At 56, Susanna Hoffs still looks like this adorable Bangles girl I used to watch on TV singing ‘Walk Like an Egyptian’ in 1987! She looked incredibly young and upbeat when I saw her at High Fidelity Records, where Tom DeSavia & Eric Gorfain record this Podcast every month. Susanna was the guest on Sunday night and they spinned a few records she had handpicked (although she had chosen way too many!) representing music that had inspired her to be a musician, before giving us a special treat, a few songs sung with the help of a few unannounced musicians.
Susanna certainly lives in the 60’s but who could blame her? I do too in a way, wasn’t the best music invented during this golden decade? She started with the Beatles’ Taxman’, a George song. Aren’t we always going back to the Beatles? Susanna admitted her love for the Fab Four, and being a ‘Rubber Soul-Revolver’ person, even finding ‘Revolver’ a revolutionary record. It was the ‘sweet spot of their growth’… ‘mixed with experimentation’. ‘There is a different Beatles for different periods of your life’, she said. ‘I was born a Paul girl, moved to John when I was in college, then moved to George, but I love Ringo!
What else does she like? Basically, everything I do, the great English classics like The Zombies (‘A Rose for Emily’) for which she admitted to have an obsessive love, a real ‘reaction to Colin Blunstone’s voice’, as if ‘some DNA shifting stuff was happening’… ‘there’s something about his voice,… not being unafraid to be uncool’. She also loves Dusty Springfield (‘Son of a Preacher Man’) whom she could ‘almost picture recording with this incredible band’ and she became all excited when that drum kicked up,.. Susanna talked about the music she loves with a real passion and authenticity. Still, there were a few American artists, such as The Merry-Go-Round whom she became obsessed with in 1976 when she attended UC Berkeley. ‘It was a fertile time creatively,’ ‘He was Impressed with me, I was impressed with them’, she said, and their song ‘Time Will Show The Wiser’ was very influential to the Bangles. Linda Ronstadt is one of her biggest influences and we got to hear Mike Nesmith’s ‘Some of Shelley’s Blues’ followed by The Bangles’ debut single ‘Getting out of Hand’. She explained that Los Angeles radio DJ Rodney Bingenheimer was very instrumental to what happened to the Bangles…. She basically stalked him, although being very shy, he told her to show up wearing a mini skirt! He liked the song, which sounded like ‘the Mamas and the Mamas’, and Rodney ended playing it every weekend for a year. Her first boyfriend turned her to the Kinks during her ‘summer of love’ in the mid 70’s, she picked ‘Get Back in Line’ and couldn’t stop praising Ray Davies who ‘was so good at painting portraits of life in England’. Then another hyper-famous UK band with ‘Loving Cup’ from the Stones’ Exile on Main Street’ and then Tom Jones’ ‘It’s Not Unusual’, a song that gives her courage, ‘No matter what’s going on, this one works!’ she added.
Susanna treated us with a very intimate set of four songs, and when I thought she would play alone with an acoustic guitar, four people showed up including Petra Haden, the violinist who has recorded with so many people including Bill Frisell, Mike Watt, Foo Fighters,… They did a very funny and playful version of ‘Manic Monday’ with strings and many detours, and I could tell they were having fun with the catchy song. Her voice is still incredibly youthful, high pitched, she beautifully harmonized with Petra and the other members of the band’s voices during Bob Dylan’s ‘I’ll Keep It With Mine’, and they gave us a very Ronstadt-esque version of ‘It Doesn’t Matter Any More’, closing with the Bangles’’Eternal Flame’ … The incredibly cute Susanna is still at the top of her game and she could not stop smiling the whole time. She said at what point that we associate certain songs with people we know during our life and this is definitively true, I would even add that we associate songs with specific parts of our lives and I was completely and deliciously back in the mid 80’s.
Susanna Hoffs will play at Largo on March 18th with Eric Gorfain, the Section Quartet, Jon Brion and I have heard that Malcom McDowell will show up too.
