This is a breakup story with a happy ending: one where four women—three vocalists-songwriters and one producer-conceptualist—find each other. They fall in love with each other’s craft, devotion, and individualism. They move through the manicured soul girl ’60s into their own often self-penned brand of funky, spaced-out, sensualized R&B and swaggering glam rock. They become global sensations, split for solo careers before hate and jealousy ever becomes an issue, and stay forever friends.
How forever? On August 18, 2021, Nona Hendryx and Sarah Dash travel from Manhattan and Trenton, respectively, to visit Patti LaBelle’s Philadelphia home. The occasion of Dash’s birthday means that LaBelle—an amazing chef with many cookbooks to her name—whipped up a meal worthy of a queen. Three queens. All on equal footing. That was the very point of Labelle, R&B’s first power trio.
Originally published October 2021 in Wax Poetics Issue 2 (Volume 2).
For even though Patti LaBelle currently has the more mainstream solo career—with both Hendryx and Dash holding their own in their respective fields (Hendryx, the experimentalist; Dash, the traditionalist)—the point of transitioning the Ordettes, then the Blue Belles, then Patti LaBelle and the Bluebelles from the mannered 1960s into the gritty yet feathery Labelle of the 1970s was a true, democratic union of three fierce voices, personalities, and artistries. Patti was most often the lead voice with Sarah and Nona sharing the front line; that is when the three weren’t intertwined in holy-rolling gospel-glam triads of glory. Unlike other R&B “girl groups” of the time, Labelle’s members also wrote songs.
The other woman in the mix—the “fourth member of Labelle” according to all members—was Vicki Wickham. This producer of the ’60s British television pop show Ready, Steady, Go! and a manager-songwriter for Dusty Springfield (she cowrote the English version of “You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me” with Simon Napier-Bell) remade this trio of women into something fabulously funky and future-forward.
“I think it is safe to say that Labelle, as we know it, would not have emerged had I not put it together,” says Wickham, without need for false modesty. “Mind you, it was all them. Nothing was forced. We couldn’t have changed them unless they wanted it. We just had to get from point A to point B.”
Going from point A to point B as Labelle meant producing seven of progressive R&B’s most bracing original albums from 1971 to 1976: two for Warner Bros. in 1971’s Labelle and 1972’s Moon Shadow; their partnership with Laura Nyro for 1971’s Gonna Take a Miracle on Columbia; the transitional album, 1973’s Pressure Cookin’ on RCA; and a trio of Epic label albums in 1974’s Nightbirds (featuring their signature smash “Lady Marmalade”), 1975’s Phoenix, and 1976’s Chameleon.
Each woman had their own passions: Patti, the mighty mistress of romantic, dramatic soul with balladry at the forefront; Nona, the avant-garde-iste moving from theatrical neo-funk and new wave to covering Sun Ra and Captain Beefheart; Sarah, the disco diva with a gospel touch who sang with Keith Richards’s X-Pensive Winos.
Then, as now, no member of Labelle wants to be pigeonholed. “I know people think of me as R&B, but I like to rock out as much as I like a beautiful ballad,” says Patti LaBelle from her home in the Philadelphia suburbs. “Scratch out anything about me not liking rock. I rock.”
Check out Patti’s stirring take on the Who’s “Won’t Get Fooled Again” on Moon Shadow, for example. Or the way she works the blues on “Messin’ with My Mind” from Phoenix. Even Patti’s impromptu soprano vocal on “Truth Will Set You Free” from 2008’s Labelle reunion, Back to Now (with Lenny Kravitz), steamrolls.
While each album is different from the last (produced, coproduced, or executive produced by Wickham), every recording benefits from a willingness to experiment freely with formula. They pursued a self-empowered, sexual, science-fiction narrative (before George Clinton came up with the Mothership) with touches of the sociocultural, political, and Black Consciousness.
Blend the gleeful vocal dynamics of Lambert, Hendricks & Ross with a seriously frank Nina Simone (whose “Four Women” Labelle covered), the swagger of the Rolling Stones (whose “Wild Horses” is a centerpiece of Labelle), everything Octavia Butler, and the frisky funk of the Meters (who appear on Nightbirds and Phoenix), you’d get a taste of where these women—WOMEN in bold capital letters—were heading in 1970.
The vocalists of Labelle came together in 1961 when Patti and manager Bernard Montague contacted two singers from the Trenton, New Jersey, singing group, the Del-Capris, to replace departing members of LaBelle’s Ordettes—Yvonne Hogan and Jean Brown.
“When Yvonne and Jean left the group, I had a feeling everything would be okay, as there were many fine singers in Philadelphia,” says LaBelle. “Montague knew Sarah and Nona—I had never met them before he introduced them to me—and I liked them immediately. Sarah’s voice was amazing. That was a go. And Nona had this great low voice. Me, I’m in the middle, so we blended very well, vocally. And honestly, we became friends first—right off the bat. No shade. No negativity. We became who we are today, quickly.”
“We were teenagers, still in school, when the Ordettes and the Del-Capris performed on the same bills—weekend gigs, New Year’s Eve gigs—and had the same manager,” says Sarah Dash, notable to all in Labelle as the member with the best memory for details.
