Is That All There Is?

Robert Cochrane — Thu, 02 Apr 2020 20:52:01 +0000

Is That All There Is? Robert Cochrane April 2, 2020 - 16:52

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Arriving ahead of the game and being an innovator can be a lonely journey. It also usually means that someone else runs with your ideas and has greater success with them, albeit in a more diluted fashion. Such was the case with Cristina, a doyenne of New York's clubland, who delivered a couple of albums and a sassy fistful of 12-inch singles before effectively retiring. The daughter of a psychoanalyst and a writer she was born in New York on 2nd January 1959 as Cristina Monet-Palac. Having dropped out of Harvard and into the burgeoning underground that was the city's clubland in the late 1970s and immediately began to garner attention.

You can savour her street hip influence in others. It flavours Madonna, gilds Lady Gaga and nods and winks in the direction of Lana Del Ray, yet Cristina was never going to embrace the mainstream, or be embraced by it Her debut single "Disco Clone" was produced by the Velvet Underground's John Cale, a later version features the actor Kevin Kline as the deep voiced macho lover, and was one of those songs you'd only ever hear whilst out at night, and never on the radio. A piece of fun, high camp, and street sass combined, it skewered the factory line mentality of, and the regimented look within, the club scene An anthem of unbridled passions in the pre-AIDS era, it became a cult classic. What also helped was that Cristina was on Ze Records, briefly the hippest but not the most successful record label in the world. Encouraged in her pop activities by the label's co-founder Michel Zilkha. the man she would eventually marry, whom she met whilst working as a reviewer for the Village Voice, her debut LP Cristina arrived in 1980 to bemused reviews and sporadic sales.

If "Disco Clone" was seen as somewhat transgressive with its sexual breathing a la Donna Summer, she crossed further boundaries by so incensing the legendary songwriting duo, Leiber & Stoller, with her snarly, petulant, mostly talked and not sung version of their classic "Is that All There Is," that they forced her to withdraw it from sale. Think a pissed up and pissed off Peggy Lee dragging her best furs through the gutter on a miserable New York night with a champagne bottle in her bejewelled hand and you have Cristina's irreverent rendering.

Next on her hit list, or non-hit list, as Cristina wasn't one for troubling the charts, was her laconic, campy and pouty version of the Beatles "Baby You Can Drive My Car." Her second album, 1984's Sleep It Off was jointly produced by August Darnell (Kid Creole) and Don Was (Was Not Was) and contained her signature tune "What's a Girl To Do" whose lyrics betray her wry and arch take on being an object of desire.

"My life is in turmoil / My thighs are black and blue,

My sheets are stained / And so is my brain,

What's a girl to do?"

I doubt if the late Dorothy Parker could have minted anything better on her trusty typewriter.

By the mid '80s, she and Zilkha had left New York and effectively retired to Texas. Her work was reassessed when her brace of albums were reissued on CXD in 2004, and she gave a few interviews, but was exhibiting the symptoms of a MS like condition. Divorced since 1990 she had returned to New York, wrote the occasional article, but was already becoming a creature around whom myths are made, such is the allure of a sparklingly brief past and an air of unavailability. As her admirer the singer-songwriter Zola Jesus astutely observed: "She was too weird for the pop world and too pop for the weird world."

Like all the best stars Cristina didn't overstay her welcome, nor instigate a comeback. In a smattering of years, she had been there and gone. I doubt that she would have wished it any other way.

She died in New York on 1st April 2020 having contracted the coronavirus. She was 61 years old.

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A Scissor Sister by Any Other Name

Robert Cochrane — Wed, 04 Apr 2007 14:32:19 +0000

A Scissor Sister by Any Other Name Robert Cochrane April 4, 2007 - 10:32

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Rita Jean Bodine: Bodine, Rita Jean (20th Century)

Before succumbing to a silence she has regrettably yet to break, singer-songwriter Rita Jean Bodine produced two strikingly eclectic albums in 1974. They weren't her first sojourn into pop. Her grandfather had purchased a piano for her even before she was born in Los Angeles on September 1, 1949 as Rita Suzanne Hertzberg. Little Rita was taking lessons by the age of four, Chopin, Bach, and Brahms being her heroes, but as she grew older she discovered that she also liked to sing, and write her own songs.

She formed The Babies, a girl group; after several unsuccessful singles for Dunhill/ABC, Bodine thought that stint would be her only stab at a music career. Several years later, the UCLA graduate was working as a secretary, and when her business letters kept turning into poems, she decided to return to music as Rita Jean Bodine. The new name came from a friend who'd written a song with her in mind. Her original moniker didn't scan, but she adored her new incarnation and used it at a recording session as a joke. It stuck. Even when she married Stanley Morgan, the production assistant on her debut album, he agreed that Rita Jean Bodine was too musical to discard.

On signing to 20th Century, it was the name she chose to be known by. Rarely have a name and a look been more compatible. Like most constructs, the edifice of Ms. Bodine was iconic and glacial. A vamp tramp from an unmade Hollywood saga, she looked like a refugee from Biba, all hatpins, cocktail cigarettes, bee-stung lips, and floppy hats. An effete, camp diva, part early Pointer Sisters, part Noel Coward with pink nail varnish. If the English songwriter John Howard had an unintentional female axis of his look, it was Rita Jean.

The album sleeves suggest an air of gentle sophistication, but if you close your eyes you'd swear this bitch was black. Her voice is a raw, agonized growl of emotional intensity. The first album is the more blues-based, and the less striking, though it does contain of wonderful version of "It Ain't Easy," the Ron Davies song covered by David Bowie on Ziggy Stardust.

The second album, Bodine, Rita Jean, is more sophisticated and electrifying. Opening with "Dynamite," a song that fires and fizzes with life, its verse is unrelenting. When she coats her vocals to James Brown's "Licking Stick," she sounds like she's on heat, dirty heat, but other songs have a warmth and sophistication that mirror the sensitivity of Joan Armatrading and Nina Simone at their finest. Her closing song, "I've Been So Long," is a visceral tour de force on a par with Annie Lennox's epic "Cold." You can just imagine Bodine howling this lament of isolation and loss in a doorway in the dead of night with steam rising from the deserted streets. The song along merits the search for her neglected mistresspiece, but the entire album can't fail to enchant. The strange hybrid of blues soul and orchestrated disco suggests a blend of Cyndi Lauper and the Scissor Sisters. She really is their natural Aunt, but perhaps more serious in her delivery.

Her second album is dedicated to "Russ because he believes in white roses," and I guess Rita Jean will continue to appreciate those flowers of romance. She just seems that kind of woman, brazen, sophisticated, and vulnerable. Like most mavericks, she didn't overstay her welcome, but if there ever was a right time to return in hatpins, feathers, and all that thrift-store elegance, she should be dressing up to sing again.