Max "Bunny" Sparber

UNTIL JUNE 12 of 1991, Subic Bay in the Philippines was a US Naval base. Then Mount Pinatubo erupted, explosively, partially burying the site in smothering volcanic ash and mud and leading to the evacuation of approximately 40,000 troops. But for fans of Rhythm and Blues, the most explosive thing to hit Subic Bay had already come and gone.

LaVern Baker had already returned to the United States after working as the entertainment director of an NCO club for almost 20 years — when Pinatubo detonated, she was just coming off a run on Broadway in Black and Blue, and would soon record songs for the soundtracks to Shag and Dick Tracy.

It was a strange route back to the American music scene for Lavern Baker, a statuesque, hourglass-shaped singer who had been an enormous crossover star of the Fifties. Her hits, which included “See See Rider,” “Jim Dandy,” and “Tweedly Dee,” featured her brashly belting out lyrics over a driving horn section, and often made as great a splash on the pop charts as they did on the R&B charts. While she’s best known for these songs, which were lightweight novelties, collectors tend to point to her less successful releases as being her defining work. As an example, her 1959 cover of Leiber and Stoller’s “Saved” is vintage Baker. The song is a street-corner Salvation Army band affair, in which Baker sings of her past sinfulness and current Christian sensibleness, and Baker’s rollicking delivery makes her hellraising sound enormously more entertaining than her current serious-mindedness.

Baker’s “Voodoo Voodoo” is one of her more obscure numbers — it was released as the b-side to a single in 1961, lacks a production credit, and did not chart. As a result, “Voodoo Voodoo” rarely appears on Baker retrospectives. It’s a pity, as the song is, bar none, the best ever made about bewitchment, a recurring theme in pop music. When jazz approached the subject, it tended to look at romantic enchantment as something genteel; Sinatra, for example, sang of being “bewitched, bothered, and bewildered,” which, from him, sounded like a rather pleasant state of affairs. But, for rock and roll, supernatural romantic entrapment was usually humiliating — the narrator of The Searchers’ “Love Potion Number 9” is so intoxicated with his concoction that he rushes out and kisses a police officer. For Baker, the results are literally hysterical. Over a staccato saxophone intro that sounds as though it were spitting in disgust, Baker, singing at an alarming tempo, cries out “I thought I was a snake, I started crawling on the ground; I thought I was a dog, I started barking like a hound.” The song is noisy and quick — it lasts under a minute and a half — and features a layered, insistently rhythmic arrangement typical of Phil Spector, who was almost certainly the song’s uncredited producer.

Baker speedily delivers her tale, and it’s nerve-wracking: she has rejected the advances of a man who, seeking revenge, has turned to magic, creating something called “oogly” out of teeth, leopard spots, giraffe necks, and zebra stripes. Sprinkled under her bed, this unction causes her to lapse into a frenzy, “stumbling and a-fumbling” Baker tells us, “like a flip mighty goon.”

Baker’s own romantic experiences, unfortunately, would be as humiliating as those described in the song. In the late Sixties, Baker went overseas to perform for soldiers stationed in Vietnam. While she was away, her husband divorced her. Her betrayal was compounded by her agent, who dropped her, and Baker slipped into obscurity. A 1969 medical stay in the Philippines stretched out over decades, until Atlantic records invited her back to the United States to attend their 40th anniversary commemoration in 1988. This led to renewed interest in the singer, and she worked constantly until her death in 1997.

LISTEN TO "VOODOO VOODOO":



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