“In our group, some of the parents—Christian churchgoers—did not want their children involved in music,” continues Dash. “It was too grown-up. In fact, I always looked at the Ordettes as being more of a grown-up group. They wore these really high heels. They were Philadelphia flamboyant. Trenton was just a little bit behind in the fashions. That said, the Del-Capris were Trenton hip.”
On being friends with her fellow Trentonian before 1961, and before the Del-Capris, Dash claims to have been the person who brought Hendryx into the business, a fact that Hendryx herself confirms. “It was all Sarah,” says Nona.
“We needed an alto voice for the group, and our church was fellowshipping with her church,” says Dash of Hendryx. “We went to see them, during what Nona said was the first time that she ever led the choir in song, and all I could think was how rich a sound that girl had. We need her… She came to our rehearsal and fit in very well. Nona will tell you; if it wasn’t for me, she’d be teaching school, maybe poetry.”
Before singing on sessions with producer Bobby Martin and label owner Harold Robinson of Newtown Records—as the renamed the Blue Belles, then Patti LaBelle and the Bluebelles—Camden’s Cindy Birdsong joins the team. “There were the four of us, playing the Uptown and the Apollo, places where Black artists played in those days,” says Dash.
Among the Sweethearts of the Apollo’s releases were 1963’s “Down the Aisle (The Wedding Song)” for Newtown/King Records’ 1963’s “You’ll Never Walk Alone” on Cameo-Parkway; and 1965’s “All or Nothing” for Atlantic, who released the group’s first studio album, 1966’s Over the Rainbow.
During this timeframe, LaBelle’s Bluebelles were known, as were most girl groups of the time, for heavenly, but somewhat uniform, vocals, chaste image, and overly mature, matching cocktail gowns.
“We were a class group of girls, not to suggest others such as the Supremes weren’t,” says Dash. “In fact, if we were in an airport, there were many occasions where people asked us if we were the Supremes. America had not seen Black young women together in that way.”
In 1966, LaBelle’s Bluebelles quartet performed on Wickham’s Ready, Steady, Go! for the first time, with Tom Jones and Small Faces as the night’s other guests. “We met Vicki on that trip—she was running Ready, Steady, Go! and managing Dusty Springfield,” recalls LaBelle. “Dusty didn’t just have a wonderful voice for a white girl, she had a great voice for a woman. We were so impressed. And Dusty loved us.”
Wickham, in addition to duties at Ready, Steady, Go!, worked for Track Records, the Who’s then-label, run by Kit Lambert and Chris Stamp. “Not only had I seen LaBelle on the program, but I had gone to clubs specifically for Patti and the Bluebelles,” says Wickham. “I thought they were wonderful. In the back of my head, though, I knew it was a new day.”
Wickham makes it clear she is not a musician, doesn’t write songs (“I just rushed to give Simon Napier lyrics for Dusty’s song as we were trying to get to dinner on time”), or that she is truly a producer—though she has credits on each Labelle album.
“I’m not a producer,” teases Wickham. “I only did it because no one else would. I’m good at organizing. Production is mostly organizing. Plus, the girls knew what they wanted to sound like. It was very much a collaboration where they got the credit for being the artist and I got the credit for being the producer. I threw a heap of concepts and song ideas at the girls. But it was up to them. No one can sing a song—well—that they don’t deeply wish to sing.”
It was in London where the seeds of change were sown for all five women—Wickham and Birdsong included—for as one chose to be part of Labelle’s future, the other started looking to become part of their past.
“Around this time, Cindy got friendly with the Supremes, who I know were interested in her,” recalls Dash. “She had the voice. She had the look that they needed. She was the same size as Florence [Ballard], so she fit their dresses perfectly.”
With the quartet having no major hits, Birdsong left the group in 1967 for the Supremes. Atlantic dropped the trio in 1969, with manager Bernard Montague (who also then handled the Delfonics) following suit.
With their luck running out in the U.S., London called. Wickham had been considering the dynamics of Dash, Hendryx, and LaBelle, and how a makeover in grittier, more era-appropriate sound and image could change the group’s fortunes.
“I was going to be in New York around the time Labelle was to play the Apollo, and dragged Kit with me,” says Wickham of her Track label partner, Lambert. “The trio were indeed good, but not great. But you could see the potential. We had, with them, three great voices. They were great-looking women who were like sisters. I said to Kit we should sign them, and he said okay.”
According to Dash, when Wickham came to NYC in 1970 to see a still-transitional Labelle at the Apollo (billed with Smokey Robinson) that night, “Labelle sang so hard,” and with such passion that everyone concerned saw the raw potential and made all commitments, “on the spot.”
The Labelle women and Wickham began conversations about how the manicured girl group ideal was over, and how the ’70s were a new era of grit over polish and social conscience over love songs.
“We immediately began rehearsing with keyboardist Gene Casey, doing Who and Stones songs,” says Wickham. “It was very obvious they could sing anything while bringing something different to it, each time.”
“Vicki was the mastermind,” says Dash. “She thought we should get away from the grind of America and strip ourselves down—no more gowns, but denim. No more satiny standards, but rather funk and rock songs instead. Our own songs too. Now, Vicki could not have done it without our agreement. But we did agree.”
