Reflections on ... Born to Be Wild (2023) by Ann-Margret

 

/ Portrait of Ann-Margret by Chantal Anderson for The New York Times, March 2023 /

82-year-old veteran sex kitten Ann-Margret dropped Born to Be Wild, her first new album in over a decade, last month (her previous one - God is Love: The Gospel Sessions 2 – came out in 2011). My notes! 

This is being referred to as Ann-Margret’s “first classic-rock album”, but her early sixties RCA recordings brim with delights like the girl group-style “I Just Don’t Understand”, her sultry cover of Elvis’ “Heartbreak Hotel” and her interpretations of R&B songs like “Roll with Me, Henry” and “Jim Dandy”. Ann-Margret has always rocked!   

On the wailing title track (a cover of the 1968 Steppenwolf song), A-M is backed by The Fuzztones – and it’s genuinely ferocious! (This isn’t her first foray into garage punk: “It’s a Nice World to Visit (But Not to Live In)” - her 1969 collaboration with Lee Hazlewood - still slaps hard). 

The musical backing is grittier, brasher and more rockabilly than you might expect. (On “Volare” A-M is accompanied by Lee Rocker and Slim Jim Phantom of The Stray Cats). “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree” belongs on every festive Spotify playlist! Her efforts at doo wop (“Earth Angel” and “Why Do Fools Fall in Love?”) and “Son of a Preacher Man” are credible. (The latter won’t make you forget Dusty, but it compares favorably with Bobbie Gentry and Nancy Sinatra’s versions). 

Best of all: “Somebody's in My Orchard” is slinky cocktail jazz loungecore with “blue” lyrics (“Somebody digs my fig trees / Someone loves their juice / That someone with that sweet juice / Ain't nothing but bad news ….”). 

/ Portrait of Ann-Margret by Chantal Anderson for The New York Times, March 2023 /

Less happily: duets with Pat Boone and Cliff Richard represent bad kitsch rather than fun kitsch. There’s frequently a whiff of Branson, Missouri and karaoke. Can’t help but wish A-M would find hipper collaborators and material. Not a fan of his but consider how Jack White produced late-period Loretta Lynn and Wanda Jackson albums. Not that A-M ever worried about “credibility” – her priority is to entertain. 

Finally: with the recent deaths of her contemporaries like Stella Stevens and Raquel Welch, the time to love and appreciate Ann-Margret is now! Next, we need comeback albums from Joey Heatherton and Connie Stevens!

Further reading: 

I reminisce about seeing Ann-Margret's ultra-camp Las Vegas revue in 2005.

Ann-Margret's cookie recipe.

 

Reflections on ... Nancy & Lee in Las Vegas (1973)

This unexpectedly downbeat hour-long cinema verité-style Swedish film (made in 1973 but shelved until 1975) documents pop duo Nancy Sinatra and Lee Hazlewood’s residency at The Riviera Hotel. It instantly entranced me with its opening travelogue footage of early seventies Las Vegas in all its garish splendor. Filmed from a car window, we pass Vegas Vic the iconic neon cowboy followed by tantalizing peeks at the old-school mid-century casinos (mostly now long demolished): The Golden Nugget. The Sands. Caesars Palace. The Mint. Judging by one billboard, Sinatra’s friend and former leading man Elvis Presley is also in town, starring at the Las Vegas Hilton. But the tone is surprisingly wistful and suffused with melancholy from the start. One of the first things you hear is Sinatra’s voice complaining, “I wanna go home. I wanna go home to LA.” 

