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Darlene Love to play CAC show

Maybe you know her from the long and storied music career that landed her in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Or maybe you know her from playing in major motion pictures, like the “Lethal Weapon” franchise. Heck, you might even know her from her starring roles on Broadway in shows like “Hairspray,” “Grease” and “The Leader of the Pack.”

One way or another, Darlene Love has found herself on your radar.

Now, Love’s area fans will get to see the legend perform live, as she is set for a concert at 7:30 p.m. Feb. 1 at the Community Arts Center, 220 West Fourth Street.

Though she may be 77 years old, you can expect Love to bring the exuberance of a performer half her age to the CAC stage while she captivates the audience with her dominating vocal presence.

“The fans are going to have a good time,” Love said, of her upcoming show at the CAC. “I tell my audiences that if they know the words to the songs, sing them; and even if you don’t know the words, just make them up. I think that livens things up.”

Love’s music career first took off in the early ’60s when she performed as a member of The Blossoms, a group that sang background vocals for acts such as The Righteous Brothers, Marvin Gaye, Frank Sinatra and Elvis Presley. As a musician at Gold Star Studios, she invoked Phil Spector’s “wall of sound” production style to breakthrough with mainstream success of her own, though it took a while to get there.

With the No. 1 single “He’s a Rebel” Love should have found her first success as a lead vocalist, except the track was falsely credited to The Crystals — a decision Spector made himself, to the displeasure of Love and her Blossoms groupmates. Spector would pull a similar stunt with the song “He’s Sure the Boy I Love,” when he again gave credit to The Crystals, though Love sang lead vocals on the track and was under the impression it would be released as her first single as a solo artist.

After those mishaps, Love finally released a single under her own name in 1963 — “(Today I Met) The Boy I’m Gonna Marry” — which climbed as high as No. 39 on the Billboard Hot 100. Later the same year, she recorded the song which she has ultimately become the most well-known for — “Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)” — for the compilation album “A Christmas Gift for You from Phil Spector.” While “Christmas” was popular following its initial release, it became a staple of holiday listening music after David Letterman began having Love play the song on “The Late Show” annually, a tradition that lasted for 29 years.

Unfortunately, fans planning to hear Love sing “Christmas” at the CAC may be disappointed, as she typically stops playing the track live by the end of January.

“This is a hard time for me to take the Christmas music out, especially ‘Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)’ because they just finished hearing me sing it for the last two months, and now they feel like they want to hear me sing it again,” Love said. “I have to tell them that I need to put that song to sleep, because I play it late into January and by the time we get to February, we don’t really want to do it anymore.

“I have to tell my audiences that if we did that song all year long, you wouldn’t have anything to look forward to from me around Christmas,” she added.

Though that track won’t make it into Love’s setlist at the CAC, that doesn’t mean fans won’t get to hear her sing plenty of other great tunes, including many of her major hits like “Wait ‘Til My Bobby Gets Home.”

Love said that her fans have a deep connection with her early music.

“I think the music motivates them and they remember the good times they had,” said Love. “They were simple songs that people could really relate to, and I think that has a lot to do with it.

“The music during that era was a time when the music really meant something; the words and the melodies really rang true,” she added.

To keep her setlist fresh, Love also likes to sprinkle in some newer songs, including several off of her 2015 album “Introducing Darlene Love,” which was produced by her longtime friend Steven Van Zandt (Little Steven), of Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band. Some of the songs she typically breaks out include those written for her by Van Zandt, Springsteen, Joan Jett and Elvis Costello.

“I try to spread it out through the whole 90 minutes so that all the people who have not heard those songs don’t get bored and say ‘I don’t want to hear that song, I want to hear the songs we know,'” Love said. “If you have been in an audience before, which I have, then that is how people feel about it.

“I don’t give it all to them at one time, I just kind of spread it out and they seem to enjoy it,” she added.

It is her stellar audiences that still make performing live a great thrill for her, Love said.

“I would say the average age (in my audience) is somewhere from around 45 to 70, and they have so much energy,” Love said. “I don’t know what their life is like and if they are always like that, but they seem to have a lot of energy for me whenever I come out on the stage. It really fills me with a lot of joy.”

She is especially excited to be playing her upcoming show in Williamsport, because she feels right at home in front of a PA crowd.

“It is going to be a thrill. Playing in this part of America — New York, Connecticut and Pennsylvania — for me, is always great,” she said. “With the Philadelphia sound and all that music being so prevalent at the time (my career got started), they really accepted me.”

For fans of Love that may not be able to make her show at the CAC, fret not, you might still get a chance to hear her sing some songs in 2019 — just not live. The musician has plans to produce a nationally televised Christmas show to “express who Darlene Love is.” In fact, with the help of her granddaughter, she has already come up with a name for the program — “78 Years of Christmas With Love.”

“That is what my heart is set on, but now I just need to get the wheels turning with finances,” she said. “Finding people who will want to be in it I don’t think will be that difficult of a job, but finding someone to finance it is going to be a big job because I want it to be spectacular and something that nobody has ever seen or has ever done when it comes to Christmas.

“I want it to be a ‘today’ thing so I am really writing it down as we go, and there are a few people already who have said they will help me do this because they do think it should be done,” added Love. “If anybody should ever do a Christmas special, it should be Darlene Love.”

But even if that program doesn’t pan out, fans should still have plenty more opportunities to see Love perform, as she has no plans of calling it quits anytime soon.

“I feel that this is a God-given talent and I think I should use it as long as I can,” she said. “We don’t know how long that will be, but however long it is, that is what I will be doing.

“It is a love for the music, but it is also about seeing the people’s faces as you are singing, especially the older songs — they get up and they like to sing with you,” Love added. “They feel like they are energized from watching the show. That makes it all possible.”

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