“I remember Vicki came to meet with us in New York after that initial Ready, Steady, Go! production, with a mind to change us, our sound, and our image,” says Patti. “We listened and began to make a great change. Vicki has that mind, that go-forward mind, that take-chances mind. But the influence, the change itself, that really came from us. We knew that changing meant that we would get more people listening to us, paying attention to us. We wanted a look nobody could compete with. We wanted to change our whole being from that of a ‘regular girl group.’ When Cindy left, we became who we are now. We had to go to London to make that change and come back to the States as Labelle.”
Hendryx wasn’t interested in discussing the Labelle of pre-1970. She was, however, laser-focused on the concept of three women, three friends, three artists, and one producer-manager-mentor evolving into what would occur, first, on 1971’s Labelle album.
“This was about the possibilities of what we could truly do, musically, when left to our own devices, left to find our own influences,” says Hendryx. “Working with Gene Casey, our keyboard player—who helped us arrange our songs and vocals on that first Labelle album, as well as preparing us for live performance, hours and hours of rehearsing with just his piano, and our vocals—working with Kit and Vicki, coming up with new music and ideas, hanging out: all of this was about us finding our way. A new direction. Being able to explore. Take time for ourselves, rather than constantly touring-touring-touring. That changed us.”
Hendryx cites the musical influence of Otis Redding, Curtis Mayfield, and Sly Stone, but quickly turns to Laura Nyro, Ellie Greenwich, and Carole King as songwriters whose lyrical and melodic visions were self-realized and often self-produced. “They could see their visions all the way through to the end. That impressed me,” Hendryx says.
Hendryx may have always written private poems and secret lyrics. But it was only through this re-freshening of Labelle that she was given the opportunity (“The inspiration or push may be more like it—the impetus”) to sow her literary and musical oats.
Being away from Philadelphia, Trenton, the grueling soul music circuit, and maybe even the misogyny and racism of America at large, too, offered a sense of expansion that perhaps she could only realize in the science fiction of her youth.
It has been said that not all of Labelle—the trio’s then-newly shortened name—was immediately up for change. On the 1998 documentary program Intimate Portrait, Patti can be heard saying, “I fought [Vicki] like a crazy woman…. I don’t want to go to London, I don’t want to change our songs. I don’t want to change my way of dress. I don’t want to change anything.”
Wickham says as much during our interview. “Patti did, at first, only want to sing Patti LaBelle and the Bluebelles songs. That was the first thing we argued about. I had to tell her no. That sound was finished. She got over it, said okay, and was game to try everything.”
Speak to her now, years after the Intimate Portrait documentary, LaBelle’s had a change of heart. She says she was more than willing to change her image, the trio’s costumes, and their entire catalog and demeanor of song, whether it meant a new direction in personalized, self-penned songs, or covering rock cuts by the Rolling Stones, Cat Stevens, and the Who.
“I loved making the big change toward the songs we were singing…and felt as comfortable with the Who and the Stones as I did doing songs such as ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’ or ‘Down the Aisle,’ ” says Patti, comparing rough-hewn rockers to soulful, show-biz-y hits she had charted with previously. “I felt great. It was eye-opening for a lot of Black women. That was one of the best moves Labelle made musically, singing rock.”
When Patti did change, and prove a willingness to test new vocal waters, no one could touch her as she soared and whooped on early Labelle songs such as Hendryx’s “I Believe That I’ve Finally Made It Home,” or their uniquely theatrical version of Cole Porter’s “Miss Otis Regrets” intended for Labelle. As she writes in her book, Patti’s Pearls: Lessons in Living, “Women who want to lead the orchestra have to turn their back to the crowd.”
Patti the individualist, within a Möbius strip–framework of Labelle’s democratic union, had arrived. “Three Black women with crazy outfits, crazy hair, sexual songs, revolutionary songs,” says Patti. “Changing our look ultimately allowed people to hear what we had to say—and how we said it—more clearly. That was the plan.”
Working out a new vibe for their vocals and visual style was one thing; forging forward with a fresh voice for personal songwriting was another, a task each member of Labelle took on, but that Hendryx took to heart, blossomed, and built on based on her poetry, her techy musical training and her individualism as a socio-conscious, science-fiction fanatic.
Wickham encouraged Hendryx to write early on during the initial rehearsal process for Labelle. “Nona told us that she wrote poetry,” says Wickham. “Me being British, I was like ‘So what. We’re not looking for poetry. We’re looking for songs.’ Nona believed she could do that too. ‘Well, go away and do that. Bring us songs, then.’ And she did. Pat and Sarah liked what Nona’s songs said, how they sounded, especially since Nona wrote mostly for Patti’s voice—which is super, and not easy when you have as big and strong a voice as Pat, to be able to contain it in a song. To keep the melody and voice equally strong. Plus, what Nona was writing was often quite risqué for the time. Shocking at first, but once Pat got the hang of what we were doing, she was quite open.”
“It was more organic than someone having a vision for us, and us following,” states Hendryx. “There was no negotiating. Kit and Vicki had enormous respect for us and nurtured us, helped us develop into what we were becoming.”
“We approached new music in a different way,” states Dash. “As opposed to a lead singer with two girls in the background doing oohs-and-ahhs, we came forward with the music, a lead voice, and in tandem with each other. Plus, we came out of it looking like three Black Twiggys…we came back to America as English imports.” This was a revolution getting televised, an approach that America had not yet seen. “Especially from an all-woman group,” says Dash. “The focus wasn’t just Pat, though she was clearly the lead singer. It was on all three of us. Intertwining.”
