“We only said good-bye with words
I died a hundred times
You go back to her
And I go back to black”
- Amy Winehouse, “Back to Black”
When Amy
Winehouse went back to black permanently at age 27 on July 23,
there was mourning, of course, but in some quarters there was
also a callous, almost gleeful sense that she got what she
deserved. On TMZ, the sleazy show dedicated to stalking
and humiliating celebrities, straw sucking host Harvey Levin
said, “People don’t really care. At least they don’t consider
her death a great loss to the music world.” A poll on the web
site from which the show was spawned asked if she would be
remembered as a great singer or a junky, and 70 percent of the
half million who took part chose the latter.
Her fans can
take comfort in knowing that Winehouse’s records experienced a
surge on the charts following her death, and more people will
mourn her passing than ever noticed the lives of any of the
losers who cash paychecks from TMZ. Her death is, indeed,
a great loss to the music world as those musicians who have
eulogized her can attest. “Amy changed pop music forever,” Lady
Gaga said, while Adele acknowledged that “Amy paved the way for
artists like me. . . I don’t think she realized how brilliant
she was and how important she is, but that just makes her even
more charming.”
Part of her
charm was in her appearance. She looked like a visitor from
another time and place, or from several times and many places.
The tattoos up and down her arms were strikingly contemporary,
but that beehive hairstyle brought to mind ‘60's pop icons like
Ronnie Specter, whom she openly revered and who returned the
admiration, saying of Winehouse, “She had such a great soul in
her voice and her lyrics were so amazing that I couldn’t help
but sing one of her songs. I was so happy to see an artist like
Amy because she reminded me of my youth.” But true talent is
difficult to categorize and can straddle multiple eras. A legend
from the smoky nightclub period that preceded the rock age also
recognized her star quality. After performing a duet with
Winehouse for an album due this fall, Tony Bennett said, “She
was a lovely and intelligent person, and when we recorded
together she gave a soulful and extraordinary performance.”
Her songs,
too, straddled the fence, mixing R&B with Motown, then filtered
through hip-hop. Her biggest hit, the controversial “Rehab,” had
a distinctive mid-‘60s, pre-Beatles feel, but her lyrics were
tougher, sometimes raunchy, and always intensely personal.
She was born
in London, England on September 14, 1983. Her father, Mitch,
drove a taxi, and her mother, Janis, was a pharmacy technician.
She was singing from an early age, inspired, perhaps, by her
father who often sang Frank Sinatra songs around the house.
Through her father, she learned to love jazz, and listened to
such artists as Julie London, Sarah Vaughn, and Dean Martin,
whose bad boy persona she admired.
At the age of
10, she joined a childhood friend to form a rap duo called Sweet
‘n’ Sour. The group wasn’t around long, but Amy continued to
sing and, at the urging of her grandmother, had professional
training at the Susi Earnshaw Theater School where she studied
for four years before moving on to the Sylvia Young Theater
School. At 14, with her rebellious streak already evident, she
was expelled for piercing her nose and for failing to apply
herself. She did apply herself outside of school, though, by
learning to play guitar. She also started to write songs. “She
was always very self-willed,” he father recalled to Rolling
Stone. “Not badly behaved, but . . . different.”
Despite all
this musical activity, Winehouse had no particular aspirations
to perform professionally. Her ambition at the time was to
become a roller skating waitress like those she saw in the 1973
movie, American Graffiti. Amy’s father wasn’t even aware
of how talented she was until he attended a recital at Sylvia
Young. “She came out on the stage and started singing, and I
couldn’t believe it. I never knew she could sing like that.”
It was while
she was singing with a jazz band that a friend offered to record
some demos which he passed on to an A&R person who took note of
her voice and eventually signed her to Island/Universal. In
2003, her debut album, titled Frank, was released to
glowing reviews in the UK where it earned platinum status and a
nomination for the Mercury Music Prize. In 2004, she won the
Ivor Novello songwriting award for Best Contemporary Song for
“Stronger Than Me” in which she mused on her man’s role in their
relationship:
“You should be stronger than me
You been here seven years longer than me
Don’t you know you supposed to be the man
Not pale in comparison to who you think I am”
Shortly before
Halloween 2006, Back to Black hit the charts and made her
a star. “When I went into this album, I just felt really sad,”
she told Entertainment Weekly, “I felt really bad. I was
clinically depressed and I put it into music.”
The pain that
went into the album was apparent. Rolling Stone called it
“a desperately sad and stirring record,” but also found it
“funny, hip, and instantly classic.” Whatever darkness inspired
the songs, Amy’s wit and talent broke through the gloom like a
ray of blinding light. “Winehouse is a nervy, witty songstress
whom indie rockers, pop fans and hip-hoppers can dig,” the rock
mag raved. The songs might have been pages of a diary set to
music. In “Addicted,” she chooses weed over a lover, and in the
album’s most famous and popular song, “Rehab,” she is defiant,
determined to live as she pleased:
“They tried to make me go to rehab, but I said ‘no, no, no’
Yes I’ve been black but when I come back you’ll know, know, know
I ain’t got the time and if my daddy thinks I’m fine
He’s tried to make me go to rehab, but I won’t go, go, go”
In May 2007,
she married her boyfriend, Blake Fielder-Civil. That same month,
she performed at New York’s Highland Ballroom. Reviewing the
show in The New York Times, Jon Pareles wrote, “If Ms.
Winehouse were a purely old-fashioned soul singer, she’d just be
a nostalgia act, though one with some telling songs. Her
self-consciousness, and the bluntness she has learned from
hip-hop, could help lead soul into 21st century
territory.”
