The Wild Nights and Free-Love Crusade of Labelle

This story was originally published in the July 3, 1975 issue of Rolling Stone.

First there is the voice from out of the darkness. A melodic hum, a brush of drums and “Nightbird fly by the light of the moon / Makes no difference if it’s only a game.” Then, at centerstage, Sarah is made out against a black backdrop. A glint from her eyes, then black feathers unfold and she preens, beaming. The already standing crowd cheers; many of them look reverent and in wonder. Sarah’s voice is joined by Nona’s and she strides out, swishing white feathers from a rhinestone headdress, a tight white knit spacesuit anatomically accented by three black patches. Handcuffs and a riding crop flap against the right hip and seem to beckon: “Anyone for SM?” More reverence and wonder.

And then the lead voice: Patti descends like a flying squirrel in slow motion, her back to the audience, arms fluttering a 20-foot fur-and-feather train of black and burnt orange. She is lowered by rings and wire. Goddess sex machine. The crescendo rises and the mob is dancing, pressing forward all the time. This is Act II of the Labelle show in Atlanta and there seems to be some kind of fever loose as they break into a surging “Are You Lonely?”

Sarah drops feathers to reveal breasts cupped in sterling silver; she is writhing on her feet. Nona is strutting and Patti, screaming like a savage, rages across the stage, then slips into the audience to touch… A man in the front row jumps up and whips Patti a dozen times with his silk scarf, then falls away in a heaving paroxysm of flagellates interruptus. She is wailing “You Turn Me On” now and pointing at him. Revived, he jumps up and down like a spastic jack-in-the-box, whirls around and yells three rows back to a star-faced young man: “I tor ya, don’t mess with me!” Too much.

Now they are singing “What Can I Do for You?,” the last number, and the band drops instruments to follow Labelle into the crowd, up and down the aisles, singing, dancing, tambourining and touching. Later, backstage, Sarah Dash will Iaugh: “‘Course they get a few kisses and a few feels here and there, but that’s nice… “

“It’s like my husband,” says Patti LaBelle (called Pat offstage), describring her onstage ecstasy. “It’s like I’m married to a million men and women when I’m out there. And when I’m married to a person, I give all I have. It’s like a climax, and when the audience does it like they did it last night in Atlanta, I come. When I came out during ‘Space Children,’ just standing there, the way they made me feel — that’s an orgasm, to see people accept you that way.” Right now, she is whispering at 33,000 feet en route from Atlanta to New Orleans, She is trying to conserve her voice. The whoosh of the jet engines washes over her words and makes her seem to be speaking in a daydream. Pat yawns and puts down a submarine sandwich. She laughs, tickled with self-discovery. “Yes,” she jokes, “I wear Pampers onstage — or might as well! I’m going to start carrying a box with me because it happens a lot. And between that and my crying… ”

Sarah is even more unabashed: “It’s like letting a million people see you in bed with whomever you love… and being naked and having sex with your music… Having orgasms with something that is so real and that you love. I could never relieve” — that is, satisfy — “myself without being onstage now. I feel tears and a good hurt and a good pain. It’s ritualistic, spiritual. When we recorded ‘You Turn Me On,’ I was howlin’. It’s not just sexual, it’s what life’s about.

“You can come anytime, for whatever. If the president did something that I thought was great and I was caught up in it, I’d have an orgasm. But he ain’t did that to me yet.” She laughs and thinks back to her feelings onstage. “‘You Turn Me On’ is my song,” she says, “but I don’t wear tampons because if it run down my leg, that’s what you see and that’s what you git. We told our band, ‘Now we like to reach orgasms onstage, and they thought we were from out there somewhere… ” She looks a little dreamy. “I really came in Philadelphia… ”

Showtime at the Civic Center in Atlanta brought out an 80/20 black/white mix of friendly bizarros, tinseled gays, lesbians, hip middle class. At least half the 1500-person crowd were highly adorned black gays who heeded Labelle’s standard request “to wear something silver.”