With Labelle, the threesome came out as songwriters. LaBelle and Dash penned tracks, with “Baby’s Out of Sight” being Sarah’s contribution (and a cowrite with Armstead Edwards, Patti LaBelle’s then-husband). “I wrote that when I was twelve,” says Dash, laughing. “I had a crush on a little guy in school, smartest kid in our class. When his parents moved, I had no one to share my intellect with…hence that song. To not make it sound so young, Armstead added some lyrics.”
Patti laughs when she considers her songwriting contributions. “I was no songwriter. I was a songwriter’s helper. I had ideas, for titles, or concepts. Thoughts run through my head, and they make for great, even major, lines and hooks in a song, but I’m not a songwriter.”
Of Hendryx’s arrival as Labelle’s primary chronicler of song, Dash still seems in awe. “To know an artist possessed of that mind, and progressive thought; to be able to interpret that level of poetry—to be part of songs such as ‘Too Many Days’—it is an honor to know greatness like that.”
Hendryx laughs, recalling her first song on Labelle. “There were too many things to do in too many days—I wanted more days to do them. Having to wait to get to do what I wanted to do probably made that song so real.”
Writing with Patti on “Shades of Difference,” Hendryx was looking at the worlds of contrast between people and attitudes. “It wasn’t just about skin color, but rather who we are inside, as individuals. Working with Patti as a writer, I’m sure she’d sing something to me, and I would sing it back to her—how I imagined it—because I truly wrote most of the songs for Labelle with Patti’s voice in my head.”
Spending time together with Patti was a gift for Hendryx. “Honestly, giving her an idea and hearing her interpret it her way was amazing,” says Nona. “That is truly how songs developed, how they were written. Sarah, Patti, and I would be together. I would show or play them my version, then it would grow into a Labelle version. It grew. I got better as a songwriter and musician. I was able to tell stories in more of a performative manner—something operatic where the three of us could tell a tale, with three individual voices and points of view.”
Labelle spells out revolution and freedom for Dash, of women breaking from tradition. “There was a brilliance there,” notes Dash. “Awareness. That album means growth to me. It wasn’t accepted though… The rawness of that sound. Women taking charge. It was the three of us. A female manager and producer. Our attorney was a woman. That was rare. We took off our wigs, and it was raw. There were artists at the time more famous than us, but we were revolutionary. We were innovators—from singing our own songs, to the manner in which we performed, sometimes flying in from the rafters.”
Equally raw, but in a far more lilting and emotional fashion is Labelle’s other work of 1971, the neo-Tin-Pan-soulful Gonna Take a Miracle collaboration between Laura Nyro and Labelle. Nyro’s song, “Time and Love,” appears on Labelle, released in September of 1971, with Miracle dropping in November. Hendryx was a fan of Nyro’s songwriting from before Miracle, as well as being a neighbor. “She defined that New York for me—Laura, Holly Woodlawn, Bette Midler, Ashford & Simpson, all these people in the art, theater, and cabaret scenes; we all lived near each other.
“Making the album with Laura was an extension of the time we spent with her eating, drinking wine, and singing,” notes Hendryx of how Miracle simply documented their hangs, but, with the sparest of production from Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff, so to best—with little interference—portray the charmed existence of this group of women.
“Laura loved Labelle…how we looked and sounded,” says Patti. “We loved her. I loved her. After we did that wonderful project with Laura, Kenny, and Leon, we became best friends. She became my son’s godmother. I became her son’s godmother. We had a lot of life together. We were in Japan together—my husband and I with Laura—when I conceived Zuri. She flew us there, and we lived first class. I remember drinking sake for the first time—next thing, I’m having a baby… Laura would come, stay at my house on weekends, in my small apartment in Germantown [Philadelphia], drive down and bring clams from Maine. She kept saying she wanted an apartment like mine. Meanwhile, she’s living in a mansion. She wanted my lifestyle, a husband. We were great girlfriends.
“When we recorded Miracle with Laura, I remember I didn’t like the finished product at first,” recalls Patti. “I wanted to go back in and record it, because I thought our parts sounded as if we were singing flat. Kenny, though, he thought we sounded fine. To this day, I know that there were moments on that record that were not pleasing to me.”
“Laura was the other fourth member of Labelle,” says Hendryx. Dash too was dear friends with Nyro. “I just think of Laura living in this shabby chic apartment on Ninth Avenue, looking down and seeing the world around her—like I thought of Nona’s genius,” says Dash. “Laura? There was a clarity in her work. Coming together with her and doing that album…we created a Black and white artist ‘first’—something which hadn’t been done between women before that, certainly.”
The next year, 1972, welcomed Moon Shadow, another Wickham coproduction (with Jack Adams) at Record Plants on both coasts, with another Dash-penned cut, “Peace with Yourself,” that came out of the singer’s Pentecostal past. “My dad was a pastor, and we had meetings in our house starting at 6:00 AM every morning,” she says. “Being married, divorced…the song was about losing when you have nothing to gain. If you don’t have peace with yourself, how are going to get it from someone else? It was a journey I was on, myself, until Labelle wanted to record it. That was a release.”
