\n\t\u201cDarlene Love: I Know Where I\u2019ve Been\u201d is a documentary about one of the greatest singers in the history of pop music, but it\u2019s also a stunning meditation on the issue of identity in pop. Darlene Love recorded her most defining songs in the early \u201960s, when she was part of the Phil Spector hit factory. She led a group called the Blossoms, who Spector recruited, in 1962, to sing \u201cHe\u2019s a Rebel,\u201d the track that became the prototype for the Wall of Sound. The song was supposed to have been sung by the Crystals, but they were 3,000 miles away in New York, and Spector, eager to rush the song into production, figured it didn\u2019t matter \u2014 he could just credit the Crystals (which he did), and no one would know.<\/p>\n
\n\tDarlene Love sings \u201cHe\u2019s a Rebel\u201d with a saucy majesty that builds in power, until it becomes almost lordly in its reverence-for-the-bad-boy. (It\u2019s no accident that Kenneth Anger, in \u201cScorpio Rising,\u201d transposed the song so that she was singing about Jesus.) Her voice is as big as the Wall of Sound she helped to create. She sang lead on another Crystals track, \u201cHe\u2019s Sure the Boy I Love,\u201d did the background vocals on many other Spector songs \u2014 and, in 1963, sang \u201cChristmas (Baby Please Come Home),\u201d the greatest pop-music Christmas song ever recorded. She was credited on that one, but \u201cThe Phil Spector Christmas Album\u201d had the misfortune to be released on Nov. 22, 1963, the day JFK was shot. The record fizzled; after a few weeks, Spector suppressed any further distribution of it. The album was essentially lost (until it was reissued by Apple Records in 1972). So even though Darlene Love had been billed on the album\u2019s greatest track, her name remained lost as well.<\/p>\n
\n\tThirteen years ago, Morgan Neville\u2019s documentary \u201c20 Feet from Stardom\u201d paid tribute to rock \u2018n\u2019 roll\u2019s most fabled back-up singers (the majority of whom were Black), and to how they spent their careers standing in the shadows. Darlene Love was one of those singers, and she featured prominently in the film; when it won the Oscar for best documentary, it was Love who stood up at the Academy Awards and gave an indelible speech. \u201c20 Feet from Stardom\u201d captured a very particular situation: The artists it was about didn\u2019t get to be stars, but the movie suggested that in an alternate universe they might have been.<\/p>\n
\n\tDarlene Love, however, has lived a special, heightened version of that conundrum. She hovered in the background, not getting the recognition she deserved. At the same time, she was a star. Not a maximal one, but if being a true pop singer means singing lead on some of the most magical recordings of the 20th century, Love did that. She was out there in front, spearheading the sound. It was her name that was erased, so in a strange way her identity got erased too. You knew that voice in your sonic bones, but it was in front of you and invisible at the same time.<\/p>\n
\n\tDarlene Love didn\u2019t need an alternate universe (she lived in both universes), and \u201cDarlene Love: I Know Where I\u2019ve Been\u201d tracks the unique fusion of glory, injustice, fleeting opportunity, dashed dreams, resilience, and latter-day recognition that defines her story. The movie, like Love\u2019s life and career, is a one-of-a-kind ride, and by the end you don\u2019t just feel like you know and understand this remarkable artist. You feel closer to the center of the mysteries of pop.<\/p>\n
\n\tLove is 85 now, but in the documentary, which is built around a present-day interview with her (though there\u2019s also a ton of great archival footage), she\u2019s ageless. Under a wig of orange-blonde curls, her face beams, her smile dances, her laugh rings out, her personality is funky and vivid, and she simply doesn\u2019t seem old. Love got to know Paul Shaffer when David Letterman fell in love with \u201cChristmas (Baby Please Don\u2019t Come)\u201d and decided, in 1986, to feature Love singing it on his late-night show (a performance that became an annual ritual). The documentary presents Love along with Shaffer and his band in a studio of the Power Station, where she performs updated renditions of several of her key songs. Her voice is extraordinary, the force and quality of it undimmed. And Love proves a great narrator of her own legend. She knows what she was robbed of (not just credit but the life she could have had), yet she has transcended bitterness.<\/p>\n