“A lot of black people are used to only going to black concerts and being black,” says Sarah. “Same with whites. We bring the gays out and they make a lot of friends. We’ve brought all kinds of people together.”
Nona Hendryx, writer of most of Labelle’s material — heavily laden with messages of personal freedom —turns from her dressing room mirror; she is sequined about the eyes: “That’s why a lot of gay people feel so comfortable with us. There’s no wall like, ‘You can buy my records and listen to my music, but you can’t come around me.’ If I find you acceptable within my own lifestyle, then you’re with me. Besides, I like appealing to both men and women. I have no preferences. I don’t limit myself. I’m all sexes. I don’t know what a heterosexual or a bisexual or a homosexual or a monosexual is. I don’t understand the differences.”

Before their show, Labelle passes the time nipping from a bottle of Courvoisier and joking about Philadelphia, where Nona ran into the microphone twice during “Lady Marmalade” and popped out her dentures. Sarah stands up to mimic: “She had the biggest black spot in her mouth and I looked down and saw these white things and went flat.”

Nona [head thrown back in laughter]: “A boy kissed me after that… “

Sarah: “Pushed his tongue all the way back to her tonsils… “

Pat: “He had been throwin’ up all over the stage. You don’t know where his mouth had been, but some guys look so good, you don’t care where they been … and he didn’t have no teeth either!” Everyone is laughing now, but Nona does a quick pause that this is being written down.

Out front, things are picking up. A black Batwoman in a maroon cape says she comes as “a universal lover, to show my love for Labelle.” A 28-year-old member of the Atlanta Feminist Lesbian Alliance in the first row earnestly tells a reporter: “Lesbians love Labelle. To us, they’re very together women who love people and each other. And they have a heavy feminist message.” And Charles Glass, a 24-year-old orderly at a mental hospital, lightsteps in a black leotard, silver pouch, black picador’s hat, black cape, black mask —a black Zorro? Not exactly. “I really wanted this to be a pouch like a kangaroo and the cape like Batman,” he volunteers with pride. “Batman’s my hero.” Glass says he talks to suicidal patients every day, that he plans to get his Master’s degree in actuarial sciences, “predicting how long people will live. Ain’t that too much?” His love for Labelle, he says, dates back to 1961 when they first formed as Patti LaBelle and the Bluebelles. “But I changed and they changed, so here I am.”

After shedding her Flash Gordon silver gable spacesuit following a stomping, race-around version of “Revolution,” Patti surprises the audience by apologizing for the song. She is hurt, she says, that white reviewers in Philadelphia had apparently misunderstood the group’s intentions. “They said we were saying to kill Whitey,” she said later. “We feel that baddies could be black or white or green or whatever.

“It has been said that we’re a racist group,” she is telling the crowd. “But the song deals with the facts of life. We want you to love the next white person and him to love us and if we put our efforts together, maybe we can get the man out of the White House.” (Again, she explains herself after the show: “Whoever’s in there who is wrong should be out.”) She asks the audience not to take the song the wrong way. It is quiet. Then the crowd breaks into shouts, whistles and tambourines.

Labelle’s arrival in New Orleans is timely, a sensuous group whose hit song about a Creole hooker underscores the city’s moral flaw. Local papers have been spinning tales of townhouse bordellos in the French Quarter, where “confidential informants” clutching taxpayers’ money have purchased acts of oral copulation for $30 a shot. Other alleged customers in the “Burgundy Street Affair” include a former King of Carnival, a bank president, local judges, city officials, Democratic party heavies and local biggies in sports, construction, entertainment and the Mafia. But names of alleged visitors listed in the warrant have not been circulated by local media, though the document is a public record. And the DA has halted a grand jury investigation into the matter. The mahogany men’s clubs are atwitter. But drawing any correlation between scandal and ticket sales will not be easy, because Philadelphia-based promoter Larry Magid has set ticket prices at an $8.50 top and many last-minute walkups will frown and turn around at the box office, leaving the 2300-seat Performing Arts Theatre about 40% empty.

