Jackie DeShannon

Jackie DeShannon -

 I Don't Wanna Be Without You (1964 or early 65)

cf.

Hole - Doll Parts (1994)

Arguably one of the biggest differences between British and American alternative music in the late 80s and into the 90s was that in the US, Led Zeppelin were generally still a cool name to drop, whilst in the UK,  they tended to be reacted against, being associated with the excesses and sexism of the pre-punk era.  Courtney Love and Kurt Cobain seemed to have feet in both camps.  Hole and Nirvana had the heavy guitar  sound of Jimmy Page, but devoid of the long solos and posturing.  Lyrically their songs  challenged rock cliches and macho bragging.  Courtney later wrote Zep’lin Song – making her views on the band crystal clear.

Doll Parts by Hole is an absolutely brilliant single, raw, powerful, autobiographical.  You feel completely Courtney Love’s visceral ache.  A simple combination of powerful guitar and anguished vocals.  The album, from which is taken, Live Through This, is consistently compelling and disturbing, with  themes of desire, objectification,  self-doubt, and complicity with celebrity culture.  Despite Love's personality pressed into every groove of the record, unfounded rumours that Cobain ghost-wrote the songs remain,  without a shred of evidence. 

In the autumn of 1964 on the back of touring with the Beatles, Jackie DeShannon flew in from LA to London to record her single Don’t Turn Your Back on Me Babe and write songs for Marianne Faithful.  For the recording session she wanted the best session guitarist to realise her vision, and a young Jimmy Page was suggested.  The photograph above captures Jackie taking Page's  guitar off him to demonstrate exactly how she wanted her riff to be played.  Soon after, the couple became an item romantically and musically, with DeShannon encouraging him to start writing and developing his own musical style.

I I Don’t Wanna Be Without You, is a demo from that period that eventually found its way onto a fan club bootleg CD about 20 years ago.  I've found no information on the recording, so am unclear whether Page or DeShannon plays the guitar.   I’m not sure that  matters – it is her song and musical concept.  This remarkable, obscure track is way ahead of its time, with harsh, discordant and Indian influenced guitar, (she was an early Ravi Shanker fan)  unsettling rhythms and raw, emotionally charged, intense vocals.  It sounds like it could have been cut in Seattle or Olympia in the early 90s.

  Photo  Jerry Long  1964

Reb Foster's Revelaire Club  Redondo Beach, California.

For all that she has had great and enduring success as a highly versatile performer and prolific songwriter, so much of Jackie’s trail-blazing  work remains virtually unheard -  unreleased albums, stunning live recordings, brilliant songs inexplicably put on B sides and well over 100 known demos of remarkable original material.  These were often self-produced with a creative freedom that was mainly denied by a male dominated music industry unable to cope with an artist, that in her own words, "they considered difficult”.

A few months after I Don’t Wanna Be Without You was recorded, an acoustic demo album by DeShannon was pressed.  This was an absolutely stellar collection of songs that had the clear potential to have been realised as an incendiary and passionate folk-rock masterpiece, a landmark album of the 60s.  As it stands, the demo recording is a gut-wrenchingly emotional solo work, sassy, questioning and heartbreakingly beautiful in equal measures.  Probably the best known song, Don’t Doubt Yourself Babe (covered by the Byrds), is a brilliant take on female empowerment that seems to directly draw from her own experiences as an artist. 

Thirty years on from that recording,  the mechanisms  and attitudes prevalent within the  music industry had moved so slowly that Courtney Love and her contemporaries were having similar issues to contend with.  The song had remained the same.