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Nothing Personal
Gobsmacked II
Rupert Everett muses on transubstantiation; Trevor-Rees Jones dabbles in exploitation; Julia Roberts half-naked before the nation. We're gobsmacked!
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Nothing Personal
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Hollywood's favorite girl-gripe is back! Also: Dino De Laurentiis gets cranky about Clarice; Chrissie Hynde's gonna use her knife; and Paul MCartney shakes his bootie on the bar at Hogs and Heifers.
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People Feature
"The Real Island"
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People Feature
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Almost immediately, Bland was drafted, and he celebrated by recording the mournful "Army Blues" ("Uncle Sam done got me/That is the awful news"). After a two-and-a-half year stint, Bland returned to civilian life to find that the Duke label had been sold to Houston music entrepreneur Don Robey -- a Mephistophelean character who would define Bland's life and career, for good and ill, over the next two decades.

Half-black and half-Jewish, Robey came from Houston's middle-class black community. He had dropped out of high school and hustled a living gambling and running a taxi business before stumbling into the music business. He promoted concerts and ran a record store in the '30s and '40s, where he doubtless got a good look at the seamier aspects of the racket. His gospel label, Peacock, recorded such legendary acts as the Dixie Hummingbirds and the Mighty Clouds of Joy. In 1952 he merged the label with Duke and doubled his roster, crossing into secular territory with such popular Duke acts as Ace (who achieved immortality playing Russian roulette on Christmas Eve, 1954), Clarence "Gatemouth" Brown and the relatively untested Bland.

History has not been kind to Robey. While some apologists note the difficulties a black man must have faced running his own label (10 years before Berry Gordy), most musical historians tend to dwell on Robey's pugnacious nature and sheer greed. Typical are the remarks of Francis Davis, who in "The History of the Blues" limns Robey as "a 100 percent sleazeball," and adds, "as if claiming co-composer credit for most of his performers' songs wasn't bad enough, he also threatened them with bodily harm or death when they objected."

While Davis characterizes Bland as "one of Robey's field hands," the singer has a different outlook. "There's some people that told me the best thing for me is go to the country and getcha plow and mule," he told a reporter in 1999. When pressed on Robey's shady business practices (there is scant evidence that the entrepreneur contributed as much as one line to the songs he took credit for), the singer demurred. "Well, he's in business. Each company that you get with does the same thing. But Robey did a lot of people a lot of favors -- me, for one, gettin' a chance to record."

A chance to record and a chance to define himself. Pairing the singer with producer-arranger Joe Scott and band leader Bill Harvey proved an act of genius. Of Scott, Bland says simply, "I'd say he was everything." He was like Nelson Riddle to Bland's Frank Sinatra, creating a landscape in which the singer's complex, vibrant tones could play while reining him in with rhythm. Working with Scott, Bland learned phrasing and timing, and to this day the singer can do more with a simple lyric -- racing it like a motorbike one minute, toying with it like a yo-yo the next -- than almost any blues singer you can name. If Robey was Bobby Bland's serpent, Joe Scott was his apple.

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Bland's early outings on Duke were riveting, if not exactly groundbreaking. "It's My Life, Baby" (1955) could have been done by Muddy Waters (no small praise). It's exciting even now: Roy Gaines' electric guitar slices though the rolling horns like a hot knife through butter, and Bland's vocal exudes the kind of dick-swinging confidence that was the staple of most blues singers. The lyric (attributed to Robey and "Ferdinand Washington") was rather tongue-in-cheek, while foreshadowing the singer's future problems: "Well you're always tellin' people I drink too much/but everytime I get a bottle you add your little touch."

Other early hits gave scarcely a glimpse of the sensitive-guy persona Bland would later perfect. The 1956 "You've Got Bad Intentions," another roadhouse blues, contains this put-down: "You say you can't go on living/If you can't be by my side/Gonna send you a bottle of poison/Please commit suicide." (Well, he did say please.)

Bland was developing the formula for his ultimate success (a success that would yield more than 30 Top 20 R&B singles) even as he was breaking through with a familiar blues sound. "If Bland's greatest natural gift was his ability to make even his shouts sound intimate, his genius (or Robey's) was in realizing that women bought blues records, too," wrote Davis. Photos of Bland performing in the '50s testify: Women reach out to touch the hem of his sharkskin garment while the singer -- a big man with a croissant of a nose and an ungainly, "Eraserhead" pomp -- caresses the microphone like a lover. He left the rambling-guy songs to other singers; Bobby "Blue" Bland wanted to stick around and talk about love.

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