Labelle, along with manager Vicki Wickham, check into the Richlieu sleepy and wearing little makeup. They are not quite midway into a tour that began in mid-March in Detroit and ended May 11th at the Harkness Theater in New York. The trip has taken Labelle to Boston, Philadelphia (a five-show sellout in Pat’s hometown), Atlanta and, now, New Orleans. The full-dress tour, they feel, will help cement the curious into a permanent following.

In the elevator, Pat explains: “Some people have to see first. They might see a poster of these three crazy-looking ladies and say, ‘Wow, we should go see what they’re doing. Maybe they’re the Supremes.’ But we’re singing material that we want to sing — but people won’t listen if we speak like human beings. We have to be raving animals, talk loud and look crazy. So after they look at us, they might listen.”

After their metamorphosis in 1970 from Bluebelles to Labelle, the women cut two albums for Warner Bros., Labelle (1971) and Moon Shadow (1972), which established Nona as a promising writer. They backed Laura Nyro on Gonna Take a Miracle. Labelle switched to RCA and in 1973 released Pressure Cookie’, an LP Pat says is their most politically significant record to date. But none of them sold — the labels didn’t understand them, said Labelle, and couldn’t promote them properly. “Labelle was ahead of our time because we did something opposite from what was happening for a black girl group,” said Nona. Then they were heard by Don Ellis, A&R executive of Epic Records, and Allen Toussaint became their producer, cutting them at his Sea-Saint Studios right here in New Orleans.

Toussaint, says Pat, is a genius for shortening their material to three-minute radio length and for showing her how to pace herself and “not give everything I have to one song.” Toussaint also wrote two songs for Labelle. “All Girl Band,” he said, contains a “heavy feminist message and symbolizes all things women entertainers and Labelle have gone through, a very real and serious picture of the pain involved.”

Vicki Wickham, along with Labelle, had a strong hand in the first three post-1970 albums. Success came with a male producer. Pat doesn’t consider the sexual politics. “The only difference working with Allen was the know-how and professionalism he brought in. We had a hit, but it was not because he was a male. It was just the right combination of things.” Toussaint has agreed to produce their next album, now under way. Things have never looked better for Labelle.

It has taken them 14 years but they range from 29 to 31 years old and the saga goes further back. Pat, 31, is one of six children of a railroad worker and part-time jazz singer from Philadelphia. She graduated from singing in front of the mirror to church, and at 16 joined a four-girl group, the Elm Tones. They performed Top 20s in local clubs for nine dollars a night. Later, she formed the Ordettes with her sister, Barbara, and Cindy Birdsong.

Nona Bernis Hendryx, 30, the first of her mother’s seven children, and Sarah Dash, 29, the seventh of 13 children and daughter of a scrap-metal dealer/minister, both grew up in a section of a South Trenton ghetto since razed by urban renewal. Nona was expelled from the sixth grade for fighting. “I had nothing, so I took it out on anybody,” she recalls.

Her father worked a succession of jobs with the railroad in a rubber factory during World War II and finally, says Nona, “got disillusioned and became an alcoholic.” She resented him at one point “because I didn’t understand the society he was living in… then I found out what he was going through as a black man in America.” The “love lost” between them and a childhood spent “hungry and cold” politicized Nona and inflamed a social conscience that jumps through such songs as “Lonely.” While she says that the suffering “made me what I am,” she does not resent it. “It’s just part of my past.” Today, she says, she is not involved in politics. “My political feelings come out in my songs,” she says, “but I don’t get involved in political groups. They don’t remain the same. I’m involved in things like charity organizations. Politics is a demoralizing occupation.”

