Flying a kite in a hurricane: Beth Hart at the Mahindra Blues Festival

Last week in Mumbai I bought a tiny cup of fries for a hill of money, but I didn’t mind. I had already spent a hill of money getting there, and after the first hill the second one doesn’t hurt as badly. In the fries line a young man told me, “You know, she played in Bangalore, but nobody knew who she was, so only about fifty people turned up!” We stared at each other with o-shaped mouths— fraudulently in my case, since I’d only been introduced to Beth Hart’s music a couple of years ago myself, with a YouTube video of her singing  a cover of ‘Change is gonna come’, which blew my mind. Still, once bitten, twice snobby about the unbitten.

I had left a friend holding our place in the line outside the Polka Dot Theatre at the Mahindra Blues Festival. We were among the first few in that line, ages before the show, because what’s the point of hauling yourself to Mumbai for 90 minutes only to get cramps from standing on your toes in the back? And yet, by the time I had received my fifteen soggy fries, the theatre was open and half full. Luckily my friend had bagged us a spot right up against the stage.

Don Wilcock wrote in Blues Blast magazine: “Interviewing Beth Hart is like flying a kite in a hurricane. Just holding on is an effort. You can try to guide its trajectory, but you have the feeling that an atomic bomb is attached to the tail, and if you jerk the line, it might go off in your face.” 

Beth Hart is pure kinesis, sinuous and twitchy, elegant and badass. She prays to the drums, kneels and sways before the guitar, hulks and roves above her keyboard, all flying hair and tattoos | Reuters

Ditto her stage presence. She is pure kinesis, sinuous and twitchy, elegant and badass. She prays to the drums, kneels and sways before the guitar, hulks and roves above her keyboard, all flying hair and tattoos. She sings lying supine with her head dangling off the stage, she kicks her legs up, drapes herself over the amps and monitors, tosses herself all over the place. 

And that voice, refracting all manner of emotion—warmly resonant in the lower registers, gravelly in the higher ones—with a shivering vibrato and astounding control over the arpeggios even when she’s screaming.  (The audience loves the screaming.) It’s raw talent. When her pale green eyes catch the light she looks like an abandoned faun, wild and panicked and vulnerable. 

She is part gangster, part child, part siren, part beast, a vibrant wreck, as honest as sunlight. She sang ‘Sister Heroine’, for her sister Sharon who died of drug use-induced AIDS, without a tear. (I was bawling.) She was all attitude for ‘Jazz Man’. Her eyes welled up during ‘My California’ for her husband Scott. She sang ‘I’d Rather Go Blind’ like a diva—it wasn’t in the set, but the audience was howling for it. She’s a force of nature, you just grab tight and enjoy the ride.

Beth Hart is open about being damaged goods, in and out of rehab for two decades of drug addiction, in and out of psych wards for bipolar disorder, in and out of pain and joy. Her father abandoned her; her sister died; she suffers all kinds of crushing insecurities. She giggles like a schoolgirl and revels in the audience’s adulation. She’s grateful for everyone who helped to pluck her out of her own destructive path. She wants to live and love, but you get the sense that she is only ever a hair’s breadth ahead of the darkness that constantly threatens to suck her down. In that hair’s breadth, she makes fantastic music. She will be remembered as one of the greats.

What’s that, you’ve never heard of her? 

Mitali Saran is a Delhi-based writer

mitali.saran@gmail.com