What they found was an embarrassment of riches. For three years McCombs and Bay Area restoration engineer Tardon Feathered cleaned, transferred and reviewed the remains of Black’s musical legacy, working from tapes caked in mold and debris. McCombs and Black’s husband Stephen Eckelberry soon endeavored to revive them. They were able to record two of them before she died, “I Wish I Knew The Man I Thought You Were” and “Royal Jelly.”Īfter her death in 2013, evidence of Black’s prolificacy languished on quarter-inch reels in neglected boxes.

“She’d given me all of her poetry and I was trying to work them into some kind of meter that would work as songs,” McCombs says. They collaborated again on “Brighter!” from McCombs’ 2013 album Big Wheel and Others, and also wrote toward a solo album for Black. As a longtime fan of Black’s movies, McCombs immediately thought to enlist her, and she in turn agreed, without hesitation. “It was synchronistic because we’d just recorded ‘Dreams Come True Girl,’ and I’d left out the last verse for a yet-to-be-determined female vocalist,” he says. In the ‘80s and ‘90s, Black performed her Toni Basil-directed one-woman show, “A View of the Heart,” in which she sang Bowie, Dylan, and her own compositions.īlack and Cass McCombs met in 2008 through a mutual friend, when he was in the midst of tracking his 2009 album Catacombs. A 1978 photo shows Black singing with Carly Simon onstage at Studio 54. Two of the songs from the 1971 sessions of Dreaming of You (1971-1976) were later developed by Black for inclusion in the soundtrack of the 1973 Canadian film The Pyx: 'It All Turned Out The Way I Planned It' and 'Passing Through,' which she renamed 'I Was Touched By Your Passing Through.' She performed her original songs on The Carol Burnett Show in March 1972 and again, five years later, on Dolly Parton’s short-lived variety show Dolly. Though she never inhabited the traditional role of career musician, there was evidence of this desire throughout her films and public appearances.

She wrote the songs she performed in the film, including “Memphis,” “Rolling Stone,” and “I Don’t Know if I Found It in You.” Robert Altman cast her as Connie White in his experimental opus Nashville (1975), a country star set on retaining her crown. She upstaged him in an impromptu duet of “I’d Rather Be Sorry,” before it became a hit in 1974. In Cisco Pike (1972) she was Sue, the free-spirited love interest of Kris Kristofferson, in his film debut. Her radiant singing, often improvised, became a calling card of a woman besmirched by devotion yet unyielding in goodness.Īs Parm, she serenaded George Segal’s Jay with an original song in Born to Win (1971). Instead, she elevated the character from unknowing victim to captivating moral compass, emanating light amid Dupea’s thunder of anomie. During casting, director Bob Rafelson worried that Black’s insatiable mind was too complex for the simplicity he envisioned in Rayette. Her breakthrough role in Five Easy Pieces (1970) was as small-town waitress and aspiring country singer Rayette, girlfriend of Jack Nicholson’s lost and philanderous rich kid-Bobby Dupea. She often completed multiple takes of a song exploring that relationship, changing her tone, phrasing or cadence in each.īlack’s love of singing was a throughline in her acting career. As with acting, for Black songwriting was a study in confession and in character. When she wasn’t on set, she scrawled hundreds of poems and lyrics, and set them to acoustic guitar or piano.

Her range swings from fluttering highs to earthen lows, with a distinctiveness that evokes the enduring quality of early Asylum Records. Recalling the everywoman quality of Judy Collins and the quiet mystery of Billie Holiday, Black largely sings over simple acoustic guitar strumming, her voice a beacon amid tales of fantasy and heartache. Co-produced by Cass McCombs and meticulously restored from the original tapes (including six of Howe’s recordings), Karen Black’s Dreaming of You (1971-1976) gathers for the first time the best of her recordings: 15 tracks that are a holistic depiction of her dreamy, introspective and earnest musical identity. In her best-suited and most vulnerable performances, she sang.Īmid her meteoric rise, Black also wrote and recorded a host of original songs, many with two of the era’s most prestigious producers, Bones Howe and Elliot Mazer. Her ability to submerge herself in each role marked her as a skilled character actor, one that translated into a real and imperfect person, not a polished emblem of Hollywood. An actor, singer, screenwriter, poet, and unyielding creative spirit, she was a prominent figure in the American New Wave, portraying a host of tender and labyrinthine women on screen.

Midnight memories 7 inch vinyl