Rollin’ With Etta : Etta James has sung <i> and</i> lived the blues, but these are good times for the R&B; matriarch bound for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame

RIVERSIDE —  The good times are rolling for Etta James. You can see it in her surroundings and you can sense it in her manner. Although she’s been on a liquid diet for a month, determined to shed some of her trademark weight, she plunges into stories with the same gusto she applies to her blues singing.

“It just seems like when you try to do something good, and if you keep trying and you really mean it, then good things happen,” says James, who at 54 has risen above it all as she sits like a blues Buddha in the suburban splendor of her valley-view home here.

The back yard features a swimming pool, a spa and a gazebo, and there’s room for a carport to accommodate some of her vintage autos, led by her 1951 Chevrolet.

Inside, the house’s den walls are covered with photographs of her husband and two sons, and in a small room off the kitchen hang pictures of James with such blues-rock luminaries as Keith Richards, Chuck Berry, B. B. King, Howlin’ Wolf and Eric Clapton. There are awards and certificates, including four Grammy nominations and a career achievement citation from the Rhythm & Blues Foundation.

But the ultimate accolade comes in January when James will be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in a ceremony in Los Angeles.

“That’s something. That is really something,” James says, lowering her voice to a dramatic whisper. “It really does mean a lot. It shows that if you’re hanging around the candy store long enough people start giving you things.”

James has been hanging around the candy store since the early ‘50s, and unlike many of her R&B; contemporaries who faded into obscurity or met with tragedy, James has fought back from exploitation, two rounds of drug addiction and scrapes with the law to renew her career.

She’s now a staple on the blues concert and festival circuit, and she’s just released her first album in three years. “The Right Time” is a soul-blues collection produced by Jerry Wexler, whose previous credits include Ray Charles, Aretha Franklin and Bob Dylan (see review, Page 57).

“I’m almost tempted to pronounce it, with a producer’s hubris, a masterpiece,” Wexler says in a separate interview. “I’ve never done anything better, and I’ve done a lot of records.

“Aretha is so church, plus jazz of course, and Etta is much more of a bluesy earth mother,” Wexler continued, comparing the two female singers. “They’re very different people. Aretha is much more introverted, into herself. They both have moods. But those are the privileges of the divas.”

James was born Jamesetta Hawkins in Los Angeles, to a 14-year-old mother and a father she didn’t know. She lived with foster parents, but when James was 12 the woman died and she went to live with her mother in San Francisco, where she fell in with with a tough crowd and encountered the hard urban blues of such singers as Guitar Slim, Roy Milton and Charles Brown.

Adding that influence to her background as a child singing in church, James and some girlfriends formed a vocal group, and in 1954 she hooked up with L.A. R&B; bandleader Johnny Otis. He took her on the road in his revue, changed her name and produced her first record.

That debut is best known as “Roll With Me Henry,” but it was officially titled “The Wallflower” to make it safe for radio and publications. One of the defining singles of the era and a key precursor of rock ‘n’ roll, it was a bawdy “answer” to Hank Ballard’s innuendo-filled hit “Work With Me Annie,” and it topped the R&B; chart for a month in 1955.

When James went on her own in the early ‘60s, she began a decade-long string of R&B; hits that spanned several styles, from Dinah Washington-like ballads to pop-flavored songs.

Over the course of that career, she also picked up a reputation as moody and temperamental.

“ Temperamental ,” James repeats, sitting on a sofa in the den of the ranch-style house, where she moved three years ago with her husband, Artis, and sons Donto and Sametto. “I mean, to this day I carry that. It’s like I’m Miss Controversy. And to me it doesn’t seem like I did a lot of things.”

Well, she admits, in the ‘50s she did walk off a Dick Clark-produced show and a couple of others. And she was the one who, on package concert tours with young colleagues such as Sam Cooke, the Everly Brothers and James Brown, would make noise when they’d pull in to do a show that wasn’t on the itinerary (a common scam to make a few extra dollars that the promoters didn’t know about). And she wouldn’t allow herself to be filmed on stage, sensing instinctively that someone would make money off it, and it wouldn’t be Etta James.

But after a while her reputation became more specific: junkie .

“All of my role models at that time, the ones I looked up to most, were heroin addicts,” she says. “Ray Charles, Billie Holiday, . . . Chet Baker, all those people I admired were like that, and I think subconsciously I thought that was a cool thing.

“Sometimes I look back on it and remember being in a hotel or something and being very sick and saying to myself, ‘Should I just kill myself now?’ A few times I pondered that. I remember being so devastated. Like, ‘Oh my God, am I gonna be like this all my life?’ It was really sad.”