Nancy & Lee in Las Vegas is ultimately a contemplation on the cruel whims of show business, capturing Sinatra and Hazlewood on a downturn. With their heady hit-making days of the mid-sixties (heralded by the tough, sassy “These Boots are Made for Walkin’” in 1965) behind them, they are now considered passé and obligated to hustle as a nostalgia act. (Sinatra has recalled perceptively and without bitterness in the past about how in the late sixties, youth culture tastes shifted towards a preference for “serious” rock bands, making go-go booted girl singers in general and Sinatra’s brand of kitschy pop instantly obsolete. Alongside the disparate likes of Bobbie Gentry, Serge Gainsbourg and Yma Sumac, Hazlewood and Sinatra were among the acts rehabilitated in the nineties “loungecore” movement when their back catalogue was reissued on CD. They’ve been a hip reference point ever since). 

Their names may be displayed in lights and they’re headlining at the glittering high-end Riviera, but the film doesn’t make a Las Vegas residency appear glamorous. Nor is it particularly lucrative. Choreographer Hugh Lambert (Sinatra’s handsome and supportive husband, who is producing and directing her Riviera revue) confides that - initially at least - mounting the whole enterprise is so expensive it’s a money-losing venture for them. (The implication is that performing in Vegas will put Sinatra back on the map). Even Sinatra’s two bodyguards admit they are being paid peanuts for this gig. 

The focus shuttles between performance footage and backstage scenes of the musicians and entourage relaxing pre-and post-show in Sinatra’s ritzy green-and-white dressing room. They kvetch over cigarettes and beer about the indifferent audiences who talk over the songs, hostile reviews and The Riviera’s jaded and uninspired house band.  Sinatra’s between song patter onstage is surprisingly negative. She delivers a diatribe about how when she first began recording in the early sixties, people sniped that her surname bestowed her with an unfair advantage and guaranteed success. But all of her pre-“Boots” singles flopped, she snaps, so clearly it was the songs that mattered, not her family connections. Then she recalls how collaborating with songwriter and producer Lee Hazlewood changed her fortunes, resulting in a string of hits - except then he “abandoned” her to relocate to Sweden. Following that introduction, Hazlewood joins her for some duets. For connoisseurs of Lee and Nancy’s sublime “country exotica” oeuvre, these performances, including “These Boots Are Made for Walkin’”, “Did You Ever?” “Summer Wine”, “Jackson” and “Arkansas Coal” (so hushed and dramatic it’s almost performance art) offer the documentary’s highlights.   

“Psychedelic cowboy” Hazlewood gets a solo spot during the set (presumably while Sinatra changes costumes). Clad in double denim leisure wear, Hazlewood somehow looks even more seedy sans his trademark retro porn star ‘tache. His strange charisma is nicely captured as he croons a finger snappin’ rendition of the jazz standard “She’s Funny That Way.” At the end he ad libs “She’s kinda squirrelly that way. She’s kinda goofy that way. She’s kinda Nancy that way …” Sinatra herself is diminutive and doll-like. Backstage, she seems exhausted. Onstage, she’s luminous. At one point, we watch Sinatra seated before her dressing room mirror dreamily teasing and then meticulously smoothing her mane of golden hair. Nancy Sinatra was never more beautiful.

/ This candid shot of Sinatra chilling with "gal pals" Liza Minnelli and Goldie Hawn was clearly taken in the same Riviera dressing room /

Watch Nancy & Lee in Las Vegas here.

Yma Sumac: The Art Behind the Legend

/ Operatic Enchantress Yma Sumac /

Make mine a Blue Hawaii! I’ve been in an exotica-drenched frame of mind lately. Trace it back to me buying the Ultra-Lounge CD Mondo Exotica (“Mysterious Melodies and Tropical Tiki Tunes”) at Amoeba Records when I was last in San Francisco in April 2012 (it’s been a staple of my DJ’ing sets ever since).  In my last post I wrote about the elusive turbaned 1950s heartthrob Korla Pandit; this time I wanted to pay tribute to another icon of exotica, the wondrous Peruvian soprano Yma Sumac (13 September 1922 – 1 November 2008).

