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Gut feeling
By John Berger
led Flack to
‘First Time’ hit
Star-BulletinTHERE are many stories about recording artists who were forced to record a song they didn't like, only to watch it become a huge hit. Roberta Flack's experience with "The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face" is just the opposite. She believed in it. Her producer didn't, deeming it "too slow."
"He said it wouldn't get played on the air and I said, 'I don't care, I'm not recording it to get played on the air.' So the song sat there for three years (and) I didn't do anything because by that time I had done another album and I was excited just to get in and do the third and the fourth," Flack recalled Wednesday evening in Waikiki. She joins the Honolulu Symphony at the Waikiki Shell on Saturday.
"The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face" topped Billboard's Hot 100 singles chart for six weeks in 1972 and won Flack two of her first three Grammy Awards (Song of the Year and Record of the Year) in 1973. That was almost four years after she recorded it in a single take during the sessions for her debut album, "First Take."
"When they released it as a single and it went gold in three or four weeks, that was my first feeling of (having) a hit."
She said the song remains special to her. "It taught me everything that I know and have learned about the music business in terms of how difficult (it is) to record something, or sing something that you love, simply out of the love and the joy of creating it."
She said it's great if everybody else loves your work, but she also makes it clear that, "I don't ever want to be in a car and hear a song that I've recorded come on the radio, and have to hit my head on the dashboard trying to hide from it."
That's happened a time or two when she was persuaded to record something she didn't believe was right for her. She recalls a disco-era bomb that "would have been perfect for Donna Summer or Gloria Gaynor."
What America remembers is the exquisite music that won Flack six Grammys in two years, made her a pop music star, and keeps her schedule a hectic one. Flack has performed at Carnegie Hall on behalf of Sting's Rainforest Foundation, toured Japan and South Africa, joined the Muppets on Sesame Street, and been cited as one of "100 Greatest Woman of Rock 'n' Roll" by VH-1."
"I think my voice is a gift, and I try my best to take care of it, but it is a voice that has grown with me and endured whatever it is I've gone through."
Flack majored in music education and taught for several years before she decided that playing music was more important than financial security.
"If you want to have a career as an artist in any medium you have to go for it. That's what I did and I imagine that's what everybody else has done. You have to want it, live it, breathe it, fight for it. It takes a lot of courage to be creative.
"Whatever it takes short of doing something illegal and wrong is what you should be willing to do."
She suggests that anybody with an interest in music or the arts get as much experience and information as they can.
"Know what your center is as an artist. Know what you can do and where you shine the brightest and go there, go to the light. Stand in the center of the stage and deliver what you've got, and be sure you know what you're doing before you get there."
She said that if you don't give yourself a chance, it's likely that someone else will take an idea you have, "improve on it and take it to another level."
That might have been the case when The Fugees reworked Flack's 1972 million-seller "Killing Me Softly With His Song," introducing it to a hip-hop audience.
Flack says she liked the remake but wasn't "intimidated" by it. She hadn't left much room for improvement.
"I have enough information in my head to recognize exactly what they did, and most importantly, what they did not do. They did not venture away hardly at all from what I had been inspired to create.
"It was basically me 20 years later and looking like Lauryn Hill! She did it a whole step lower than I did but with the harmonies which I had created in my head. It wasn't like they came up with some great idea to change the song."
Change is one of the things she enjoys in music whether she's finding fresh perspectives on her own hits or exploring songs popularized by others.
"I'm not going to do my own songs the same way I did 24 years ago, first of all because I don't sound like that, and I try very hard not to do the same thing twice anyway.
"The songs that have been successful for me over the years I wouldn't even dream of doing the same way twice."
On stage
What: Roberta Flack performs with the Honolulu Symphony; with B.B. Shawn opening and Matt Catingub conducting
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