Three months
after that review appeared in the Times, the paper’s
“Arts, Briefly” column quoted her father-in-law, Giles
Fielder-Civil, as saying she and his son would be dead soon if
they did not seek help for their addictions. “Perhaps it’s time
to stop buying records,” he said, suggesting that a boycott of
Winehouse’s music might encourage her to seek help. He also said
that she should be ineligible for awards until she cleaned up
her act.
His remarks
fell on deaf ears. At the time, she was a nominee for numerous
honors, including an MTV Music Video award, and, by the end of
the year would earn six Grammy nominations.
The paparazzi
and those who make their scurrilous living by documenting the
foibles of the famous were already having a field day with
Winehouse. In October 2007, she was arrested along with her
husband and a third person on marijuana charges in Bergen,
Norway. She paid a fine and was released. A month later at a
performance in Birmingham, England, she arrived late and was
booed after stumbling about the stage in a daze. She responded
to the jeers by swearing at the audience and threatening them.
“(J)ust wait till my husband gets out of incarceration - and I
mean that” (hubby Blake was imprisoned at the time for
assaulting a pub owner). The concert ended abruptly when
Winehouse simply stopped singing, dropped the microphone on the
floor and walked off stage. In November, she was arrested in
London as part of an investigation related to her husband’s
assault charge.
When the
Grammy awards show was telecast in February 2008, she was unable
to attend due to visa problems and performed via satellite from
London where she was doing a stint in rehab. At the same time, a
video showing her apparently smoking crack made the rounds on
the web. Of course, her big hit, “Rehab,” which found her
resolutely refusing treatment, made the perfect soundtrack for
the clip.
The song had
its genesis when she and her husband “were walking down the
street, on our way to the pool hall, and I sang out of nowhere,
like a joke. . . He’s like, ‘you should do that as a song, it’s
funny. And I was like, it’s true.”
She performed
the song for the Grammy audience and burst into tears and
embraced her mother upon winning Record of the Year, one of five
awards she won that night.
Sadly,
“Rehab” proved to be successful only as a song. She admitted
that she sought treatment before recording the hit, but “for
just 15 minutes. I went in and said ‘Hello’ and explained that I
drink because I’m in love and have (messed) up the relationship.
Then I walked out.”
Following her
Grammy triumph, the only thing that remained were headlines, all
providing a preview of the tragedy to come. In 2008, she was
arrested in London on suspicion of drug possession. In 2009, her
husband divorced her, citing adultery. A highly anticipated
“comeback” gig at the Saint Lucia Jazz Festival was cut short
after six songs with Winehouse’s spokesmen citing heavy rains
and technical difficulties. But Winehouse was having
difficulties of her own, often appearing disinterested, and
spending some of her time on stage slumped over a speaker.
Finally, in
2011, there was another attempt at rehab, but after less than a
week at the Priory Clinic, she checked herself out. Her
publicist issued a statement saying she was “rarin’ to go,”
about to embark on a summer tour of Europe. Her performance in
Belgrade on June 18 proved otherwise. She turned up an hour
late, and, once on stage, she slurred lyrics, had trouble
holding the microphone, and spent less time singing than telling
the crowd which of her band members she liked best. Once again,
she was booed off the stage, and then cancelled shows in Athens
and Istanbul scheduled for later that week.
Those of us of
a certain age had been here before. In one of her later concert
appearances, Judy Garland arrived an hour late and was heckled
by a crowd that thought she was drunk. In the last year of his
life, Elvis Presley’s concert appearances were often
psychodramas with his entourage and the audience wondering if
he’d show up, and, if he did, could he perform? Like Garland,
Presley’s decline was faithfully charted by an often salivating
tabloid press, though not, as is the case today, on YouTube or
TMZ. Both performers - legends, giants among men - died
young, ingloriously, alone in their bathrooms. Amy Winehouse was
only joking when she told a journalist that in ten years she
would be “Dead in a ditch, on fire.” In retrospect, it sounds
like an optimistic statement. She was giving herself more time
than it turned out she had.
There was one
performance to go when she joined her goddaughter, singer Diane
Bromfield, on stage in London. Three days later, she died, alone
in her bed.
Yes, she
self-destructed. The self-incriminating evidence is there in her
songs:
“I cheated myself,
Like I knew I would
I told you I was trouble,
You know that I'm no good”
But she almost
certainly had help, including from the media. The paparazzi
surrounded her around the clock, hoping for a photograph or
video of the notorious bad girl, preferably in a drunk and
disheveled state. Comedian Russell Brand, a friend of Winehouse,
observed that the media “is more interested in tragedy than
talent, so the ink began to defect from praising her gift to
chronicling her downfall.” Estelle, a fellow singer, said, “This
fame is a juggernaut: It slaps you in the face and you don’t
know what you’re doing.”
Author Nick
Tosches, in an essay titled “Elvis in Death,” noted that hidden
within idolatry is a streak of envy. “So overwhelmed is the
being of the idolator by that of the idol that only the latter’s
supreme self-sacrifice, martyrdom, can justify and sanctify
their relationship.” Martyrdom may also be the only way Amy
Winehouse could have satisfied the vampires of the media, the
same voyeuristic leeches who gloated over her death.
Is the TMZ
poll accurate? Will Amy Winehouse be remembered more as a
junky than a great singer?
She’ll likely
be remembered as both, but if she hadn’t been a great singer,
she wouldn’t have been known at all. There are thousands of drug
and alcohol abusers, most of whom live and die anonymously,
known only to their friends and family. It was her talent that
made the difference, and it was her talent, not the drugs or
even the beehive, that made the world stand up and take notice
of the little girl from London with the big, beautiful voice.
Rest in peace,
Amy Winehouse.
by
Brian
W. Fairbanks