Dusty in Memphis by Warren Zanes
Dusty Springfield's Dusty in Memphis by Warren Zanes
I've just finished reading this book, about one of Elvis`favourite albums. Nothing sensationally new in it but an interesting ,thoughtful effort all the same. Zanes has an interesting and amusing way of encapsulating things. Writing about Son Of A Preacher Man he writes -(P.7)
The story it told was suggestive , subversive , and cunningly so. I`d looked down enough blouses in church to know just how the sacred and the profane can meet at prayer time. Elsewhere he neatly sums up the bag of emotional strife that Dusty was with the following (P22) -
If Dusty had always stuck close to the general territory of the teenage unrequited love saga , which , it seems , always had an audience , with the Memphis record she slipped out the back door and went wandering in the night of it all. While he does bang on a bit about the myths of `The South` - and gives Alan Lomax a very hard time - this short book has given me a whole new perspective on this album. Incidentally , he has also read Elvis` sleeve note to the 2002 re-issue - he quotes the `simply one of the most knowingly adult records ever made ` line on p.9.
Excerpt:
The love that is the subject of Dusty in Memphis is different from the love of her earlier songs: it is a love that is all at once diffuse, dark, unpredictable, ecstatic, and a terrible deal. It is a love too big for the lyrical (and for that matter musical) framework of Dusty’s earlier pop productions, no matter the breadth of that work. Like Memphis itself, the love that is the subject of Dusty in Memphis is indeed bursting with the contrary: it happens not simply when you yearn for it, as in some adolescent dream, but when you’re not prepared for it; it reveals itself not simply under the star-filled skies where a moon hangs low--in fact, as the first and last tracks on side one attest, it might be at its best when the sun’s just arriving at work.