Back To Winehouse
AMY
Ten Years After: Back to Winehouse
Donald Brackett
Ten years ago today, Amy Winehouse's Back to Black took the music world by storm. Join culture critic and Winehouse aficionado Donald Brackett as he tangentially contemplates two key questions at the tail end of the tempest: What made Back to Black a contemporary masterpiece? More vitally, how did grief on musical steroids manage to sound so damn good?
“Celebrity is a mask that eats into the face.” –John Updike
Before long, the brilliant album Amy Winehouse released ten years ago today will have lived longer that she herself did. Back to Black was then and still is now a singular achievement with few sonic peers in the realm of pop music. This is especially ironic because it was never intended to be a pop record at all and instead merged jazz, blues, R&B, funk, ska, soul, hip hop, Wall of Sound-esque sixties girl groups and something else without a name into an amazing witch’s brew with many imitators but few equals.
Having just completed a book on the album, its historical roots, brilliant producers and backup band, I am as amazed by the record now as I was when I first heard it a decade ago. Almost as strange is the fact that she passed away nearly a half a decade ago this year and took with her one of the most oddly gifted and mesmerizing torch song talents to come along since Billie Holiday, Dinah Washington, Nina Simone, Anita O’Day and Sharon Jones.
If the last talent mentioned is not quite a household name, it’s only because Jones’ superb backup band, the Dap-Kings, are the lesser-known revivalist soul masters whose sound was borrowed by the brilliant young DJ/Producer Mark Ronson to help create the brand we identify with Winehouse today. Old-school analog devotees in every sense, the Dap-Kings recorded for Daptone Records, founded by the great Gabriel Roth, almost 20 years ago. It was their warm direct-to-tape style that leant the authentic soul spice to Winehouse’s only masterpiece. Roth, who won a Grammy Award for sound engineering her hit, can often be as blunt as Winehouse could: “Show me a computer that sounds as good as a tape machine and I’ll use it!”
Winehouse may indeed have been a savant, somewhat unaware of how she managed to reach such vocal heights. She was definitely a spookily gifted mimic, channeling both mellow torch jazz giants and melodramatic torch pop songbirds into a unique dream soup all her own. She was also plunged onto a fast track to supersonic and unexpected stardom through her chance encounter with Mark Ronson on a New York street ten years ago when she began goofily singing her talk to the hand riff, which stopped him in his tracks. All he could hear in her insistent complaint was a perfect pop hook—and he was right.
Ronson has often expressed how thunderstruck he was that spring day when Winehouse, visiting from England with friends, came to his studio located at Mercer and Canal in downtown New York. As he explained to Billboard, they hung out and talked about music. “She was so magnetic, and just her energy—I just instantly liked her and I wanted to impress her, basically. I wanted to have a piece of music that would make her be like, wow, I want to work with this guy.” He famously convinced her.
“When she did this ‘talk to the hand thing,’” Ronson remembered, “I said that was really hooky. We didn’t give it much thought.” Following his initial reaction and suggestion that she go write a song based on ‘talking to the hand,’ Winehouse played him what she’d come up with. He responded with his typically laconic “cool,” recommended putting some handclaps here and there and perhaps adding a minor chord to the verse to make it a bit ‘jangly,’ and, according to Ronson, “that was it.” After Winehouse went away for the night, Ronson worked on the arrangement and she returned to sing over it the next day. He had added his own drums, guitar, and keyboards and enhanced its now classic groove while “Winehouse’s vocal hit the hook with a vengeance.”
By now, almost everyone on the planet has either listened to the album, read about its tragic backstory, or seen Amy, the riveting documentary film produced by Asif Kapadia released last year. But unlike Little Girl Blue, the 2015 documentary on Janis Joplin, or Miss Sharon Jones!, the one about (surprise!) Sharon Jones, or What Happened, Miss Simone?, which (logically) profiles Nina Simone, the Amy film, alas, was largely focused on the gripping but tabloid-like subtext to her greatness as an artist. It paid less attention to her musical antecedents, influences, roots, fine creative collaborations, superb technical prowess, and the gifted producers and fantastic band who made her musical miracle possible in the first place.
