The Patti LaBelle Playlist

First let's give a quick sky-point to Peabo Bryson who just passed away recently. We were just talking about him recently here on the Celine Dion post with his songs like "A Whole New World" (with Regina Belle in 1992) and "Beauty and the Beast" (with Celine Dion in 1991). There's also his big hits "If Ever Your In My Arms Again" (1984) and "Tonight I Celebrate My Love" (with Roberta Flack in 1983) and this song I discovered recently and love, "Feel the Fire" (1978).

I was able to see Patti LaBelle in Albuquerque last Friday. It was a bucket list show for me but also disappointing for a few reasons. Seeing shows in New Mexico can be a hit-or-miss proposition. In my house, we call it "getting New Mexico'd." We're an outback experience here, a state of people with a mañana attitude, providing services that are randomly less than professional. 

If you live here, you either think this is normal or you've have come to acclimate to it. It's everything from slow service at a coffee shop to having a hard time taking your junk fridge to the dump. Business hours are often not honored, lunch hours are literally hours, and people here generally think this situation is a feature and not a bug. The world needs to slow the f**ck down, my state says. Don't come here unless you want to slow the f**k down. 

So this can create problems with visitors. Like I have never had, for example, any luck seeing concerts at Route 66 Casino. When I saw Sammy Hagar there a few years ago, the sound was off and from our side of the theater we could only hear Michael Anthony singing. 

This time, the amazing ensemble of Patti LaBelle kept blowing out the sound system. And then there was the fact that the theater wasn't full. This isn't all that surprising considering New Mexico has a smallish African American population (growing slowly) and considering LaBelle didn't have that many mainstream pop hits. Some of my younger friends don't even know who she is. She's also an artist even some of my 80s friends don't like. 

In the beginning I didn't like her voice myself. It sounded very nasally, especially in that whine-fest, paint-dry song "On My Own" with Michael McDonald.

But I came to appreciate her range and stamina in live performances (the kind of thing that did not translate well to MTV videos like "New Attitude" and "On My Own.")

If you like Patti LaBelle, you really like her. Not everybody appreciates what an amazing vocalist she is. In her book We Gotta Get Out Of This Place, Gerri Hirshey labels Patti LaBelle's olympic melisma as "oversouling" but explains Whitney Houston's acrobatic runs as "genius."

Even still, there were plenty of white fans in our audience (myself included) and Indian Nation fans, just not enough to fill the theater. There were holes at all price points. In fact, an usher moved us up from the center back to a front section and we picked our own new seats from an empty row that were fully surrounded by more empty seats. Up in the front! (This has only happened to me one other time at a Barry Manilow concert in Las Vegas where my group was taken from the very last to the very first row.)

So that was pretty lucky for me but not so great for Patti LaBelle. I kept thinking I was lucky she visited New Mexico at all.

Anyway, her merch had a "Let Patti Cook" t-shirt which reminded me that Patti LaBelle has this whole other food thing going on. While waiting for the show to start I gleefully went online with my phone and bought one of her cookbooks. Why didn't the merch table include all the food stuff?

 

Every time I see a show, especially now that my mom has passed, my Dad wants to know who it was and I end up having to send him video clips. Doing this last weekend I was able to start a pretty good Patti LaBelle playlist.

We start with The Bluebelles, a girl group mostly famous for having lost their fourth member, Cindy Birdsong, to The Supremes when Florence Ballard was booted out for being too chunky (and sad and boozy) in 1967.

The Bluebelles did a good version of "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" (1966):

 And this version of "You'll Never Walk Alone" (1965):

Patti LaBelle just gave it that much more oomph than the other girl group leads. And as they were settling into their threesome, the glam-funk group LaBelle (a better deal than the Supremes reincarnation if you ask me), they stopped for a minute to record a 1971 album with Laura Nero, Gonna Take a Miracle. They re-did some girl-group classics but with delicious softness. My favorite of these is "The Bells" (1971):

LaBelle then turned into a spectacular, refurbished glam/funk trio and this is their biggest song, "Lady Marmalade" (1974):

While I was moving from St. Louis to Yonkers to prepare to go to Sarah Lawrence College, I spent about six months in Boston and it was in my brother's guest bedroom that I first fell in love with the LaBelle greatest hits CD.

My favorites were "What Can I Do For You?" (1974):

And "You Turn Me On" (1974):

Other good songs were "Are You Lonely?" (1974), "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised" (1973) and "Wild Horses," (1971).

Then (imagine!) when VH-1 started airing the 1975-6 Cher show episodes in the 1990s and I was first able to see Cher sing with LaBelle in some unforgettable performances. Just wow. LaBelle sang "Lady Marmalade" sans Cher on 6 April 1975:

On the same episode, they sang "What Can I Do For You" with Cher:

Poor Cher. She's out of breath, trying to keep up! That's the magic of Patti LaBelle right there.

LaBelle returned to Cher's show on 5 October 1975 to sing "Are You Lonely?" with Cher:

Not long after that, Patti LaBelle went solo. I like this early single from the late 1970s, "Joy to Have Your Love" (1977):

Then came the 1980s. 