Hendryx recalls Moon Shadow first for the musical camaraderie made, then maintained, with pianist Leon Pendarvis and organist Andre “Mandré” Lewis, with whom she would continue working throughout her solo career. “I wasn’t trying to write hit singles…pop songs,” says Hendryx. “I wanted to put to music what we were experiencing. Not just Patti, Sarah, and I, but all of what it took to be a band, to be a human. I thought of Moon Shadow with an album’s mentality.”
As Hendryx wrote six of the songs on Moon Shadow, did the songwriter feel a sense of responsibility to her sisters? Especially considering that every Labelle album afterward also offered six or more Hendryx originals. “Yeah, that was important to me to write from a sense of Labelle, not only my perspective, but who we were as a group,” says Hendryx. “I had to bring words and music together where we could proudly look back, historically, and say ‘This is who we were in that moment.’ ”
Of Hendryx’s six songs on Moon Shadow, “I Believe That I’ve Finally Made It Home” stands out for its dedication to Black sociopolitics. For a group that started life in 1961 selling its heart to the junkman, the search for Black truth and the reality of finding it is a radical new pulse for Labelle. Patti is quick to say how great it was—and is—that Hendryx wrote socially conscious music. “She was that girl.”
Of singing conscious songs, a change from the love and relationship lyrics of their past, Patti was pleased to make music with real messages. “This wasn’t ‘I-love-you-baby-man-woman-romance’ anymore. This was about real life. What went on socially. The way it really was. Heck, yeah. I loved it. Starting with that song, I felt great we were changing to something with a message. To sing about something enlightening, more than loving a man… Songs like that opens minds. Nona’s one of the better songwriters in the world. It started there. Her mind has always been in the right direction, a direction that most people wouldn’t expect from three Black women.”
“We grew up,” notes Dash of Hendryx’s “I Believe,” as well as their cover of griot Gil Scott-Heron’s “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” from 1973’s Pressure Cookin’. Despite artistic integrity, Moon Shadow barely charted. Still, Labelle moved forward with another change—one that tied their soaring soulful song to an image of science fiction, the possibilities of pan-sexuality, and the ever-growing revolution of Black Power.
Come 1973, Labelle was performing at NYC’s Village Gate every Monday, building a following that necessitated larger Town Hall showcases. Here, they made the acquaintance of emerging space-age fashion designer Larry LeGaspi while prepping to sign with RCA—home to glam gods David Bowie and Lou Reed.
“The science-fiction thing has always been part of me, my mental lexicon, since childhood,” says Hendryx about concepts of space relations that rocketed across 1973’s Pressure Cookin’. “It just evolved with time. I’m very much a futurist. Trans-human. A believer. This was always part of my diet. Since I was four years old, I was a tinkerer of technology, all about science and science fiction. There were always touch points and people who were part of that; Larry LeGaspi was one. His vision in fashion, and in life… It was natural—fate or kismet—that we came together at that perfect time. He was among those people with a futurist vision who find each other—like me. Like Labelle.”
Hendryx muses on what went on racially, sexually, socially, and politically, moving from Moon Shadow to Pressure Cookin’ and considers what four women had to do to forge forward in a musical landscape that hadn’t been there previously. “Before Labelle, there was nothing like Labelle,” says Hendryx. “The forces, the guardians of the gate did not see us a viable, money-making, art-making venture. We needed to do what we needed to do, not be forced into something cookie-cutter—maybe successful monetarily, but soulless.”
Labelle was liberated and confident by the time they got to RCA and Pressure Cookin’. Having chimed its bells of freedom with “I Believe That I’ve Finally Made It Home,” this third Labelle album was a sonic boom.
“Early 1973, there was a real New York renaissance going on,” recalls Dash. “Gay people. Spanish people. Black people. That was our audience; especially gay people who were supportive of us—they were a community who had been rejected. Labelle had been rejected. We found each other… If you could place the Harlem Renaissance in 1973, that’s us. That’s Pressure Cookin’ with everything bubbling over.”
Labelle’s growth was heightened, exponentially, once Larry LeGaspi made his appearance, and merged his plush, silver, space-soul identity with what’s coming out in Hendryx’s lyrics. “It was so foreign, but people wanted to be a part of it,” says Dash. “Larry LeGaspi? He found us.”
Before he would make a fashion-world splash making metallic-based stage costumes for KISS and Parliament-Funkadelic, LeGaspi and his friends (“True Village people with big rings and outrageous hair-dos,” laughs Dash about LeGaspi’s crowd) cornered the trio at the Bitter End. “This one night, the Bitter End was stacked and packed,” recalls Dash. “Larry came backstage, told us how he’d studied the three of us, that he had different outfits for all of us—a top for Pat, pants for Nona, and this top and skirt with a funky bottom and this-and-that for me. That’s what we wore onstage that night.”
From there, LeGaspi and Labelle conspired to come up with more costumes to suit Hendryx’s lyrics and each member’s style—Patti, the earth mother with flowy outfits for the mobility of motherhood, Nona with her headdresses and astronaut bodysuit with “this crotch thing,” laughs Dash. For Dash, anything that allowed her to show off her navel worked. “The cover of Pressure Cookin’ is us at Carnegie Hall in Larry’s outfits. I remember Pat in that billowy outfit clear as day, pregnant with Zuri, and just going for it.”
