Scott:

Hello and welcome back, everybody, to the Unforgettable Voice. I am here once again with my wonderful friend Lori Turner. We are at the lovely theatre space in the Richland Academy of the Arts in Mansfield, Ohio, where all these wonderful young performers get to learn their craft and practice their craft in junior high and high school, right?

Lori:

Oh, all the way down to the itty biddies.

Scott:

Oh, right. Yes. So we've got, we may pick up some noise from the kids, but that's okay. Because this particular episode is all about noise. If you don't remember, Lori is a trained vocalist, operatically trained. She teaches voice, and I wanted to, after my episode about Julie Kavner, who is the voice of Marge Simpson for 40-odd years, doing that voice. I was interested in talking with Lori about those performers who do everything to abuse their voice in the view of vocal teachers. So we're going to be talking about Janice Joplin and Tina Turner today.

So, Janice Joplin, known for her banshee scream, her blues rock voice, “A Piece of My Heart” is the song that everybody knows. I want to, Lori, I want to know your take on Janice.

Lori:

Well, it's such an interesting topic, I think, because as a voice teacher, Janice and Tina both do everything you would say, “don't do that, you’ll ruin your voice!”

With Janice, we don't know about her longevity because she wasn't with us very long.

Scott:

That's right.

Lori:

However, Tina Turner, my goodness, was able to sustain that heavy, raspy rock sound all her life. So they're doing something right, which isn't traditionally right. 

Scott:

But for some reason, it works and draws people in. And I can't even imagine Janice Joplin doing however many shows she must have done during that time. I mean, you had to perform all the time.

Lori:

Right.

Scott:

And I think what's really interesting about her stage persona is that it's all about working that microphone and working with the voice. And being, I don't know, it's an interesting dynamic of her being a white woman singing the blues and doing it well and doing it in a way that is her.

Lori:

Right. 

Scott:

What's your take?

Lori:

I agree 100% with everything that you said. And the other thing that kind of popped into my mind when I was thinking about this topic is passion. She sang with such passion. And I think that's what draws us in, because yes, it's blues. It's not something you would traditionally see someone of her demographic doing at that time in history. And it was harsh.

Scott:

Yes.

Lori:

But it was so passionate. And I think that's what touches our heart is the passion.

Scott:

Absolutely. Even when it's like she goes into her upper register, if that's what we can call it. Right?

Lori:

Yeah.

Scott:

That very, I don't even know how to describe it. It's not screaming. It's not. It's very breathy. There is a sharpness to it. When she's singing “Summertime,” you know, really up there with those ballads, you wouldn't think a voice like hers is that hard edge of a voice would do well with ballads, but she brings something to it. Is that worse for your voice? Singing up there like that, like she did with her. 

Lori:

Interesting, you should bring that up. Because a while back, I saw a video clip of her on a talk show. I think it was Dick Cabot. And something came up. I don't remember the topic, but she suddenly sang very gently in an upper register.

Scott:

Wow.

Lori:

Beautifully. Okay. And so, so I think that the choices she made were choices. And something about her, she knew her instrument well enough to, well, we think, because again, we don't know if she had gone done that for 10 years. Maybe she would have suffered some kind of vocal damage, but at least for the time she was with us, she was able to make vocal choices that suited what she wanted to do.

Scott:

That's interesting. Interesting that you bring that up because it is, the performance is different from real life. So, Janice in performance is different from Janice in real life. And then what came to my mind was John Fogerty.

Lori:

Oh yeah.

Scott:

So, John Fogerty of Creedence Clearwater Revival puts that Louisiana Bayou accent into his singing. And then when he's done with the song, he's like, thank you very much. He's got sort of a Midwestern, big California. I can't remember where he's from, but it's so much, there is a difference between performance, my performance choices, and what I can actually do with my voice.

Wow. And yeah, I'd love to check out that clip of the Dic Cabot.

Lori:

Yeah, I think I'm not going to swear to it, but I think it was Dic Cabot. And I can't remember who the other guest was. But she just sang a few phrases in a really soft, beautiful, lovely voice. 

Scott:

So she could …

Lori: 

If she chose. 

Scott:

If she chose. If she chose, she could do that. But it's interesting that time and how much American blues really affected popular music.

Lori:

Yes.

Scott:

And maybe she didn't want to be a Joan Baez. Because that probably wasn't her.