The strange magic of her talent and the creative genius of the amazing instrumentation, arrangement, orchestration, record production and band performance support were essentially lost in the alarming soap opera that enveloped the shy and insecure star. Equally absent was any hope of understanding why a style of delivery as personal and idiosyncratic as hers managed to garner listeners from absolutely every corner of the music-buying public.
Her appeal was so diverse, so eclectic, and so hugely popular across all tastes, genres, and markets that drastically different listeners could easily discuss her record without having a single other thing in common to bring them together. The demographic for her seductive brand of soul-scorched torch song was simply so universal that it could seem somewhat baffling.
It certainly baffled her.
In fact, the popularity of this dark and disturbing record (despite the obvious beauty of its shining surfaces) prompts us all to wonder about the central role of pop music in our contemporary culture: what it does for us and to us and how that perfect pop hook that captures our attention also sometimes clouds our judgment while still answering a deep subliminal call from our hearts. The hook of more hopeful music (like that of the Beatles) was one thing, but what about the hook of distressingly sorrowful blues music that takes you to the root of a dilemma that its glistening glamour can never truly deliver you from?
After debuting with her bouncy, up-tempo retro-jazz album Frank (produced by the great Salaam Remi, who would return to co-produce Back to Black) in 2003, the twenty-two year old Winehouse would experience some of life’s more challenging emotional moments (to put it mildly). The musical novice would then get to write a whole new book about love found, then lost, then found again—before being lost once more.
For her follow up record, which many would agree was her only masterpiece, a more hard-edged Winehouse would depart from the jazz current and reach back to the classic girl group sounds of the sixties to find her true calling: she was suddenly the ideal contemporary exponent of an ages-old tradition known as the torch song. Something about our era made us embrace her approach to wild bad-girl abandon with wide-open arms and hearts. We fell for her entirely—pop hook, line, and heavy sinker. Why?
If nothing else, one thing can be said with certainty regarding the no-no girl: in the spirit of the sultry crooner who first inspired her to sing, this Cockney kid truly did it her way.
Most importantly, when we consider the many historical musical roots that nourished her—the Crystals, the Chiffons, the Shangri-Las, the Supremes, the Dixie Cups, the Shirelles, the Marvelettes, the Secrets, the Rag Dolls, the Angels, the Orlons, the Exciters, and most crucially, the Ronettes—we realize that Winehouse and her grand Ronson-produced homage to the Spector Era didn’t just pay a deferential debt to the past. What they did, in fact, was strip down the branches of popular music to draw directly from its muscular trunk, pruning the past to nurture a growing, unprecedented future.
Oh, to have been a studio fly on the Wall of Sound during the fabrication of Back to Black! One can’t stress enough how central—crucial, really—both Remi and Ronson were to its realization. After waiting three long years for a follow-up to Frank, Winehouse’s Island Records executives gave her an ultimatum and threatened to drop her from the label if she didn’t buckle down and deliver the goods. Remi provided her a safe refuge and practically nursed her back to psychic health at his studio home in Miami between her first and second albums. He let her hang out away from the temptations of London after her emotionally traumatic break-up; he let her sit quietly in his garden scribbling sad poems and forlorn diary entries into her notebook. Then he helped her craft some of these therapeutically healing rhymes into early versions of remarkable tunes such as “Tears Dry On Their Own,” “Just Friends,” “Me and Mr. Jones,” and “Some Unholy War.”
Meanwhile, Ronson, the production wizard who shared her love of the sixties girl groups’ maximal ethos and vastly echoing Spector Wall of Sound technique, spent only a few studio days with Winehouse in New York. In this incredibly brief interval, he recorded the vocals for masterful but heartbreaking songs such as “Rehab,” “You Know I’m No Good,” “Love is a Losing Game,” “Wake Up Alone,” and, of course, the madly majestic title track “Back to Black” (which was literally composed overnight).
Most emphatically and, perhaps, historically, Ronson made an indelible sonic mark by taking these raw vocals and creating arrangements, band instrumentations, and orchestration charts around them. Maybe most fatefully, he decided to visit the Brooklyn-based analog studios of Daptone Records and use the actual Dap-Kings soul band to envelop these vocals live in the studio. Rather than trying to sample their old-school style digitally to create a false simulation that mirrored their snappy, direct-to-tape seventies tone, Ronson incorporated authentically produced black funk and soul music—something that some listeners and critics had occasionally faulted Winehouse for so brilliantly but blatantly appropriating.