“Larry executed those concepts, those outfits, so well,” says Patti LaBelle. “His clothing complemented our sound. We looked crazy and sounded great. The five of us—Vicki and Larry included—were responsible for us going glam rock. Richard Erker too. He did our silver earrings. He did Sarah’s silver metal bra.” About that bra, Dash says, “Richard had to take a model, a cast, of my bare breasts, to make that space-age bra. I had never had a man that I wasn’t having a relationship with touch them before.”
“If it hadn’t been for Larry LeGaspi…” starts Wickham. “He came to us saying how he’d love to do clothing for us. I would have loved anyone to have done clothing, but we had no money. Poor Larry. He wasn’t expecting to get paid. He just wanted to get the girls in his clothes immediately. Once he did, everything turned around. He had the concept for what the look should be. Not the girls. Not me. Larry. And that was what was left that hadn’t been tended to. His partner, Richard too, with jewelry. Between his sparkle and Larry’s silver, it was magnificent. I come from a straight background of musicals and pantomime and really loved production. The girls, their interaction with each other, was also theatrical. They didn’t realize that at first, but it was true. My favorite songs of Labelle’s were always the most theatrical: [Nina Simone’s] ‘Four Women,’ ‘Miss Otis Regrets,’ ‘Hollywood,’ ‘I Believe That I’ve Finally Made It Home’—so many of Nona’s songs fall into that category. Those songs defined what Labelle was, and wasn’t. They weren’t just pop. I mean, Nina Simone was my dream artist, and I believe Labelle walked in her shadows…. With Larry’s outfits, everything we had, the sound and the image, now just clicked.”
Pressure Cookin’ is notable as the first album to be solely produced by Wickham, save for one song by a “friend,” Stevie Wonder, who produced and penned “Goin’ on a Holiday,” while additionally writing “Open Up Your Heart.” “Stevie really wanted to work with us, and we felt blessed and honored he did,” says Patti. “We weren’t necessarily friends, then—we knew him from shows we had done—but we definitely weren’t enemies.”
Also notable is “(Can I Speak to You Before You Go To) Hollywood,” an epic, quiet-storming track with flinty Philly-soul guitar licks and a sly, catty lyric. It’s the song most beloved by all within Labelle’s brain trust—Wickham included. Rumored to be inspired by events following Cindy Birdsong’s disappearance from the Bluebelles to join the Supremes—without saying a word until weeks later—the stewing, soulful cut features all three women wailing out their winding leads. Of this track, Hendryx recalls that Patti suggested the song title based, not about Birdsong but, rather, “Someone with whom she had an encounter who went all ‘Hollywood’ on her,” says Nona with a laugh. “That was a phrase we would use on anyone who would snub you. Today people call it ‘giving you shade.’ Back then, it was geared toward anyone who thought they were too important to speak to you, or couldn’t give you the time of day.”
Pressure Cookin’ was also not a grand success, and Labelle left RCA. A lack of sales for three albums in a row never confounded or shook Labelle’s faith in its still-new direction or in its producer-manager Wickham.
“Sales and success never ever bothered me because I knew that it would happen, that sooner-or-later someone would catch us,” says LaBelle. “I did believe that we were being held back. Because of our race. Because we were women. That did make me crazy. I knew the job was dangerous when we took it because of who we were. We still did it. I also knew one day someone would realize we had it going on.”
On maintaining faith in Wickham’s vision, Hendryx says, “Vicki is absolutely the spark that lit the fire under, and for, Labelle. That is absolute. That is true. That is fact. Without Vicki and possibly Kit, there would be no Labelle. That continued on for the rest of our lifespan… Vicki supported us, allowed us to sing our truth. Make our own way—our own direction. Look, we were not teenage girls. We were women.”
With Pressure Cookin’ behind them, and a rainbow cult following for their troubles, Labelle and Wickham were looking for a label willing to truly promote three strong Black women and one white British woman manager/producer.
They found it, in 1974, in Epic Records and Greg Gellar, who in turn suggested producer-pianist Allen Toussaint to head the label’s newest signing.
“I know exactly why they had not ‘succeeded’ in a big way before Epic,” says Wickham, when asked. “Labelle was a group of Black female artists. The record companies had no idea how to promote Black artists unless they were singing straight R&B. That in-between of ours? Nobody knew how to promote that. Only when Greg Gellar signed Labelle did someone get them, and that they had the team they could promote them.”
“As far as the labels went, nobody got us until we got to CBS and Epic,” says Dash, dismissing Warner and RCA, while hailing Epic Records. “We were breaking tradition being an all-woman enterprise in an industry run by men. Black women, yet, singing things they weren’t used to hearing in ways they weren’t used to hearing it.”
Nowhere is that pure, pernicious style more on display than 1974’s Nightbirds, their richest and most risqué album for Epic, and one that saw them trade NYC for NOLA, move Wickham to the executive producer seat with Allen Toussaint behind the wheel (or from an intercom in his office, long his legend), and trade the Big Apple’s funkiest session men for the toast of New Orleans, the Meters’ George Porter Jr., Leo Nocentelli, and Art Neville.
“Epic thought matching us with Allen was a good thing—Toussaint studied us—and after a meeting with Vicki and Nona, [Patti] did as well,” says Dash. “Allen Toussaint changed our lives with that production, all due to his insightfulness.”
