Morgan Neville (2013)

This Oscar-winning documentary has a catchy title and a good subject but the title is slightly misleading, the film repetitive and verging on tedious.   Morgan Neville’s subject is backing singers; he and the producer Gil Friesen, a music industry executive, have assembled a group of principals whose various ambitions and experiences supply a range of life stories.  There’s reference to how the late Luther Vandross moved from the background into the spotlight but, except for Oren Waters, part of a trio with his two sisters, the backing singers featured in Twenty Feet from Stardom are otherwise all women, while most of the mega-star talking heads who share the screen with them here are men (Mick Jagger, Bruce Springsteen, Stevie Wonder, Sting).  There are a few mentions of exploitation of the faces and bodies of girl backing singers in times past although Neville doesn’t make a big sexist deal of this.

Darlene Love has gone through the familiar dramatic vicissitudes of a show business career.  She was, for years, unjustly denied fame by Phil Spector:  it’s Love’s voice that’s heard on several huge Spector hits but it was someone else’s name on the record and face on television.  At one stage, she tells Morgan Neville, Love worked as a domestic cleaner to pay the rent; her sustained comeback was sealed with induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2011.  Merry Clayton had a much more supportive producer in Lou Adler but her solo career never took off in the way her talents deserved.   Claudia Lennear enjoyed unusual celebrity as a backing singer in the late 1960s and early 1970s but left the music industry to become a language teacher.  Lisa Fischer, a generation younger, won a Grammy as a soloist but returned to session singing because she enjoyed it more; she’s been part of every Rolling Stones tour since 1989.  Tata Vega has, also for decades, doubled as a soloist and a backing singer.  Judith Hill, still only in her late twenties, attracted global attention when she sang at her mentor Michael Jackson’s funeral in 2009 but she’s struggling to establish a solid career.  (Shortly after Twenty Feet from Stardom premiered at Sundance, Hill was a contestant in The Voice in the US.  She didn’t win.)

All these women have great voices and several of them are jolly company on screen.  Most have their singing roots in church gospel choirs; they’re aware that this kind of background is a cliché (although Morgan Neville explores it nicely).  Beyond this, though, it’s clear there isn’t a unifying backing singer biography.  A larger issue is that several of those featured are big enough names in their own right to mean that Neville is hardly giving unprecedented exposure to performers who’ve spent a lifetime in the shadows of celebrity.  At the very start of the film, Bruce Springsteen suggests that the ‘twenty feet’ can be a long way to travel because of the ‘conceptual distance’ it represents to some backing singers.  Lisa Fischer is the prime example of this mindset and she is by some way the most engaging personality in Twenty Feet.   A vocal phenomenon, she has no interest in the calculations and complications which she recognises are essential to sustaining a solo career.  Fischer is candid about her unconventionality:  not only does she lack driving personal ambition; she eventually tells Neville she’s never really missed getting married or having children either.

Merry Clayton is the polar opposite to Fischer.  She says that, when Lou Adler was promoting her career in the early 1970s, she firmly believed that, if she put her heart and soul into her singing, solo success was bound to follow.  Another contributor, who sees Clayton as unlucky, says her problem was that, in those days, there could only be one big African-American female soul star and the position was already filled by Aretha Franklin.  When you watch Clayton, then in her mid-twenties, on a television show, however, you can see there was more to it than that:  she’s a peculiarly self-absorbed performer, who lacks any connection with a studio audience close enough to touch.  In her mid-sixties, Merry Clayton is a grande dame and knows it.   Morgan Neville sometimes presents his protagonists in more or less staged settings.  Where this involves performing a song the technique is fine; when he films Clayton sitting in a hotel room and looking around her, Neville is merely encouraging her self-awareness.

Except for Lisa Fischer, whose vocal versatility is matched by a revelation of personality that deepens as the film progresses, it’s clear within a few minutes of their first appearance on screen who all the principals are.  There are few surprises to follow.  The singing is bound to be a major part of Twenty Feet from Stardom but I think Neville becomes excessively dependent on it to keep things going.  I guess I enjoyed the film less than I expected because I prefer pop to soul and R&B – there’s not much pop in evidence after ‘He’s A Rebel’ and the other Phil Spector hits that Darlene Love voiced but The Crystals et al got the credit for.

31 March 2014