POP MUSIC REVIEW : After Lapse Into Burlesque, Etta James Hits Stride

Advertising, television and film tell us every day that fat people, especially fat women, got no reason to live.

Or if they do have a reason to live, it’s certainly not as sexual beings.

You’ve seen all those dance-pop nymphets and heavy metal hood ornaments of MTV, all those sleek things stepping out of sleek cars during commercial breaks, all those perfect bods appearing elsewhere in this very newspaper to seduce or shame you into plunking down for a health club membership. The message: If you’re not like them, you don’t qualify as a respectable sexual being.

When a fat actress is seen in a role that accords her normal sexual desires--Kathy Bates in “Fried Green Tomatoes” or Roseanne Arnold on her TV series--it’s with a husband rotund enough to make her seem almost svelte. The message is that it’s OK for the hippos to roll together in their own pond. Otherwise, you’ll see Bates cast as the sort of emotionally misshapen, sexually hung-up gargoyle she played in both “Misery” and “At Play in the Fields of the Lord.”

The culture of blues and soul music is not the culture of mass media, of fashion models and health clubs and MTV. It’s the culture of working people who have jobs to do, kids to raise, fast, filling meals to grab and bills to pay. For them, life is hard, and eating is one of its most reliable and accessible comforts. They might wish to watch their calories, but there is so much else they have to watch out for. They live in reality, and reality, if you’re not a natural ectomorph with a revved-up metabolism, tends to be fattening.

Etta James, one of the finest products of R&B; culture, certainly doesn’t fit mass pop culture’s model profile. Physically, she is big enough for two or three video age starlets. But she has more raw talent, believability, and expressive power as a singer and an in-person presence than Madonna, Paula Abdul and Janet Jackson put together.

James also is an openly sexual performer, refusing to be cowed by our pervasive stereotypes against fat people. Sexuality has been her main theme since she emerged in 1954 with “Roll With Me Henry,” a song so randy that it was retitled “The Wallflower” in hopes of escaping censors’ attention.

Not much has changed since then. Friday night at the Coach House, James, who will be 54 on Saturday, portrayed sexual need and sexual jealousy, tendered sexual comforts, and passionately thanked lovers for sexual comforts tendered. She swaggered with and reveled in her considerable physicality. Unfortunately, she also stepped over the line into sexual pandering and unseemly burlesque.

The show could have done without the exaggerated hip shaking, French kiss tongue poking, crotch rubbing and Kabuki-like facial mugging that James went for during the first three songs of her 95-minute set. Those vulgarities did serve to rile up the full-house crowd but James could have accomplished the same thing with the sheer energy of her vocal presence and her engagingly sassy, no-nonsense chat.

“I’d Rather Go Blind,” one of her most aching ballads, was ruined during that warm-up, as James chose to make bawdy visual jokes rather than to explore the song’s anguish over sexual betrayal. “Damn Your Eyes” also lost its bite as James used it as a vehicle to rouse the audience--this time not with sexual antics, but with a long, salsa-flavored call-and-response vocal segment.

Just as things threatened to become truly tiresome, James backed away from the shtick and put her trust where it belonged: in her singing, and in her natural, pleasure-filled reactions to the music pumped out by her excellent, six-man backing band.

“Come to Mama” continued the grandstanding showmanship, but this time, instead of overselling sex, James went for crowd appeal by trading bluesy vocal flights in a playful cutting contest with organist Mike Finnegan. James paid some tribute to Howlin’ Wolf and John Lee Hooker with raspy, deep-voiced “how-how-hows.”

With the next song, “Your Good Thing (Is About to End),” James began to sing with a focus and impact that had been lacking earlier in the show. Then, moving from soul-tinged material to straight blues, she strung together a fine, extended medley of shuffle classics like “Baby What You Want Me to Do,” “Dust My Broom” and “Seventh Son.” That worked so well that James kept going with another epic-length blues number, B.B. King’s “Sweet Little Angel.” Here, she celebrated her sexuality with pure class in a song of praise for an exhilarating lover. James registered peaks of adoration and pleasure on the lines “I love the way he spreads his wings. . . . When he spreads his wings around me, I get joy and everything.” No need to loll your tongue or rub your hands below your waist when you can accomplish what James did with voice and ecstatic (but not-so-blatant) body language.

James’ Roots Band stretched out during the blues tunes, showcasing the talents of two fine guitarists, Josh Sklair and Bobby Murray, and of organ ace Finnegan, a Los Angeles session regular who also tours with Crosby Stills & Nash. Bassist Reggie McBride also took a punchy, jazz-leaning solo during the extended “Sweet Little Angel.” The drummer was James’ son, Donto, who offered good, basic, precision without flash--just the right approach to take in a band focused on a singer and three strong instrumental soloists.

After that, no one would have complained if James had gone on singing the blues to infinity. Instead, she ended the show by giving a textbook lesson in pure soul balladry.

The song, “Sugar on the Floor,” went beyond the portrayal of sex as a physical experience to probe the psychological dimensions of love. James rendered what it is to be hurt and vulnerable in love, to feel worthy but unappreciated, like sugar spilled on the floor, and to wonder whether rejection and hurt are worth risking again. Calling on her gospel roots, she broke through the ballad’s doubt and pain and began to summon up strength during an extended vocal improvisation. “You gotta take one step,” she shouted over and over, strutting across the stage with a proud, purposeful gait. “I know what it feels like,” she cried. James meant that she knew both the pain of rejection and the pride of overcoming it. You knew, as she sang, that she meant it and felt it, because she had lived it.

That glorious finish left the audience standing and hollering for more long after James had left the stage (to sing an encore would have been a mistake; she already had put a bold and final period and exclamation point on her show). They were responding to the expression of vitality, talent, and fully lived and felt experience. Those are the things of greatest beauty for a performer, and it doesn’t matter in what shape they come. This was the real thing; don’t be deceived by seductive substitutes.