Hendryx recalls that since Gellar was instrumental in signing Labelle, with Gellar and Toussaint close, Labelle would take Epic’s tip and fly down to New Orleans for a two-month stay at Sea-Saint Studios with their own soulful stalwarts (Edward Batts, James Budd Ellison) joining the Meters’ Art, George, Leo, and a swamp-rocking, voodoo R&B disco trip.
Of course, there was “Lady Marmalade,” a swaggering, Delta funk cut not from Hendryx or Toussaint, but rather Kenny Nolan and Bob Crewe, the latter of Four Seasons’ “Big Girls Don’t Cry” and “Let’s Hang On” writing fame.
“We’re on our way to the airport to New Orleans, and Crewe calls Vicki with this song ‘perfect for us,’ ” recalls Patti. “We met Crewe—first time I laid eyes on him—he plays us ‘Lady Marmalade,’ and we knew it was a hit. When we got to the studio, we wanted the first song we recorded to be ‘Lady Marmalade.’ ”
Dance music, or rather, the pre-disco scene of club life in New York, was a curiosity for the trio—especially for Dash. “I loved to dance, go out—not to the point of damnation, mind you, but I loved the environment,” she says. “There were great gay clubs like the Gilded Grape. Regine’s, Paradise Garage, and Studio 54 weren’t there yet, but they were coming. It was about the movement of life. I loved disco music as it was building, coming around the bend. The underground was coming to fruition. By the time ‘Lady Marmalade’ came out, it was one the first songs promoted exclusively for discos, at first. That was right up my alley.”
From there, Nightbirds’ hot mix doesn’t sound radically different than that of Pressure Cookin’. Further listening, however, presents more deeply nuanced, in-the-pocket grooves and the sly interaction of Patti LaBelle’s churning vocals on Hendryx’s funked-up “Are You Lonely,” “Somebody, Somewhere,” and “Space Children.”
Of Hendryx’s craft on Nightbirds, Patti hums when she says, “Nona is my goddess when it comes to songwriting. Anything she wrote, I loved, and she mostly wrote for my voice. Anything that she brought me, I did. Every song that she wrote, before, during and after Nightbirds was a blessing.”
The flickering strobe-light disco of “What Can I Do for You?” penned by Batts and Budd Ellison amazes too, as does Nightbirds’ greasy, Hammond organ riffs reminiscent of B-3 Jimmy Smith’s Back at the Chicken Shack.
“These songs were organically written and produced in the studio,” says Hendryx. “I did some demos, but we really worked it all out there, live. We played the music until we hit the right spot. There was no major plot. We played it, and hit it. We were touring so much that I really didn’t have time to write away from when we were booked into studios to record. I would either write on the road or the studio, get together with musicians, and do it.”
Along with choosing the songs beyond Hendryx’s selections—five including the heartbroken “Nightbird” and the sci-fi operetta “Space Children”—Toussaint’s production comes across like a sixth sense. “He knew where every voice was and should be,” says Dash. “He’d bring a measure down to a place where everything fit. There was a simplicity to it that was just magical. He did the same thing on the next album too,” says Dash of the rougher-edged and often complex Phoenix, also produced by Toussaint.
Patti LaBelle believes continuing the sound, songwriting, funk, and feel of Nightbirds onto 1975’s Phoenix—rather than switch lanes—made sense. “I knew that we had the right formula,” she says. “I never wanted to change our way from there. People had to catch up to us, ’cause if it wasn’t broken, we weren’t fixing it. It didn’t need no fixing.”
LaBelle continues on to say that “Phoenix (The Amazing Flight of a Lone Star)” has a vibe of ascension and uplift. “That song is so mysterious and happy to me,” she says, singing the song back to me. “I can’t explain it. I would cry when we sang it. That song just…rises. Like a phoenix. That’s one of my favorite songs. Not just by Nona. By anyone.”
In addition to the tricky, theatrical “Phoenix,” there is the space-funk “Black Holes in the Sky” and the bluesy “Marmalade”-ish “Messin’ with My Mind” that stand out on this fifth Labelle album. “We made the mistake of trying to do another ‘Lady Marmalade,’ ” admits Dash. “That was corny. But overall, it is a great record. Same with Chameleon, which Vicki and David Rubinson produced after that. The progression was marvelous. I don’t want to sugarcoat anything. It is all sugar. And it is all coated. And with those three albums, when you eat it, it is delicious.”
Talking about the glossy but edgier Phoenix and its progression into the grandly theatrical Chameleon from 1976, Hendryx calls its funky curve an evolution of all of the aspects of the women of Labelle as individuals. “Each record was a mini-opera about us, and our lives,” says the songwriter. “We were night birds. We were chameleons. We were very much like the phoenix who rises, falls, and rises again. It was how we lived. Phoenix may’ve been more polished because of the producer, and different colors in the arrangements had changed. But it was a year apart from Nightbirds, and we had lived another whole existence since that time.”
By 1975 and heading into 1976, Patti LaBelle must have begun to feel stretched thin—more by the desire to be home in Philadelphia, raising her child. But also, it was thought, that Patti wished to return to more traditional soul jams and creamy R&B ballads, with Hendryx wishing to continue her experiments in funky theatrical Black music, and Dash taking kindly to disco.
