Bettye LaVette – The Scene of the Crime

In art, the surest route to the universal is by way of the particular. Bettye LaVette understands this. She knows the best way she can examine what it’s like to be human — what it can mean to be in love or alone or royally pissed off — is to conjure for us a bit of what’s like to be Bettye LaVette.

On The Scene Of The Crime, her follow-up to 2005’s I’ve Got My Own Hell To Raise, LaVette presents herself not as a caricature or a type or, God help us, a brand, but as a complex — uniquely complex — human being. Decades after the “crime” of her title — in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, in 1972, she cut an album that Atlantic Records unaccountably decided not to release — she returns to FAME studios, still pissed off. And amazed at her own endurance. And exultant.

“Record deals kept fallin’ apart,” she bewails before having the last laugh in the triumphant “Before The Money Came”, a song she wrote with one of her co-producers, Patterson Hood of the Drive-By Truckers. “One [record deal] with Atlantic nearly broke my heart…before the money came!” The song is subtitled “The Battle Of Bettye LaVette”.

Now, this isn’t to buy into any foolishness about “authenticity.” LaVette’s an artist; she deals in artifice by definition. Still, she draws upon her life the way a method actor uses sense memory — not to create what’s real, but to create an illusion of it. It ain’t just the facts, ma’am, but it is the truth.

Helping LaVette cast this spell are Hood and the Truckers. A great band, but for players who idolize Lynyrd Skynyrd and are led by the son of Muscle Shoals bassist David Hood, they have until now been grounded within some unaccountably wooden rhythms. Backing LaVette, though, and with assists by Shoals legends including the senior Hood and keyboardist Spooner Oldham, the Truckers are soulful, supple, more dynamic.

On the album opener “Take Me Like I Am”, they sound as if the Mick Taylor-era Rolling Stones had found a better singer. On a front-porch-spare version of the 1999 George Jones hit “Choices”, they dig a groove with little more than organ and acoustic guitar. And on Willie Nelson’s “Somebody Pick Up My Pieces”, their billowing, empathetic country soul feels like the only thing keeping LaVette from disintegrating altogether. Throughout, the Truckers sound like a new, and improved, band.

Good thing, too, because anything less in support of LaVette’s amazing performances here — her shards-of-glass vocals; the clipped, ravaged phrasing so singular that it can only be termed LaVette-esque — would have constituted a crime anew. Her version of Elton John’s “Talking Old Soldiers”, in particular, is for the ages. Crying bitterly to the accompaniment of Oldham’s piano and a pedal steel guitar, LaVette sings the blues, her blues. She’s pretending she’s down in her cups at the bar, bemoaning dead friends, dead soldiers, dead dreams, death itself. It’s “One For My Baby” with lives at stake.

“I’ve seen enough to make a young man blow out his brains,” she screams at those who may tag her as nothing but “an old crazy broad.” “How the hell do they know what it’s like to have a graveyard for a friend?” Her voice is jagged and rusty, weary, but filled with life too, hard as new-forged steel, and with no intention of going easy.