A Look Back at the Life of Dusty Springfield
by Matt Chayt

On March second, the twentieth century lost its greatest singer. Her name was Dusty Springfield, and she was 59 years old when she lost her five-year battle to breast cancer. Unfortunately, she is not remembered by legions of fans, nor have sales of her music earned her a place in the record books. She does leave behind a catalog of staggeringly diverse, intelligent performances and an intriguing, queer life.

At 16, Mary O'Brien was a fat, awkward tomboy with a crush on Peggy Lee's voice. She had reluctantly quit playing soccer and was trapped in a dull adolescence in Hampstead, England. Looking in the mirror one day in 1955, she told herself, "Be miserable or become someone else."

And so began Mary O'Brien's 35-odd years of masquerading as Dusty Springfield, a glamorous, heterosexual femme fatale who hid under thick eye makeup, elegant gowns, and an outrageous blond beehive. As Dusty recalled, she would have to think herself into the Dusty Springfield persona before going on stage. The parade of guises she adopted -- "white negress," mod queen, and folk singer, to name but a few -- were all manifestations of her desperate desire to fit into the straight system. It didn't matter that behind the scenes, she got in food fights with Martha and the Vandellas, or that she punched Buddy Rich's lights out. Dusty Springfield's glittery public image had no rough edges.

After a few years in her brother's band, Dusty struck out on her own in 1963 with her first solo single, a little ditty called "I Only Want To Be With You." Hit after hit followed, and before long she had her own TV program and had even made a dent into the U.S. charts. Her first singles became hits in the United States at the same time as the Beatles' earliest work, and thus Dusty was a soldier in the British Invasion. During this early period, she gained appreciation from her countrymen for introducing breaths of cultural fresh air like Motown, Woody Allen, and Jimi Hendrix to the United Kingdom. Sometimes, however, she pushed the envelope too far, as when she protested apartheid in South Africa in 1964. She was placed under house arrest by the South African government for refusing to sing to segregated audiences and eventually drummed out of the country. In this instance, her beloved England failed her, disavowing her actions and reprimanding her for fear of alienating its racist trading partner.

Those who knew Dusty's work appreciated her ability to test the musical boundaries of her time. As a singer, she constantly pushed herself, tackling Broadway-style ballads (like "I Close My Eyes and Count To Ten," recorded in a ladies' washroom) along with slinky numbers like "The Look of Love" and "Wishin' and Hopin'." On her most famous album, Dusty in Memphis, Dusty proved that she had what it took to pull off serious R&B music. The album's nostalgically sensual cut "Son of a Preacher Man" ensured that Dusty Springfield would forever be known as the "white negress" -- a label bestowed on her by critics who couldn't reconcile the single's spellbinding vocal with the fact that Dusty was not only English, but white. By contrast, Aretha Franklin's version of "Preacher Man" is never heard, and for good reason: it stinks.

In the 1970s, with the arrival of singer/songwriters and the increasing over-emphasis of guitars in popular music, Dusty's popularity dwindled. She relocated from London to Hollywood and began to enjoy the women's tennis scene and the friendship of Billie Jean King, as well as experimentation with drugs, escapist pleasures which helped her to cope with poor record sales, and a constant battle with rumors in the press. After several years of increasingly dangerous drug abuse, Dusty began to fight back. She gave an interview in which she blasted the hypocritical pre-AIDS Hollywood environment, where she observed rampant homophobia in an industry that was "75 percent gay." At the same time, however, she also confessed "I still don't know who Mary O'Brien is." Close observers were not startled to read in the press that Dusty's erotic investments were other than heterosexual. She had long demonstrated an opposition to gender norms, as when she upset her record label by recording "Twenty-Four Hours From Tulsa," a song originally written for a man. Nevertheless, the 1970s were rough for Dusty, and for years things only worsened.

By 1987, Dusty Springfield was at the end of her rope. She had gone from releasing the greatest album ever by a female singer, Dusty in Memphis, to recording the theme songs to "The Six Million Dollar Man" and "Growing Pains." Retired in England, and certain she would never perform again, she got a phone call from the Pet Shop Boys, a geeky synth-pop duo. They wanted her to with them on a song they'd written. Both Dusty and her manager thought the idea was a little crazy, but figured there was nothing to lose.

Dusty reported to the studio and came face to face with the Boys, two of the most notable of her many gay fans. As the legend tells it, she asked the duo "What do you want me to sing like?" She was prepared to adopt yet another mask. Which would it be this time? Would she have to dig her beehive out of mothballs?

"We just want the sound of your voice," vocalist/lyricist Neil Tennant replied. The freedom from constantly creating new identities was the first of several breakthroughs for Dusty. Over the next three years, Dusty Springfield was to record some of her greatest work, including her masterpiece, "In Private," which she energized with her personal experience as well as her powerful voice. For that track, the Pet Shop Boys provided her one of their typically faux-melancholic soundscapes while also giving her a powerful lyric that offered her the chance to launch a viciously witty assault on the heterosexual system that had forced her into decades of psychological hiding.

