Karen Black’s Lost Music

Karen Black, one of the quintessential actors of Hollywood’s New Wave, could play many kinds of women, but she particularly excelled at vulnerable free spirits both liberated and damaged by the counterculture. With her ski-slope nose and her famously close-set, almost-crossed eyes, she had a beauty that was often described as offbeat, and an acting style to match—she could do a kind of disaffected seventies vacuity along with an ardent, out-there emotional directness. In “Five Easy Pieces,” Black played Rayette Dipesto, the waitress girlfriend of Jack Nicholson’s well-bred, self-loathing rebel. Rayette is sweet and sexy and annoying, prone to baby talk and sulking. Nicholson’s character cheats on her and ultimately abandons her at a highway gas station. But Black enriches the role with occasional flashes of dignity—and one of the ways she does so is by singing. In another sort of movie and another sort of performance, the clinging, clueless girlfriend who wants to be the next Tammy Wynette would have opened her mouth and warbled—ha ha—off-key. But Black had a lovely voice and excellent control over it, and when she breaks into song, sitting next to a stony-faced Nicholson on a long road trip, we catch a glimpse of Rayette transcending her limitations.

Although Black was not primarily known as a singer, this was not the only time that she sang professionally. In Robert Altman’s “Nashville,” as the glamorous country star Connie White, she performed two songs that she wrote. In Ivan Passer’s “Born to Win,” bundled up with George Segal on a chilly beach, she serenades him with a wistful song, also of her own composition. During the eighties and nineties, she worked with a friend, the singer and choreographer Toni Basil, who had acted with her in both “Five Easy Pieces” and “Easy Rider,” to put together a cabaret-style one-woman show that she performed on both coasts. And, toward the end of her life, Black, who died of complications from cancer in 2013, began collaborating with the indie musician Cass McCombs, contributing vocals for two of his original songs—“Dreams Come True Girl” and “Brighter!”—and planning an album with him. The pair recorded two other songs together before she died, and those, along with a clutch of rediscovered songs of hers (and one Moody Blues cover) make up the new album “Dreaming of You (1971-1976),” released last month by the label Anthology Recordings.

McCombs was nearly forty years younger than Black. An age gap that big in an artistic partnership, especially when the younger partner is a man and the older a woman, throws some people almost as much as a May-December romance in which the December is a woman. (One of the few such collaborations that I can think of is the eightysomething director Agnès Varda and the thirtysomething street artist JR making the 2017 documentary “Faces Places” together.) Black’s widower, Stephen Eckelberry, her fourth husband, was twenty-one years her junior. “People got worked up about that,” Eckelberry told me. “They got all Freudian on you, and said I was searching for my mother. That wasn’t it at all. I fell in love with her, and we got along great.” He said Black had a curiosity about other people—“she wanted an image in her mind of what life was like for them”—and a playful emotional honesty that kept her vital and sort of eternally young. At a glitzy Hollywood party where she was supposed to be networking, he’d find her in rapt conversation with the doorman.

McCombs told me that he rarely thought about the generational difference after he and Black, who met through a Bay Area filmmaker they both knew, became friends and began making songs together. McCombs’s own music, with its cryptic lyrics, loping melodies, and bloom of psychedelia, has a sort of dreamy seventies feel, made for the kind of aimless road trips that often wind through movies from the era. Black loved his music and heard echoes of Roy Orbison in the songs that she recorded with him. “There are lots of things that can divide people in a collaboration, and I guess age is one of them,” McCombs said. “But Karen had a very youthful spirit.” Growing up in Northern California, McCombs had worked in movie theatres and video stores, and he knew film history. “Of course there were times where generational lines were revealed,” he wrote in an e-mail. “I remember one time she corrected me on the pronunciation of Deborah Kerr... ‘It’s Car, Cass... not Care.’ ”

A couple of years after Black died, as Eckelberry was going through some of her belongings, he found four boxes of tapes in the garage. He sent them to McCombs, who saw that a recovery would be difficult: the recordings were on “every possible medium available between 1971 and 2015 – ¼ inch tape, ½ inch tapes, cassette tapes,” McCombs said. Some of the earliest had been recorded professionally, with the producers Bones Howe and Elliot Mazer, for demos that did not result in albums. (Eckelberry thinks that the demands of her acting career took over; she received a Best Supporting Actress Oscar nomination for “Five Easy Pieces,” in 1971, and was suddenly in more demand for film roles.) Others, McCombs said, were more like “sketch tapes”—Black trying out songs and fragments of songs at home.

The tapes had to be painstakingly transferred—a process that McCombs entrusted to the sound engineer Tardon Feathered, who has a studio, Mr. Toad’s, full of vintage audio equipment. Feathered specializes in resurrecting music recorded on obsolete technology—among his projects was a restoration of forty-two songs by the Velvet Underground, captured on four-track tapes at the Matrix, a club in San Francisco, in 1969. Feathered told me that many of Black’s tapes were gunky with mold and flaking adhesive; they first had to be baked in a food dehydrator for about ten hours, at one hundred and thirty degrees, to insure that they wouldn’t be irreparably damaged the first time they were played. In the two dozen reels of recordings that emerged, McCombs found fifteen songs that struck him as “focussed, beautiful work.”

The over-all effect of the album is a time-travelling sort of intimacy—as though, years later, you found the recordings that your big sister made, sitting cross-legged on her canopy bed, before she ran off to Haight-Ashbury. Some of the songs feel a little unfinished. A harpsichord makes an unfortunate appearance on one. But Black’s vocals, whether in her pure, folky soprano on “Sunshine of Our Days” or a Nancy Sinatra-like growl on “You’re Not in My Plans,” are consistently affecting and sometimes haunting.

And there is one true standout on the album, an autobiographical song about a college professor who encouraged Black intellectually and took advantage of her sexually. She wrote the lyrics toward the end of her life, looking back with all the sadness and ambivalence and now-I-get-it insight that experiences like that—so common but, until recently, so seldom explored artistically—can engender. The song’s title, “I Wish I Knew the Man I Thought You Were,” is maybe the best single line about this particular kind of broken trust that I’ve come across:

I wish I knew the man I thought you were
I would tell him when you touched me
It astonished and betrayed me
I know you’re making much of me
It’s not my kind of accolade.

This was one of the songs that McCombs recorded with Black, and McCombs, who came up with the music, has filled it out with bass, guitar, drums, and pedal steel that give it a swing and a drive worthy of the lyrics. Their emotional forthrightness is all Black’s. “Even in her seventies,” McCombs said, “Karen was still really eager to make music. She just really wanted to do that, in a kind of innocent, impulsive, inspired way.”