As early as 2004, Winehouse was downplaying any borrowed blackness—which would become even more evident as her flavor shifted from jazz/blues to R&B/hip-hop—in her music. She was also already acknowledging the central power of the producer as artist in her creative process. As she admitted to Blues and Soul magazine, “I wrote my songs on guitar; I went to a producer, and he did them for me . . . I just sing and write reflecting everything I’ve ever heard . . . the minute I even start to think about what I’m doing I just lose it. I have to just shut my eyes and flow!” Later on, of course, a Winehouse in decline would petulantly take Ronson to task for his identical explanation of how he transformed her simple guitar riffs into formal band arrangements. They fought over her Twitter attack and made up quickly, like the close siblings they had become.
But the making of Back to Black didn’t just consist of the incredibly fast ten-day period when Ronson had Winehouse to himself in the studio crafting raw and (often) acoustic demos, or even the heady five months during 2006 when he assembled the album from recorded fragments separated by an ocean. In a very real sense its actual history is comprised of the sixty years of pop music that preceded Winehouse’s sudden rise to prominence. Ronson wove arcane musical threads to create her tapestry—a feat that seems even more startling ten years on due to the almost supernatural ease of its conception and the way he layered the Dap-Kings under her furtively captured vocals.
In fact, Winehouse didn’t even meet or play with her magical backup band until the CD had already been released. Even more mind-boggling is the fact that, like most twenty-first century singer-songwriters seeking the street cred of rough rap textures, she refused Ronson’s suggestion to put orchestrated strings on the record—even when he offered to personally pay for them. Undeterred, Ronson added this crucial element while she was away. His grand reveal, especially of the blissfully sad “Love is a Losing Game,” resulted in a weeping and appreciative Winehouse and a classic torch song album.
Without these two gifted producers, each a talented musician in his own right, the chart-topping edifice that is Back toBlack may have never materialized at all. With their mentorship, guidance, and, eventually, their friendship, she was able to embody her own exotic brand of girl group wherein she alone performed the personas that required three or four singers back in the day. Like the sixties girl groups who ruled their own pop kingdoms for a time—those shimmering alchemists who took the melodrama of teen angst and turned it into biting psychodrama—Winehouse perfumed her songs with a heartache that we could all guiltily celebrate. This unique anguish would go on to win her five Grammy Awards in 2008 (with a sixth Grammy awarded posthumously for her soul-wrenching duet with Tony Bennett).
To her credit, and to the credit of the producer who decided to use the analog majesty of the Dap-Kings as the record’s studio and concert backup band, Winehouse definitely cashed the check that those girl groups wrote back then—and she cashed it big time. The perplexing beauty of her stylistic inheritance and the perfectly fused hybrid of her genre-bending technique provide more-than-ample evidence that Back to Black transcended the many origins it borrowed from.
It also paid back the loans—with dividends—of all concerned parties since it basically elevated all the earlier sensibilities it stirred together to become what we have to call quintessential pop music: music for global ears belonging to eclectic and diverse listening audiences. Ronson, of course, is pleasantly humble by nature (something rare in the music industry) and has also been smart enough to frequently state, “I didn’t make her career. She made mine.”
For the first time since the Beatles, there was music that kids with ska, rap and hip-hop predilections could listen to while, at the same time, their parents inclined toward jazz, blues, funk, and soul could appreciate its exotic and singular vibe. In the end, that’s what makes it perfect pop music: it literally has something for everyone, whether or not you know about the tragic undertow that eventually swamped its creator.
In fact, the less one focuses on the soap opera that swirled inside and around Winehouse and the less one recalls the sheer media feeding frenzy that erupted in the wake of her public meltdowns, the easier it is to deeply appreciate the album’s timeless qualities. Now, as we return to the brief tsunami that was Winehouse ten years later, the true grandeur and stature of her masterpiece can come to the foreground, as can the magical way it seamlessly transitioned the torch song tradition from one era into another.
