Sonic Nation: 'Hope' takes
By Chris Morris
It was the damnedest thing, watching CNN on Nov. 4. Days later, I still can’t get over it – Barack Obama acknowledging the cheers of 250,000 in Chicago’s Grant Park. Like many Of a Certain Age, I found the spectacle unfolding in my hometown overwhelming, and I cried. (I’m not so hard.)
This year, Election Day offered a demonstration of how far we’ve come, and, for many, how far we still have left to go. Inevitably, those like me who lived through the 1960s calibrated the incredible distance traveled since the discordant era of the civil rights struggle. Mavis Staples’s new live album, released the day we went to the polls, makes that measurement explicit in its title, Live: Hope at the Hideout (Anti-).
Staples trudged the Freedom Road with the protesters of the day. She was the lead voice of the Staple Singers, founded in Chicago during the ’50s by her father, singer-guitarist Roebuck “Pops” Staples, as a family gospel group. They played the protest rallies, sang the spirituals and gospel tunes that served as the soundtrack to Dr. King’s crusade, and spent time in Southern coolers. In the ’70s, they created original soul-pop numbers – “Respect Yourself,” “I’ll Take You There” – that carried the movement’s ethos onto the charts.
Mavis Staples has hardly lost a step vocally, and, beginning with a solid 2004 gospel album for Alligator, Have a Little Faith, she has returned to the public eye. Last year, she revisited the “freedom songs” of the ’60s on her Anti- debut, We’ll Never Turn Back. The album was produced by Ry Cooder, who dutifully applied his increasingly sterile house sound to the proceedings. Except for a suitably punchy “99 and 1/2,” the record stank of the museum, and after an initial spin I never returned to it. (Surveying the liner notes now, I note with some amazement Staples’s shout-out to Rev. Jeremiah Wright, the former pastor of her church, Chicago’s Trinity United.)
In the interim, events asserted the renewed pertinence of these exuberant songs of conflict and liberation, and Staples decided to revisit them on stage. As Obama’s nomination as the Democratic candidate increasingly looked like a foregone conclusion, Hope was recorded this June 23 at the titular Windy City club. Staples was accompanied by three backup vocalists (including sister Yvonne) and a brawny trio familiar to many L.A. audiences – bassist Jeff Turmes, drummer Stephen Hodges (formerly with Tom Waits’s band), and guitarist Rick Holmstrom, who adeptly replicates the watery tremolo of Pops Staples and plays with a fire distinctly his own.
What seemed dull and studied in Cooder’s hands comes alive here. Credit much of the excitement on Hope at the Hideout to Staples’s five decades in the gospel game. Slightly hoarse, testifying and extemporizing, she turns out the nightclub hipsters like a Baptist congregation. During “Waiting for My Child,” she steps off-mike as she works the house, raising the tension and intensity of the performance. She ups the ante on her remakes of tracks from We’ll Never Turn Back, and delivers fierce interpretations of fresh material like “Wade in the Water” and “Freedom Highway.”
Hope at the Hideout is a marvelous record in its own right, as wonderful in its very different way as Aretha Franklin’s sacred stomp-down Amazing Grace, but it also seemed to perfectly sum up the essence of the moment for me in the wake of Obama’s triumph.
The songs Staples sings maintain their pertinence. As I looked at pictures of last week’s protests in West Hollywood and Westwood, following the passage of Proposition 8 by many of the same people who elected Obama, I turned to her version of Stephen Stills’s “For What It’s Worth” – written in the wake of some tumult on Sunset Boulevard 40 years back – and found it woefully appropriate. It will take more than one election to expunge bigotry and unreasoning hatred from our society. The struggle continues.
Chris Morris hosts Watusi Rodeo on Indie 103.1 every Sunday at 9 a.m.
Published: 11/13/2008
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