Free History of Rock 'n' Roll in Ten Songs by Greil Marcus Page B

her first two words James is all sweep, fog rolling in over the hills in San Francisco and then all across the country,her tone so clear you can see straight through to the end of the song. As it goes on there are terrible, subtle shifts into a lower register, terrible because each degree of shading speaks for a despair that would shame anyone who tried to put it into words. She worries hands for only a second, but worlds of loss, of one hand coming away from another, never to touch again, are in that moment. She comes down harshly on certain words, pushing them away from her, trying to push the images they call up out of her mind. She seems to be remembering something that happened a long time ago, or imagining what’s going to happen, and how she’ll feel when she remembers it. Time stops, swirls, and fades out. I heard —James’s sound is so full of beauty it’s hard to stand it, and nothing that follows will even approach the purity of her sound, right here; it will draw you back to the song again and again, to see whether the spell will wear off, as you half hope it will, to see if the sound can again take you to unglimpsed countries in your own heart, which it will.
    Etta James was not happy when in 2007 she heard that Beyoncé Knowles, born in 1981 in Houston, had been signed to play her in Cadillac Records, a film about Leonard Chess and the Chess label. “She’s going to have a hill to climb, because Etta James ain’t been no angel,” she was quoted as saying. “I wasn’t as bourgie as she is, she’s bourgeois. She knows how to be a lady, she’s like a model. I wasn’t like that. I smoked in the bathroom at school.” But the scene inwhich Beyoncé records “All I Could Do Was Cry” is so powerful it can make the rest of her career seem like a cheat—a cheat she played on herself, and her own talent, more than anyone else.
    Leonard Chess was born Lejzor Czyz in Poland in 1917; along with his mother, his sister, and his brother and future partner Phil, he arrived in the United States in 1928. After the war he and his brother opened the Macombo, a blues and jazz joint on the South Side in Chicago; by 1947 they were in the record business. Muddy Waters put them on the map; they effectively wiped every other label in town off of it. Howlin’ Wolf, Little Walter, Bo Diddley, Chuck Berry, Sonny Boy Williamson, Buddy Guy, Dale Hawkins—for the future members of the Rolling Stones, Fleetwood Mac, and other British blues bands, the Chess studio at 2120 South Michigan Avenue wasn’t merely legendary, it was Shangri-La. Leonard Chess died in 1969 at fifty-two, in his Cadillac, of a heart attack, driving away from the offices of the company he had sold months before.
    Cadillac Records is one thing after the other, all story and no ambiance, no sense of place or purpose, until Beyoncé appears. Off camera, we hear her singing, and Adrien Brody as Leonard Chess calling “Cut, cut.” “Fuck you,” Beyoncé says. “What the hell you know about the blues?” We see them in the studio, Beyoncé in a short blonde Etta James wig. James wasn’t pretty; here neither is Beyoncé. “I gaveyou a damn good track,” she shouts, then closing her face with her eyes open, putting down the lead sheets. “You want it,” she says matter-of-factly, “you sing it.” Brody turns to the band, a what-can-you-do expression on his face. “Now she wants me to sing it. Now go home, go home. Forget it. Everybody go home. What you smilin’ at?” He goes up to Beyoncé as she’s gathering her things, and bears down on her like a mugger: “My mistake. You ain’t woman enough for that song.” “I’m plenty woman,” Beyoncé says, and with the way her teeth fill her mouth for the second word, making plenty weight the line like an anchor, you begin to hear the music that wasn’t there when the scene began. Brody presses harder, contempt covering his disgust. “That song’s about being in love, you know what that is?”