That tradition has always been founded on the simplest of emotional ingredients without any special effects:
1. Lover, come back!
2. I cried a river over you…
3. I love you more than you’ll ever know; therefore,
4. This is your song.
The torch tradition doesn’t entail any special effects, elaborate sets, or wild costume changes because its simple stage set—the broken human heart—requires no props beyond its own emotional pleas.
Was Amy Winehouse a pop genius? Probably, but not of the garden variety, especially since she would have balked even more if she knew Back to Black would be remembered as a pop gem (which, ironically, occurred almost in spite of her intentions) rather than an edgy record filled with existential raps and hip street cred. It’s just that the jazz, blues, and girl group sentiments were all so perfectly crafted by Ronson, Remi, and the Dap-Kings that they didn’t seem at all nostalgic or retro. They didn’t even seem revivalist, which is that soul/funk band’s Daptone-drenched specialty. It was the future past, and it sure was tense.
Instead, Back to Black constitutes a postmodern plunge into unbridled romanticism that may have altered the sonic landscape for years to come regardless of whether Winehouse is around to collect additional accolades. Like her vocal heroes Donny Hathaway and Ray Charles (who she referenced in her mega-hit “Rehab”) or her angelic heroines Roberta Flack and Ronnie Spector (who she channeled like a séance medium), she invented a new kind of musical instrument. It was a vulnerably human and powerfully female voice that felt rarefied and taut beyond compare, so organically fluid that it shared a unique love affair with the microphone that transmitted it to all of us.
Earthy and somewhat na?ve, Winehouse was also an untutored and totally natural anti-movie star, weaving the paradoxical powers of Judy Garland, Barbara Streisand, Edith Piaf, and Diana Ross together into an utterly unique carpet only she could stand on. She was Dusty Springfield drenched in darkness and Petula Clark from hell—instead of chirpily taking us all downtown, she took us all down there.
Weirdly enough, the promoter who originally “discovered” her was the crafty mogul who made The Spice Girls a household name, for better or worse. But Winehouse rebelled, declared that she ain’t ‘gonna work on Fuller’s Farm no more, and launched her own melancholy space-girl career into orbit.
If the pop song evolved into the personal and public soundtracks of the last century, as it so clearly seems to have done, what does that tell us about the emotional movie we all live in? In addition to her privately personal testaments on Back to Black, Amy Winehouse gave us all a key to the secret basement rec room of popular culture in her intimate and yearning interpretation of Al Kooper’s classic soul song “I Love You More Than You’ll Ever Know,” making it all her own in a haunting live rendition.
“We're still alive,” she said at the end of the song’s performance at the Carling Academy in Liverpool in 2007, “we’re still alive, we're still standing.” Even then she sounded surprised—and she hadn’t even started her final descent yet. When it comes to making your life into your material and your material into a breathing emblem of your living sorrows, Winehouse seems to have achieved a new high watermark for such rare creative transformations. She engraved herself on our hearts whether we wanted her to or not; she was tattooing a torchy dream.
This brings us to what, in a sense, is perhaps her greatest challenge of all. Once you release a great album, something she managed to do with the vital help and collective genius of Ronson, Remi, Roth, and the Dap-Kings, there is still a big shock in store for an artist like Winehouse. You have to be healthy enough, or at least strong enough, to go out and stand on concert stages around the planet to give the people what they want, over and over and over again. For her, that was a lot more difficult than making the record in the first place, simply because she now forced to live it over again every night in a different city.
In essence, her torch songs soon became living home movies. Before she left us, though, ten years ago this October, we were given the gift of her remarkable music in a personal, brave, and intimate way seldom seen or heard before—or since.
There is an antique epigram that applies rather spookily to Winehouse. It is from “Epistle to a Lady,” written by the British poet Alexander Pope in 1743 as a piece of feminine moral advice. Pope’s admonition of the overarching ambition of passion defeating reason could also serve as the ideal emblem for the short, sad, gifted life of one of the most inspired and inspiring jazz/blues/soul singers to come along since (fill in the blank if you can). As Pope opined:
Wise Wretch! with Pleasures too refin'd to please,
With too much Spirit to be e'er at ease,
With too much Quickness ever to be taught,
With too much Thinking to have common Thought:
You purchase Pain with all that Joy can give,
And die of nothing but a Rage to live.