On the Pet Shop Boys-produced album Reputation, Dusty returned to the genre-bending spirit of Dusty in Memphis, venturing into hardcore techno ("Occupy Your Mind") and even rap ("Daydreaming"). She even engaged the then hot-button issue of nature vs. nurture on the track "Born This Way." The most famous song that resulted from the collaboration, however, was "What Have I Done to Deserve This?," an exuberant, multi-layered duet that was a massive international hit (even if nobody remembered the "old" Dusty Springfield).

Dusty's music and life seem a collection of contradictions. She was a pop singer old enough to have had her picture plastered on a teenage Elton John's wall, yet she recorded club hits in the 1980s. She is best known for songs that wove tragic, abusive heterosexual love narratives (like "You Don't Have to Say You Love Me"), yet she came out in 1975, a year before Elton John's allegedly pioneering confession. The roles she played were a reminder of the provisional nature of all our identities. She floated between labels -- white and black, straight and gay, male and female. These inconsistencies, this queerness, boosted her appeal to gay people. The astounding fact that she herself was simultaneously a diva and queer, of course, made us especially love her.

What everyone can appreciate, regardless of his/her sexual proclivities, is that she was truly talented. Amid contemporary models of Girl Power that are more about packaging, parody, and pregnancy, Dusty Springfield's voice carries her above the rest. Sure, she had the survivor's ethic that's critical to Girl Power, but most of all she had that voice. She never had to learn to read music because the art of singing came naturally to her. Whispery and vulnerable, yet capable of superhuman feats of volume and pitch, Dusty's voice is immortalized on her records, which she painstakingly recorded one word, sometimes even one syllable, at a time.

Mary Isobel Catherine Bernadette O'Brien, a.k.a. Dusty Springfield, was posthumously inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame on March 15, 1999.

A Final Goodbye to Stanley Kubrick
by Justin Humphreys

A gang of masked thugs brutally assaults a writer and gang rapes his wife in their own home as the leader of the attackers croons "Singin' in the Rain." A hick pilot waves his cowboy hat, hoots and hollers, and rides an atomic bomb as it falls to its target in Russia. Three innocent French soldiers are mowed down before a firing squad for a mistake made by their superiors. A manic drill sergeant screams, "I will rip out your eyes and skullfuck you!" to a group of green recruits he is haranguing. A writer, possessed by the evil spirits harbored in a remote Colorado hotel, prepares to hack his beloved wife and child to ribbons with a fire axe. An astronaut is transformed into an entirely new lifeform as mankind approaches the dawn of a new evolutionary age. These are just a few of the volatile, arresting images of late director/cinematographer Stanley Kubrick. In a career spanning four decades, Kubrick's cold, calculated, and angry films seldom left moviegoers disappointed.

Born on June 26, 1928, in New York City, Stanley Kubrick showed a pronounced interest in photography, jazz music, and chess as a youth, which prefigured his obsessive drive for order and meticulous, mathematical planning in later life. After high school, he took up a career as a photographer for Look, among other magazines, and never attended college. He graduated to cinematography, producing two documentary films, including Day of the Fight and The Seafarers. Kubrick's background in photography led him into feature film production, where, following two limited-release low-budgeters, he first gained prestige for his caper-gone-wrong classic, The Killing (1956). Starring such stalwarts as Sterling Hayden, Marie Windsor, and the immortal Elisha Cook, Jr., the film chronicles, much like Kurosawa's Rashomon, a race-track robbery from the points-of-view of all of those participating in the crime. The film's editing, cast, script, and photography set it apart from other programmers of the time and marked Kubrick's future promise. His next film was the exquisitely photographed Paths of Glory, a World War I tale of misused authority that shifts the blame for a tactical blunder in battle from the higher-ups who committed it to three luckless soldiers (Ralph Meeker, Joe Turkel, and Timothy Carey from The Killing). The film showed a pronounced distrust for authority and boasted some truly remarkable shots, in particular, the film's centerpiece battle scene and the disturbing execution of the three "Judas goats."

The star of Paths, Kirk Douglas, convinced Kubrick to helm his next big production, the epic Spartacus (1960) -- the tale of a slave uprising in ancient Rome taken from Howard Fast's novel of the same name. The film, though taken away from Kubrick for finishing, still retained some of his trademark touches: the exquisite scene where a group of over-privileged Roman scum sit by nonchalantly as two slaves (Douglas and the great Woody Strode) fight to the death in the arena. Never one to rest on his laurels, Kubrick sprang back with a 1962 adaptation of Nabokov's immortal comedic novel of love-gone-wrong, Lolita, which caused a tremendous controversy and makes the remake look like the hunk of fluff that it really is. Actors James Mason (as Humbert Humbert) and, especially, Peter Sellers (as Clare Quilty) steal the show (they essentially are the show). One of the film's funniest lines is when Sellers tells Mason, "I am Spartacus -- Let me free!," in a thinly veiled swipe at the producers of Kubrick's own Spartacus for overriding his control of it.

