Two Bonnie Raitt Performances Make One Great Concert On Public Television
When Bonnie Raitt decided to make her first live-concert record, she had no idea how exhausting it would be.
But it’s done, and she’s ready for a break. Capitol Records has just released Raitt’s double album, “Road Tested,” produced by Don Was, and PBS stations show the corresponding scenes behind the music on the concert series “In the Spotlight.”
Making this was “exciting but exhausting,” Raitt said. “I just was nervous about having hand-held cameras come up to me,” she said. But the camera people were pros, and she said they put her at ease. “I think the first night we had some jitters so we were glad to have the second night.”
The 90-minute “In the Spotlight” concert was compiled from two performances in Oakland, Calif., in July, at the end of 46-year-old Raitt’s summer tour.
During the concert, she invites friends to share the stage, including blues greats Ruth Brown and Charles Brown, plus singers Jackson Browne, Bruce Hornsby, Bryan Adams and Kim Wilson of the Fabulous Thunderbirds. Along with these guests and her band, Raitt performs hits (“Thing Called Love,” “Something to Talk About,”) along with rousing blues and a few new songs.
She is especially thrilled with her band.
“To play this range of material from Delta blues to funk tunes to rock is really asking a lot,” she said. “These people play like I feel it in my heart.”
Raitt quickly found that producing a double record was, appropriately, double the work. Then, to complicate things, there were three distinct video projects being made from these concerts.
The long-form editors were looking for documentary footage for the two-hour home-video release; PBS needed “In the Spotlight” edits; and the electronic press kit for the album was being shot, to be sent worldwide. Raitt was continually asked to approve video footage.
“I’m glad it’s over; I’m really proud of it. I’m not complaining, but I don’t know how people make feature films,” she said.
But she cannot take a vacation yet. This month Raitt flew to London, where she and Bryan Adams appeared on the hugely popular “Top of the Pops” television show. And her voice is a bit rough from a cold she caught over there.
With eight Grammys and several multi-platinum albums sold, why take so long to make a live album?
“Well, I’ve been wanting to make a live record since about the fourth or fifth album on Warner Bros., around the time of the hit ‘Runaway.’ ” That would be 1977. “I was ready to put out a live record about then, but it was like a marriage that didn’t work out.”
Warner Bros. “relieved” (her word) both Raitt and Van Morrison in 1979, re-signed her a year later, then dropped her finally in 1987. Lucky for Capitol.
“It’s now been three (Capitol) studio albums, and I feel it’s the right time to do a retrospective,” she said. She also wanted to do a special for Christmas, with guests. Plus, she added, it took a while to create the hits to warrant a live album.
Raitt taught herself to play the guitar at 8, and as a teenager in the mid-‘60s, she idolized Joan Baez, Peter, Paul and Mary and other folk singers. “By 14, I was mad I wasn’t old enough to go to Haight-Ashbury and Greenwich Village,” she recalled. Instead, she channeled her energy into learning slide guitar in her Los Angeles bedroom.
Compared to a lot of the stuff that was on the radio at the time, “to me, soul music was so much cooler. I fell in love with the Rolling Stones and the Beatles, because they were so bluesy,” she said.
xxxx “IN THE SPOTLIGHT” “In the Spotlight” with Bonnie Raitt airs Tuesday at 9 p.m. on KSPS-Channel 7.