Toussaint works with his own compositions and was signed to Warner.Īnd at first that’s a good thing. (The cagey credits officially list Samwell s producer but thank Toussaint for “musical supervision, brass arrangements” and more.) But it’s a completely different sound.
The reissue’s liner notes don’t say why Allen Toussaint and not Samwell produced the last five songs. (There’s also a song she wrote, “Not at All,” about Jagger.) Only on the laid-back, acoustic version of bluesman Furry Lewis’ “Casey Jones” does Lennear get to show off her expressive voice, with a seductive drawl strikingly similar in places to Lucinda Williams. There’s no way a record buyer could listen to this and be interested in the singer. That’s despite having good session musicians – Ry Cooder on guitar and Jim Dickinson on guitar and piano among them. His work is awful here – so flat and muddled that one wonders just how many recording tracks were at his disposal in the production room. favorite at the time for producing America. The album’s first five cuts (the vinyl record’s first side) were produced by Ian Samwell, a Warner Bros. She’s fighting the arrangements for singing room. Nobody involved had any prescient vision of her as a lead singer. This album answers any question about its failure by its mediocrity. A stunning beauty, she was close to Mick Jagger and David Bowie, who were inspired by her to write “Brown Sugar” and “Lady Grinning Soul.”
Lennear had sung with the Joe Cocker/Leon Russell Mad Dogs and Englishmen revue, at George Harrison’s Concert for Bangladesh and on albums by Dave Mason and Gene Clark. One of those included was Claudia Lennear, who released only one solo album – 1973’s Phew! for Warner Bros., which Real Gone Music has just reissued. The documentary 20 Feet From Stardom raises the question of why so many strong-voiced, gospel-oriented female back-up singers of the 1960s and 1970s failed to have solo careers.