. It Looks Like Snow soured them on my sales ability. Plus, with my personal and health problems, I think I had no business being in a studio for most of those years. I was really hung up and the albums were mediocre to terrible because of it. My credibility as an artist and my communication with them just gradually got worse. I could not pull myself together to continue. They’re a great company but it just would not have worked for me.”
The last album Snow made for Columbia, 1978’s Against The Grain, “got a tiny bit of hype,” according to the singer, “but once again the Columbia suits told me something big would happen. It didn’t. Maybe in Australia. That album wasn’t even me! I was hardly in control of what I was doing. I was still beset with worry. Actually, I think it was around that time that I probably started saying, `hey guys, you think we could finally make a damn rock’n’roll record?’”
That’s why she’s so pleased with her new label, Mirage, and the sound and scope of the new album, Rock Away. “I’ve wanted to do something like this for at least five years,” she says breathlessly. The “Games” single has on it go-to Los Angeles heavy hitters like Waddy Wachtel, Craig Doerge, Danny Kortchmar, Russ Kunkel and Billy Payne. Other tracks have Billy Joel’s band chugging away. There’s a fiery version of Don Covay’s 1963 “Mercy Mercy” that the Stones covered in ’65; a New Orleans-inspired Allen Toussaint partyer; two soft songs that Snow wrote; and the best Dylan cover in years. Bob wrote “I Believe In You” about Jesus but the song takes on a whole new personality and importance when Phoebe sings it to her daughter, Valerie Rose.
Valerie is the astonishingly beautiful, severely brain-damaged daughter that is a result of Snow’s unsuccessful marriage to Phil Kearns. Now five, Valerie is autistic, but has made tremendous progress in the last two years through vigorous therapy. “She’s the light of my life,” Snow beams. “I’ve never been so in love with anyone in my life. She’s remarkable. Doctors just can’t get over her progress. Being with other kids like Valerie Rose is what helped me get my shit together. There is no truer love in the world than that between a parent and an impaired kid. They ask nothing of you but just love. It’s the most perfect form of love.” (Judging from Snow’s lyrics to “Something Good,” her love life—finally!—isn’t doing too badly either.)
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Snow still loves the blues and fully intends to take Bessie Smith’s 1929 “I’ve Got What It Takes (But It Breaks My Heart To Give It Away)” and make it a showstopper when she’s finally healthy enough to tour again. “This album was two years in the making,” she says before her boyfriend interrupts us by calling on the phone. She answers. Looking delighted, she turns back to me before even hanging up, to say, “I was listening to what Cream did with Robert Johnson’s 1936 `Crossroads.’ That’s what I want to do with Bessie Smith.” Sometimes, though, things don’t work as planned. She really wanted to include John Fogerty’s “Long As I Could See The Light” and Sly Stone’s “Thankful And Thoughtful” on the album. Maybe on the next one.
As for the “Games” single, co-producer “Greg [Ladanyi] gave me a demo with Tina Turner singing. I told him I didn’t know if I had the balls to do it but once I said yes, he called over the guys he works with in Jackson Browne’s band and we did the track, the overdubs and vocals in one day.”
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Even after all her past problems of a divorce, an impaired child, chronic health and weight worries and a declared bankruptcy on April 15, 1980, Phoebe says she’s just now started to enjoy the fruits of her labor. “I wholeheartedly recommend filing for bankruptcy,” she says cheekily. “It’s good for your finances!” Now with a new label, a new boyfriend, Valerie’s progress, and a new outlook, she’s ready to hit the road…but only if she can get off her damn back which is still killing her.
Post Script: Valerie Rose died March 19, 2007 at the age of 31. Phoebe Snow, a longtime Teaneck and Edison resident, suffered a cerebral hemorrhage on January 19, 2010, slipping into a coma. She died April 26, 2011, at the age of 60.