Why Etta James never wanted to be like The Rolling Stones
“The Stones are great,” Etta James once said, but it took her a while to admit it. At first, back in her younger and more angsty days, she was determined to hate them, vowing never to be like Mick Jagger and his troupe.
“I was originally like a punker, know what I mean, like the punks are today, I’d spit in a minute,” she said of her rebellious younger years before she found her genre-blending sound. Along with the style, James was leaning right into the anti-establishment mindset. She hated the rich and the bourgeoisie, and, to her, that’s precisely what The Stones were. So when she opened for the band on their 1978 tour, it was conflicting.
“The first night I worked with them, I almost cried in my dressing room,” she added. It was a conflicting upset. On the one hand, there was a degree of jealousy as she remembered, “I thought, God, here are these guys, they’re famous millionaires from doing this here, and I’m still nowhere after all these years. What is happening here?”
But on the other hand, that enduring punk spirit had given her a very different outlook on money and fame. “Then I think, I don’t know, I wanna make money, but I don’t probably never wanna be cool about it, you know what I mean?” she said. To her, it was all about the work, whether that work was in the big venues the Stones were taking over or her local pub.
She continued: “I would never be cool about it. I would never give a shit whether I worked Las Vegas or Lake Tahoe or not. I’m not a bourgeois person, never will be. I could work Dingwalls forever because I’m used to that kind of joint.”
That seemed to be the difference between her and the band. “Like the guys came to me last night and said, ‘I’m sorry this is not like the Ritz.’ Well what the heck would I know?” she continued. “In 25 years I’ve never worked the Ritz; I’ve worked nothing but places that look like Dingwalls. And for those kind of people, that stand there and scream all night, and when you get through they’re mad because you don’t come back, that’s my kind of people.”
For her, it’s the smaller venues that bring her joy. Anything too fancy squashes her excitement for the show as she commented: “See, I don’t like places where people can’t dance – don’t like clubs or theatres where a bunch of bourgeois people sit around tip, tip, tipping their fingers.”
However, pretty soon after James’ music caught attention, it was marketed to exactly the kind of crowd she was looking to avoid. “I wanna show that gospel, country, blues, jazz, rock ‘n’ roll, are all just really one thing,” she said of her music, but it’s a known fact that nuance like that is often lost to the masses. Instead, her old punk ways were lost to the image of a prim and proper soul singer with sleek makeup and perfectly done hair. Soon, she was playing in the ballrooms and glitzy venues that she once feared or frowned upon.
However, not everyone can stick to the guns they first drew as a fired-up teenager. As she settled into her career and her position in the music world, James came to love the band as she said, “They got the direction and they know what the hell to do. They know how to pump plenty of sound, they know how to get real intense and get people so crazy that they don’t know what the heck’s happening to them. And that’s the way you gotta do it.”
The feeling was mutual. That initial tour together created a life-long bond between James and the band, with Keith Richards calling her his “rock ‘n’ roll wife”. He included her track ‘Sugar on The Floor’ as one of his essentials on his Desert Island Discs appearance, showing just how much of an impact her music had on him.
Even if she initially considered them to be bourgeoisie, James became a passionate fan of the group, admitting, “I find myself going crazy about the Stones just like the kids are in the audience”.
