By Johnny Ray Huston

IT'S 1970. Esther Phillips is onstage at Freddie Jett's Pied Piper, a supper club in Los Angeles, the city where she was discovered more than two decades earlier as a 14-year-old R&B belter. The stage lights beaming down give the room a warm brown glow; Esther – all five feet three inches of her – is dressed in a sleeveless white ensemble. (Thanks to the gold sash tied tightly around her waist, the lower half of her robe resembles a Greek column.) Esther and her six-piece band whip through Aretha's "Don't Let Me Lose This Dream," paying tribute to a singer and songwriter who, three years later, will repay the favor by giving fellow nominee Esther the Grammy that she's won.

As a familiar languid melody kicks in behind her, Esther speaks, with a dramatically rhythmic cadence – silences that register as clearly as words – similar to her singing:

Welcome to the Pied Piper. We have a selection of songs picked out for you ladies and gentlemen, some you've already heard. I'd like to do this song for [pause] all the lovers. We have lovers lined up wall to wall here tonight. Yeah. I do most of my love songs for the lovers because [pause] I love to love [pause], and I believe love makes the world go round. So for those of you who agree –

I give him [pause] all my love. Without missing a beat, Esther begins the first line of "And I Love Him"; the first three words are tart, the last three words are honeyed, as only Esther can flavor them. That's all I do: the word do is a long swoon.

This version isn't the same as the studio version of "And I Love Him" found on the 1965 album of the same name. Produced by Ray Ellis, who helmed Billie Holiday's Lady in Satin, the studio version binds Esther in a muted yet high-strung mandolin-dominated arrangement. Its tempo suggests Dusty Springfield's "The Look of Love" (or "The Girl from Ipanema," another track from And I Love Him). Everything about the studio version of "And I Love Him" is petite. Polite. Even Esther's voice. However sly. However ironic.

But here, at the Pied Piper – thanks to producer and arranger King Curtis – Esther has time. Her own sweet time. She has time to linger silently in the middle of a phrase, time to turn the line As long as I have you near me into As long as I have you, hey baby, near me, time to turn me into a word with a dozen or so syllables – another long swoon, this one a little more feverish. She has time to turn "And I Love Her," one of many hits by the Beatles, into "And I Love Him," a singular live recording by Esther Phillips.

"And I Love Her" is, like most Beatles songs, a ghost of Western consciousness. You probably don't have to watch the 50th, 51st, and 52nd multi-mediated minutes of A Hard Day's Night to visualize Paul's o-shaped mouth, to hear him crooning each line with the same confidence and contentedness; you can probably recall the recording's compressed Brit-beat production, the stopwatch precision of its flamenco guitar. "And I Love Her" clocks in at two minute and 29 seconds – having added a European romanticism to the fab four's brand of flirtation, it stops abruptly, with nothing left to say.

By the two-and-a-half-minute mark of "And I Love Him" – when she changes will never die to ain't gonna never never never never never never mmmmm never die – Esther Phillips has already given the original a sex change, taken its virginity, and picked a lover's quarrel with it. And she's just gotten started.

Each word carries a meaning, each letter of a word carries a feeling. Mmmmm: Paul's doesn't make this sound during "And I Love Her." Mmmmm: when Esther sings it, you can taste it. She gives him all her love, and tenderly, making those last two words ripe with physicality. "And I Love Him" is about Esther's love more than it's about him, and she wants to take you there – she turns the word me into a vessel of bliss. Esther makes a kiss into an episode, into sex in miniature form. And I love him: how many ways can she sing that phrase? How many ways can you make love?

Aaaaand Iiiii said I love him

I just love him, I just love him now

I just love him, and ooooo Iiiii love him

I just love, love, love, love him

I love him

Esther swims through the title of the song. Some strokes are short, some strokes are long. Then she abandons the words altogether and hums the melody, adding to it, drawing it out. As the rhythm section saunters along, she and a flute perform a call-and-response duet that's like some earthy, non-neurotic update of an operatic mad scene. Esther's humming hypnotizes, playfully: if I could truly make my description of it on this page mimic its effect, the font would gradually grow little curlicues, the words would break free from their rigid lines and trace patterns all over the page, and you'd fall into a trance trying to follow them.

I SAID C'MON BABY LIGHT MY FIRE!

"Razorblade phrasing!" Diamanda Galás once exclaimed when describing Esther, one of her three favorite vocalists, on a British radio show. For the second time – just like her quicksilver shift from spoken intro to opening melody – Esther pulls out a surprise. Forget "surprise": she switches from slumber to seizure in a split second, hurling the demand like a lightning bolt as the thunder of the horn and rhythm section looms behind her. When the storm dissipates, quick as it came, and Esther moans Lord it's all right, it's more than all right. It's the best kind of relief.

A voice is a part of a personality, and a personality is a part of a voice. Esther Phillips liked to watch "creature features." Esther Phillips was hooked on heroin before she hit 20. Esther Phillips was a terrific cook. Esther Phillips used the word "motherfucker" as a form of punctuation. Esther Phillips once showed up at CBS Records, dressed in furs and wielding a baseball bat, in order to collect a check. Esther Phillips was married once, briefly, late in her life. These sentences, however characterful, relate Esther's personality from a distance, in the past tense. Esther's "And I Love Him" serves up personality first-person, in the present tense.

On her best recordings – when her record companies give her the opportunity, or when she subverts her material – Esther Phillips sings the blues. During this period of her career, Atlantic had Esther cover blues-influenced popular white groups that made rock music: the Beatles and the Stones ("As Tears Go By"). Esther's live version of "And I Love Him," incorporating the Doors, has – more than its sources – the feel of the blues. But it speaks a different language. Esther uses the words of Paul McCartney and Jim Morrison as an opportunity to call the shots. McCartney's sentimentalism and Morrison's imperviousness become Esther's pleasure: a pleasure that contains more complexities, and a pleasure that, for once, is without pain.

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