Hartbreaker (With Her Forty-Four)

Hartbreaker (With Her Forty-Four)

by Don Allred
November 17 - 23, 1999 Issue 46

Beth Hart
‘L.A. Song’
Lava/Atlantic

Turns out Beth Hart's "L.A. Song" is not merely one more antishowbiz rant
from a tender-tough broadski. (Janis left 'em here to sing this song, from Maggie
Bell and Genya Ravan down thru Kim Carnes's Morning After tonsils on every
Disease of the Week made-for-TV movie ever rerun on Lifetime, the Anxiety
Channel.) No, it's all of that and more: "She got a gun she calls the Lucky One,"
but no cathartically hard target materializes; she leaves El Lay for a small
town, meets "a man who takes her in," but feeds her the same ol' "bullsshhitt"
(she goes from weariness to almost a hissing relish of indictment, tho without
excess nerves consumed thereby): "And he lied and he lied and he lied, like a
salesman, selling flies" (eeewwww...).
So she sings again, like she did in L.A., "Man I gotta get out of this town,"
which of course means going back to L.A.—which she does as the song "ends."
For her, everywhere is and has been L.A.'d. Maybe for us, too—she sounds pretty
convincing, young and earnest, not so much sentimental as still capable of
hoping for something better (without actually blowing or rasping your ears out,
but also without trying to seem younger or more delicately vulnerable than she
actually is). (Though the album's called Screaming for My Supper.) She sounds
very scared as she announces what she's gonna do.

Beth knows (or at least shows) that whether you try and you try and you try
(like the woman in the song, who also "took and she took and she took and she
gave," but apparently not as much as she took, not in L.A.) or not, you might
find that you get what you need. Or anyway, that you get what you get. She's
destiny's child; she fights authority, authority always wins—so far. And as far
as the sudden (Live! Creed! Melissa!) boom in Fervor-Merchants goes (not that
I'm complaining, better Fervor than Whinesellers or Burpfart Pop, like we been
getting so much of otherwise), she's the one who gets to me, who doesn't
sound a little ambient.