There were two hits I never did like: "New Attitude" from the movie Beverly Hills Cop (1984) and "On My Own" (1986). But "Stir It Up," also from Beverly Hills Cop (1984) is one of my favorite songs ever.

But it was the "If You Asked Me To" (1989) that got me interested in Patti LaBelle. 

I remember hearing her version of the song at the mall while I was waiting for my friend Lisa to pay for some outfits. We were at 5-7-9 or some store like that. I thought, you know what? Maybe I do like this Patti LaBelle. I love this video, especially where she kicks her shoes off. She also did this in her live show. Who needs shoes?

In Albuquerque you could tell she was also overheating and she stayed in front of a big fan most of the show. She's 82 now and was wearing some outfits that were very Patti-spectacular but way too hot for New Mexico in June. She wasn't singing the entire songs anymore either. She was saving herself for the Patti-Patti parts and the band would fill the rest in. I was okay with that, mostly because her band was so great, her backup singers beyond amazing (very Patti-like in their vocal abilities). Longtime backup singer Debbie Henry gave me chills when she did a solo. Here they are singing "You Are My Friend" (1978) together 12 years ago:

Anthony Williams Jr. did quite a few solos including "Can We Talk" and there was a new singer from Connecticut who was pretty amazing too. I can't find her name online. LaBelle lost track of introducing the whole band by the end.  

During the show she also sang "Somebody Loves You Baby" (1991), "When You've Been Blessed" (1992) and "Love, Need and Want You" (1983), three songs that only charted on the R&B chart. She also did "Right Kinda Lover" (1994), , "If Only You Knew" (1983) all which scored much higher on R&B charts. Her current show favors these R&B hits over her pop hits. I know there were at least two gospel numbers toward the end, but they aren't listed on Setlist.com.  

This was my favorite new-to-me song from the show, "When You Talk About Love" (1997). It's very fun and everyone sings along to the "Patti! Patti!" parts.

LaBelle ended by having a group of about six men come up from the audience to sing "Lady Marmalade" with her. They must have been preselected because they knew the somewhat unusual lyrics and they all sounded anywhere from passable to great. I also learned that night there is a tradition where fans bring up flowers to LaBelle and tell her how much they loves her and she passes out stems from a gigantic bouquet to audience members and asks them questions about themselves. That's how we learned people had come from all over (California, Colorado, Carlsbad, New Mexico) to see her in Albuquerque.  

The "Let Patti Cook" tag is rumored to be from a viral video when an audience member yelled out "Let Patti Cook" out while she was singing. But I can't find evidence of this online. In any case, it has a double-meaning for her secondary career on TV demoing her love of cooking. She had her own DVD (segments of which are now on YouTube), she's been on shows like The Steve Harvey Show, Oprah and morning shows. 

I really miss the old-style cooking shows, the slow-burn, more relaxing and imperfect ones from the 1960s and 1970s with their wide-shots and only a few close-ups and all in one take. The Galloping Gourmets and Julia Childs. 

The Cooking Channel (and maybe the Food Network before it but I'm not an expert on these food shows) introduced more slickly-edited segments where nothing looks all that real, the personalities are overly-choreographed and bland. LaBelle did have a 6-part cooking show on the Cooking Channel in 2016. Some reviewers online didn't like LaBelle's presentation (I can't see anything in this review about the actual food or recipes, just things she says the reviewer finds ridiculous). So it seems they just didn't like her displaying a natural kitchen personality. Talking about "black people cheese." 

But this is exactly why I prefer LaBelle's DVD segments to the later-day televised segments. 

She has produced a few cookbooks: Recipes to Sing About (1999), Lite Cuisine (2003), Recipes for the Good Life (2008) and Soulful Sweets to Sing About (2017). She's also launched various food products that have seemed to come and go over the years, like hot sauces and currently pies, breakfast syrups and mixes and TV dinners (coming soon?) via Walmart. 

This is a mac-and-cheese demo from the DVD:

 Here's a Bean Soup demo from 2020 and Don't Block the Blessing Dressing for Oprah (2021-ish).

I hosted a Dolly Parton Easter party last year where all my friends made recipes from Dolly's seasonal cookbook with her sister Stella. Then we had a Halloween party where we all made Vincent Prince recipes. One recipe had a fatal flaw that almost killed the guests...but the kinda tracks with the macabra theme.

I can see a Patti Party happening soon. 

 

Patti LaBelle  is of those underrated artists (in mainstream terms that is) who I hope will one day start receiving mainstream accolades. Often called a singer's singer, many speculate she was an artist better suited to live performances than a pop-star career. She never traded on sex or hyper-femininity. To this point, at the end of the DVD cooking segments, as she's putting a brisket or casserole in the oven, LaBelle always says it takes a "real girl" to lift these heavy pots into the oven. And that says a lot about why she didn't break-out bigger into the 1980s and 1990s. She prioritized living and eating.

I'll leave you with this last amazing bit of Patti LaBelle impressing the great Aretha Franklin with her rendition of "Aint No Way" (1993):