Sarah Dash, as a girl, sang on street corners. “My father used to say, ‘Child, you’re singing for the devil,’ and my mother would laugh.” She was expelled from the choir when the choirmaster discovered her freelancing in nightclubs. Sarah found Nona in another church choir and asked her to join the Del Capris. They dropped out of high school, traveled to Philadelphia to audition and were hired by the manager of the Ordettes as a separate group. Personnel changes resulted in Pat, Sarah, Nona and Cindy merging into Patti LaBelle and the Bluebelles. Their first hit, “I Sold My Heart to the Junkman,” sold a million in 1962. Through the years, they had more modest successes — “Down the Aisle,” “Danny Boy” and “You’ll Never Walk Alone”; they trod the chitlin circuit with Roy Hamilton, James Brown, Brook Benton, the Temptations. Their R&B/gospel sound — mellowed with standards and show tunes — brought them a crown of thorns: “The Sweethearts of the Apollo.”

From the beginning, their audiences included healthy numbers of homosexuals. Sarah says their songs — especially the standards — did it; Nona says it was the group’s “intensity and emotion onstage. And we had a freedom of touch. If a gay girl went into a show where anyone was performing and touched, the group would be horrified. I wouldn’t be. You can’t put yourself that far from people.” Besides, she reminds, “there’s a gay chitlin circuit, too. We played places like the, Music Box in Cleveland.”

LaBelle never made more than just enough to get by, and in 1967 Cindy Birdsong left to join the Supremes. “It made me feel very hostile at first,” says Pat. “We didn’t find out until the night she Ieft. And I was very bitter toward her for a while; then we realized that she was doing something she felt she needed to do… you can’t knock a person for trying to better themselves.”

They auditioned for a new fourth member, but after a drag queen showed up, Pat said, “We realized we didn’t need anybody else. And it worked.” And where are, say, the Supremes today? “We could have easily ended up that way,” says LaBelle, shaking her head. “We think how lucky we are every day. It might be what they want, but we would not have been happy doing what they’re doing, not progressing, just doing the same thing over and over and not really doing music.”

In the Apollo days, there was neither the conviction nor the magic glue that bonds the women now. “We just wanted to diddy-bop sing,” says Nona, “get onstage and be in the lights. We didn’t know any better. There wasn’t the feeling, strength or power the three of us have now. We’ve gone through so much with each other, it’s like a marriage. You just don’t split up until you can’t grow any further together. We feed off each other.”

Pat looks like the group’s mama, and she admits to a “mother fetish” for Sarah and Nona onstage, and for everyone else offstage. And she exudes Earth Mother sexuality, though she doesn’t consider herself sexy. “I have great sexual drives and rushes, but my body is not a sexy body and I don’t have a sexy face and voice. But I love sex and my husband considers me a sex maniac.”

Between shows and recording sessions, she is a happy wife and mother in Philadelphia, where her husband, Armstead Edwards, is a high school administrator and a reported “bookworm.” Pat won’t deny it. Edwards, she says, is never concerned with her silvery showbiz life. “He never says anything negative. He doesn’t say much of anything. If he didn’t like something, he’d write me a letter.”

She constantly phones up Sarah and Nona, who live in Manhattan, only several blocks away from each other, but prefers the home life — “cooking, cleaning and watching TV” — to hanging out. “If I had to choose between music and home, I’d stay home.” Among her best friends is Laura Nyro, who she met when she tagged along with Vicki Wickham when Wickham interviewed Nyro for a British pop paper. “We’re at each other’s houses all the time, and we exchange tips on food, men, babies — she’s my facts-of-life sister; all we talk about are the facts of life.” The reclusive Nyro, she said, would be performing again soon.

Sarah Dash calls herself “probably the most boring” of the group; she visits nearby discotheques occasionally (Nona does most of the dancing in the streets). Her best friends are Pat, Nona, Vicki and her family, who live in New Jersey. Her father, the Pentecostal minister, “probably wishes I’d put more clothes on. But the first time he saw us the way we are now, he was overgassed. Now he can’t stop talking about us.” A New York-based underground paper told of Sarah having three boyfriends. She denies it. But while she’ll laugh and tell about onstage orgasms, “my personal life is something I never discuss with anyone. It’s another side to me.”

