In the car when I was an adolescent, maybe 13 or 14, the oldies station on the radio played a song that began with a very stately, grand horn intro with a backing chorus, and it was as if I knew what was coming. A woman’s rather ghostly voice started to plead quietly with someone she loved, and I got very still and embarrassed there in the car with my parents. I was always getting embarrassed somehow by over-emotional or somehow explicit 1980s pop music with them while we rode this way and that in the car, but this was something different.
There was something about the melody and the backing from the instruments and the woman’s voice that transfixed me. She was singing that her lover had changed, and she would have to follow him (presumably) and beg him to come home. “You don’t have to say you love me,” she claimed, and she seemed to mean it. “Just be close at hand…you don’t have to stay forever…I will understand.” The song built and built after that until she was crying, “Believe me! Believe me! Belie-hea-eav-e me!” The sound was very soulful, but a soulful sound that seemed to be on its last legs and laid waste to, a beautiful throbbing voice about to give out and get extinguished. And what a spectacle she was making out of this!
I wanted to know the name of the woman who sang this song, and it took a while. I asked my parents when the song came on another time or two, and I think they wondered if it might have been Petula Clark. And then maybe the fourth time I heard this song I think the radio announcer said that the singer’s name was Dusty Springfield, and that didn’t sound right somehow. The name sounded like a male country singer; it didn’t seem to belong to this voice that sounded to me like the ultimate in abjection, and the ultimate, perhaps, in topping from the bottom.
I was very abject myself in those days, and lovelorn, and so Dusty Springfield and “You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me” had a special meaning for me. It was like an anthem. It was like my most secret emotion buried deep inside me brought out and made somehow beautiful in its twisted way. “Vicki (Wickham) and I had thought our lyric was about avoiding emotional commitment,” said lyricist Simon Napier-Bell of this song, which went to number one in the UK in 1966. “Dusty stood it on its head and made it a passionate lament of loneliness and love.”
When I was in college, Pulp Fiction (1994) was all the rage, and on the soundtrack of that movie was another Dusty Springfield track, “Son of a Preacher Man,” a teasing ode to a man who had taught her all about physical love; he was the only one who could “ever reach” her, and they had to make love on the sly, and the secrecy of this clearly added to the pleasure for both of them, but maybe this son of a preacher man is best for her in memory.
Aretha Franklin, not known for being encouraging to other singers, caught Springfield once in an elevator right after the release of “Son of a Preacher Man,” which she had turned down but eventually recorded herself. Franklin registered Springfield’s presence and she felt the need to put her hand on Springfield’s arm and say, “Girl!” as if she were impressed.
I finally bought a CD of Springfield’s hit singles, and the first songs were cheerful pop candy with lush string backing like “I Only Want to Be with You.” Springfield’s most popular songs all seemed to revolve around her obsession with a man, and what she would do to keep his attention, and this all seemed to go well beyond anything conventional or accepted, though no doubt many women did think like this in the mid-1960s. “Do the things he likes to do…wear your hair just for him!” she counsels on “Wishin’ and Hopin,’” but there is an awfully mournful horn on that song that seems to signal how hopeless this all is.
Songs like “I Just Don’t Know What to Do with Myself” and “All I See Is You” were very much in the vein of “You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me.” There was something about the lush fragility of her voice and the backing behind these near-crazed torch songs that had and still have an intense masochistic appeal to me; if anything, “All I See Is You” is perhaps even more splendidly self-pitying than the song that first made me love her, with even more dramatic horn backing to start and a build to a key change at the end that tells us all bets are off. Springfield performances like this are the epitome of a sort of high school fantasy life romance and yearning, taken to the most extreme lengths, especially when she sings, “And when I throw my arms out wide and find that you’re not by my side….”
I listened to her hits album over and over again, and I eventually bought her perfect soul album Dusty in Memphis (1969) and played those story songs over and over again, too. But it was only in the late 2000s that I started to learn more about Springfield herself and watch her perform songs on British TV shows of the 1960s. Her look was very armored: big blonde beehive of hair, ultra-black “panda” eyeliner, pink lipstick, and she was a performer who liked to make a lot of both static and fluttery hand gestures when she sang, and this could seem campy, something she was eventually aware of and even played up to. It was a signal, maybe, that we didn’t need to take the sentiments of her songs entirely seriously.
Springfield obviously felt the need to get into “female” drag to hide; the drag queen Lady Bunny later took on her full look. When she recorded back-up vocals for other singers, she used the name Gladys Thong, and she had that kind of humor in her, but her image led her to record things like Jacques Brel’s “Ne Me Quitte Pas,” the ultimate in romantic weakness and abjection. “Somehow…it seems the love I knew…was always the most destructive kind,” Springfield says before starting to sing Charles Aznavour’s “Yesterday When I Was Young” in 1970.
Springfield was a lesbian; her nickname Dusty had come about because she was a tomboy and always playing football with boys in the fields. She was performing in a time when that was not something that could be spoken about, and she was terrified of losing her career if people found out. Yet in 1970 she was brave enough to make this statement to the Evening Standard: “Many other people say I’m bent, and I’ve heard it so many times that I’ve almost learned to accept it…I know I’m perfectly as capable of being swayed by a girl as by a boy. More and more people feel that way and I don’t see why I shouldn’t.” The journalist said afterward that Springfield was nervously laughing when she told him this, and not long afterward she wondered if saying this would be the kiss of death for her career.
Her career did go downhill not long after that, and not just from the fallout of her coming out publicly in 1970, almost 30 years before Ellen DeGeneres, but from her own self-loathing, drinking, drug use, and self-harm, and so the masochism of her songs had a horrible real-life consequence in the 1970s. But she recorded a lovely and very sexy album called Cameo in 1973 that was ignored at the time but to me seems the equal of her best work.
Springfield was noted for being a perfectionist in the recording studio, so much so that she would sometimes record a song note by note or syllable by syllable, and surely this did not help her professionally either; she produced many of her 1960s tracks, but without credit. From 1974 to 1977, she mainly hid out in the US and did not perform, trying to dodge tabloid press. Her relationships with women were difficult to maintain, and some of them were violent.
Her voice was more fragile when she began to climb back up in the late 1970s and through the ‘80s, when she finally had a hit with the Pet Shop Boys called “What Have I Done to Deserve This?” She died in 1999 at age 59. The message of her music and image are of another time; they are strategies, basically. Surely we should reject those messages now. And yet. Isn’t there a teenager in all of us who would still like to stand up at the talent show or what have you and do “All I See Is You” or “You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me” for some teenaged ideal, and with everyone watching and understanding. Yes, and that should still hold true now, even if there is no longer any pressing need for the extremes of this position.
Another tender piece of understanding.
Off to listen for the first time to Cameo -
"Cameo" really is beautiful, James--