PicoBlog

by T. Bloom

There isn’t much to say about Alice Clark that hasn’t been said elsewhere already, but mostly that’s because there just isn’t much to say.

Even less was known when I first happened across her music back in 2009. Nowadays she has a Wikipedia page containing a few scant details about her personal life. But even these are enigmatic — a suggestion that she grew up in Bed-Stuy, and this quote from album collaborator Billy Vera:

"I got the impression her life wasn't that great. She... had kids and belonged to a religious order that forbade either bathing or washing hair, I don't recall exactly which…”

Can we even consider that “information”?

Some of the more concrete facts: Clark recorded fifteen songs between 1968 and 1972, across a handful of sessions. This culminated in a self-titled album release, featuring a fantastic version of Jimmy Webb’s “I Keep It Hid” as the lead single.

But the single failed to gain any traction, and the album sank without a trace. That’s the end of Clark’s part in this story; music bloggers seem to love writing that she “turned her back on the music industry,” but no one seems to know what really transpired. Likewise, her date of death is given as 2004 by MOJO Magazine, but I haven’t been able to find an obituary.

So one could say that “I Keep It Hid” turned out to be more than just a song title for Clark. Unintentionally, it became a statement about her withdrawal and post-career anonymity — which has itself become a huge part of her renown, second only to the singing itself.

In her music the heart is laid bare, marking her as a presence that seems to yearn to be known. Where did that spirit come from… and where did it go?

“I Keep It Hid” was the song that first drew me into Clark’s mystery — that, plus the album cover, which presents her in closeup, modestly styled in a contemplative pose. It’s a portrait of one who is haunted by heartbreak, who’s been awake all night waiting for the call that never comes.

Knowing (as we sort of do) that this everywoman guise was not just a pose imparts a special flavor to Clark’s vocal performance, particularly when she reaches for the high notes, momentarily seeming to tear free from the heaviness of her burden. In these moments she transforms herself to a figure of tremendous power, stature, and feeling. This transcendent quality is a staple of soul music, which lends expression to the sacred interior, showing how relatively common experiences can reverberate within the performer (and through them, the listener) on a spiritual level. Love, or the promise of it. reconnects us all with the divine; the loss of it can plunge us into hell.

In “I Keep It Hid,” Clark sings from the perspective of someone watching from a purgatorial distance as a former lover struggles through difficulties. Ultimately she finds herself unable to reach out, citing “being the way I am” as the sole explanation for swallowing these feelings and continuing on alone.

Deep down inside
I know I still love him
But he'll never know
Cause I'll never tell
I'll confide that I'm thinking of him
And wishing him well
I can't walk up to him and say to him
Baby, what you been doing
I still love you like I did
You know, nothing's really changed here
But being the way I am
I keep it hid…

This relatively ordinary persona is consistent across the other songs on Clark’s album, including the opener “It Takes Too Long To Learn To Live Alone,” which begins:

I leave the house, I catch the bus
And go to work the way I did before
It’s the same routine most every day
Except I guess I see my folks much more
A year has passed, I thought by now
That I could make a new life of my own
But habits are so hard to break
I think of you and I still ache
It takes too long to learn to live alone...

These are songs about the fleeting sense of liberation that love can impart. Upon crashing rudely back to earth, it’s hard not to feel like the best moments of life have been used up, and now all that’s left is the damage, the leftovers. But love can also rebirth itself in surprising ways, recurring throughout our lives in many stages and cycles. In songs like “I Keep It Hid,” even suppressed love can serve as a masochistic source of vitality and inner purpose, sustaining a person through the leanest times.

In “Never Did I Stop Loving You,” which appears later on the album (and was featured in the 2019 film The King of Staten Island), Clark allows herself to revel unabashed in the joy of reunion with one considered lost. The heart’s most abject failures occasionally prove to be part of a longer tale of redemption and triumph… but is that too much to hope for? And how are the lovelorn meant to survive in the meantime?

This is the subject of my other fave from Clark’s album, a cover of “Maybe This Time” which is essentially Cabaret by way of Dreamgirls.

As sung by Sally Bowles (famously portrayed by Liza Minnelli that same year) the lyrics wring an uncanny sense of optimism from the doom closing in around the free-spirited Weimar Republic. Clark’s version summons a distinctly American verve, a sense of determination to break loose from the limitations of Black working-class womanhood, in which being lucky in love really may constitute a kind of superpower. Clark and Bowles are products of entirely different worlds, and even when singing the same lyrics, their respective yearnings reflect that divide.

And that’s before we factor in religion, which presents us with a cluster of unknowable influences to consider when imagining Clark in the context of her everyday life. I’ve been wondering whether she may have belonged to one of the Black Hebrew Israelite churches, which flourished in New York during the ‘60s and ‘70s. This could explain Billy Vera’s sorely under-informed recollection, quoted above — women of this faith would have been expected to practice ritual immersion as outlined in traditional Judaism, and may don head-coverings (such as the ones Clark wears in all of her promotional photos).

Whatever her religious beliefs may have been, it’s interesting that the songs she chose to record were distinctly secular (the quasi-exception being her 1969 rendition of “Heaven’s Will (Must Be Obeyed)” a love song that invokes spiritual imagery). Did Clark’s musical aspirations serve as a kind of outlet for exploring the more worldly interests and opportunities that eluded her elsewhere? Or did her discography constitute a compromise between Clark and the producers she working with at the time, who would have been grooming her for wider appeal?

