Of Human Bondage
In the year of hip urban sleaze, a clashing note sounds in the press bio of newlyweds Sarah Lee Guthrie and Johnny Irion. Girl grows up an indifferent scion to folk royalty (her dad is Arlo Guthrie), meets North Carolina boy on a journey of self-discovery in golden California, then marries boy and makes beautiful music. And it all seems to be true, even the part about the music. Their first record as a duo, Exploration, bears out in honeyed harmonies, suede-and-denim arrangements and old-fashioned sentiment. There should be something amiss, but these two really are beautiful, earnest and in love.
However, whereas darkness merely for darkness’ sake has never done anything good for music, marital strife certainly has. Not to diminish Guthrie and Irion, but the musical output of miserable marriages has achieved a more compelling chunk of music than that of functional ones. So here’s a brief guide to some of the worst unions and best music of the past 50 years.
“I came from a humble background, and I did not exactly know how to spot a lunatic,” said Ronnie Spector of Phil Spector last year at a live presentation of her autobiography. Neither the king of orchestral pop nor the candy-voiced siren could have gilded “Be My Baby” and the ringiest sounds of the ’60s without the other. On the downside, he imprisoned her in his mansion and once told her mother that when Ronnie died, he would display her in a glass coffin. The point of no return in their separation was probably when Phil threatened Ronnie with snipers.
The most celebrated case of domestic abuse and subsequent personal triumph needs little introduction. When Tina Turner was at her musical peak — and we’re not talking Beyond Thunderdome — she feared Ike Turner‘s very touch. Tina, even more than Mick Jagger, defined what a rock singer could express onstage. But even though it was her voice, charisma and rural upbringing that fueled the Turners’ hits, Ike’s bright, raw arrangements cannot be erased from history just because he was a heel.
Bad British betrothals seem to be a subtler kind of hell. Richard and Linda Thompson, guitar god and vocal heroine, respectively, married in 1972, but by the decade’s end, Linda was battling a case of bottled-up nerves so acute that she could barely breathe deeply enough to sing more than a line at a time. The result was Shoot Out the Lights, perhaps the most unsettling folk-rock album ever made and maybe the most enthralling.
But the greatest (and worst) musical marriage of the past 20 years never even came close to happening. Need we detail the hypothetical domestic travails of a vainglorious Midwestern Jehovah’s Witness and a demure Nice Jewish Girl who always attracts attention despite herself? Though Prince was rumored to have been an item with the Bangles’ Susanna Hoffs, he just geeked out and stared at her in the studio. All we have to show for it is “Manic Monday.” Too bad — for us at least.