Turns out it isn’t so antique after all. It’s timeless and terribly true.
Both Billie Holiday and Nina Simone (whose styles she merged in a manner that poured Marianne Faithful through a sieve made of similar white British angst) and the gifted white American jazz singer Anita O’Day suffered from a rage to live identical to that which took Winehouse away from us. Like all of them, she was a wise fool, a medium who spent her short life at the threshold of the known and unknown, and she left behind only two private diaries in sound. The second, that dark and soul-blistering pile of steaming, sad brilliance called Back to Black, is a masterpiece from beyond. It’s not that Winehouse invented something totally new; she simply reinvented something old and extended its tradition in a way that was totally now. After all, the opening notes of the Supremes’ classic “Baby Love” decorate the dark shadows of Back to Black’s eponymous title track; the triumphant melody of Marvin Gaye’s “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough” provides the foundational tune for “Tears Dry On Their Own”; both “Wake Up Alone” and “Some Unholy War” contain actual sonic elements of The Shangri-Las in general, and “Leader of The Pack” and “(Remember) Walkin’ in the Sand” in particular. Amy Winehouse didn’t exactly come out of nowhere—it only seemed that way.
Perhaps Alexander Pope’s clever moral epigram isn’t quite so quaint after all—as a matter of fact, it might even be an eternal verity. Winehouse was a wise wretch. Her pleasures were too refined to please. She had too much spirit to ever be at ease. She had too much quickness to ever be taught. She did too much thinking to have a common, shared thought. She obviously purchased pain with all that joy can give. And, alas, she clearly did die of nothing but a rage to live. Suddenly Pope, a classical social commentator, becomes just as pertinent, prescient, and visionary a plumber of the human heart as Carole King or Joni Mitchell. Who, as they say, woulda thunk it?
Like the ratio of dog years to human years, in the shimmering world of pop music a decade feels like an eternity. Now is perhaps an ideal time to listen to Back to Black again, probably to cry again, and perhaps most importantly, to remember just how huge a creative shadow Winehouse’s brief presence has cast across our popular culture.
Why is Back to Black so important? Why does it deserve to be called and cherished as her only masterpiece? So far there are more than 20 million reasons worldwide. Each one represents a human being from a diverse culture who owns a copy and for whom it has some special meaning. It therefore has over 20 million meanings, each one being the true and correct meaning. Today, ten years since it was dropped from the sky by a strange and exotic bird flying high overhead, Back to Black has come to symbolize a heartfelt message about the human condition composed especially for each listener—a message that transcends cultural boundaries and is recognized as a rare and unique work of art destined to withstand the test of time. In other words, it is a pop classic.
Winehouse may well have been a savant, but only time would have told, and time, as jazz giant Artie Shaw once astutely remarked, is all we’ve got. But even if she was a freakish bolt of lightning that only struck us once, the exotic light she shed and the exquisite darkness she illuminated are still well worth our acclaim.
Once something so personal transcends the realm of the private and breaks through to the universal, it gets to be regarded as a classic. A classic is any work of art, whether it is a painting, a building, a book, a film, or a musical composition, that instantly makes the viewer, reader, or listener feel that the work in question was painted, designed, written, or composed for him/her personally. It remains permanently situated in the present moment no matter how much time passes since our initial encounter with it in the cultural arena.
A classic piece of music is not necessarily one that is classical but rather one that transcends the time in which it was produced, influencing everything that follows it and having a shared meaning long afterwards. But in the end, the more compelling reasons for Back to Black’s privileged position in pop music history are even more basic: how it was composed, how it was produced, how it was recorded, how it was performed live, and, perhaps most importantly for us, how it sounds today.
Ten years later Back to Black still sounds like a predestined marriage between heaven and hell, a combined technical production achievement and poetic musical accomplishment that remains uniquely aloof and untouchable. In a strangely alluring way, there’s everybody else in pop music—and then there’s Amy Winehouse.
About the Author
Donald Brackett is a Vancouver-based culture critic who writes about music, art and films. He is the author of Back to Black: Amy Winehouse’s Only Masterpiece and is currently working on new books about the music of Scott Engel Walker and the fiftieth anniversary of the pop band Fleetwood Mac.