Bonnie Raitt Ain’t Gonna be Your Sugar Mama No More

Bonnie Raitt is aware of her occasional verbal excesses, but she admitted, “I don’t think before I talk. In terms of true freedom, you should just be able to be what you are. And that just naturally comes out of my mouth. Me and my brothers’ friends were always a group — I was the only girl and I probably started to make off-color jokes as a way to get in with the guys. And ever since I can remember, it’s been me and a bunch of guys.

“I really like cracking up with my friends and fool in’ around with the guys,” she said. “It’s a release of tension. But I have to learn how to curb it because, if I am gonna be a model, I should be a model.”

Bonnie was born 26 years ago — she celebrated her birthday November 8th — in Burbank, California, daughter of John and Marge Raitt. You, or perhaps your folks, remember John as the star of Carousel, Oklahoma! and Pajama Game on Broadway, and on “original cast” albums. The two met at the University of Redlands in California: Marge was the leading lady in an alumni production of The Vagabond King, John was the returning hero.

Bonnie spent most of her first years in New York, where her father was doing Pajama Game. The family moved back to Los Angeles in 1957 when Raitt starred in the movie of that play. “He wasn’t around enough to be a real father,” said Bonnie. “He’d come home off the road and bring us presents, so naturally as a little girl I’d fall in love with him. My mother got a raw deal that way, because she was strict and had to be both the mother and father. I didn’t get along with her at all. She’s real strong, and I think there was a natural jealousy.”

John Raitt always sang around the house, and Marge was his accompanist on piano. “And we would go to his shows. There was just lots of music in the house. And all three of the kids — I have two brothers — we all sang. I was singing from the time I was two or three. It wasn’t any deliberate, ‘Okay, I’m going to teach you how to be musical.’ There was no force-feeding.”

At age eight, her parents and grandparents chipped in to get her a $25 Stella guitar for Christmas, each party wrapping half of the box. Bonnie’s grandfather was “real musical, too,” she said. “He’s a Methodist missionary and was head of the Prohibition party for 20 years in California. He wrote about 600 hymns and he used to play Hawaiian slide guitar on his lap and play zither and accordion and a piano.” She took piano lessons for five years. Her teacher, she remembered, told her she had “a quick ear.”

“By the time I was ten, I taught myself how to play my grandfather’s slide guitar. When I was 11, I got enough money to get one of those red Guild gut-string guitars.”

The only daughter of a famous Broadway leading man had to scrounge for money to buy a guitar? “My parents were Quakers and Scottish,” she explained. “They were both raised real poor, and we got a minimal allowance. We had to earn if we wanted anything. I’d iron clothes if I needed to make extra money.”

John Raitt was an isolationist from the Hollywood showbiz circuit. Off the road, he liked to stay at their home atop Mulholland Drive in Coldwater Canyon, working in the garden and fixing up the house. His antistyle deeply affected Bonnie.

“I wasn’t allowed to hang out, because I was always the first kid on the bus or the last kid off. It took me an hour to get to school every day. And by the time I’d get home it’d be four, and for me to get back down the hill to play with my friends, I’d have to get somebody to drive me, and my parents weren’t into it. That’s how I got into just sitting in my room playing a guitar.” And worrying about her freckles. “I had a dream once where people were segregated — the spotty from the clear. And I saw these magazine ads: HIDE UGLY FRECKLES. I used to try and bleach them out with lemon juice and Tide. And then Doris Day came along and changed my life.”

At age eight, in 1958, the year of Perez Prado and Domenico Modugno, of “Sugartime” and “Witch Doctor,” Bonnie was tuned into R&B radio and listening to her older brother’s records of “Rock-in Robin” and “Yakety Yak.” “I didn’t have one of those things for Frankie Avalon,” she said. “I liked my dad. I thought he was hot looking because he had that same kind of hairstyle.

“When I was in junior high, the peer-group pressure was to like Jan and Dean. In the summer everybody would go to the beach and get tanned and learn how to surf. Everybody cut school. And I was redheaded and didn’t get tanned and I lived in the canyon and couldn’t get to the beach.”

In the summers, there was camp in the Adirondacks while John Raitt did Dinah Shore’s summer-replacement TV show. Later, he would do the summer-stock circuit. Altogether, Bonnie was packed off to camp every year from age eight to 15.

“So every summer I’d miss all that romance and the beach. I was the kid that always went away.”