As of 1988, Etta James was known for a bunch of stuff, good and bad: a raunchy stage presence; a huge voice that could express pain like no other and had a rare facility with blues, jazz and rock; and songs like “W.O.M.A.N.,” “Tell Mama” and “Dance with Me Henry.” So much for the positives. Back then it also looked like the former child prodigy was going to join her near-contemporary Esther Phillips as one of the greatest squandered talents in American music history. (As her former road manager Phil Kaufman put it in his book Road Mangler Deluxe, James had a fondness for a certain substance that “makes you talk fast and think slow.”) But in 1988, somebody in Hollywood slid James’s version of “At Last” over the top of a key moment in Rain Man, and an American standard was born. Hollywood, being Hollywood, recast the song a hundred million times — it became every bit the movie trailer/TV commercial clichรฉ that “I Feel Good” has become and “Hey Ya” is fast becoming. (As evidenced by every American Idol competition, many people who’ve probably never heard of Etta James’s old labelmate Muddy Waters or their old label Chess Records learned “At Last” by heart and are all too willing to inflict their versions on anyone within earshot.) Happily, around the same time Rain Man came out, James cleaned up her act for good — she released her comeback album, Seven Year Itch, and wrote her unblinking memoir, Rage to Survive, a little later. Survive she has, and brother can she rage.
This article appears in Apr 22-28, 2004.