And then there’s Nona, who frequents the discos, bicycles, plays tennis and has taken up fencing. For her songs, her favorite political input is “people.” Musically, it’s Randy Newman, Stevie Wonder and Joni Mitchell. Poetically, it’s Nikki Giovanni and Kahlil Gibran. Spiritually, Alan Watts. “Nightbirds,” she says, was for Janis Joplin, and she wrote the song after being repulsed and hurt by a book called Going Down with Janis. “To me, the book destroyed the illusion of her music. The song wasn’t in answer to the book, it was just my own tribute to her.”

Nona’s best friends are Pat, Sarah and Vicki. She names four other women, including Rosie Casals, and two men. The first is Elton John, who used to back the Bluebelles in Europe when he was Reg Dwight, pianist for Bluesology. “He was quiet and shy and we fed him ginger cookies all the time.” The other man is Mick Jagger; the Bluebelles were the opening act on the Stones’ first U.S. tour in 1964. “I see him now and then,” said Nona.

As for her handcuffs and whip, Nona laughed them off as “props — and, you know, you can look but don’t touch.” Then she opened up: “I like whips — I use one, but not the one I wear onstage. I used to live next door to a person who did it for a living. I’d never seen it, and one day I peeped and saw the outfit and everything. Then a friend of mine said she was into doing it and had a whole kit. I thought it was highly sexual.” She doesn’t like pain, she said, “but all that black leather — it’s cute.

“And I’ve always had a handcuff fetish. I used to get policemen, security guards at concerts, to lock me up. And I’d sit and look at them and play with them. They were shiny.” And sexy? She thought it over. “I imagine so,” she says, her voice a little softer. “I like it. You could say so.”

At 3:00 p.m. it is 80° beside the pool at the Richlieu, but the women change for the concert and slip into their limo for lunch at Roccaforte’s, a briny eatery deep in the city’s Irish section and a favorite hangout of political ward bosses. Everyone orders seafood. Pat, a renowned cook, sniffs suspiciously at her crustaceans and sends the salad back with disgust. The lettuce had brown spots. Talk turns to the circumspect sniff Pat gave Vicky Wickham’s radical ideas about the group in 1970, when they joined her in England to cut a record. Pat was afraid of losing fans.

“Nona and Pat had a thousand old standards up their sleeves,” recalls Vicki, a crisp, 35-year-old blonde. She had hosted the Bluebelles in 1965 on a top British rock show she produced , and saw the women as potential Stones. “And I was saying, ‘No, I really don’t want to hear any more of those Cole Porter songs.’ “Pat, a voracious eater who tastes from all plates and scrapes what’s left, nearly chokes on a scallop and the table cracks up.

“I had no concept of the problems a black act had in America. English acts, if they were any good, played at Festival Hall, and I couldn’t understand why a black act, if it was good, couldn’t play the same circuit the Who played. My naiveté probably made it work because when the girls would say, ‘We can’t do that,’ I’d say, ‘don’t see why not.’”

“If she hadn’t,” said Pat, “we’d still be in Philadelphia doin’ clubs.” Vicki changed their name to Labelle, beefed tip their material with songs by Jagger-Richard, Pete Townshend, Carole King and Cat Stevens, urged Nona to write from her gut, split singing among all three women, booked them into the Bottom Line, nodded when Bette Midler got them into the Continental Baths, home of Midler’s first major triumphs and hooked them up with Toussaint. (The clothes came from Larry LeGaspi, a young Puerto Rican who was “a groupie,” says Pat, from the Bluebell days. “He came up with some things, we started wearing them and they just got crazier and crazier. Now he has his own store opening.”