The year 1964 saw the release of one of Kubrick's masterpieces, Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, one of the darkest parodies of cold-war paranoia ever. Beautifully cast, photo-graphed, and written by humorist Terry "Blue Movie" Southern, Strangelove featured Peter Sellers returning to the Kubrick fold in three different parts: American President Merkin Muffley, British airman Lionel Mandrake, and the president's own nuclear adviser, the (suspiciously Hitlerian) Dr. Strangelove ("Mein Führer! I can walk!"). As is par for the course in a Kubrick film, the movie ends as darkly as possible: the world is exterminated in a nuclear holocaust. Somehow, under Kubrick's guidance, it's funny. Disturbing as hell, but funny.

Kubrick left the 60s with a bang with the 1968 movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, a science fiction epic to end all science fiction epics (or is it just a long, long boring movie? -- Judge for yourself). The film can be taken as either an allegory for an upcoming step in man's evolution -- with extraterrestrial help -- or as a black comedy where man's progressions forward are only on to bigger and deadlier weaponry and where a computer, the immortal HAL 9000, has more personality than any of the flesh-and-blood characters. Based on the novel The Sentinel, by Arthur C. Clarke, the film was a tremendous hit and proved incredibly influential to all science fiction spectaculars to come. The movie's theme music, "Also Sprach Zarathustra," would go on irritating moviegoers long on into the next few decades and would be parodied endlessly by everyone from Monty Python to Mel Brooks.

In 1971, Kubrick garnered his first and only X-rating for A Clockwork Orange, which remains controversial to this day. The film deals with a cold, barren, decadent near-future England where gangs rule the night, raping and terrorizing all they meet. Set to a surreal moog-synth score by Walter Carlos, Clockwork follows one such gang member, Alexander Delarge (Malcolm McDowell), who is eventually convicted of murder, sent to prison, and given a voluntary aversion therapy, "the Ludovico Treatment," where he is tortured into becoming an emotionally castrated model citizen -- a "clockwork orange," healthy and natural on the outside, cold and mechanical on the inside. The film is still incredibly popular, as is the novel it was based on by Anthony Burgess. It is one of the few films that no one who sees it ever forgets, love it or hate it. It is one of Kubrick's most finely photographed and most mean-spirited films, and if you look really closely, you can see a young David Prowse as Julian the bodyguard -- several years later, Prowse would go on to play Darth Vader in the Star Wars films (though James Earl Jones , a veteran of Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove, provided Vader's voice).

Barry Lyndon (1975) came next and remains one of Kubrick's most lovely and underrated films. Each camera set-up in Lyndon is like a master painting in itself. Kubrick, in mercilessly underplayed strokes, beautifully captures the utter sleaziness of Redmond Barry, the film's eighteenth-century gold-digging anti-hero. The film deals with the base cruelty and criminality innate in man just as much as any of the director's other movies, but on a much subtler level. Like many of Kubrick's films, it features a mainly classical soundtrack which includes the Chieftains' lilting version of "Women of Ireland." The film's sole fault is the ridiculous casting of Ryan O'Neal as the title character; Lyndon is easily his worst performance ever.

In 1981, The Shining was Kubrick's sole venture into the horror genre. Though it displeased author Stephen King, whose novel it was based on, this stark, revisionist take got under millions of movie watchers' skins and made a killing at the box office, and placed star Jack Nicholson in America's nightmare unconscious as the off-the-wall Jack Torrance. Again, people seldom come away unscathed from the film's potent imagery, such as the tidal wave of blood and the nude (yecch) old hag in the bathtub.

The year 1987 brought with it Kubrick's grueling Vietnam sadism-fest, Full Metal Jacket. Ask anyone you know who's seen it and they'll almost automatically go into an imitation of Lee Ermey's venom-spewing Sergeant Hartman -- his quotable lines are endless: "What is your major malfunction, numbnuts?" and "I'm going to call you Private Joker!" Also pretty unforgettable is the immortal "Alabamy blacksnake" monologue. Jacket's shining moment though is the "Surfin' Bird" segment, one of the most downbeat images to come out of Vietnam cinema.

Kubrick was constantly noted for his brutal mistreatment of actors (often shooting countless takes and retakes and never printing any of it), his over-meticulous pre-planning, concentration on composition, and his beloved editing. Kubrick's films are always recognizable for their apparent coldness and lack of emotion. Kubrick left America in the early 60s for England and never returned. His films are some of the most often revived and passed around on tape of the past 30 or 40 years and are much darker than those of his peers, including Arthur Penn, John Frankenheimer, and Robert Altman (though none are exactly light). His latest film is Eyes Wide Shut with Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman, opening later this year. Perhaps Kubrick's gravestone will bear the description of him made by his recurring associate Kirk Douglas: "Stanley Kubrick is a talented shit."