\n\tThe film\u2019s director, Barry Avrich, takes us back to the age of radio (he pays nifty homage to it in the opening credits), when you would hear a voice coming out of that box, and the voice took hold of you. Love, born Darlene Wright in 1941, shuttled between Los Angeles and Texas and spent her first 15 years in church, dunked in gospel as much as Aretha or Ray Charles were. She joined the Blossoms in the late \u201950s, and they sang backup on a host of classics, starting with Sam Cooke\u2019s \u201cEverybody Likes to Cha Cha Cha\u201d and then on \u201cChain Gang\u201d and \u201cRockin\u2019 Robin,\u201d \u201cMonster Mash\u201d and \u201cJohnny Angel.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\tFrom there, they moved on to Phil Spector. They worked for him as back-up singers, in addition to being swapped in for the Crystals and Bob B. Soxx and the Blue Jeans, for whom Love sang lead on the sublimely lilting \u201cWhy Do Lovers Break Each Other\u2019s Hearts.\u201d Spector was a holy terror even then (though he was also a genius), and the name game he played with his female soul singers, moving them around as if they were interchangeable game-board pieces, was designed to do several things at once. It made Spector himself the star. (He was the first producer to do that.) It enabled him to withhold royalties. And in the largest sense, it was his (racist) way of treating all his talent like indentured servants.<\/p>\n
\n\tLove became a magnetic presence on \u201cShindig!,\u201d the great rock \u2018n\u2019 roll TV show that allowed its performers to be wild and woolly (Shaffer offers a great reminiscence of it). She led the Blossoms in back-up vocals on pop songs from \u201cMonday, Monday\u201d to the Beach Boys\u2019 \u201cIn My Room,\u201d and she went on tour with the other Spector singers, falling into a serious relationship with Bill Medley of the Righteous Brothers. Onstage, she had a toothy insolence.<\/p>\n
\n\tHer career was a string of missed opportunities, including one that sounds like a conspiracy theory, though as presented in \u201cI Know Where I\u2019ve Been\u201d it\u2019s a fascinating one. Love was originally set to record \u201cRiver Deep, Mountain High\u201d for Phil Spector. At the last minute, he changed the singer to Tina Turner \u2014 and the song was, of course, a legendary commercial flop, the one that effectively ended Spector\u2019s reign. The theory presented is that Turner\u2019s rendition of it had too much R&B grit to succeed on the pop charts of 1966. Whereas Love, who had a much smoother pop-soul croon, would have made it a hit. Ah, the seduction of alternate-universe thinking! The documentary reveals how Spector became a creepier presence with the years and continued to shadow her, at one point buying out a contract she had with someone else. There\u2019s no doubt that Spector\u2019s great songs made her career, but the way he designed it they also nipped it in the bud.<\/p>\n
\n\tLove was still singing in the early \u201970s (we hear her do a spellbinding rendition of \u201cI\u2019ll Be There\u201d), but as the age of peak R&B wound down, so did her opportunities. She was married several times and had four children, two of whom got involved in the L.A. gang-banger scene and wound up in prison. (They have since emerged and triumphed.) Love wound up cleaning houses. Yet she was not forgotten. Bruce Springsteen and Steven Van Zandt, both fans from way back, took an interest in her (they are interviewed extensively). She wound up reviving her career by doing nostalgia-act performances on cruise ships. This ultimately led to the 1984 jukebox musical revue \u201cLeader of the Pack,\u201d which she was featured in as it began performances in the Greenwich Village club the Bottom Line; it became a sensation. The documentary hints that it was also successful when it moved to Broadway (which isn\u2019t the case; it flamed out there), but Darlene Love was relaunched.<\/p>\n
\n\tAnd as much as that, she was recognized. The exultant Letterman performances of \u201cChristmas (Baby Please Come Home),\u201d featuring bigger choirs each year, helped a great deal, and so did her 2011 induction into the Rock \u2018n\u2019 Roll Hall of Fame. Suddenly, everyone knew who Darlene Love was. \u201cI Know Where I\u2019ve Been\u201d completes the journey. It\u2019s a film that leaves you staggered \u2014 at the soul-stirring splendor of her voice, at the forces of the time, both big and small, that marginalized her, and at our awareness of what might have been, which should never stand in the way of our awe at what was.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cDarlene Love: I Know Where I\u2019ve Been\u201d is a documentary about one of the greatest singers in the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":852854,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[52],"tags":[270687,88,206,46686],"class_list":["post-852853","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-darlene-love-i-know-where-ive-been","tag-entertainment","tag-movies","tag-tiff"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/852853","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=852853"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/852853\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/852854"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=852853"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=852853"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=852853"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}