Betty Davis: Betty Davis / They Say I'm Different

It's rare that a pop history footnote looms as large as the figures she's meant to support, but then again, Betty Davis is one hell of a footnote.

Malcolm Gladwell groupies can tell you all about "connectors," roaming person-to-person hubs that link disparate corners of society. Well, in the late 1960s, Betty Davis-- then Betty Mabry-- was the link connecting such luminaries as Jimi Hendrix, Sly Stone and Miles Davis, the latter ultimately contributing his last name through a relatively short but tumultuous marriage. His 1968 album Filles de Kilimanjaro features then-model Betty on the cover; the track "Mademoiselle Mabry" was inspired by her.

As legend has it, Miles grew jealous of Betty's friendship with Hendrix (which Miles allegedly suspected may have been more than that), but Betty's place in the middle of this intersection of geniuses apparently resulted in more than just divorce filings. By popular account, it was Betty who turned Miles on to Sly and Jimi, which in turn may have been the catalyst for Miles' most radical musical evolution: the still awe-inspiring Bitches Brew, released in 1970, a year after his separation from Betty.

Betty Davis' own response was her self-titled 1973 debut, a groundbreaking slab of funk that featured a huge hunk of the Family Stone (it was produced by drummer Greg Errico) and fused soul, sex, and hard rock like the best Sly or Funkadelic disc, albeit from a female perspective. But if George Clinton waved his freak flag proudly, Betty Davis wore it as underwear then rubbed your face in it. An oft-quoted passage in Miles Davis' autobiography gets it just right: "If Betty were singing today she be something like Madonna, something like Prince, only as a woman," wrote Davis back in 1989. "She was the beginning of all that when she was singing as Betty Davis."

No doubt. Betty Davis never gives up in its aim to seduce and destroy; songs like "If I'm In Luck I Might Get Picked Up", "Ooh Yeah", and "Game is My Middle Name" are raw and relentless in their intent. Then-Afrophile nympho Brian Eno might have called it Music for Fucking, though the semi-classic "Anti Love Song" is music for fucking with, specifically fucking with a former lover many suspect is Miles, but who might as well be any man stupid enough to do Betty wrong (in every sense).

Davis' part banshee/part Amazon shriek isn't the smoothest delivery system for seduction, but it does get the point across. Supposedly it was Marc Bolan who encouraged Davis to write her own songs, and there's no question Davis understood the best way for her to perform them was to wail like she was about to bite someone's head off.