"The First Cut Is the Deepest" by P.P. ARNOLD
A great song and what makes it so -- in the time it takes to drink a half cup of coffee.
”But if you want, I'll try to love again”
P.P. Arnold had an offer from Ike Turner. It was after her husband hit her that she took it.
She had only gone to the audition as a favor to a friend who needed a third for harmony and was hired on the spot. The 19 year-old mother of two had grown up in a family of gospel singers and was four when she started soloing in church, but she had never seriously considered a career in music. The audition was on a Sunday, her day off from the two jobs she was holding down to support her young family -- days as a typist and evenings separating yolks from egg whites. She got home late from seeing The Ike & Tina Turner Revue; her husband was furious. The fight ended with her taking the children to her parents and leaving her name, Patricia Ann Cole, behind.
Arnold toured as an Ikette from 1965 through the fall of ‘66, when after a UK tour supporting the Rolling Stones, she decided to stay in London. Mick Jagger had encouraged her to pursue a solo career, and as she later explained, “A young black woman on her own in America in a white environment would not have been treated as well as I was in England.” She signed on with Stones manager Andrew Loog Oldham’s Immediate Records and toured and recorded with the Small Faces, singing on “Itchycoo Park” and, memorably, “Tin Soldier.” In May of 1967, she released an achy song written by teenage singer-songwriter Cat Stevens, who had just scored a hit with a frilly wage-slave weepie, “Matthew & Son.”
“The First Cut Is the Deepest’” has been a hit at least a half dozen times, from Rod Stewart in 1977 to reggae star Dawn Penn in 1984 and Sheryl Crowe in 2007. Cat Stevens released his own version in late ‘67. True to the song, it’s Arnold’s original that’s the hardest to shake. The poignancy of the song is rooted in not just one broken heart but what’s sure to be two, which lends itself to downcast, sensitive vocals that play against the muscularity of the chorus. Arnold wrings out more than sadness, though, vaulting from a tear-choked quaver to a soulful wail; she sings less with sorrow than a full spectrum of grief.
The production carries a torch of its own, clearly crushing on Phil Spector’s wall of sound. The track begins with the very 1967 sound of a tinkling harpsichord before kettle drums thunder in. This familiar territory for Arnold, who sang back up on the Ike & Tina River Deep, Mountain High tour and lead vocals on the Ikettes “Whatcha Gonna Do (When I Leave You)” for Spector’s Phi-Dan label. Producer Mike Hurst (Stevens’ Matthew & Son and New Masters albums) piles on elaborate touches -- solo violin, plangent piano bass notes, heraldic trumpets -- that pull the song halfway between Spector’s epic sound and where Between the Buttons Stones were heading at the time with songs like “Ruby Tuesday.”
I still want you by my side
Just to help me dry the tears that I've cried
'Cause I'm sure gonna give you a try
And if you want, I'll try to love again
But baby, I'll try to love again, but I know...
The first cut is the deepest, baby, I know
The first cut is the deepest
“Baby” can be such a throw-away line in pop music, an easy gender-neutral rhyme or non-lyric tossed in to create a bit of space, a generic rock ‘n’ roll caesura. For Arnold, it’s where she focuses the song’s anguish. Each escalating “baby” begs for understanding, but it’s also a warning: Her performance takes the selfishness (“I still want you by my side / Just to help me dry the tears that I've cried”) as seriously as the sorrow. Part of what makes Arnold’s the definitive version of the song is that it echoes with the hurt of someone who’s succumbed to sadness but, unlike subsequent versions1, hasn’t been numbed by it.
P.P. Arnold never quite broke through as a solo artist, despite all the rock guys who thought they could get her there -- Jagger, The Small Faces’ Steve Marriot, with whom she had a romance, Eric Clapton, Barry Gibb. Her second album for Immediate, the ambitious Kafunta, was released amid the shambles that would cause the label to shudder two years later. The Clapton- and Gibb-produced tracks that would have been her third record were collected 45 years later on The Turning Tide. In the interim, she went back to singing backup, appearing on the The Jesus Christ Superstar soundtrack and on albums by Nick Drake, Dr. John, and Graham Nash. Her session work was in demand again starting in the late ‘80s, with a fresh set of admirers, cutting sessions for megahits like Peter Gabriel’s “Sledgehammer,” to KLF’s "3 AM Eternal."
Her first album of new material in 50 years, The New Adventures of P.P. Arnold, was produced by Ocean Colour Scene’s Steve Cradock. To the credit of her most recent rock guy collaborator, it’s not a nostalgia trip, but it is also much like her previous adventures. Like all her two Immediate albums, the record is not beholden to any one style, flitting from gentle soul pop and lush ballads to a cover of “Different Drum” and the 10-minute slam-poet spoken word of Bob Dylan’s “Last Thoughts of Woody Guthrie.”2
P.P. Arnold never had a signature sound as an artist. It’s not mere eclecticism or adventurousness -- both laudable. In P.P. Arnold’s voice, like that line in “Different Drum,” it sounds more like independence:
I'm not ready for any person, place, or thing to try and pull the reins in on me.
10 Song Playlist
Songs mentioned in or in the neighborhood of this piece.
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Thanks for reading,
Scott
Rod Stewart cuts the lyric “when it comes to love, she’s first” from his version. What the fuck, dude?
Arnold’s version of Dylan’s “Last Thoughts on Woody Guthrie” replaces “on” with “of.” Whether a mistake or artistic license, who can say?