Lori:

Right. And I could be getting my dates mixed up, but I think we're also seeing the emergence of punk right around here. Like, like, early, like, Sid Vicious early.

Scott:

Well, Sid Vicious, I think in the 70s, I think you're thinking of, um, oh, kick out the jams. What is that? MS? No. The M? Oh man.

(That would be MC5, old man.)

But I know, I know what you're talking about. The beginnings of heavy metal. Steppenwolf kind of.

Lori:

So you're with Joan Baez, you have, and early Bob Dylan, you have the protest aspect, the social aspect in the lyrics. But with these people that are coming out of that, they're voicing their social protest in the sound.

Scott:

Yes. Yes. I never heard it put that way. That's a great way to look at it. The protest is in, I'm going to sing ugly. I'm going to, I'm going to put that rasp in my voice so you can hear how adamant I am. And Bob Dylan, too, could sing. He could carry a tune. It wasn't, you know, all that stuff that he's known for. But yeah, he could, he could carry a tune too. You can hear that before he made the choice to do that, “Bob Dylan” voice.

Lori:

Right.

Scott:

Awesome. Great discussion so far. We're going to take a little break, and we'll be right back.

We are back. This is the Unforgettable Voice. I am Scott. I'm talking with my friend Lori about Janice Joplin and Tina Turner. We've spent the first segment talking about Janice. Now we're gonna give some love to Tina Turner, who has a very, very different vocal style. Obviously, than Janice does, it's still considered sort of blues rock, probably more soul with Tina, right? Tina's power is so, so fast, so quick; her attack is incredible. If Janice has a raspy attack, how would you describe Tina's attack, Lori? 

Lori:

Oh Golly, that I have not have thought of the onset of sound. Yes. Yeah, but what strikes me most with Tina and I use her as an example for my students who want to do rock and roll pop styles. She sings with her whole body. Whole body. And you can see, you know, she's always got her legs bent because that sound is coming from the soles of her feet. And that's what I think makes her onset of sound a little bit different from Janice. Janice is singing from

Scott:

Yeah, up here, up in the chest. 

Lori:

Yeah, but Tina is really pulling it up from the depths of her body

Scott:

And that's an interesting way to look because Janice is right there at the microphone. Her performance is at the mic using the mic and using her voice, where Tina is, you know, expected? I mean all those expectations of Quote-unquote black music in Motown. You've got to move, you've got to dance. Yeah, and during “Proud Mary,” she's doing that shimmy dance and singing at the same time, and nobody can do that anymore, yeah, so her presence at the microphone and her presence with her backups and her husband. Sorry, Ike. 

Lori:

If you if you can take the biopic about Tina at face value, He's the guy who taught her to support the voice because before then she was singing more kind of you know, a bird a flaky kind of Okay style. Yeah, but he got her down into the gut. Okay, to support the voice. In the biopic, that's how it's portrayed.

Scott:

There's always, if you have a biopic about a singer, there always seems to be that scene of like in the Ray Charles bio … You're singing too much like Nat King Cole. Yes, you're too much like this. 

Lori:

Yeah, find your own voice.

Scott:

The Johnny Cash thing. Yeah, what if you were, you know, what if you were bleeding out on the street and you had one thing to say … And I think that that's important, an Important step in finding your voice is to it's because it sounds different in your head than …

Lori:

It does it does …

Scott:

Everybody else. So I guess I know with Tina and singing with her whole body, and being able to, like, the intro to “Proud Mary.” Yeah is that's very sweet. Yeah, that's what we're gonna do. We're gonna do this. And she even describes what she's about to do, and it still hits. She's a really start off nice and easy. Yeah, we're gonna sing this, and then we're gonna end nice and rough. 

Lori:

Just to call back to our first podcast. It's storytelling. 

Scott:

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yep.

Lori:

And she's an impeccable storyteller. 

Scott:

And she's got that song in particular, a Fogarty song. Good good storytelling there and, I don't know how would you describe Tina's voice in terms of how she uses her range? If we talked a little bit about how Janice uses that upper register in a raspy, right? Tina's range. How does she use it? 

Lori:

Well, she, at least in her early days She was able to access those upper notes. I don't recall the last time I saw her sing live, but she, I mean she was singing and singing with power up until, you know, and it was really incredible. Most of us, unfortunately, as we get older, we lose some of the high notes. So, I would imagine that as she got older, she may not access that upper register as well. But she had a great, what we call we voice teachers call, the passagio. She had a great transition. From the middle to the top, which is through the passagio. It means passage and Italian.