Though James managed to keep recording, her career inevitably suffered.

“I wasn’t dependable. People couldn’t send me a deposit, ‘cause they wouldn’t hear no more from me.”

James’ habit eventually led her to write some bad checks, instigating a series of scrapes with the law that ultimately left her with a choice in the mid-’70s between a rehabilitation facility and prison. She went to rehab in Tarzana, breaking heroin’s hold only to succumb to cocaine a few years later.

“I was getting to the stage where things were really burning out,” she said of her second addiction, which she acquired, along with an attendant taste for cognac, when she was the opening act on the Rolling Stones’ 1979 U.S. tour.

“My kids would knock on the door, ‘Ma, what are you doing in there? Ma, can we come in?’ ‘No, go and eat, why don’t you guys go eat lunch or something?’

“These are the same kids that knew about their mama’s other big problems. She had just got rid of that problem and was starting to have a pretty good life.

“I remember going in the bathroom one night, I was on my knees and praying, and I had never, never ever prayed like that. I’m not saying I’m some kind of fanatical person. I was on the toilet seat and I was praying and crying. I said, ‘I can’t handle this anymore.’ I never touched cocaine and I never touched cigarettes and I never touched Remy Martin from that day on.”

Off the cocaine and booze in early ‘84, James suddenly found a focus. She bought a desk for $10 from a neighbor’s yard in South-Central L.A. She picked up a file cabinet and printed some business cards. She found an old contract and whited out the names. Etta James Enterprises was in business.

One night James typed some letters of introduction, including one to Mayor Bradley volunteering her services for the upcoming Olympics. That eventually led to her appearance at the Games’ opening ceremonies in the Coliseum, where she sang “When the Saints Go Marching In.”

Says James, “That’s when basically I think my life changed. When that happened it was like magic. That’s something I did . I wrote that silly letter and I couldn’t even type. It was just like miracles were happening.”

James started booking her own shows. She and her husband would load her six-member band in the back of their camper--the musicians called it the penalty box--and drive to dates all over California, conscientiously setting aside some of the money from each show.

Then “The Wallflower” popped up in the hit movie “Back to the Future” and James sued for royalties, ending up with a nice settlement. Soon after that, MCA Records purchased the old Chess Records catalogue and struck a new royalties agreement with all the artists, including James. Her recordings started appearing in more films and commercials, and more payments started coming in. MCA plans to release a two-CD “Essential Etta James” next year.

James’ rebound picked up steam with a show-stopping appearance in the Chuck Berry tribute film “Hail, Hail Rock ‘n’ Roll,” and with two albums for Island Records, “Seven Year Itch” in ’88 and “Stickin’ to My Guns” a year later--though the latter, with its high-tech electronics and a duet with rapper Def Jef, had an air of compromise.

“I almost lost my audience with ‘Stickin’ to My Guns,’ ” James admits. “So many people were writing me, interviewers were saying, ‘You think Etta James needs to do a rap song?’ ”

Says producer Wexler, “They were attempting to build in the necessary compromises for crossover. . . . I always found the ones that cross over the best are the ones that stick the truest to the root. (On “The Right Time”) I wanted to make an album that would evoke the roots but would be very much in the ‘90s.”

Wexler, who also produced James’ 1978 Warner Bros. album “Deep in the Night,” noticed the changes in the singer during the recent album sessions.

“Her career has taken off. . . . I think she’s a little more focused and, I wouldn’t say career-driven, but career-energized than she was then.”

It’s no surprise that the colorful blues matriarch has a few opinions on the nature of the music.

She subscribes strongly to the maxim that you need to do a little living to really sing the blues.

“You know, there was a young (singer), about 19 years old, what’s her name? Miki Howard. Someone was asking me about her, and I said, ‘She’s a great singer, she can sing her butt off. But right now I don’t believe her.’

“It’ll take her five or six years, then she’ll be right in there. She’s had a few knocks now and she’s kind of coming around. A person doesn’t have to be drug through the mud, but they have to pay some kind of dues. . . . Something that gives them that extra feeling of hurt or sadness.”

But James doesn’t like that limited notion of the blues’ emotional range. She sits up straight and adopts the haughty pose and preaching cadence she might display on stage as she completes her dissertation on the blues.

“It’s not all sad--’Woe is me, o lordy, my hog’s got cholera.’ The blues that I sing, basically I feel it’s just some kind of experience. It’s like living, dying, breakin’ up, fightin’, happy. It’s everything all mixed up. It’s funny, some of it. I’m not saying every time I sing a song that it’s funny. Because some of those songs I sing I get pretty damn mad in there. . . . It’s life.”