Controversial pop culture theorist Camille Paglia has rhapsodised about the impact of Sumac’s 1950 debut album Voice of the Xtabay on her imagination and sensibility as an impressionable child, especially its sensational cover:

"The cover image of  Voice of the Xtabay with a glamorous Sumac in the pose of a prophesying priestess against a background of fierce sculptures and an erupting volcano, contains the entire pagan worldview and nature cult of what would become my first book, Sexual Personae, published 40 years later. Thank you, Yma!"

I’ve loved Sumac’s ululating voice,  regal persona and tempestuous musical vision since the 1990s when her old albums began being reissued on CD at the height of the lounge music revival vogue (especially her classic 1954 album Mambo! -- never was an exclamation point more deserved). Lately I feel like re-discovering Sumac, and delving deeper into her back catalogue.

In the Winter 2008 print issue of Nude (the sadly now defunct alternative arts and culture magazine) I reviewed the biography Yma Sumac: The Art Behind the Legend by Nicholas E Limanksy (YBK Publishers Inc).  (Weirdly, the issue of Nude featuring this review virtually coincided with the news of Sumac’s death – an eerie coincidence). Anyway, here it is below:

Of all the pre rock’n’roll singers unearthed in the 1990s lounge revolution, the strangest and most exotic was Yma Sumac.  In the 1950s the operatic Peruvian diva was a genuine pop culture phenomenon, boggling the minds of international audiences with her berserk four octave vocal range and mystical Incan high priestess image.   A lovingly researched new biography argues that Sumac (dubbed the “Voice of the Earthquake”) was both one of the first beneficiaries and casualties of record company hype.

Nicholas E Limansky charts the journey of the former Zoila Augusta Emperatriz Chavarri del Castillo from her modest roots as an authentic Andean folk singer wearing traditional Peruvian costume to her emergence as the enigmatic Yma Sumac, bejewelled ersatz princess supposedly descended from Emperor Atahualpa, peddling a Hollywood-ised interpretation of what purported to be ancient Incan music.  Sumac’s “career (was) in a constant state of compromise”, Limansky argues, characterised by “corruption of musical and ethnic innocence; of artistic ideals.”

 In hindsight Capital Records’ public relations spin was not particularly adroit (Limansky notes they persistently scrambled Incan and Aztec imagery on Sumac’s record covers) but initially it was massively successful: in 1950 her debut album Voice of the Xtabay went to number 1. The absurd publicity overdrive led to a backlash, though. Her parasitic manager-husband Moises Vivanco alienated many. The arrival of Elvis heralded the end of her chart topping days. And by The Beatles Sumac was a relic.

Obscurity beckoned until her albums were reissued on CD in the 1990s. Sumac’s rise had coincided with the fascination for all things exotic after World War Two: Latin, African and Polynesian music; Tiki lounges; tropical cocktails. When a new generation of hipsters embraced this pagan and taboo strand of Exotica lounge music its proponents Les Baxter and Martin Denny became cult figures – and Yma Sumac rehabilitated as the scene’s high empress.   

While the pleasure in listening to Sumac’s intoxicating music is analogous to donning a Hawaiian shirt or drinking a Mai Tai, she shouldn’t be dismissed as purely kitsch or camp. Heard today Yma Sumac’s remarkable voice still inspires awe.  

/ In 1954 Sumac made her film debut in the Hollywood adventure film Secret of the Incas, starring Charlton Heston. You can watch the film in its entirety on Youtube, but be warned – it’s pretty stultifying.  It does, however, capture Sumac in the supporting role of Kori-Tica at the height of her haughty, raven-haired beauty and in full nostril-flaring cry -- all in glorious 1950s Technicolour. Here are her best bits: /

 




Bonus track: the eerie and otherworldy "Chuncho": Yma Sumac at her witchy best.


Further reading:

The Yma Sumac biography The Art Behind the Legend was published on demand by YBK Publishers Inc. You can always contact them via their website

Yma Sumac's entry on Allmusic Guide website

Yma Sumac on Wikipedia

The official Yma Sumac website is a thing of great beauty