Down the road, Vicki sees Labelle playing small theaters cross-country — a traveling Broadway show, eventually expanded for TV, a la Midler, minus props. Epic’s merchandising director, Bruce Harris, says simply: “The time was right for them to happen,” and cites their past gay, hip audiences “who didn’t come into fruition until now.” A super number was done in New York for the Met (Labelle was the first black pop group to play the Metropolitan Opera House) last fall to spread it from New York. Before the Met,” Lady Marmalade” was playing the discos, where LabeIle would drop in, dance and tell the folks about the Met engagement. They advertised the concert in publications like Michael’s Thing, Alter Dark and Interview. “The Met was explosive,” says Harris, “and the single iced the cake.”

In Seattle, Mrs. Marvin Branham denounced “Lady Marmalade” as a song that “flaunts prostitution and is offensive to blacks.” She led an irate group of black mothers from St. Theresa’s Catholic Church in hounding radio stations to drop the song. Her key objection lay in the French line, “Voulez vous coucher avec moi?” which means “Do you want to sleep with me?” The women bought ads in the city’s papers and urged parents to tie up radio station switchboards with complaints. Most of the stations did not knuckle under.

In a fashionable Philadelphia private elementary school, children were reportedly threatened with suspension if they did not cease and desist from singing the lyrics with abandon in the halls. CBS television made Labelle alter the lyric in question to “Do you want to dance with me?” to appear on a recent Cher show and Pat says that similar requests were made in Belgium and France during a winter tour of Europe.

Pat sighs, “It’s really weird after singing ‘Sunday’s News’ and ‘Revolution’ and other songs that were just as good or better than ‘Lady M.’ It’s sad. We believed in the other stuff more than ‘Lady M’; the lyrical content was just more relevant. But ‘Lonely’ could never get to be Number One…. I don’t see how a hooker got to be Number One, though, because people are afraid of that too… I mean, it’s kind of a tacky song to bring into liking you… I wouldn’t want my baby singing it.”

The talk gets Vicki thinking about the rash of “Lady M” censorship incidents, and she gives vent to a powerful rage: “If all of us got up off our asses and did something about it, we wouldn’t put up with Ford and we wouldn’t put up with the bullshit of CBS telling us not to say ‘coucher’ on television.” Her “chief ambition for Labelle,” she says, “is that we’re going to be strong enough one day to say to CBS, ‘To hell with you!’ If we can’t say what we want to say, then we’ll go somewhere where somebody will let us.”

Nona ends the conversation by calling “Lady Marmalade” “just a silly, dumb song that made me laugh. Dodging something that’s real — like prostitution — is ridiculous. I just will not hide in a closet.” The record, she says, is “sweet and sour. I find it sour when people think that ‘Lady M’ is all Labelle is about.”

New Orleans is a bust. The women blame the promoters for being too bullish (and greedy) and the Epic rep forgot to advertise the concert on the radio. “It was just a fuckup,” he says. In the limo on the way for post-show shrimp, Nona asks him, “You been married three times, huh? You must have hangups.” He just stares out the window, and she falls asleep.

Friday. A clambake with friends is called off to fly unexpectedly to New York for costume fittings, then back to Memphis. And as the Cadillac bounces over ghetto ruts on the way to the airport, Patti washes down pork skins with chocolate milk and says that she is tired, wants to “get out soon and us to do what we’re going to do soon because I want to have a family, have more kids, be a star in my own house. I don’t want to be out there funkin’ at 35. The body feels old now. Some can get away with it, like Tina Turner, she’s ageless. But I really don’t want to be an old rock star. So before it happens, I’ll get out.”

And the others just look out the window at the black kids on one roller skate, radios glued to ears, and Sarah lets Pat finish and says, “I hope Labelle goes on forever. If Carol Channing can do it, I can do it. I don’t see any limit to our age. And Pat? She will be back. I know Pat. Music is part of her life. We’re no different from any other women, we just know what we want. And when I hear us happen onstage, it’s a feeling beyond compare.”