The lounge at the East of the Ryan Motel on 79th Street is not what you’d expect from a nightclub with a reputation for elegance and sophistication. The ceiling is low, the wooden walls mostly unadorned. Customers sit at long, cafeteria-style tables. Despite a few sparkling chandeliers, which add a touch of class to the room’s upper reaches, it feels less like a nightclub than the venue for a neighborhood church social. Only the well-stocked bar, which winds its way along the back wall, reveals the place’s true function.
But when Johnson ventured into more emotionally complex areas, he tended to fall short. “Get Your Money Where You Spend Your Time” was originally popularized by Bobby “Blue” Bland, and his version remains the standard by which all blues balladeers are judged (though his vocal abilities have waned in recent years). “Get Your Money” requires a delicate mix of anger and bluesy resignation, but Johnson charged into it full throttle, roaring out the lyrics and attempting to affect the trademark guttural gasp that’s become a cliche even in Bland’s performances. Johnson’s attempts made him sound like a tubercular lion.
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Everything was prelude, of course, to “Let’s Straighten It Out,” prefixed in Lattimore’s current show by a Wagnerian swell of guitar and synthesizer that threatens to overwhelm the song’s gentle romanticism. He then augments it with yet another spoken lecture on tenderness, understanding, and the “difference between making love and screwing.” It’s a message that Lattimore’s fans, especially his female fans, never seem to tire of.
Perhaps in atonement, she concluded her rap with an unexpected but well-received lecture on safe sex: “Before you let anybody go wading in your pond, be sure he got good boots on! And fellas, before you go wading in anybody’s boots, make sure you got on a good life jacket!” LaSalle finally put her red-hot-mama persona aside and concluded her show with a stirring finale in the style popularized by Otis Redding, soaring above the band with some powerful vocals and proving that her dirty-talking funk, amusing as it is, shouldn’t be allowed to obscure the fact that she’s a first-class R & B entertainer.
