Dangerous Highway
Hinton died in 1995 at age 51, but he’s still unchallenged as the greatest blue-eyed soul singer ever to live. “He remains unique,” wrote Wexler, “a white boy who truly sang and played in the spirit of the great black soul artists he venerated. With Eddie it wasn’t imitation; it was totally created, with a fire and fury that was as real as Otis Redding’s and Wilson Pickett’s.” That’s no hollow hyperbole, coming from a man who guided the careers of legends like Big Joe Turner and Aretha Franklin. British critic Barney Hoskyns, writing in Soul Survivor magazine in 1987, called Hinton “simply the blackest white voice ever committed to vinyl.”
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In fact, Hinton’s likeness was famously and intentionally left off the packaging for his debut LP, 1978’s Very Extremely Dangerous. Hoskyns was backstage after a mid-80s Bruce Springsteen concert, where a few members of the E Street Band were singing along to the record, and recalls their reaction when he told them Hinton was white: “They were as dumbfounded as I was.”
The ongoing Hinton revival now includes a feature-length video documentary, Dangerous Highway, directed by Moises Gonzalez and Deryle Perryman and narrated by bluesman Robert Cray. Both fascinating and frustrating, the film’s a well-intentioned mess that raises almost as many questions as it answers. For much of his adult life, Hinton struggled with addictions to alcohol and drugs, which exacerbated a range of mental health problems–or perhaps mental health problems drove him to self-medicate. Those struggles are the single biggest factor in the colossal “What if?” that hangs over Hinton’s career, but though his family, friends, and colleagues tolerated or accommodated his erratic behavior to varying degrees, few seem willing or able to see it for what it was–in that way the film’s a reminder that the cultures of addiction and mental illness are still relatively new. Hinton’s idiosyncrasies were the stuff of legend–when he was between checks and had to borrow money from friends, he was adamant about paying it back on the agreed-to date and would walk up to 40 miles to do so. He sometimes heard voices or suffered strange fits of anger, and once disrupted a recording session with an unprovoked attack on an old friend, fellow Muscle Shoals guitarist Jimmy Johnson, only to snap out of it when Johnson knocked him down. But though Dangerous Highway hints that these were symptoms of undiagnosed schizophrenia or bipolar disorder, no one ever says those words aloud.
Hinton reconciled with his family and stabilized his mental health with treatment, though the drugs he was prescribed sent his weight ballooning. His final recordings, 1991’s Cry and Moan and 1993’s Very Blue Highway, lacked the fire of his best work but included a few tunes now recognized as classics, like “The Well of Love” and “Nobody but You.” His future was starting to look promising again–there was talk of a European tour–when he was felled by a heart attack on July 28, 1995.
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