“Things began to fall apart because we didn’t feel the same way, musically, any longer,” says LaBelle. “None of us, personally, wanted to go our separate ways. I never wanted to be a solo performer. Before I got onstage again, after the breakup, I had to see a shrink. I was afraid of people blaming me for the breakup. Nona wanted to do much more rock. Sarah wanted to do her thing. I wanted to do more of my thing. Everything rock-rock-rock was not my idea of a Patti LaBelle song.”
Patti makes clear that Hendryx didn’t just write rockers. From the spun-glass soul of “(Can I Talk to You Before You Go To) Hollywood” to the undulating R&B of “Get You Somebody New,” and beyond, Hendryx should go down in history as one of rhythm and blues’ finest songwriters.
But. “Nona, increasingly had more of a rock-and-roll head,” says LaBelle. “That was beautiful. And it wasn’t. So we had disagreements in the studio as to what songs to sing.”
With Chameleon’s caramel-thick, ooey-gooey glam-funk (featuring Randy Edelman’s gorgeously stormy “Isn’t It a Shame”), you could see the multiple directions that Labelle could have gone—perhaps the magic territory of Shaman, a planned fourth Epic album that Patti mentions in her autobiography, Don’t Block the Blessings.
Hendryx gave up the bulk of Chameleon’s material, including a New Orleans–influenced character study “A Man in a Trenchcoat (Voodoo),” the smolderingly psychedelic “Get You Somebody New” that could’ve turned Prince green with envy. All that, and still the torridly tender soul of “Come into My Life” and the gospel-influenced title track are the album’s brightest highlights.
“David’s production is explosive,” says Dash of Chameleon and its coproducer David Rubinson, who was behind the boards for Moby Grape as well as psych-era Herbie Hancock and Santana. “Wall-to-wall singing. Being a part of every cadence, triad, and augmented sound… The way he moved and our old-fashioned downhome-but-progressive vocal arrangements, the tightest group of musicians who had on the road with us forever, like guitarist Eddie Martinez… Just. Wow. [James] ‘Budd’ Ellison and Rev. Batts too were part of that album, doing arrangements, and they continued on with Pat for some time.”
As the sun went down on Labelle, and Phoenix gave way to Chameleon, Hendryx claims Patti LaBelle never stopped testing the waters.
“She’s open, make no mistake,” says Nona of Patti. “Like having food you love to eat, you want to eat more of it. That doesn’t mean that she wouldn’t try other things. She was mostly game. Adventurous. What changed was our personal lives. Pat had a husband, a child, and essentially was a homebody. If there’s any splintering to be found, it was there.”
Patti recalls one of Chameleon’s last sessions, “Isn’t It a Shame,” as a poignant farewell. “When I sang the last lyrics for “Isn’t It a Shame,” and the whole Mm, mm, mm line, I was thinking about us no longer being a group,” she says. “How sad it all could be. And it’s the most beautiful song to have to sing such a sad lyric. It’s still in my shows today.”
Going back to songs Hendryx wanted to write versus songs that LaBelle wanted to sing, by that point, Patti notes, “If you’re feeling forced into singing songs that you don’t want to sing, then you probably shouldn’t still be together,” she says. “You’re doing other people’s business at that point. Singing other people’s minds, and not your own. It just came to a head. Just. Like. That. No fights. No blaming me. Or me thinking my head was too big for being in a group. Nothing at all like that.”
There’s a story Patti LaBelle tells in Don’t Block the Blessings about a December 1976 show where Hendryx left the stage during a performance and locked herself in a dressing room. Rather than go down a path where friendships would forever be fractured, the three went their separate ways after that.
“In retrospect, they ended at the right time,” says Wickham. “Pat was obviously a solo artist who knew what she wanted to do. All three girls knew what they wanted. All three girls had become very independent, even though they were still a group. Sisters, really. But they were different women with different lives and tastes by then.”
“There was heartache in this,” says Patti, now. “I never wanted to think of us as gone. We are phenomenal women. Our music together is phenomenal. We were, and are, all that. But if you’re in a marriage and the husband doesn’t get along with the wife because she just happened to cook the wrong meal that night and made him mad—it’s better to walk away. We just got tired of being married. It wasn’t even like we got full-out divorced, because look at us now. We still hang. Still collaborate. We just had to say goodbye.”
“We went as far as we felt like going,” says Dash of Labelle’s close. “I was in shock when it happened, the last one to make a solo album, and wasn’t initially as prepared to be a lead singer as Patti and Nona were when Labelle was over; but between Don Kirshner signing me and giving me time to prepare, I got over that fast.”
Dash claims that what happened to Labelle by 1976, was no different than most long-standing bands or friends. They were in each other’s spaces and faces, daily, since 1961 by that point. “Life was bound to happen to something so explosive,” says Dash. “I don’t think it was a mistake to move apart from each other at that point, because we are all still here as friends and collaborators. We fought like sisters some days. We all had places we wanted to be and things we wanted to do… Besides, not every idea is going to work for a group. History bares that out.”
“We were four women against the world,” says Wickham. “Absolutely tight, united, and speaking as one.”
Mention to Hendryx, again, that there was nothing like Labelle, then or now, considering the trio’s diverse powerhouse vocals, genre-jumping R&B-based melodies, and smartly written lyrics weighed against any featherweight follow-ups of the present, and she says proudly, “You’re absolutely right.
“There couldn’t be Labelle without all of us. Not without Vicki. Not without Patti, Sarah, and me. You could never have Labelle—or any girl group who came after Labelle.”