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1982 City Paper (Edited/trimmed to fit Web format)   Current Web site

(cont. By Jack Veasey)

These days, though, she believes "R&B comes naturally to me because I grew up surrounded by it in Philly." Mohawk feels pop music has become enough of a melting pot that distinctions between "black" and "white" music no longer really exist.

"I'd say there's music that's definitely black music and music that's definitely white music," she said, "but there are a lot of white artists who play black music and black artists who play white music — so when you get to individual human beings, you can't generalize. If there was any 'rule,' everyone I know would be, an exception!"

She credits her affinity with "the Philadelphia sound" as a major force behind the decision to move back East, and flowing with that empathy has already paid off. Though the contract for release of her already-produced record is still being negotiated, and though her own area tour is just beginning, McFadden and Whitehead have just recorded one of her ballads, "Not With Me," for an album they're currently making with Capitol Records. And some of her tunes are scheduled to be recorded in the near future by the Four Tops.

Cover versions of her tunes by major artists are no small plum for Mohawk, as she's generally been thought of as primarily a singer — despite the fact that she penned all but one song on her four released albums, and has written over 100 songs since the release of her last record in 1977. Though her recordings on such major labels as Reprise, Asylum and Verve consistently garnered rave reviews in publications like Rolling Stone and Downbeat, attention has tended to focus more on her impressive, jazz-influenced vocal gymnastics than on her refreshingly intelligent lyrics and strikingly memorable tunes.

This is understandable in that her voice, a soprano of surprising purity and power, spans an almost unprecedented range of four octaves, placing her in a very small category, of pop singers with such famous "vocal oddities" as Yma Sumac and Flora Purim. ...

On more recent recordings, her funkier flights into soulful scat singing and gospel-flavored wails and growls have reaped comparisons not to other vocalists so much as to horn players like Coltrane and Charlie Parker. Perhaps unfortunately for Mohawk, her influence on pop music, beyond the fierce loyalty of her own cult following, has often been felt through the impact of her work, both as a singer and writer, on other artists — particularly Laura Nyro and Joni Mitchell.

Some critics have suggested that Nyro and Mitchell were "imitated" on Mohawk's later recordings when in reality the two pop superstars were, in effect, proteges of Mohawk's during the beginning of her professional career in the late sixties. After swapping songs with Mohawk, and following her early gigs, both Nyro and Mitchell exhibited startling and sudden growth as both writers and singers. Though Nyro and Mitchell both advanced further and faster on the path to stardom than Mohawk, their success is not begrudged.

On the contrary, says Mohawk, "the situation with Joni Mitchell was totally positive. We were neighbors in Rural Canyon, and she'd come over and we'd play tunes for each other, and when I suggested she stretch out more vocally and use her voice as an instrument, she immediately responded and found her own way of doing that. ..."

... Mohawk's impact on the music of the late Sixties and early Seventies has not gone totally unrecognized: a chapter on her will be included in an upcoming book currently being readied on the development of pop music in the Sixties.

Mohawk's early career was marked not only by great promise but by great tumultuousness: two unsuccessful marriages, four label changes — one involving a nasty lawsuit — and one scary bout with drugs conspired to limit her success. Though she still maintains astoundingly youthful good looks — it's very hard to believe that she's entered the latter half of her 30s, as she still looks very much as she did when, at 19, she joined the Mothers Of Invention — her approach to life and her work have matured and sobered considerably, though her clowning-kid-on-the-corner sense of humor remains undiminished.

She attributes the storminess of her past to the fact that "I was a child of the Sixties... and something we did in the Sixties, though I'm not sure what, extended our adolescence far beyond the usual time. So I've had a real long adolescence ... and apparently it's had a physical effect, because everyone asks me how I've stayed young all these years."

Her idealism is also intact; as she puts it, "I'm more idealistic than ever, but now it's idealism with a realistic foundation, which seems to work better. ..." She credits her own turn-around largely to a form of Japanese Buddhism which she's been practicing faithfully for the last three and a half years: "It's given me a more wide-angle vision. I see the whole world now, instead of just seeing with the tunnel vision of youth. And once you see that, you have to start taking responsibility for what role you play in shaping that world and sculpting your own future ... you can't put the blame on Mame anymore!"

She laughed her easy laugh again, but then hastened to seriously add that one very primary thing hasn't changed in the least — the sincerity that's always marked her statements as a singer and a writer: "My singing and my writing are both like anything else that's alive; they grow, and they evolve ... but in the moment when I'm doing it, I can't be self-conscious; it's got to come straight from my guts, from that moment and that place where it's most real to me, 'cause that's just where it can be real for other people. No matter what. I'll still be singing from the edge where everybody livers.”

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