Whitney Houston had only been pronounced dead four hours earlier. The news was still very fresh and very grim.
Lionel Richie, father of formerly “troubled” Hollywood kid Nicole Richie, was on CNN giving us what would turn out to be the only perspective on the death of the great primal new era pop diva that made deep sense in the last four days.
He was talking to Piers Morgan who, only a day earlier, had on his interview show Jennifer Hudson and record mogul Clive Davis, at one time the “discoverer” and mentor of Whitney Houston and the fellow whose pre-Grammy party is always said to be the nontelevised event of the entire weekend.
That Davis party was an event where Hudson — whom Davis was squiring around to news interview studios — was scheduled to perform. Houston wasn’t.
Davis had told Morgan a day before Houston’s death that Hudson was “the next Whitney Houston.”
What Lionel Richie said about Houston’s death:
“What would be your identity if your identity was your voice and you don’t have the identity that you had 10 years ago? What an amazing psychological pressure that could be on top of you. To be excellent every night. To be excellent every time you perform on record is devastating. … If a young singer just came along that could be the next you, can you imagine how that sounds in your head if you’re an artist?
“Can you imagine someone saying, ‘You don’t have to hit the notes that you used to hit; we’ll take it down a half step for you’? Or, ‘We’ll take it down a whole step for you’?
“As much as it sounds accommodating, it’s not exactly what a vocalist wants to hear — especially when you have the ‘next’ version of you sitting there in the audience hitting notes higher than you ever hit the first time in your life. I understand it.”
So do I.
Especially on a Grammy weekend where you discover that you’ve been all-but-superseded by the new “you,” Jennifer Hudson, at the famous industry party of the man who discovered and guided and mentored you for so long. Where the likelihood of anyone wanting to risk exposing your voice and demeanor to industry scrutiny was slim. Where almost no one is waiting for you to exhale.
Or inhale for that matter.
Where the surefire clean-sweep winner of the Grammys themselves was the possessor of yet another new powerhouse voice, Adele, whose promos for her scheduled pre-Grammy interview on “60 Minutes” had been carpet-bombed all over CBS for a full week before the show.
Every new season of “American Idol” brings new versions of you — and now your imitators — from all over the country: immense voices trying to overwhelm with purity of sound and maximal emotion.
And there you are with a voice blasted to a shadow of its former self by a bad and addicted life.
Veteran jazz people know the sound well — even from an era before voices could be roasted by the crack pipe. Billie Holiday’s voice was never pretty, much less beautiful the way Ella Fitzgerald’s was. By the time the natural laryngeal changes of the years and a life of drug addiction had had their way with Billie Holiday’s voice, she was surviving on her sublime musical art, which was still glorious inside the cracking wreck of her voice. You were listening to her phrasing, her infallible swing, her ability to find the songs that she could do with dramatic meaning.
Whitney Houston wasn’t Billie Holiday. Her voice was huge and clear, and she used it hyperemotionally. Her looks in her prime were drop-dead supermodel stunning. Her acting ability in her three major films (“The Bodyguard,” “Waiting to Exhale,” “The Preacher’s Wife”) was more than substantial, as almost anyone might guess from the emotionality of her singing.
But in triumphant battle against her glorious voice and looks was her life, a long-term matter of public wrecks followed by temporary repairs.
Said Richie: “We live our lives every day in the public, more so now than ever. … Every single day, there’s a tweet, a blog, a blurb, something about your personal life.”
And then it’s Grammy weekend come round again. You no longer really figure at the party of your mentor. The new “you” Jennifer Hudson — the one whose hyperemotional singing already won her an Oscar — does.
Nor do you really figure in the Grammys, either.
Your voice just isn’t the same — even in a world now filled with replicas of you.
We don’t yet know what happened Saturday to cause Whitney Houston’s death. Toxicology reports, for one thing, always take a while (Elvis, Heath Ledger, Michael Jackson).
All we know now are details floated scurrilously over the media watch that is going to be in place for a while — details about being found by her bodyguard in the bathtub in a hotel room with Xanax and Lorezapam and Valium bottles in it.
But how hard now is it to imagine a woman crushed by so much disappointment having a drink? And another? And maybe others? And relaxing with a Xanax etc.? Or two? Or more, if that was her wont.
And then getting into the tub?
And then?
The thing that none of us can really imagine, not even a final episode of “The Sopranos”: Nothing.
Jeff Simon
jsimon@buffnews.com
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