Scott:

Yeah, so how does that work? Is that ike the …

Lori:

Yes, every voice has it, and it's usually between D and F sharp, okay, and you will feel that either your voice is about to hit a ceiling or you're able to make it through that passage, and it blooms up into the upper register.

Yeah, for me personally, I feel the passagio … Like how it is if you have to go in between two cars that are parked closely and you have to go like that, so you slim down a little bit and once you're through, you open up, okay, and I think she did that really, really well.

Scott:

And especially, I think in the 80s with “What's Love Got To Do With It,” a lot of those songs, her voice sounds mature. Yeah, but she can still tackle the love subject, yeah, love storytelling and all of that stuff in her own way without trying to even.

She didn't have to compete with Madonna. 

Lori:

No, no, no, she is her own person.

Scott:

Yeah, she was her own and she was her own iconic presence. And I think that I mean that is the reason why people try to emulate her and never can. Because, I mean, that's such a special thing to do to be able to be so true to yourself. Especially during that time. Yeah, the stories that artists tell about the 80s, especially people like Anne Wilson from Heart, when they couldn't write their own songs, and she was relegated to singing these demo songs. and putting them out, but she still did the job. Yeah, you know, she still has an incredible voice.

And the 80s were such a weird time in the music industry. When I was all about you know those those, well, Daryl Hall talks about making videos with the directors on cocaine and jumping from giant drum sets and doing all this weird stuff when all we wanted to do was make music and sing. Daryl has a great voice, too.

Hey, yeah, we hope you're enjoying this particular segment that you're listening to, whatever that may be. This is Marty Merman of The Albatross Cafe. Which, if you don't know, is the sketch comedy segment of the Electric Secrets variety podcast. We hope you'll check out our unforgettable voices … myself, my beautiful mother Esther, “Hello everybody,” and everybody's favorite septogenarian maniac, ma's best friend Agnes. “The new pope is tapping my phones, and Marty has yet to return my socket wrench.” We hope you'll check out the Albatross Cafe for tons of laughs and many moments of WTF. And now, uh, back to a Scot Leon Smith. “Using your middle name is pretentious,” and, uh, the Unforgettable Voice.

Scott:

All right, back for our last segment, my voice is starting to take on a little bit of a rasp, which I'm going to enjoy with my microphone. Lori, do we need today in the musical culture that we have today, we can take popular music, we can take show tunes, what have you. Do we need more vocalists like Janice and Tina?

Lori:

I think so. Absolutely. And mostly because of the storytelling and the passion. There's, especially in pop music today, it's so produced. There's a, I don't feel passion.

Scott:

Mm-hmm. You may be able to hear my eyes rolling back in my head right now.

Lori:

I don't hear passion in that music. Yeah, and genuine excitement from the artist. And I think, for me, that's much more inspiring than just hearing a pretty sound. 

Scott: 

Yeah, and I think there is something that changed in the music industry, especially at the turn of the 21st century, where, that clean type of produced sound with solo artists and with so-called boy bands, things like that, was making a lot of money, and people did not want to, especially after 9-11 they didn't want to bank on anything that was a risk. They wanted a sure thing.

So I think that's what we've been doing the past 25 years is banking on things that are going to be a sure thing musically, right, and make money.

Lori:

Yeah, and so what we've done is kind of narrowed our musical exposure. Yeah, it's so as my mom used to say, “It takes all kinds to make a world.”

Scott:

That's right. That's right. 

Lori:

It's our musical experiences so much richer when you have a variety of sounds.

Scott:

And I think this generation, Gen Z, I think, I meet kids all the time who know old stuff. They'll know Janice and Led Zeppelin, and um, a young man last night was singing something. Uh singing something from the disco era. I like finished the line. I was like, “I’m surprised you know that,” but yeah, I mean, I think when popular music and what you're always exposed to is throwing so much of the same thing at you. I think naturally, you seek out new stuff or you seek out what your parents listen to, or what your older siblings listen to. So I think we still get that it's just we have to look forward for ourselves rather than get it from the industry, because the industry is going to do what the industry does

So is there anybody now that you know of that is sort of, that we can say are the Janice and Tina of the 21st century, the last 10 years? Maybe not emulating them or being just

Lori: 

Yeah, but having kind of, carrying that torch.I have to confess my ignorance of pop artists at this moment.

