Story By: Evelyn Mcdonnell / Story From: MiamiHerald.com
In 1970, the three singers who comprised the group Patti LaBelle and the Blue Belles needed a change. In their nine years together, they'd had moderate success as a harmonizing vocal trio. But the girl group era was over, and Patti LaBelle, Nona Hendryx and Sarah Dash needed to either shake up their formula, or break up.
Enter Vicki Wickham, former producer of Ready Steady Go. She and Dash had stayed in touch since the Blue Belles performed on that influential English TV show. When Dash told Wickham the Blue Belles were in crisis, the Londoner flew to New York to see the group perform in its old stronghold, the Apollo Theatre. 'We blew the Apollo away,' Dash says now. ``We actually had them laid out.'
Wickham took the singers back to swinging London and became their manager. Thus began a makeover that was almost a revolution, as girl group became rock band.
The group, newly renamed Labelle, evaporated aesthetic barriers with its atomic mix of soul, rock, dance and gospel, most famously on the proto-disco smash Lady Marmalade. Breaking out of the usual R&B circuit in space-oddity costumes and recording feminist anthems penned by Hendryx, they broke new ground for black and female artists.
'There was nothing or no one like Labelle,' Hendryx recalls thinking when, in preparation for the group's current reunion, she went back to listen to those old albums. ``No wonder our fans were so crazy about us, and why we attracted the multiracial, multisexual and multicultural crowd we did.'
Forty-eight years since the trio first joined, and 32 years after they separated over creative differences, Labelle is back. Last fall, the three founding members released the CD Back to Now, featuring producers Lenny Kravitz, Wyclef Jean, and Kenneth Gamble and Leon Huff. A tour brings them to Miami Beach's Fillmore at the Jackie Gleason Theater on Sunday.
'It feels really good,' says Dash. ``There are moments during the show when it seems like we never left. The moment we walk on and hear the audience's response to our being together lets me feel like something very important is happening.'
THE BLUE BELLES
The Blue Belles formed out of two girl groups, the Ordettes and the Del Capris. All the singers were from New Jersey, except for LaBelle, who was from Philadelphia. (Founding member Cindy Birdsong left in 1967 to join the Supremes.) They had such minor hits as I Sold My Heart to the Junkman. By the end of the '60s, the group was suffering from bad management and a dropped deal with Atlantic. But mostly, history was on the verge of passing them by.
'Times had changed,' says Hendryx. ``The world had changed. We'd gone from the cocktail hour, picket fence, suburban dream to free love and the British invasion. Feminism was coming into being. We'd gone through civil rights. So much had happened, and we were still the same pretty much.
Gradually -- organically, Hendryx says -- Labelle began to reinvent itself. Out went the old-fashioned bouffants and matching dresses; in came futuristic, funky outfits by Larry LeGaspi and Richard Erker. 'Vicki said there was no reason we have to all wear the same gowns and hairdos,' Dash recalls. ``She looked at it as presenting females in a different way.'
Wickham similarly transformed the group's sound from one of close harmonies to an interplay of three women belting to be heard in the stars. 'They were very stuck in a sort of conventional arrangement of lead with some backup,' Wickham says. ``I felt groups should be a group. One person didn't have to sing all the leads if others were capable. Three great voices could be brought much more to the front. The songs were not pretty songs, they were much more rock, and needed singing with a different attitude.'
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