Darlene Love Doc Traces Career After Spector Erasure — SkimNews
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- "Darlene Love: I Know Where I've Been" is a documentary directed by Barry Avrich, built around a present-day interview and archival footage showing the 85-year-old singer performing updated renditions of her key songs with Paul Shaffer and his band at the Power Station studio in New York.
- Phil Spector recruited Love's group the Blossoms to sing "He's a Rebel" in 1962 and credited the Crystals instead because they were 3,000 miles away in New York; the same credit erasure repeated on "He's Sure the Boy I Love," stripping Love's name from the Wall of Sound's defining recordings.
- Love was credited on "Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)" (1963), but the parent album released Nov. 22, 1963 — the day JFK was shot — was suppressed by Spector after a few weeks and effectively lost until Apple Records reissued it in 1972.
- The documentary reveals Love was originally set to record "River Deep, Mountain High" before Spector switched to Tina Turner at the last minute; the film argues Love's smoother pop-soul croon might have made the notoriously underperforming single a commercial hit.
- After cleaning houses at her career nadir, Love relaunched through cruise ship nostalgia performances, the 1984 jukebox musical "Leader of the Pack" at the Bottom Line in Greenwich Village, and her annual Letterman performance of "Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)" beginning in 1986.
- Bruce Springsteen and Steven Van Zandt, longtime fans interviewed at length in the film, helped fuel Love's comeback; she was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2011.
- Love previously stood at the Oscars to accept best documentary for Morgan Neville's "20 Feet from Stardom", delivering what the review calls an "indelible speech" as the film cast her as rock's most fabled uncredited backup singer.
Why it matters: For Love, the documentary closes the loop on a career where Spector's credit manipulation — and a fluke release date colliding with JFK's assassination — kept her name off her own recordings for decades. Now 85, she performs with Shaffer at the Power Station with her voice still described as extraordinary, as the film completes her public reclamation from uncredited singer to 2011 Rock Hall inductee.
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