Either way, I’m tempted to imagine that Clark’s faith is the reason we never heard from her again after 1972, after her album failed to make a splash. Perhaps if “I Keep It Hid” had muscled its way onto the charts, she might have considered it a blessing, a sign of approval from God; the distinct lack of success may have seemed just as potent a sign, one which she took to heart.

Faith and family are not necessarily a barrier to fame and fortune, but they can point someone down an alternate path when the industry shows its teeth, or presents a cold shoulder. Many artists persist and excel simply because they have nothing else to fall back on, no other dream, no ready forms of support or acceptance beyond their artistic community. For someone with a family, a congregation, a sense of higher purpose, it can be easier to let certain opportunities fall by the wayside, trusting that one will be guided into service through different means.

I found some support for this theory on a British soul music web forum, where a member claimed to be in touch with someone professing to be Alice Clark’s grandson, and who relayed this message to readers:

“Her story is probably more amazing than her voice… she was a selfless lady who put her loved ones before her singing, a decision she was very happy with up to her death.”

The conversation occurred six years ago; although I was able to find contact info for the relative in question, so far he has not responded to the email I sent.

This brings us to the issue of Clark’s post-career fame in the British “Northern Soul” dance club scene, which has kept honor on her name across the intervening decades — even resulting in a 2019 vinyl album reissue, which remains available today.

The man cited above as Clark’s descendant had been quoted as being unsure whether the singer had been “aware of her ‘fame’ on the worldwide soul scene.” Since her album had remained an out-of-print collector’s item all those years, there’s certainly no way she would have seen royalties or received any formal acknowledgment, even though her tracks were spun regularly by those keeping the soul scene alive overseas.

Not that many Americans are aware of the enduring impact of African-American music on the UK and Europe. Ronnie Specter (lead singer of The Ronettes) wrote a bit about this in her memoir Be My Baby, recalling how the so-called British Invasion of the ‘60s swung attention away from our country’s homegrown Black musical acts, making it even more difficult to break into the business; however, upon traveling to London to perform, the Ronettes were astounded by the incredible enthusiasm they were met with. This haphazard cultural exchange created offshoot trends and musical fandoms that are still in operation all these decades later, on both sides of the ocean.

While other 1972 releases by established artists such as Aretha Franklin, Stevie Wonder, and Al Green were met with acclaim, there was less room than ever for up-and-comers like Alice Clark… in America, anyway. The 1999 book Last Night a DJ Saved My Life: The History of the DJ contains a chapter devoted to Britain’s soul scene entitled "A Genre Built From Failures," which asserts:

“Northern Soul was the music made by hundreds of singers and bands who were copying the Detroit sound of Motown pop. Most of the records were complete failures in their own time and place ... but in Northern England from the end of the 1960s through to its heyday in the middle 1970s, were exhumed and exalted.”

Clark was exactly the kind of non-starter likely to get swept up in this gyre of belated appreciation, and while there’s something satisfying about knowing she eventually found her audience (especially since it’s the only reason why we in 2021 are able to enjoy these tunes or know anything about her at all) it’s also extremely frustrating. The nature of what is preserved vs. cast aside may seem arbitrary, but there’s still a selective aspect to it. Just as Americans have romanticized and fetishized aspects of British culture that affirm the we see ourselves, Brits and Europeans have done the same in their passion for African-American culture. There’s often a necessary context missing in the way this music is preserved, presented, and discussed by white stewards, as well as a sense of nostalgia for the past that is jarringly distant from the spirit in which Black Americans created this music in the first place.

The less present a figure is, the less actively they participate in their own mythology, the more vulnerable they are to becoming blank screens for others to project their own fantasies upon. This has happened with nuclear-grade celebrities who died young, such as Marilyn and James Dean; it’s also happened with those who grew more reclusive over time, such as Prince. There’s an especially pernicious version that happens to more obscure figures, whose image and voice are only accessible via collectors and cultural gatekeepers — and while this does often result in worthy artists being granted a wider, much deserved re-appraisal, it’s usually too late for them to be anything except a consumer commodity, to be evaluated and spoken about, used to burnish tastemakers’ cred. But as a real person and artistic entity, they remain as mute as ever, eclipsed by everything that is imagined about them.

Which is why we can’t assume that Alice Clark spoke to us about her life through these fifteen songs. People at that time had the opportunity to ask her these questions, probe the motivation behind her artistry, but this was deemed unworthy of attention. Later on, the chance to fill in these blanks was either squandered, or else it was withheld by the artist herself.

We can, however, still admire her unmistakable vocal talent. We can sense the vibrant, passionate being that was there, is there. And we can marvel at the strange arc of fame, which has a way of twisting creations and narratives out of an artist’s hands, imbuing them with unintended significance, burying them for decades or even centuries until they’re considered “lost” — stealthily setting them up to be “found” again.

And of course, we can appreciate Clark as a woman who poured years of her precious time and energy into a dream — a very popular dream, just as it is today. A woman who, unlike most dreamers, achieved the tantalizing milestone of hearing her own voice soar out of a record player on professional-grade speakers, with full instrumental accompaniment, perhaps even seeing her LP in stores. And we can appreciate how, after a time, she voluntarily released her grip on those balloon strings, letting her creations fly and fall wherever they may.

And just as the work speaks for itself, so does the mystery. Whatever else she might have had to say about this topsy-turvy brush with fame, it appears that — being the way she was — Alice Clark conspired to keep the rest of it hid, for keeps.

ncG1vNJzZmiipZm0prnEp6tnq6WXwLWtwqRlnKedZL1ww8eon6ivp53GbsPArGSapJmYsm6vy5qppA%3D%3D