VIA NY TIMES:
Long before Lady Gaga, Beyoncé or even Madge, there was Betty Davis. Not the smoky-eyed “All About Eve” star, but the preternaturally funky 1970s diva whose high-voltage performances could melt the black off tar. She was light years ahead of her leisure-suited contemporaries, who didn’t get Davis’s piercing growl, far-out fashions and sexually charged funk-acid rock amalgam. But now, with Light In the Attic Records releasing two of Davis’s long-lost albums, “Nasty Gal” (1975) and “Is It Love or Desire” (1976), the time is right for us late adopters to catch up to this sassy soul sensation.
Davis’s brassy and oversexed stage persona — in the best tradition of Josephine Baker, Millie Jackson and Li’l Kim — was outrageous. Ribald songs like “If I’m in Luck I Just Might Get Picked Up,” “Nasty Gal,” “He Was a Big Freak” and “Don’t Call Her No Tramp” had no chance at airplay. And Davis was never able to land a contract with a major label, though she came close with Motown and Chris Blackwell’s Island Records. (She was also ahead of the curve in demanding artist copyright ownership.) Throughout her career, she faced opposition from church groups and even the N.A.A.C.P., which claimed her music reinforced negative stereotypes — to which Davis would say she was just telling it like it is.
Photo by Fin Costello/Redferns Davis, two of whose albums are being reissued by Light in the Attic Records, was also a model and Miles Davis’s wife.
Offstage, she was more down-to-earth, her natural beauty shining through. She modeled for the Wilhelmina agency and appeared in Ebony, Seventeen and Glamour, but ultimately found it vacuous. Her fearless fashion sense remained intact (and her stint at New York’s Fashion Institute of Technology couldn’t have hurt). Check out Davis in thigh-high silver boots, a futuristic Egyptian leotard or a plume-festooned petticoat. Men, like Miles Davis, found her irresistible (as did Hugh Masekela and Jimi Hendrix). The liner notes to one of her albums describe her first date with Miles in 1967; she wore a see-through butterfly dress by Stephen Burrows (one of her favorite designers). A year later they married.
Though she was nearly half his age and a billionth as famous, she kept Miles on his toes. She turned him on to experimental rock and funk artists like Hendrix and Sly Stone, overhauled his wardrobe and was, for a time, his muse. She appeared on the cover of Miles’s 1968 “Filles de Kilimanjaro,” which included the track “Mademoiselle Mabry.” (Davis was born Betty Mabry in 1945.) Her funk-rock predilections influenced his classic fusion album, “Bitches Brew” (1969).
But Betty hardly needed anyone’s laurels to rest on, least of all a dysfunctional musician. Miles wrote in his biography that despite her talent, Betty was “too young and wild” for him. After their divorce in 1969, Betty devoted herself full-time to music. She wrote all her own songs and produced all but one of her five albums. She also penned songs for other artists, including the Chamber Brothers classic “Uptown (To Harlem),” and wrote songs for bands like the Commodores. Her coterie of friends and admirers reads like a Studio 54 guest list: T-Rex’s Marc Bolan, Muhammad Ali, Richard Pryor, Maurice White, Rick James, Eric Clapton, Carlos Santana.
By the early 1980s, Davis had had enough of the music biz. Her song “Stars Starve, You Know,” explains why:
“They said if I wanted to make some money/I’d have to clean up my act. … It’s hard for me and the band to make a livin’/Less I do myself in/And let em’ win/And commit one of them commercial sins.”
Which, thankfully, Betty Davis never did.