Scott:

Me too. 

Lori:

You know. So that's a great question, and I'm not sure that I know if there is there are certainly voices out there that I think show a variety of sound, um, I might be putting myself at risk here, but I'm going to hesitatingly say Bruno Mars. He's got a variety of styles that he does, and um

I would like to see more of the nitty gritty from him, as well, rather than what the producers think is the money-making stuff.

Scott:

Do you think that there is, it seems to me, like, because we went over the decades through these different 

Lori:

Amy Winehouse. 

Scott:

Oh, yes. Yes. And of course thinking, um, I'm thinking Pink. 

Lori:

Yeah. 

Scott:

Pink and, um, Florence and the Machine um, but we've gone through decades of

especially in hip hop and in R&B, where the music has become a lifestyle. And it's like, do you think that making music into a sort of a lifestyle type of thing, like you know, heavy metals like that, and uh, and punk and things like that, do you think the restrictions of he lifestyle of music might be hemming people in and keeping them from exploration along with the industry of course. 

Lori:

Yeah, and I don't know how much of this is industry-driven, but I do think that for today, the image is pre-eminent before the music. So, what they're selling is the image more than the music because the music basically is all the same, right?

Scott:

The lifestyle is a big part of the image. Wearing the right clothes. Singing the right way. And it's almost like these stars make more of a statement with their clothing than with their music. Yeah, it's all sort of woven together now in this weird, bizarre package. 

Lori:

I'll take one small tangent and go momentarily to visit Lady Gaga, who I think is a very interesting artist because she does a jillian in one vocal styles. And she is also a performance artist person. So the whole vision is part of her product, but she controls it. It's not the industry controlling her, and also she has this reverence for what's gone before. Her relationship with Tony Bennett, for example, that so I think she brings a well-rounded voice to the voices of today. 

Scott:

Yes! So so I mean, and it isn't just I mean, she's got a great voice by itself. Yeah, but

Allowing, it's almost like, culture has to embrace you, the way it embraced the Beatles before it'll let you expand your voice into different areas, whether it's your sound or whether it's art or whether it's clothing or whether it's, you know, zipping in on a zip line for the super bowl. She did that, didn't she?

Lori:

Very possibly

Scott:

Terrifying myself. Oh my god. She's gonna fall. But yeah, that's a great example, Lady Gaga.

So, back to Janice and Tina. So here's my question to end on, just out of pure curiosity. If Janice and Tina were vocalists today, where do you think they fit in that industry fashion scheme

Lori:

Well … I think for sure Janice has a niche because we have a very similar socio-political area as we did in the 60s. 

Scott: 

Oh, people want to scream.

Lori:

Yeah, so I think that Janice would certainly be right out there voicing that protest, you know, and Tina, I mean, I'd love her love her love her, but she came from a different era. So I'm not sure if she was singing today, if she would have evolved to a new style, or if she would still be doing what she did so fantastically well.

Scott:

If we transplanted Tina from the 50s and 60s to now, when she's young, if she were a young vocalist today, do you think she would be singing the same?

Lori:

I think she probably would sing with power. And I'm not sure if she would be singing the same … telling the same story … but t I think whatever story she was telling, it would be with power. 

Scott:

Fun to think about, fun to speculate on.

Oh, Lori, I always enjoy our discussions. This is so much fun. Thank you so much for being on the podcast again. I hope you'll be on the podcast numerous more times because we always have a fun discussion, and I'll figure out a nice pairing of voices to talk about for our next

Episode.

Oh my goodness. I didn't think of an ending for this episode.

Hey, I know how to end the episode. What did we not talk about that is so awesome about Tina Turner? Not only did she sing a James Bond movie theme, of course, she's a diva. She gets a bond theme, why not, you heard it, “Golden Eye.” She also sang the theme song to a Mad Max movie, Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome, and she played the villain. Tina Turner played the villain in a Mad Max movie. I don't think any other diva has done that. So the crown jewel of Tina Turner's legacy has to be Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome, and if that is not a cool note to end on, I don't know what is.

Thank you all so much for listening to the Unforgettable Voice, and thank you to Lori Turner for, once again, lending her expertise to this episode. We certainly hope you'll go and pick up some Janice Joplin and some Tina Turner.

My name's Scott. I am not an iconic diva, but I will see you next time.

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