Candid Coolidge

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This article was published 09/04/2016 (3817 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Just a few weeks ago, pop music star Carly Simon released a memoir called Boys in the Trees about her rise to stardom in the 1970s and her marriage to singer James Taylor. Now another pop music sensation from the same era, Rita Coolidge, offers her memoir about her early career and her marriage to actor-singer Kris Kristofferson.

While Simon apparently wrote her own book, Coolidge had the help of Michael Walker, who has written two books on the ’70s music scene: Laurel Canyon: The Inside Story of Rock-and-Roll’s Legendary Neighborhood, and 2013’s What You Want Is in the Limo: On the Road with Led Zeppelin, Alice Cooper, and the Who in 1973, the Year the Sixties Died and the Modern Rock Star Was Born.

Best known for her hit Higher and Higher and her album Anytime…Anywhere, Coolidge gives much personal insight into being a woman in a business dominated by men, the breaks she got, the hard work and the success. Her memoir is concise, with some frank opinions on the people she has known as well as funny anecdotes sprinkled throughout. The blend of candour and humour in Delta Lady seems just right.

Coolidge was born into a happy family in Lafayette, Tenn., in May 1945. Her father, a Baptist minister, was Cherokee and her mother Cherokee-Scottish. The fact she never heard her parents argue gave Rita great expectations about her own future relationships.

She shared her happy childhood with two older sisters, Priscilla and Linda; Priscilla was into music and helped Rita find her niche. Rita went to school in Tennessee and to university in Florida before settling into the Memphis music scene.

With help from a Los Angeles-based producer, Leon Russell, she recorded her first single in Memphis. Eventually, she moved to L.A. with Russell and became caught up in the recording world, claiming she loved being a backup singer — it was “the best job in town.”

She took up with handsome drummer Jim Gordon, and both were picked by English singer-songwriter Joe Cocker for what became the infamous Mad Dogs & Englishmen tour in 1970. She refers to this as a “rock-and-roll circus” featuring “one of the greatest ad-hoc bands ever assembled… a 50-person entourage of singers, players, and untold hangers-on.”

“Part of the scene… along with the drugs, was sex. Make that group sex. One day, I walked down to the lobby and there was a line of people. And I said, ‘Oh, my God, have I missed a lobby call?’ And they said, ‘No, we have VD; we’re all going to get shots.’ It was half the band.”

At one point on that tour Jim hit her, knocking her unconscious and abruptly ending their relationship. (A few years later, he killed his mother and was convicted of murder; he is currently serving a life sentence.)

Coolidge’s next love interest was Graham Nash of Crosby, Stills & Nash fame. Though she was with him for only a year, she calls him “the best guy I ever knew. I look back at my life and think, ‘If I could change one thing…’”

Her memoir builds in such a way the high point is her time with Kristofferson, much as the high point for Carly Simon was her marriage to Taylor. Coolidge met Kris on a plane from L.A. to Memphis and recognized him as the man she wanted to marry.

Kristofferson seemed reluctant to converse; he had just broken up with actress Samantha Eggar the night before and “even Kris needed a day or two between romances.” But they spent that night together, and several years after that.

Kristofferson sang songs “that moved people’s hearts” and they had a great effect on Coolidge’s own style. She says, “I didn’t want to be where rock and roll was going. I didn’t want to be a screamer. I wanted to move people’s hearts.”

And she did, never more deeply than when she and Kristofferson performed on stage together.

Dave Williamson is a Winnipeg writer whose latest novel, Visiting Fellow, has just been published.